By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Way back in 1951 The Miami Herald ran the Pulitzer Prize-winning project “Know Your Neighbor” that called out organized crime figures who lived in town.
If U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden’s suspicions about former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law are correct, it might be time to consider an update spotlighting unregistered foreign agents.
Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and a former senior advisor to the ex-president, today operates Affinity Partners and the $3 billion in funds it manages out of ninth-floor offices across from the Atlantic Ocean in Sunny Isles Beach. The couple resides in a waterfront mansion on exclusive Indian Creek Island, a short commute down AIA that the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser’s Office values at $24.4 million.
Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Three weeks ago he sent a six-page, single-spaced letter to Lauren Key, chief financial officer of Kushner’s private equity firm, expressing his concerns because “99% of the investment funds managed by Affinity Partners (‘Affinity’) comes from foreign sources, primarily the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
“It is deeply concerning that several Middle Eastern governments are using funds managed by Affinity as a means to pay tens of millions of dollars in fees every year to former President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, creating significant conflicts of interest and potential counterintelligence risks.”
Wyden went on to add that the arrangement is being “exploited by Mr. Kushner and other government officials as a means to avoid complying with the Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA] and other U.S. laws requiring U.S. persons to disclose payments from foreign governments.”
A willful violation of FARA is a felony, punishable by imprisonment for not more than five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.
$3 BILLION FROM TWO CLIENTS
Wyden asked Affinity – whose legal name is A Fin Management LLC – to produce answers and documents in response to a baker’s dozen questions “in order to better understand Affinity’s structure, funding sources, investment outlays and relationships with U.S. and foreign individuals.” He asked for a response no later than June 26.
Neither anyone at Affinity Partners nor Senate Finance Committee spokesman Ryan Carey responded to Florida Bulldog’s inquiries on Monday and Tuesday.
It’s not the first time Congress has had questions for Affinity. In February 2023, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote Kushner to complain about Affinity’s previous failure to adequately respond to the committee’s request for records.
In required filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March, Infinity acknowledged that nearly all of the $3,004,963,927 in pooled investments it managed was for two clients.
Wrote Wyden, “The largest source of funding for Affinity Partners appears to be a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund (hereafter ‘Saudi PIF’) made in June 2021, shortly after Mr. Kushner left the White House. The remaining $1 billion is split between sovereign wealth funds owned by the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar; Terry Gou, a Taiwanese billionaire and politician who is the founder of the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, and another investor whose identify whose identity has not been publicly reported.
“These activities generate tens of millions of dollars in advisory fees every year for Affinity and its principals, especially Mr. Kushner…As the anchor investor, it appears the Saudi PIF alone has paid Mr. Kushner’s firm at least $80 million in 2022 and 2023 combined ($40 million annually) in management fees alone, in addition to expense reimbursements. As the founder and sole owner of Affinity, Kushner is the biggest beneficiary of the fees paid to Affinity by the Saudi PIF and other Gulf state clients.”
KUSHNER ‘REWARDED’ FOR OFFICIAL ACTION?
The Saudi PIF’s board is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, heir apparent to the throne. Its decision to invest $2 billion in Affinity “so soon after Kushner’s departure from the Trump White House raises concerns that the investment was a reward for official actions Kushner took to benefit the Saudi government, including preventing the accountability for the Saudi government order the brutal murder of journalists and American citizen Jamal Khashoggi,” the letter says.
FARA was enacted in 1938 amid the rise of Nazi Germany to counter foreign propaganda in the U.S. Today, its focus is on requiring individuals lobbying on behalf of foreign powers or persons in the U.S. to register and disclose their activities and compensation.
According to Wyden, however, “Affinity’s funds demonstrate how foreign actors can put up all of the money for a private investment fund, pay politically exposed U.S. persons for ‘investment advisory services,’ and exploit longstanding disclosure exemptions afforded to private investment firms. There has long been concern from Congress that foreign actors, including foreign governments, have been exploiting the lack of reporting requirements for private funds as a means to launder money, influence the U.S. political system and engage in other illicit financial activity.”
“Among investment funds, Affinity Partners is highly unusual,” Wyden wrote. “Its founder is a private equity novice with a questionable investment background whose main recommendation is his relationship with the former president…Taking advantage of a legal loophole, Affinity’s leadership and employees, many of whom are former Trump officials, are untouched by U.S. laws requiring disclosure of work on behalf of foreign entities.”
In his letter, Wyden likewise raised the matter of heightened national security risks from funds like Kushner’s “that take money exclusively from foreign politically exposed investors.”
“For example, through the potential to disguise efforts to obtain sensitive national security information from portfolio companies and avoid notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for investments with national security implications,” the letter says.
While Wyden didn’t mention it, there was also the potential for a foreign agent, registered or not, to have obtained sensitive national security information from the trove of classified presidential records that former President Trump stashed at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.
Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified records. Prosecutors have said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of classified records, including documents about U.S. nuclear secrets and the nation’s defense capabilities, and also tried to block their return to the government.
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