Jared Kushner, Boy Wonder, Can't Seem To Fill Out A Government Form Without Lying
Jared Kushner really has a problem filling out government forms. He has already left out his meetings with Russian Ambassador Kislyak and the head of the sanctioned Russian “bank” when he filled out his security clearance. Now it is reported that Kushner also failed to report a sweetheart $285 million loan from a bank currently under investigation for money laundering and that Kushner personally guaranteed on his financial disclosure form.
Last October, the Kushner Companies, with Jared as its titular head, received a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank, the one Wall Street firm that still did business with Donald Trump. The loan was to cover four floors of an office building in New York City that the Kushner Cos. had purchased in 2015 for around $295 million. One year later, in a declining New York real estate market, the Kushner Cos. received the Deutsche Bank loan plus another loan from another lender for $85 million, totaling nearly $75 million more than the purchase price of the property.
At the time of the loan, Deutsche Bank was under investigation for mortgage fraud relating to actions taken leading up to and during the financial crisis in 2008 and faced fines of up to $14 billion, which was actually almost as much as the market value of Deutsche stock at the time. It eventually settled that suit for a mere $7 billion. At the same time, the bank was also under investigation for running a $10 billion money laundering scheme for wealthy Russians trying to move money out of that country from 2011 to 2015.
More importantly, there was a major catch to Deutsche’s loan to the Kushner Cos. and that catch was that Jared Kushner and his brother Joshua would personally guarantee the loan. As the Post reports, the Kushner boys’ guarantee was “a ‘nonrecourse carve-out.’ Such guarantees require more than a loan default to kick in. They are commonly known as ‘bad boy’ clauses, a reference to how a lender could seek to hold the guarantor responsible for the debt under circumstances that might include fraud, misapplication of funds or voluntary bankruptcy deemed inappropriate.”
Since the loan was considered a major coup for the Kushner Cos. and only was secured a couple of months before Kushner filled out his financial disclosure form, it is hard to see how this would slip his mind. Kushner’s lawyer claims that the loan and the fact that Kushner was a guarantor did not need to be disclosed but, when presented with the details of the loan by the Post, the acting head of the Office of Governmental Ethics admitted the law may not be clear on the issue but recommended Kushner report it due to the size of the loan and the implications of Kushner’s guarantee.
Rachel Maddow also made an important point about that sanctioned Russian bank that Kushner forgot to mention he met with in his security clearance. VEB Bank is not a bank in any sense of the word. It is not a registered bank in any country, it is not a regulated bank anywhere, it has no capital, it has no cash, it has no deposits. It is merely a vehicle for the Russian government, and that means Putin, to throw Russian money around investing in various projects and people as he sees fit.
In addition, VEB was also instrumental in salvaging the Trump hotel in Toronto when it was close to failing, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Trump’s partner and builder of the hotel tower was struggling with severe cost overruns and the backing out of buyers of pre-sold condos in the wake of the financial crisis when VEB appeared with a deal to buy the builder’s stake in a Ukrainian steel maker for $850 million. The builder had bought his share of the steel maker for just $70 million shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Democrats keep asking why Jared Kushner still has a security clearance after lying on his application. They have received no answer. And Kushner still hasn’t given a reasonable answer to why he met with VEB to begin with and now the question is why he did not list the personally guaranteed loan from Deutsche Bank on his financial disclosure form.
The deeper this investigation goes, the more Kushner seems critical to it. Kushner was responsible for the data analytics for the Trump campaign which seems important since it seems the Russians were uniquely able to target Clinton voters with propaganda during the campaign. And Kushner and the Kushner Cos. have tried to use their connections to Trump to line up funding for their failing office tower at 666 5th Avenue in New York. It’s hard to believe that issue did not come up when Kushner met with the head of VEB bank. It’s no wonder Kushner just hired top-flight Washington attorney Abbe Lowell.