It is just over nine years to the day since Jared Kushner naively asked Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak to use Russian secure facilities to communicate in such a way that US spies wouldn’t find them.

Kushner went forward with the meeting that Kislyak had requested on November 16. It took place at Trump Tower on November 30, 2016.1139 At Kushner’s invitation, Flynn also attended; Bannon was invited but did not attend.1140 During the meeting, which lasted approximately 30 minutes, Kushner expressed a desire on the part of the incoming Administration to start afresh with U.S.-Russian relations.1141 Kushner also asked Kislyak to identify the best person (whether Kislyak or someone else) with whom to direct future discussions—someone who had contact with Putin and the ability to speak for him.1142

The three men also discussed U.S. policy toward Syria, and Kislyak floated the idea of having Russian generals brief the Transition Team on the topic using a secure communications line.1143 After Flynn explained that there was no secure line in the Transition Team offices, Kushner asked Kislyak if they could communicate using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy.1144 Kislyak quickly rejected that idea.1145

Shortly after Kushner indicated his enthusiasm for back-channel discussions that US spies couldn’t find, Sergei Kislyak threw Sergey Gorkov at him — someone who would dangle financial goodies that would require overturning sanctions to collect, someone functionally analogous to Kirill Dmitriev.

The accounts from Kushner and Gorkov differ as to whether the meeting was diplomatic or business in nature. Kushner told the Office that the meeting was diplomatic, with Gorkov expressing disappointment with U.S.-Russia relations under President Obama and hopes for improved relations with the incoming Administration.1157 According to Kushner, although Gorkov told Kushner a little bit about his bank and made some statements about the Russian economy, the two did not discuss Kushner’s companies or private business dealings of any kind.1158 (At the time of the meeting, Kushner Companies had a debt obligation coming due on the building it owned at 666 Fifth Avenue, and there had been public reporting both about efforts to secure lending on the property and possible conflicts of interest for Kushner arising out of his company’s borrowing from foreign lenders.1159)

In contrast, in a 2017 public statement, VEB suggested Gorkov met with Kushner in Kushner’s capacity as CEO of Kushner Companies for the purpose of discussing business, rather than as part of a diplomatic effort. In particular, VEB characterized Gorkov’s meeting with Kushner as part of a series of “roadshow meetings” with “representatives of major US banks and business circles,” which included “negotiations” and discussion of the “most promising business lines and sectors.”1160

It’s all there in the Mueller Report, plain as day: From the very start Jared Kushner planned to use his role in Trump’s White House for his own benefit. It was in the background of his dealings with Mohammed bin Salman, who has domesticated him since. It was the plan for Russia, too, until Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec scuttled the plan.

Even in the first iteration of this fraud, Jared was hiding what he was doing from the Secretary of State — at that point Rex Tillerson.

And then Kirill Dmitriev picked right up where he left off eight years earlier, finding the weak venal levers for Trump and, ultimately, Jared. The plan didn’t succeed in February. It came closer but didn’t succeed in August. In November, once Dmitriev finally got Kushner on board, it seems to be succeeding.

It’s all worth revisiting again given this important (but nauseating) report from WSJ– one they themselves suggest is the follow-up to their report, Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine.

The way the Russians succeeded in getting Trump to sell out Ukraine and the West (and I promise you, Trump has no fucking clue the ramifications of this and probably doesn’t give a fuck anyway) was by taking the $300 billion seized by Europe as punishment for their invasion of Ukraine — money Europeans were hoping to use to arm Ukraine — and instead used it to bribe Trump, effectively.

The Trump administration in recent weeks has handed its European counterparts a series of documents, each a single page, laying out its vision for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the return of Russia to the global economy.

The proposals have sparked an intense battle at the negotiating table between America and its traditional allies in Europe. The outcome stands to profoundly alter the economic map of the continent.

The U.S. blueprint has been spelled out in appendices to current peace proposals that aren’t public but were described to The Wall Street Journal by U.S. and European officials. The documents detail plans for U.S. financial firms and other businesses to tap roughly $200 billion of frozen Russian assets for projects in Ukraine—including a massive new data center to be powered by a nuclear plant currently occupied by Russian troops.

Another appendix offers America’s broad-strokes vision for bringing Russia’s economy in from the cold, with U.S. companies investing in strategic sectors from rare-earth extraction to drilling for oil in the Arctic, and helping to restore Russian energy flows to Western Europe and the rest of the world.

[snip]

If the U.S. vision prevails, it would override Europe’s own plans to shore up Ukraine’s wartime government and further cement Russia’s economic isolation. The result is what several officials described as a frenzied race to move ahead before the U.S. imposes its own arrangements.

U.S. officials involved in the negotiations say Europe’s approach would quickly deplete the frozen funds. Washington, on the other hand, would tap Wall Street executives and private-equity billionaires to invest the money and expand the amount available to invest. One official involved in the talks said the pot could grow to $800 billion under American management. “Our sensibility is that we really understand financial growth,” the official said.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had held productive conversations with the investment firm BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink.

The U.S. negotiating team sees shared economic activity and energy interdependence as the cornerstone of its business-for-peace philosophy: Ukrainian data centers would draw power from the currently Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, for example.

Some European officials who have seen the documents said they weren’t sure whether to take some of the U.S. proposals seriously. One official compared them to President Trump’s vision of building a Riviera-style development in Gaza. Another, referring to the proposed U.S.-Russia energy deals, said it was an economic version of the 1945 conference where World War II victors divvied up Europe. “It’s like Yalta,” he said.

Just as pitching Trump on a Riviera where millions of Gazans once lived, Bibi Netanyahu solicited Trump’s assistance in genocide, so has Dmitriev convinced Trump to sell out the Western order by turning the nuclear plant they stole into fuel for a data center.

As Judd Legum lays out, this is all happening via a guy, Jared, effectively serving as an agent of the Saudis.

Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, and that creates a host of legal issues.

As a de facto SGE with substantial authority, the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Kushner from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has raised at least $4.8 billion for Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Nearly 99% of Affinity Partners’ funding comes from foreign sources. The largest investment, $2 billion, came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF).

The Saudi government pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million annually. Other investors, including the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), pay annual fees of up to 2%. As of September 2024, Affinity Partners had collected $157 million in fees, mainly from Middle Eastern governments.

Kushner is continuing to collect these fees as he serves in a top foreign policy role for the Trump administration. This is precisely the kind of behavior the Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent.

See also Legum’s assessment of Jared’s role in Paramount’s effort to buy Warner using foreign (and Jared’s) money.

Horse trading away a half century alliance is bad enough.

But remember: These people are horrible businessmen. There’s no sign that Jared has any competence to judge these deals on the merits. He’s not a competent businessman, he’s a captured one.

And Trump was vastly more successful as a businessman when reality TV show producers controlled the plot than he every was IRL.

Throw enough goodies at my son-in-law and I will betray Europe, Donald Trump seems to be saying.

And that’s all it took.