So, there he was, photographed at the World Cup Final. In the VVIP box. In Qatar.
The brazenness is fascinating.
I’m talking not about Elon Musk, the leading contender as the world’s most controversial billionaire—who, wrongly in my opinion, has been the focus of most news articles covering the event. Why shouldn’t Musk be at the World Cup?
Kushner on the other hand? Well, there is a very good reason he shouldn’t have been there, as it happens.
As I reported last weekend, there’s currently an amping up of the congressional investigation into whether Kushner’s family business was saved by a firm whose second biggest shareholder was the Qatari Investment Authority—at a time when Jared was Senior White House Advisor (where his unofficial title was “Secretary of Everything”) and the Qataris needed U.S. help in ending a Saudi- and Emirati-driven blockade that had reportedly begun with Kushner’s knowledge but not the knowledge of the U.S. secretaries of state and defense. In the spring of 2018, following a visit to the White House by Qatar’s Emir, the U.S. withdrew its support of the blockade of Qatar. And then the Kushner business was suddenly saved—by a fund in which the Qataris had a huge stake. The two events occurred within weeks of each other.
Coincidence? Or more? That’s exactly what Congress wants to know.
And yet here, investigation notwithstanding, is Kushner. In Qatar—the very Middle East state that is the focus of his troubles. Standing publicly beside Musk, whose acquisition of Twitter has meant there’s rarely a day the billionaire is not in the news. If ever a gesture was designed to flip the bird, this surely is it.
The photograph of the pair—who, comically, do look as if they could be plotting world domination—has spawned news articles questioning what the nature of their relationship is.
Well, one answer is in my 2019 book, Kushner. Inc.