Jared Kushner didn't disclose his business ties with George Soros, Peter Thiel, and Goldman Sachs or that he owes $1 billion in loans
Jared Kushner didn't disclose his business ties with George Soros, Peter Thiel, and Goldman Sachs, or that he owes $1 billion in loans, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The top White House adviser and Trump's son-in-law failed to identify part-ownership of Cadre, a real-estate startup that he co-founded and links him to the Goldman Sachs Group. Kushner's ties to Cadre mean that he is business partners with mega-investors George Soros and Peter Thiel, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
Kushner's lawyer Jamie Gorelick issued a statement saying that Cadre is part of BFPS Ventures LLC, a company he owns and identified in his government financial disclosure form.
He also said that a revised version of Kushner's form (that includes Cadre) will be made available once ethics officials have taken a look at it.
Kushner also failed to identify debt of more than $1 billion from 20 different lenders and personal guarantees to pay more than $300 million, the Wall Street Journal found.
While Gorelick called revisions to the disclosure form "very normal," ethics experts told the Journal that the loans and guarantees should be disclosed so that officials can decide whether Kushner needs to recuse himself from issues that involve his lenders. Investment into startups like Cadre should definitely be disclosed, experts said.
"Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this," Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told the Journal.
Another source told The Wall Street Journal that Kushner plans to recuse himself from anything that concerns Deutsche Bank or RBS, two lenders that have given him money for his properties or companies. That said, he still owes money to Bank of America, Blackstone Group LP, Citigroup, UBS Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC - all of which were not disclosed.