I reached out to former White House ethics czar Richard Painter today following the latest reporting from the New York Times, which puts both Kushner and Mnuchin negotiating in the Gulf after the election (there, so they say, on behalf of the outgoing Trump administration). These visits raise important questions about what exactly was being discussed in those meetings in the last months of the Trump administration: Was it purely about government business or was it personal?
I spoke to Painter about the pieces of this story that played out in plain sight and why we’ve yet to see a full investigation—by the DOJ, Congress, or the Inspector General of the Treasury—to find out what Kushner and Mnuchin were really up to in the Middle East.