The horror show that is Jared Kushner’s avarice knows no bounds.

Jared Kushner’s real estate firm Cadre is ready to pounce on low-income and minority neighborhoods devastated by coronavirus and its economic fall-out.

The president’s son-in-law personally oversaw the failed White House response to the coronavirus, which resulted in the death of more than 200,000 Americans so far, and contributed to the economic decay of large swaths of American cities.

Kushner’s Cadre is a real estate investment start-up he partly owns with his brother, Joshua. The company uses artificial intelligence to identify investment opportunities based on the very factors that Kushner’s failed coronavirus response amplified..

Kushner owns about $50 Million in shares in the company (which he has not divested). George Soros and Mark Cuban are also investors in Cadre.

‘Not The Role of Government’

In March, while the president was lying to Americans about Coronavirus, Cadre CEO Ryan Williams had the foresight to lay off 100 workers and braced for the worst.

At around the same time, Kushner’s coronavirus shadow task force met repeatedly at FEMA.

According to attendees, the president’s senior advisor appeared to assume his father-in-law’s mantle, reigning over the meeting with a decidedly dictatorial tone.”The federal government is not going to lead this response”.

“It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do,” he reportedly told those attending.

Vanity Fair reported last month that Kushner was specifically referring to blue states because at the time, democratic-leaning states were the epicenters of the virus.

The White House even canceled a national testing program that would have slowed down the disease dramatically.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner told his task force. “That is not the role of government.”

Max Kennedy, Jr. was one of a motley crew of volunteers from the finance world on Kushner’s task force. Kennedy told Jane Meyer in the New Yorker that he quickly discovered no-one else was coming to help with the coronavirus response.

“It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever,” the young Kennedy said. “The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

“It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” he added.

Kennedy, who is the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, was compelled to write anonymously to congress.

ethnic cleansing

It’s against this setting that Cadre’s CEO Ryan Williams chose to announce that his company will resume investing, which basically means buying up large swaths of valuable property in neighborhoods in economic distress.

That distress has been made far worse by GOP Senators refusing to extend emergency coronavirus funding to the hardest hit Americans, depriving them of extended unemployment benefits. That, in turn, has resulted in large-scale evictions.

It’s into this soup of economic despair that a squadron of Cadre’s vulture opportunists will descend. When things are at their lowest, the start-up’s opportunity specialists will use whatever pressure is necessary to force residents out of their homes.

Bill Barr’s threat to withdraw federal funding from New York City, Seattle and Portland may also be used as leverage to compel state and city officials to go along with what appears to be some sort of for-profit ethnic cleansing scheme.

Barr won’t explicitly state he is targeting Black communities, instead he uses the phrase. ‘anarchic jurisdictions’.

Kushner’s reputation as a slumlord is well documented, and the city has a long track record of vulture developers preying on poor neighborhoods, including both Kushner’s father and father-in-law.

His father, Charles Kushner was a criminal who spent time in prison, but even he never engineered the genocide of hundreds of thousands for capital gains.

If anyone were capable of such a scheme, people who know the Kushners say, it would be Jared.

The post Vulture Capitalism appeared first on Narativ.

Is Jared Kushner a White House mole for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

Not since Jonathan Pollard, has the United States had a public spy scandal involving our closest mid-east ally, Israel. Now within the space of a few years, we’ve learned about Jeffrey Epstein, George Nader, Psy Group, and George Papadopoulous, all off whom are, or were suspected of being assets for Israel.

Now there’s compelling evidence to suggest Kushner is heavily influenced by Netanyahu as part of a multinational conspiracy to destroy American democracy.

On the latest podcast, I’m joined by futurist and strategic analyst Eric Garland and Twitter’s authority on organized crime, Lincoln’s Bible. We break down the evidence from every angle: America’s interest, domestic politics, and intelligence operations

If you don’t already follow them, I highly recommend doing so @EricGarland and @LincolnsBible on #Twitter

Part 1 of Jared Kushner: Inside Man

Before you watch Part 2, Narativ relies on donations from viewers like you to fund our investigations and podcasts. Go to Patreon.com/Narativ and support real independent journalism for as little as $5 a month.

PART 2 OF JARED KUSHNER: INSIDE MAN

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The DOJ’s reversal on prosecuting Michael Flynn means reopening the case of Flynn’s alleged treasonous acts.

In my latest podcast, I was joined by strategic analyst Eric Garland. We discussed Flynn’s crimes and why Jared Kushner’s and Bibi Netanyahu’s actions need closer examination.

Before you watch Part 2, Narativ relies on donations from viewers like you to fund our investigations and podcasts. Go to Patreon.com/Narativ and support our independent journalism for as little as $5 a month.

Here’s part 2:

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As COVID-19 came to America, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner saw dollars not deaths.

For three critical weeks beginning in February, the White House could have stopped the spread of the coronavirus.

My investigation reveals Intelligence and National Security Council officials briefed Donald Trump about the scale and severity of the looming outbreak in January. Yet he officially failed to react and publicly denied the threat.

By February 24, as the stock market tumbled on the news the coronavirus had spread outside of China’s borders, to South Korea, Iran, and the U.S., Trump remained inexplicably in denial.

It took Trump until March 13 for Trump to declare the pandemic a national emergency, 19 days after the financial markets began their retreat.

Instead of putting America on a war footing, Trump kept talking down the severity of the coronavirus, calling it a hoax and downplaying the actual numbers and projections his advisers were giving him.

Those 19 days when Trump fiddled, could have saved America from this crisis.

TRUMP IN DENIAL AS COVID-19 SPREAD

On February 24, there were 15 confirmed cases of Americans with COVID-19. By March 13, the figure was 2163. There is no doubt that a more prompt and deliberate response to contain the virus would have suppressed its growth trajectory significantly.

South Korean officials acted decisively after their first COVID-19 case on January 20, diagnosed on the same day the U.S. had its first confirmed case.

The South Koreans began testing symptomatic cases, contact tracing anyone who was potentially infected and isolating suspected cases. As a result, the spread of the virus in South Korea was dramatically slowed.

The opposite was playing out in the United States. Trump declared the coronavirus “very much under control in the U.S.A.” when in reality it was spreading without any attempts to contain it on the ground. A ban on travel from China was instituted.

Yet even as he was downplaying the virus publicly, Trump was engaged behind the scenes as American pharmaceutical companies were bidding to acquire test manufacturers and vaccine makers. One of those companies doing the buying was Thermo Fisher Scientific.

On March 3, Thermo Fisher Scientific completed a $10 Bn acquisition of Qiagen, A Dutch company that developed a COVID-19 test.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Ten days later, On March 13, Trump’s opinion of the looming crisis suddenly shifted, and he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency.

The declaration allows the FDA and other government agencies to circumvent usual regulations for drug and test approvals.

Trump mentioned Thermo Fisher by name when he announced the national emergency, adding that FDA approval would not be far behind. It wan’t. Thermo Fisher’s test kits were approved by the FDA within 24 hours.

There are troubling murmurs of a conflict of interest but nothing iron-clad.

Trump owned shares in Thermo Fisher before becoming president. He says he divested them in 2017, but Trump may still hold them via a trust.

The CEO of Thermo Fisher’s China division, Gianluca Pettiti, was also one of 20 U.S. business leaders who attended a banquet for Trump and Melania during their 2017 state visit. In a social media post, President Xi is visible just feet away from Pettiti and Trump.

It’s hard to account for Trump’s coronavirus about-face: from hoax to national emergency within days. Some argue Trump was just being overly reassuring to Americans in the early stages, but how does that account for his lack of attention to disaster prevention?

The coronavirus and other bio-agents represent a brand new multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical sector. Thermo Fisher for example, intends to make 5 million COVID-19 tests a month. They will charge medicare $51 for each test (up from the CDC’s $31). That’s $3 Billion per year based on the Medicare price alone, which is vastly lower than other providers. And the taxpayers will shoulder the difference in cost.

Interestingly, Thermo Fisher also has ties to the Koch Brothers. Tyler Jacks headed the late David Koch’s cancer foundation at MIT. Jacks sits on the board of directors and the advisory board of Thermo Fisher.

Beyond testing, vaccines, masks, protective equipment, and surveillance tech represent other potential growth markets in this new sector. It’s not hard to see how the war against viruses will become the new war against terror.

While Trump managed Thermo Fisher’s FDA approval, he was also actively pursuing potential suitors of vaccine makers from around the world.

The CEO of Germany’s CureVac visited the White House on March 2. A visit arranged with just 24 hours notice. He was publicly fired a week later amid allegations Trump tried to buy the company’s vaccine production for the exclusive use of Americans, a claim which has been widely disputed.

It’s unlikely that CureVac will sell its entire vaccine supply to any country, let alone America. Still, there are 51 other vaccine studies around the world, and the first to market stands to make its owners a fortune. This is the race to watch as the sector heats up.

We also found out this week, Jared Kushner’s much-vaunted Google website initiative was neither successful nor Google’s. Jared’s brother’s health care company, Oscar, developed the site. Jared was a shareholder in the company until he allegedly disinvested from it.

While Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 has been an unmitigated disaster, an unmistakable pattern of Trump’s hyper-focus on dealmaking rather than disaster response has emerged.

Trump is so fixated on being America’s CEO; he’s failed at the most crucial role of being its president: saving American lives.

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Henry Kissinger played a significant role in getting Donald Trump elected with Russian help, and it’s not the first time he betrayed his country for a Presidential nominee.

Richard Nixon would have taken the circumstances surrounding the Chennault Affair to his grave if it weren’t for a moment in space and time which placed the archived memos of Nixon’s Chief of Staff in historian John Farrell’s hands.

It was 2016. Farrell hit the historical equivalent of winning the Powerball when the Nixon Library granted him access to some of the last documents released from Nixon’s Presidency.  He came across memos by Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, from the 1968 presidential campaign.

Farrell recognized the notes as confirmation of a rumour which had persisted for decades. The Nixon campaign had colluded with the South Vietnamese to scuttle President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks to end the Vietnam War, just as those talks appeared to be nearing a successful outcome.

In the Summer of ’68, Nixon’s election support was cratering as a result of Johnson’s overtures to the South Vietnamese. Nixon knew he’d lose the election to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president if a peace deal were struck before election day.

Henry Kissinger, who would later become Nixon’s National Security Adviser, started the whole thing. In ’68 Kissinger was a little-known, 45-year-old Republican strategist who manoeuvred his way into the peace talks as an advisor and, in an act of considerable betrayal, leaked news of the negotiations to Nixon.

Kissinger’s calculus was personal and not political, although it certainly could have been influenced by his connections in Russia and China. He knew he’d get a cabinet position if either campaign won, but as a practitioner of realpolitik, he also knew a diplomat with his skill-set would have far greater opportunity under Nixon and a much higher profile in a prolonged war. He was also covering his bases.

Faced with a choice between peace and power, Nixon made a predictable decision. Along with Haldeman, he hatched a plan which would be tantamount to treason but would land Nixon the White House. It became known as the Chennault Affair.

As Kissinger leaked details of Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, Nixon hatched a plan that would become known as The Chennault Affair

Nixon and  Haldeman enlisted the help of a prominent Republican fundraiser with connections to China. Anna Chennault struck a glamorous figure as she wielded power, money and influence in the US-China lobby and within Republican circles.

The affair was named after her because Chennault was also Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government. She convinced them to stall the Johnson talks, promising a better deal, if Nixon were elected.

In four pages of notes attached to memos from his years as Chief of Staff, Haldeman had left behind clues for future investigators like John Farrell, to discover. They proved that the Chennault Affair, which Nixon often dismissed as a “canard,” was a true story.  In the memos, Haldeman hand-wrote that Nixon ordered him to “monkey wrench” the Vietnam peace negotiations and that Nixon wanted to “keep Anna Chennault working on SVN.”

As Farrell read Haldeman’s notes, the cruelty of Nixon’s plan struck him. There is no doubt the memos were held back for as long as they were because they revealed Nixon won the White House at the cost of American lives.

President Johnson was furious when he discovered Nixon’s betrayal, calling it treason, but he couldn’t prove it.  The spy agencies had obtained intercepts of calls between Chennault and the South Vietnamese ambassador, pleading with him to “hold on,” and assuring him “we are close to winning,” but there wasn’t conclusive evidence of  Nixon’s involvement.

Even as peace talks collapsed and the election lost, Johnson never spoke publicly about the affair, although he did confront Nixon in the Oval Office. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage [South Vietnam] not to come to the table,” Nixon is heard saying on White House recordings.

Nixon had good reason not to fess up.  The affair was likely a violation of the Logan Act. That would have meant far more severe consequences for Nixon than a break-in. Watergate meant impeachment; treason spelled death.

Watergate brought Nixon down, but as far as Presidential scandals go, the Chennault Affair was far more consequential, not only because it potentially extended the war for years but because it revealed the lengths to which Nixon would go to seize power.  The deaths of 1000’s of American soldiers in Vietnam was not too great of a price for the man who would become the 37th President.

Haldeman died in 1993 without ever revealing the affair. Chennault was buried in Arlington Cemetery. She always denied her role was consequential. Of the four main conspirators,  Kissinger is the only one still alive today.

Kissinger became a towering figure in global affairs by often favouring profit and practicality over principles, even if it meant skirting the law and cost lives.

Kissinger has had his foot on the scale of global power for over half a century. Over the years he’s been accused of committing genocide in Cambodia, encouraging death squads in Chile and Argentina and more recently, of looking passed Russia’s atrocities in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.  He believes the world would be a better place if strong US and Russia relations could co-exist with the Kremlin’s global misbehaviour.

“The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multi-polar and globalized,” he said. “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.”

That thinking is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. Kissinger has had a close relationship with Putin since they first met in the early 90’s. Next to actor Steven Seagal and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Kissinger is the closest connection Putin has to Washington, D.C. and the peculiar way it handles itself.   He is also friends with Donald Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when it came to a political marriage between Putin and Trump, Kissinger was the inevitable matchmaker.

If Time Warner was the proposal, the Mayflower was the engagement party.

Henry Kissinger faced the prospect of a damp Manhattan reception as he made his way to the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle in March 2016. He was the star attraction at a swanky power lunch hosted by executives of the media company and was to speak about US-Russia relations.

The Center for National Interest co-hosted the lunch.  Nixon founded the Washington-based think tank in 1994 and Kissinger serves as its Honorary Chair. The Center is a remnant of a bygone era, a place where fossilizing former titans of business and politics can lay their hat when fate, age or circumstance counts them out of the game.

Dimitri Simes is the Center’s president and the publisher of its magazine, National Interest. The Center appears to operate like any other think-tank, but it has a reputation for an extremely pro-Russian ideology.

Jared Kushner sat quietly, absorbing the scene.  The soon-to-be son of the next President of the United States was invited by HBO president Richard Plepler and former Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, who both sit on the Center’s governing board (a fact which deserves greater scrutiny). CNN president Jeff Zucker, who at the time reported to Bewkes, was also present at the event.

After lunch, Kushner met Kissinger and Simes. The encounter was a formal introduction, not a chance New York meet and greet. Kissinger, it would emerge, was trying to broker a relationship between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

In the ensuing weeks, Kushner would ask Simes and the National Center to put together one of the pivotal events of the Trump campaign timeline: a foreign policy speech scheduled for April 2016, entitled “America First.”  It was to be a public announcement of Trump’s pro-Russia foreign policy platform.  If Time Warner was the proposal, The Mayflower was the engagement party.

From that moment, Kushner took over the bulk of the campaign’s foreign policy, while Simes began organizing the Mayflower event.

Simes invited Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and other foreign diplomats, he arranged for the venue to be moved from the National Press Club to the Mayflower Hotel and organized a pre-event meet and greet which would include guests like Kislyak, Michael Fynn, Jeff Sessions and Kushner (who met Kislyak for the first time at the event).

Simes is himself an intriguing figure.  He is directly connected to Putin and keeps in regular touch with Kremlin insiders.  In 2013, he sat alongside the Russian President on a panel and was effusive as one can be. “I fully welcome President Putin’s tough stance, not because I am not a patriot of the United States, but because I believe that with regard to the great powers, baby talk is not the way to agreement. You need to understand what you can expect from another country, and you need to understand where there is resistance.”

Simes also chairs the Center’s advisory board which includes Alexey Pushkov, the former head of the Duma’s international-affairs committee.

The Center has also repeatedly intersected with key Kremlin figures in Trump-Russia, Alexander Torshin is Deputy Governor of Russia’s Reserve Bank.  Torshin and suspected Russian spy Maria Butina played a significant role in influencing the NRA to become an intermediary of Russian money funnelled to Trump’s campaign. Torshin and Butina had several interactions and meetings with the Center, which remain unexplained.

After Trump was elected, Kissinger felt emboldened to come out of the shadows.   A report in the German tabloid Der Bild headlined ‘Kissinger to prevent new Cold War’, claimed the former envoy was working towards a new relationship with Russia which included the U.S. accepting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Kissinger, now 95, had proved himself just as shrewd a diplomat as he was at 45. While it is clear Kissinger played a vital role in aligning Putin and Trump’s interests, it isn’t clear if he knew anything about Putin’s cyber plans to manipulate the electorate or hack DNC emails, not that it would have changed much. There’s a good reason the New Yorker trumpeted in a headline in 2016,  “Does Henry Kissinger have a conscience?”

The post Kissinger appeared first on Narativ.

Jared Kushner’s tangled web of Russian contacts and business dealings may prove his undoing. It also imperils the global balance of power.

Billionaire boys were all the rage at the start of this decade. Young men with last names like Zuckerberg, Thiel, Dorsey and Kushner became instant moguls in an era of free-flowing capital, unicorn dreams and billion dollar IPOs.

Against this backdrop, in 2014, Joshua and Jared Kushner and their friend, Ryan Williams, created Cadre. Williams was the public face of the operation while the Kushner boys worked investors through their V.C. fund,  Thrive Capital Partners. They raised $18 million in an initial funding round which included tech mega-stars like Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, David Yu, George Soros and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel.

Cadre was conceived as a data-driven real estate platform. A private club whose super-wealthy members gained access to the type of premium real estate deals the rest of us would have only learned about, if we happened to drive by the construction sites.

Cadre is estimated to be worth $800 million today and is attracting the attention of Trump-Russia investigators. As with many scandals, it was the cover-up which tipped off investigators to the underlying potential crime. Jared Kushner failed to disclose his $25 million stake in Cadre on his financial disclosure forms when he was appointed White House special adviser by Donald Trump, his father-in-law.

Kushner “inadvertently” left off a total of 70 investment holdings from the forms, an act which may constitute a felony and also begs the question: Is there something about Cadre – and Kushner’s other holdings – which made him risk five years in jail by forgetting to disclose them on a mandatory form?

The Paradise Papers link Jared Kushner to Kremlin cash.

“I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector,” Kushner told reporters in July, while standing behind a White House podium placed in the driveway of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Kushner had just testified before a congressional committee denying any collusion with Russian officials in the 2016 election and dismissing any notion he had business ties to Russia.

Last month, a leaked trove of documents revealing the origins of major global investments, the Paradise Papers, put lie to Kushner’s denials. They exposed a Russian tech billionaire as an investor in Cadre. Digital Sky Technologies CEO Yuri Milner had invested $850,000 in Kushner’s company via a family trust, the Paradise Papers revealed.

DST is a Russian-owned private global investment firm with holdings in some of the world’s biggest brands in tech.  While the company’s funding origins have raised suspicion before, the Paradise Papers revealed DST was operating as an investment front for sanctioned Kremlin companies investing in U.S. firms.

In 2011, two sanctioned Russian government firms, VTB Bank and Gazprom, gave Milner’s DST $191 million to buy large stakes in Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook investment was made just before the social network went public and its value mushroomed to $1 Bn after the listing.

“It was a different time,” Milner said in an interview with The New York Times. “It never even occurred to me back then that VTB Bank was not just another investor for us.”

Milner may shrug off the investment as a remnant of a different age, but it’s given Special Counsel Robert Mueller hard evidence the Kremlin was a business partner of Facebook, Twitter and Kushner’s Cadre.

The Kushner boys’ V.C. firm, Thrive Capital Partners, is also indirectly linked to a major Russian bank with deep ties to Trump-Russia. Thrive’s investment custodian is Silicon Valley Bank which partnered with sanctioned Russian Sberbank to invest in the U.S. tech sector in 2012.

Sberbank is the same bank which sponsored Donald Trump’s 2013 Moscow Miss Universe and VTB Bank was involved in funding the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow.  There are many questions about whether the Kremlin used Sberbank to launder money through Cyprus, Trump properties and the tech sector.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller now has a financial trail linking Kushner’s businesses to Kremlin cash via DST’s Yuri Milner and Russia’s Sberbank via Silicon Valley Bank. That’s aside from Kushner’s December meeting with Sergey Gorkov of Vnesheconombank and a recently revealed campaign overture from former Russian central banker Aleksander Torshin. Jared Kushner’s denials about his business ties to Russia do not hold up.

There is also the albatross around Kushner’s neck known as 666 Fifth Avenue. He bought the Manhattan trophy building in 2007 for an inflated $1.8 Bn and is now facing a $1.2 Bn mortgage bill he cannot repay. Kushner has been seeking a bailout from anyone who’ll listen including the Qataris, Chinese and Russians.

Data is the global weapon of choice for nation states trying to tip the balance of power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows data is the future of power.  “[Artificial intelligence is] the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,”  Putin asserted on state-funded RT recently.  “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Cadre, Facebook and Twitter, like many data-driven tech behemoths are all cast from the same dye:  They use data to control the price and pace of commerce based on who you are, what you like, how much you’re worth and with whom you are friends.

This data becomes even more significant in an era of Artificial Intelligence. A.I. is accelerating at such a pace that it’s hard to overstate how much machine-thinking will change every aspect of our lives in the coming years.  A.I. will control your existence and whomever controls A.I., will rule the world.

In this context, Putin’s multi-year campaign to invest in the U.S. tech sector was both cunning and shrewd. He was able to use his social network investments to exploit the social media landscape and elect a president with his own compromising Russian business interests. And now we know Trump’s son-in-law is also connected to Kremlin cash.

Make no mistake though, Trump’s election was only a means to an end in Putin’s strategic game. What he really seeks is nothing less than a shift in global power.

Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia and Jared Kushner. Why global power is literally shifting beneath your feet.

In October, Saudi Arabia held a conference which many dubbed “Davos in the Desert”.  The Kingdom used the conference to announce it intends to invest its vast liquid assets from fossil fuels into the tech sector. They plan to grow their Public Investment Fund from a current $65 Bn to $400 Bn, in just two years.

Like Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country which flagrantly flouts human rights norms. Still, 3,000 delegates from around the world attended the Riyadh conference.  Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink were all there. So was Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Newly installed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, made a rare appearance at the conference with a message: ‘We are open for business’.

Prince Salman also announced the kingdom would return to “a more moderate Islam and destroy extremist ideologies.  He announced women would be allowed to drive and also made a humanoid a citizen of the kingdom.

“We want to lead normal lives, lives where our religion and our traditions translate into tolerance, so that we coexist with the world and become part of the development of the world,” Prince Salman said.

Prince Salman presents himself as a grand reformer but his actions seem to be more authoritarian than liberal. He has aggressively consolidated power and arrested Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful men in an ‘anti-corruption’ drive.  He started a massive blockade of neighboring Qatar, is committing genocide in Yemen, forced the Lebanese Prime Minister to resign and is igniting the flames of war with Iran.

And at the center of the crown prince’s draconian crackdown is none other than Jared Kushner, who has developed an intriguing friendship with Prince Salman, according to Foreign Policy Magazine:

“Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, was in Riyadh again only recently. It was his third trip to Saudi Arabia since Trump took office. He again met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom he appears to have established a close personal relationship. It should therefore come as no surprise that Trump, who shares the young crown prince’s antipathy toward Iran, has commented favorably on the recent developments in Riyadh.”

Kushner has given Prince Salman carte blanche to reshape the Middle East using any means necessary. Laura Rozen quotes a former U.S. admin official as warning the situation could turn into chaos. “There is no one who has that camaraderie with the crown prince and has the instinctive desire to find common ground that Jared does. If something happens to Jared — he gets distracted or is no longer on the scene — what happens to [their] critical relationship with the White House?”

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been U.S. allies for the better part of a century as foes of Shiite-controlled Iran. Prince Salman however, has shifted his foreign policy eastward. He recently signed a $3 Bn arms deal with the Kremlin. The deal was described by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as “an historical moment”.  Putin called it a “landmark event”.  Add to this, Russia’s military and political control over Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and it’s easy to see how Russia may have used its influence over the Trump White House as cover to shift the balance of Middle East power.

This plan appears to have originated as early as last December when Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, mercenary Erik Prince and Stephen Bannon met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in secret in New York. Abu Dhabi is the capital of Saudi’s regional ally, United Arab Emirates.

Prince Zayed acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin since then. He met with Putin twice in 2016 and facilitated a meeting between Erik Prince and a Russian emissary in the Seychelles in December.  According to reports, the meeting revolved around isolating Iran in exchange for a dropping of U.S. sanctions.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is also investigating Kushner’s communication with Israeli officials in December to help veto a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli construction in disputed territories.  Kushner also met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and discussed a back-door communication channel with the Russians in the same month.

Does any of this connect to Kushner’s financial woes? Perhaps. In 2015 and 2016, Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated a financial bail-out of 666 Fifth Avenue with a Qatari sheikh. The $500 million deal failed in July this year.  Soon after, Saudi Arabia launched its blockade against Qatar with Trump’s support. Kushner visited Saudi Arabia three times since. Are the Saudi’s helping bail out the Kushners in exchange for looking the other way on Prince Salman’s crackdown?

Kushner’s business history shows no allegiance to conscience. He has ties to Kremlin insiders and sanctioned Russian entities, his deliberate obfuscation on his disclosure forms and an obstruction of justice investigation suggest Kushner cannot be viewed as an honest broker. He remains a singular focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and it seems evident the billionaire boy should not be trusted to handle our mid-east policy, until Mueller has completed his job.

The post The Billionaire Boys Club appeared first on Narativ.

Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump, have more connecting them than Ivanka Trump. 

On April 19 last year, Donald J. Trump was taking a victory lap after winning the Republican Party nomination. In his speech, he mentioned by name a number of bold-named businessmen who were there to hear him crow. Carl Icahn, Howard Lorber and Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust.

“The great Steven Roth,” Trump extolled. “Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South, it’s a tremendous success.”

“I said, ‘Steve, congratulations on the building,'” The newly-minted Republican presidential nominee said.

“He said, ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’ Is that right? My man!”

Trump and Roth have been friends (and sometimes business foes) for over 30 years.  They jointly own the 1290 Sixth Avenue office tower. Trump and Roth became business partners after Trump threatened to sue his former partners for trying to sell it to another party without his permission. 1290 Sixth Avenue became the second largest in Vornado’s portfolio but by no means the only marquee property in Roth’s sprawling Manhattan empire.

One other is 666 Fifth Avenue, which Roth’s Vornado Trust co-owns with Jared Kushner’s family. Jared made news in Manhattan’s real estate circles when he purchased the trophy building for $1.8 billion, using mostly borrowed money. By all accounts, Kushner overpaid for the building by paying twice as much per-square-foot than any other Manhattan building sale before it, according to the New York Post. Tellingly, the deal closed on Jared’s 26th birthday, Jan. 10, 2007.

It was an expensive birthday gift by any measure but for the young real estate scion it represented a giant statement to Manhattan. Two years earlier, his father, Charles Kushner, was imprisoned for 14 months after pleading guilty for tax evasion charges and for making illegal campaign contributions. Before exiting prison, Charles turned over his holdings to his eldest son to manage a business free of an ex-convict CEO. Jared was just 25. If his father’s prison sentence wasn’t enough for the young heir to handle, the circumstances that led to it, tore the Kushner clan apart.

Before being charged in 2005, Charles Kushner heard his brother-in-law was talking to investigators about his misdeeds. To gain leverage over him, Kushner paid a “very attractive, high-end call girl $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a Bridgewater, NJ, motel after she pretended to need a ride when her car broke down,” according to the Post. Jared’s father had the whole motel encounter taped and sent it to his sister, Esther. She turned the tape into the feds. Classic kompromat.

Now it seems, Kushner family history could be repeating itself. Investigators want to know if Jared has kompromat all of his own. Only this time, the disparaging evidence is financial in nature and it’s the Russians who could be holding it over him.

666 Fifth Avenue, The trophy building Jared bought for $1.8 Bn in 2007 has proved to be a financial noose around him and the family. By 2008, the building was generating just 70 cents on every dollar it owed.  Under pressure, Jared was forced to sell the pricey store space for $525 million to a partnership in 2008 and a 49 percent stake in the office portion to Stephen Ross’ Vornado in 2011. Yes, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump share more than wife and daughter, they share a business partner. A $1.2 Bn mortgage on Jared’s trophy building is due in just two years which unpaid, could destroy the family fortune.

Congressional investigators and the FBI are now probing a secret meeting Jared had with Vladimir Putin’s banker at Trump Tower in New York in December last year. The White House and the Russian bank have offered conflicting explanations for the meeting between Kushner and Sergei Gorkov.

The post Ties That Bind appeared first on Narativ.

Unnamed sources say the FBI now has details of how the operation to elect Trump colluded with Russia to win. Here’s what to expect.

Back in the Spring of 2012, the campaign of the incumbent President of the US offered one lucky supporter a “Dinner with Barack”.  Not just any dinner, mind you. Dinner with former President Barack Obama was going to take place at the West Village Brownstone of Sarah Jessica Parker with the “Sex and the City” star and other celebrities in attendance.

This extraordinary intersection of pop culture and US political power was no accident. It was the result Obama’s extraordinary data machine figuring out that some his supporters had an affinity to certain celebrities, Jessica Parker among them. The dinner contest was just one example of how the Obama campaign utilized “big data” to galvanize support for the president in a way no other president had ever done before him.

To be fair, Facebook was only 4 years old when Obama was elected the first time, 8 years-old the second time around, so being first was good fortune as much as foresight.   But to his campaign’s credit, they realized social media was a way to upend the establishment and win an election. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” declared then campaign manager Jim Messina.

As President Obama took a victory lap for his wins in 2008 and 2012, a team of geeky data crunchers were doing their own high-fiving for their role in winning and re-winning the White House.  Time Magazine revealed this effort after the election in a story about how data won the election for Obama.

What they revealed was:

“a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Flash forward to 2016, and reality TV star and property mogul Donald J. Trump was eyeing the White House. As a “self-funded” campaign the billionaire was not utilizing much of his own cash to power his campaign but now it has emerged, he was relying heavily on a big data campaign of his own.  Not funded by his own wallet, but by the coffers of a foreign nation.

Trump had little to no celebrity support and he certainly wasn’t organized enough to build a date machine in the Obama mold but with Russia’s help he was able to create a data machine with impressive results. Central to their operation was a server housed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The server, was described as “odd” by FBI investigators.  The server made regular check-ins with two other servers owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

Alfa Bank outwardly operates independently of the Kremlin but is largely believed to be a front operation for Vladimir Putin. Spectrum Health is a medical facility chain run by Dick DeVos, husband of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Brother-in-law to Erik Prince, The Blackwater CEO and Trump ally who is believed to have held a secret meeting in the Seychelles between UAE officials and Russia, on behalf of Trump.

“From May 4 until September 23, the Russian bank looked up the address to this Trump corporate server 2,820 times — more lookups than the Trump server received from any other source,” according to CNN. This accounted for 80% of connections to the server. The remaining 20% (714), were look-ups by Spectrum Health servers.

Now a few online bloggers, including Tea Pain and Conspirador have concluded that the server was reconciling a SQL databases – basically updating a giant spreadsheet of voter information, contact info and social media data so Trump and his Russian partners could spam, intimidate and influence the election.

This would be just like the Obama data machine only this time the data was illegally gotten by a foreign government.  Here’s a sample of the IP look-ups which has led analysts to believe what was going on here was a reconciliation of voters data.

The post Dial ‘C’ For Collusion appeared first on Narativ.