Trump adviser sparks '5-alarm constitutional fire' as grift triggers threat: expert

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law whom he named as a special peace envoy, is representing the United States in ongoing negotiations with Iran while also “apparently planning to hit up” foreign governments for “billions in funding for his private equity firm” — conduct one legal expert flagged on Friday as a “five-alarm constitutional fire.”

“The questions too few people are asking are: Who is Kushner actually working for, anyway? And is he breaking the law in his role in his father-in-law’s administration?” wrote Kim Wehle, a constitutional law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, in an analysis published Friday in Zeteo.

Kushner served as CEO of his father’s real estate company from 2005 to 2017, taking the company over after his father, Charles Kushner, pleaded guilty to 18 criminal counts, including witness tampering. The witness tampering charge stemmed from an elaborate scheme in which Charles Kushner arranged for a woman to seduce his own brother-in-law so that he could “secretly” record the encounter and send the video to his own sister as an intimidation tactic.

While Kushner left the company in 2017 after joining the first Trump administration as a senior adviser, Kushner did not leave his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, after being named as Trump’s special peace envoy, which, while not an official position within the Trump administration, still raised serious ethical concerns, Wehle argued.

“It’s a five-alarm constitutional fire,” Wehle wrote.

“Grift aside, the fact that Kushner is playing a leading role in what is the most sensitive national security issue for the country right now – the disastrous war that Donald J. Trump recklessly started alongside Israel in Iran – without being bound by the ethics and transparency rules designed to protect the public interest, is an egregious affront to the Constitution, with deeply troubling implications for the nation. And people are barely even talking about it.”

As recently as March, reports surfaced that Kushner was actively seeking $5 billion or more in investments for his investment firm, investments he’s been probing for in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – all countries with deep military ties to the United States, per five “people with knowledge of the talks” who spoke with The New York Times.

“Kushner is no peace envoy,” Wehle wrote. “He’s an embodied threat to democracy itself, with the blood and treasure of the people in his hands.”