Is Jared Kushner a 'walking conflict of interest'?

Tonya Mosley (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley.

Jared Kushner is once again playing an extraordinary role in American foreign policy. He's President Trump's son-in-law, and during Trump's first term, he was a senior White House advisor who became one of the administration's central players in the Middle East. Today, he's helping negotiate peace deals in some of the world's biggest conflicts, from Israel and Gaza, the Russian-Ukraine War, to the US war with Iran. At the same time, Kushner runs a private equity firm backed by billions of dollars from places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. My guest, Dexter Filkins, spent months tracing how these two worlds overlap and what happens when diplomacy and private business become difficult to separate. Filkins is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who's covered wars and foreign policy for more than 25 years. His new piece is called Jared Kushner's Dollar Diplomacy.

Dexter Filkins, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Dexter Filkins (1:05)

Hi there.

Tonya Mosley (1:06)

Okay. I want to start with this title because it uses the phrase dollar diplomacy. A century ago, that essentially meant using American money and investment as an instrument of American power abroad. What does dollar diplomacy mean in Jared Kushner's hands?

Dexter Filkins (1:24)

That was back when we had money to throw around.

Tonya Mosley (1:27)

Yeah.

Dexter Filkins (1:28)

Well, you touched on it at the top there.

Jared, he's wearing two hats right now. He's a diplomat, he's unpaid, but he's an agent for American foreign policy and for the White House and for President Trump on one hand and on the other hand, he is managing a large private equity fund with several billion dollars in it, nearly all of which was gathered from foreign countries and foreign governments and their sovereign wealth funds. And so, he's potentially a walking conflict of interest.

Tonya Mosley (2:03)

Right. You mentioned that he doesn't take a salary. He's not a cabinet secretary. He's not a confirmed ambassador. And the White House's position is that because he isn't paid, there is no conflict of interest.

Dexter Filkins (2:17)

Yeah. I mean, that's what they say.

I think that strains credulity. I sound like a lawyer in a court room. But I mean, it strains kind of believability. And I think most of the lawyers that I talk to kind of work in the realm of government ethics were pretty clear about this. And basically, what they said was, it doesn't really matter if he's taking a salary or he's taking a salary of a dollar a year or whatever. It doesn't matter. What matters is that he's acting as a government employee. He's acting as an agent of the United States government. And that in every conceivable way, Jared Kushner is a government employee, whether he's making money at it or not. I talked to any number of government ethics professors, lawyers who said that and said it pretty clearly. This is the sort of thing that like wouldn't have come up for debate a decade ago. It just wouldn't have come up. I mean, the practice of former government employees cashing in on their former jobs in the private sector, I mean, that's a tried and true tradition.

You work at the Pentagon or whatever, and then you leave and then you lobby the Pentagon. Now they've put a bunch of rules in place that have sought to separate those interests and slow the conflicts down, so that when you leave the US government, if you leave, let's say, the Treasury Department, like you can't lobby the Treasury Department, or you can't lobby the executive branch for X number of years. It's not a long time, it's like two or three years or something, but you can't walk out of the building and then pick up the phone and say, hey, I'm available to lobby the Treasury Department. And all my former colleagues that I was just sitting with like two days ago, you can't do that, right, there's a cooling off period.

Tonya Mosley (4:11)

I want to get into though what this undefined role actually looks like. And you write quite extensively about it in this piece. But first I just want to lay the groundwork of what it looks like for Kushner out there. There's someone else by his side in a lot of his work, specifically in Iran and Ukraine, Steve Witkoff, he's a real estate developer that President Trump has known for decades. Presidents have always kept wealthy friends close, often in ambassador roles.

What does the president believe that these two, Kushner and Witkoff, can do that diplomats cannot?

Dexter Filkins (4:48)

I think their titles are the Peace Envoys.