Jared Kushner’s unofficial role in Trump administration sparks ethical questions

His only official job title at the White House is son-in-law. But Jared Kushner has staged a remarkable — and sometimes controversial — comeback to US President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Four years after leaving the White House, Kushner has played a key role in the Gaza and Ukraine peace talks alongside Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.

This week, the 44-year-old husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka also emerged as an investor in a bid by Paramount to buy Hollywood giant Warner Bros. If successful, the purchase could mean the Trump family partially owning CNN, the president’s most-hated news channel.

Kushner and Ivanka served as special advisors in the first Trump White House, where critics of the president hoped they would serve as a moderating influence. At the time, Kushner helped secure the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab nations, and was instrumental in drafting the Peace to Prosperity proposal for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was not implemented.

After Trump’s 2020 election loss, Kushner and Ivanka, who are Jewish, decamped to Florida, buying a home on a Miami island nicknamed the “Billionaire’s Bunker.” Kushner vanished into the private sector, insisting he would not return for a second administration.

Since then, he has founded an investment company largely funded by the same Middle Eastern countries that he dealt with in the first Trump term — and has become a billionaire, according to Forbes.

That has raised ethical questions about possible conflicts of interest, which Kushner has denied and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has branded “frankly despicable.”

But it has not stopped Trump, who has long mixed business and politics with family, from bringing him back.

“We called in Jared,” Trump told the Knesset on October 13, after Hamas released the last 20 living hostages held in Gaza as part of the ceasefire Kushner helped negotiate.”We need that brain on occasion. We gotta get Jared in here.”

The White House said that Kushner was giving “valuable expertise” while stressing that he was working as an “informal, unpaid advisor.”

“President Trump has a trusted family member and talented advisor in Jared Kushner,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to AFP, citing Kushner’s “record of success” in the Middle East.

Trump and Witkoff, “often seek Mr. Kushner’s input given his experience with complex negotiations, and Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked,” said Kelly.

Real estate scion from Modern Orthodox home

The slim, soft-spoken Kushner, a scion of a real estate empire, was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish home in New Jersey, where he attended the Frisch School, an Orthodox yeshiva high school.

Kushner’s father, Charles, who, like Trump and Witkoff, made a fortune in New York real estate, was jailed in 2005 for 14 months for charges including witness tampering and tax evasion. The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump at the end of his first term in 2020, and now serves as the president’s ambassador to France.

Kushner married Ivanka in 2009 after she converted to Judaism. Ivanka has frequently highlighted the family’s Jewish life on social media and has written about observing Shabbat.

When he joined Trump’s first administration, Kushner faced criticism for being a dilettante. But he ended up playing a key role in a range of Trump projects, including the Abraham Accords — the administration’s signature diplomatic achievement — and built enduring relationships with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

As Trump sought a Gaza ceasefire in his second term, he turned again to his son-in-law.

Kushner began to be seen around the White House again, and Trump dispatched him and Witkoff to secure a Gaza truce and hostage-release deal through negotiations with Israel, Middle Eastern powers and Hamas itself.

After the deal was secured on October 9, Kushner, Witkoff and Ivanka were received rapturously by tens of thousands of people at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv.

Speaking there, Kushner praised Trump’s commitment “to seeing peace, to seeing the hostages return home, to seeing Israel secure and safe, and to seeing the entire Middle East stable and thriving.”

Kushner said, following the Gaza deal, that his role was only temporary — and joked that he was worried Ivanka would change the locks of their Florida mansion and not let him back in if he stayed on.

But the next month, Kushner turned up at the Kremlin with Witkoff to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. Top Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Kushner “turned out to be very useful.”

Paramount bid role

Kushner’s business interests hit the headlines again this week when it emerged that his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, was among the investors backing Paramount’s battle with streaming giant Netflix to buy Warner Bros.

It added a political twist to the story. Not only has Kushner’s father-in-law said he would get “involved” in approving any deal, but Trump also appears determined to clamp down on CNN, which is part of Warner.

Kushner founded Florida-based Affinity in 2021, with much of its funding coming from foreign sources, particularly the Middle Eastern governments he’d worked with.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) gave $2 billion in 2022, The New York Times reported. The Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate Capital together gave around $1.5 billion in 2024, Kushner said on a podcast last year.

Kushner’s firm now manages $5.4 billion, according to a press release in September.

A US Senate committee launched an inquiry last year into whether Affinity was effectively being used as a foreign influence-buying operation with the Trump family ahead of the 2024 election, saying it had won millions in fees from foreign clients without returning any profits.

Affinity Partners did not reply when contacted by AFP.

Kushner hasn’t commented on the Paramount deal, but he has previously rejected any suggestions of ethical breaches, particularly regarding his Gulf ties.

“What people call conflicts of interest, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships,” he told the CBS program “60 Minutes” when it interviewed him and Witkoff in October about the Gaza deal.