In This Episode
In our 41st episode of This F*cking Guy, Erin and Alyssa dive deep into the past of the Dumb-a** Daddy’s Boy, Jared Kushner. From slithering into the top Ivy League with help from his corrupt father, to being one of NYC’s most soulless slumlords, to his abhorrent handling of COVID and his Middle East meddling under his father-in-law, this may be one of our more notorious nepo-baby guys yet.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast, episode title, and episode date.
Kushner Companies Lied About Rent Stabilized Tenants on 30th Ave, 38th St Properties (QNS)
The group of Kushner Villages tenants says the properties’ fire sprinklers don’t even work. (Legal Reader)
Kushner Cos. fined $210K by New York for false documents (AP News)
Port’s New Head, Sued by Brother, Faces an Inquiry (Observer)
Erin Ryan: Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the show where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria Podcast.
Erin Ryan: Alyssa, have you ever wondered what would happen if a haunted doll were put in charge of the Middle Eastern peace process?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No, I can’t say that I have.
Erin Ryan: Well, wonder no more.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I literally haven’t been wondering.
Erin Ryan: Well, the answer is this episode’s subject, Jared Kushner.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay.
Erin Ryan: In order to get the full Jared, we need to go back a bit further in his family history than we normally do with fucking guys to two Jewish kids living in Eastern Poland during World War II named Yossel Berkowitz and Rae Kushner.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Eastern Poland was a bad place to be during World War II for pretty much everybody, but especially for Jewish people.
Erin Ryan: Rae Kushner and her family escaped the Nazis by hand-digging tunnels from their occupied village into the woods where there was a larger group of Jews living in holes to evade detection. One of the others was a young man named Yossel Berkowitz. Rae and Yossel were married and Yossel took his wife’s last name because she came from a higher status family than he did.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How very modern.
Erin Ryan: Yes. Jared Kushner’s grandpa, the original feminist. After Soviet troops liberated their village, Rae and Yossel lived in a refugee camp while waited to find out if any countries would let them in.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Writing for ProPublica, Allan Sloan dug up an interesting excerpt from an interview Rae Kushner gave in 1982, where she recalled how miserable the ordeal was for her family. Quote, “the day after we got married in Budapest, Hungary, we smuggled ourselves over the border into Italy, Rae Kushner said. This was our honeymoon. In Italy, we sat in a displaced person’s camp. It was like being in the ghetto again. Nobody wanted to take us in. So for three and a half years, we waited until we finally got a visa to come to United States.”
Erin Ryan: Yeah, the Kushners were ultimately able to leave the camp after Yossel, who had by then changed his name to Joshua, fudged his immigration forms a bit and claimed that his father was already living in the U.S. It was actually his father-in-law.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Can’t begrudge people doing what they need in order to survive. But imagine how willfully unsympathetic Jared Kushner would have to be to fail to see the connection between the ways his own family was harmed by restrictive immigration policies and the ways that the Trump administration is doing the same thing to families now.
Erin Ryan: Yeah. What the Kushners did to get into this country would be, by MAGA standards, grounds for incarceration at a migrant detention center. So the Kushner’s moved to the U.S. and settled in New Jersey. They had three kids, Murray, Esther, and Charles. Joseph got into real estate and became part of what’s known as the Holocaust Builders, European Jews who settled in the same part of Jersey around the same time and worked in the same business. The Holocaust Builder’s were typically people who kept their heads down and their minds on their businesses and their families. They weren’t flashy or fame seeking, and they certainly didn’t want to draw too much attention by getting mixed up in politics.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But Charles Kushner was not like that. He was flashy, pushy, and ambitious, and was seen as gauche by others in their small community. In other words, he was kind of a dick.
Erin Ryan: Charles Kushnner wasn’t ha ha, put this character on a reality show trashy. He was throw him in the basura trashy for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. Charles and his wife, Seryl had four children, Dara, Nicole, Joseph, and today’s fucking guy, Jared Corey Kushner, born on January 10th, 1980.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jared Corey, a name meant to be airbrushed on a t-shirt on the Wildwood Boardwalk.
Erin Ryan: Yep, that name comes with a trans am and a Valtrex prescription. [laughter] Jared was the older of the two Kushner boys and his father’s favorite. According to Vicky Ward’s book, Kushner, Inc., Charles Kushner thought of himself as a kind of Joseph Kennedy figure and thought that Jared would make a great JFK. I think of Charles Kushnner more like the George Bluth and Jared more like the Buster.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Charles wasn’t all that interested in priming his daughters for greatness. This from a man who was descended from a woman so badass that she dug a tunnel out of a Nazi-occupied village.
Erin Ryan: Sexism is so dumb.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Charles was a well-known philanthropist who gave to schools and hospitals as well as synagogues and charitable causes both stateside and in Israel.
Erin Ryan: He also donated to a lot of Democratic politicians. One was a young upstart named Cory Booker, who launched an ultimately failed mayoral campaign in 2002, a campaign partially fueled by a donation from Daddy Kushner. Charles had a tight relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, the future Israeli prime minister, who would take Jared’s childhood bed during one of his visits with the family, displacing Jared to the basement for the night.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That is bananas.
Erin Ryan: That’s bananas.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But Charles Kushner’s prized political pet was a man named Jim McGreevey, who ascended all the way from mayor of Woodbridge Township to the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion before his career and life came crashing down. His rise and spectacular fall would not have been possible without Charles Kushnner.
Erin Ryan: In the few years between when Kushner and McGreevey met in the late 1990s, and when both men’s lives went tits up, Kushner, and his close associates, donated at least $369,000 to McGreevey. Kushner was also what’s known as a bundler, which is a donor who wrangles up donations from other donors. Reporting suggests that Kushner raised at least a million dollars for McGreevey when he successfully ran for governor of New Jersey in 2001.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2002, McGreevey nominated Kushner to be the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. This was a powerful post that would have given Kushner’s sway over the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, as well as influence over billions in trade.
Erin Ryan: Now, even for the corrupt world of New Jersey politics, this was a bridge and tunnel too far. As Charles was cozying up to McGreevey, trouble was brewing in the Kushner clan. The first generation of American Kushners were at one point a close-knit extended family. According to a New York Magazine piece from the early aughts, Esther, Murray, and Charles would take big extended family trips together. All the kids, all the grandkids, et cetera. But that all started to come apart when, in 2001, Murray sued Charles over allegations that Charles had cheated Murray out of money from real estate deals. Murray’s suit also alleged that Charles had been mismanaging funds in other ways, funneling millions to political candidates and public figures, like Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom Charles had allegedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. Before discovery could be completed and evidence of Charles’ dealings could be made public, the case was sealed.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Enter Robert Yontef. Yontef, a former Kushner Company employee, also sued Charles, alleging he was fired after he’d helped Murray’s lawyers assemble documents necessary for the original suit to proceed.
Erin Ryan: So, the Port Authority nomination happened while there were still all these unanswered questions about Kushner’s business dealings. Charles Kushner had girl bossed too close to the sun.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Because the pieces were moving into place for McGreevey’s downfall to happen almost in tandem with Kushner’s. In 2000, Charles Kushner had taken McGreevey with him on one of his many trips to Israel. While they were there, according to Vicky Ward, Charles introduced McGreevey to a young man named Golan Cipel. After he was elected governor, McGreevey appointed Cipel to a Homeland Security post, which confused people because Golan’s Cipel had like no experience.
Erin Ryan: Now that was back when people would actually get upset by no-nothing political appointees. Eyebrows were raised, whispers were whispered, McGreevey was married and had children, but by 2003 rumors were swirling that Cipel was going to file a sexual harassment suit against the governor, which would include allegations that the governor and Cipel were in a same-sex relationship, which led to this Hall of Fame awkward press conference.
[clip of Jim McGreevey]: I engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony. It was wrong, it was foolish, it is inexcusable. And for this I ask the forgiveness and the grace of my wife. She has been extraordinary throughout this ordeal, and I am blessed by virtue of her love and strength. Given the circumstances surrounding the affair, and its likely impact upon my family and my ability to govern, I have decided the right course of action is to resign.
Erin Ryan: Sometimes I’m worried that we haven’t come very far where I’m like, man, things are worse now for women than they were in the 90s. And then I see footage like this and I’m, like, I feel like today it would be more acceptable for a wife to be like, fuck you though. Like, I’m not standing behind you.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: One rumor recounted by New York Magazine was that it was Kushner who had egged Cipel’s lawsuit on because Kushner knew he was about to go down and wanted to take McGreevey with him.
Erin Ryan: After McGreevey’s resignation, state lawmakers demanded that Kushner submit to a review of his business practices before they’d confirm him to one of the most powerful appointments in the state. But rather than be scrutinized, Charles Kushner withdrew his nomination.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This did not help dispel suspicions that Charles Kushner was hiding some dirty dealings. Investigators started sniffing around.
Erin Ryan: And that’s when Charles Kushner really broke bad. [laughter] He suspected that his sister Esther’s shoulder and her husband Bill were helping the feds in their investigation into Kushner’s dealings. And so to get back at her, he paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure Bill to a hotel, seduce him, and secretly record the sexual encounter. Kushner then mailed the tape of the blowjob to Bill’s wife, again his own sister, and timed it to arrive on the same day as her son’s engagement party.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Keep it classy.
Erin Ryan: So anybody who’s looked into Jared Kushner’s piece of shit dad knows about that. But I was surprised to learn in researching this that Charles Kushner tried the same scheme with a different guy, Robert Yontef, the guy who had helped with Murray’s lawsuit. Yontef rejected the prostitute’s advances, though.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2004, an ambitious federal prosecutor by the name of Chris Christie secured an 18-count indictment against Daddy Kushner. The charges included illegal campaign contributions, tax crimes, and witness retaliation.
Erin Ryan: The witness retaliation charge came courtesy of Kushner’s sister Esther, who had taken her husband’s blowjob tape directly to the feds.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What a messy bunch.
Erin Ryan: Kushner surrendered willingly and pled guilty. Why? There’s a lot of speculation about this. One school of thought is that Christie’s investigation had been so aggressive that Kushner’s team just wanted him to lay off before he uncovered other stuff. Vicky Ward reported in Kushner, Inc. that the unsubstantiated rumor that Christie had threatened to expose Kushner for being secretly bisexual or other salacious details of his personal life.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: There’s never been any verified evidence confirming this rumor, but the fact that it exists and is written down in a book is a testament to what an attack dog Christie was and how eager he was to bring Charles Kushner down.
Erin Ryan: Gotta respect it, right? Let’s get back to Jared for a second. Growing up, the future golden boy of the Trump White House was, by all accounts, about as unremarkable as a white gym sock. He attended private Jewish schools, where he was a mediocre student. He played high school basketball and was a big fan of Billy Joel.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That’s Seton Hall caliber, not Ivy League.
Erin Ryan: But shortly before it was time for Jared to apply to college, Charles made a $2.5 million donation to Harvard University. And then, lo and behold, his favorite son got in. Jared got in over the actual exceptional students at his high school that had better grades than him.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Mediocracy at work.
Erin Ryan: The line is actually meritocracy, but mediocracy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Whatever, both.
Erin Ryan: Hey, let’s keep the portmanteau. I love it, mediocracy, by most accounts, Jared was also boring and average at Harvard, returning home most weekends. Spending his free time buying and selling real estate in the greater Boston area. After graduating, he enrolled at NYU in a dual MBA and JD program.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wow so he must have done okay at Harvard.
Erin Ryan: I mean, hard to say. He was enrolled in the NYU program in 2003, which happened to be the same year that Charles Kushner rented some prime office space to NYU at a discounted rate, and he’d also made a donation to NYU in the recent past.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Weird.
Erin Ryan: Charles Kushner went to prison in 2005, and when his dad was in the clink, Jared would visit him regularly. He maintains to this day that his father was not a corrupt piece of trash. But rather a victim of prosecutorial excess, even though in his 2022 book, Breaking History, he admitted that his dad made some big, big mistakes. Jared hasn’t said much about the actual academic aspects of his college years. After college, he used the money he earned from collegiate junior slum-lording to purchase the New York Observer, a once venerable journalistic outfit that he would go on to slowly ruin. He hired former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers to sit atop the masthead. Spiers has recounted both on social media and in a lengthy op-ed for the Washington Post that Jared was kind of an idiot who didn’t know what he was doing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Spiers observed his business acumen thusly, quote, yes, he ran the company, which he inherited, not uncommon in New York’s dynastic insular real estate world, but he was sure he had the goods. When I worked for him, I didn’t think he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accouterments as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view this position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.
Erin Ryan: I’ve also heard through secondhand sources that Jared is quote, dumb and mean. [laughter] Somebody I know who worked for the Observer during these years after the Spiers era said that they never saw Jared in the office, not once. It’s pretty much consensus among media watchers that Jared destroyed the New York Observer, but quality journalism that New Yorkers can depend on was never what he aimed to do. Some have implied that the real reason Jared bought the Observers so that there’d be a place for him to launder his family’s flagging reputation.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Charles Kushner got out of jail in 2006 after serving 14 months of his two-year sentence and served out the remainder of his term in a halfway house. After that he wasn’t supposed to be taking an active role in running the company, but it was widely acknowledged that Charles was the puppet master even though Jared technically had the title of head of his dad’s company.
Erin Ryan: I mean, Bluth family vibes. 2007 was a big year for bump it hairstyles, Forever 21 going out tops, and Jared Kushner. For one thing, this was the year he was introduced to his future wife, Ivanka Trump.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Charles and Seryl Kushner had some issues with her at first because she wasn’t Jewish. For a time, the two broke up, but they got back together.
Erin Ryan: According to Vicky Ward, Donald Trump was also initially disappointed with Jared before coming around to him. He’d hoped to marry his prize child off to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. [laughter] Seriously, it sounds like something like a six-year-old would do.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s crazy.
Erin Ryan: But both sets of parents eventually came around to the coupling. After all, both families were Manhattan outsiders who desperately wanted the adoration and fear of the insiders who looked down on them. Ivanka converted to Judaism, and in 2009, Javanka got married in a 500-person over-the-top ceremony at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Alyssa, I wonder if mother of the bride, Ivana Trump, knew that within a decade, she’d be buried on that very golf course.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I knew that’s where you were going. Ivanka wore a Vera Wang gown meant to pay homage to Grace Kelly, who she’s weirdly obsessed with. She tried to do Grace Kelly cosplay at her sister Tiffany’s wedding years later, America’s princess girl boss.
Erin Ryan: Yes. Jared and Ivanka, like their parents, are also weirdly obsessed with the Kennedys. Now, I know you and I have talked about this.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes.
Erin Ryan: But you know, all three of Ivanka and Jared’s kids have Kennedy names, Joseph, Theodore, and Arabella. Now, who is Arabella? Arabella is the name of JFK and Jackie’s first daughter who died shortly after she was born.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jackie O? More like Tacky O.
Erin Ryan: So that’s the fairy tale origin of the Jovankan romance. But back to Banner year 2007. That’s when Jared demonstrated his impeccable market timing by purchasing 666 Fifth Avenue. I went down a rabbit hole researching this episode, and yes, it turns out that a powerful Orthodox Jew with ties to Israel purchasing a building with the address 666 was not handled calmly by America’s anti-Semitic lunatic fringe. There are theories that the Kushners are part of a secretive sect that worships the ancient Canaanite god Baal?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Woah.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, Baal is huge in the lunatic fringe right now, Alyssa. So much Baal. I saw more than a few message board dwellers suggesting that Jared is the Antichrist, which is so silly on its face because the Antichrist would have more gravitas than a guy who sounds like this when he talks.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: My name is Jared Kushner. I am Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump. When my father-in-law decided to run for president, I served his campaign the best I could because I believe in him and his ability to improve the lives of all Americans. And now, serving the president and the people of the United States has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime.
Erin Ryan: You know what I mean? Like the Antichrist is gonna be like, he’s gonna have like a James Earl Jones thing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: A hundred percent.
Erin Ryan: He’s gotta have rizz.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Jared Kushner is associated with real stupid and real evil stuff. No need to involve the old gods here.
Erin Ryan: When Jared tried to make his felon dad’s skyscraper wishes come true by purchasing a building with an unfortunate address, real estate had been going up, up, up, number not go down, not ever. And so Kushner companies led, at least on paper by Jared, aggressively pursued the eye popping $1.8 billion purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue. At the time, it was the biggest transaction in the history of Manhattan commercial real estate.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes, it was. Shortly thereafter, the 2008 financial crisis would hit and uh-oh, number go down.
Erin Ryan: Uh-oh. In the ensuing years. That’s how I imagine business school. Uh-oh. Where’s number? Number fall down. [laughter] In the ensuing year, 666 Fifth Ave would become considered one of the worst real estate deals in all of Manhattan.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What a business savant. I can’t believe that anybody would suggest that Jared didn’t deserve to get into Harvard.
Erin Ryan: In the years before Jared’s father-in-law would slither down the golden escalator and embed himself into our nightmares forever, Jared Kushner was focused primarily on his family’s real estate portfolio, which consisted mainly of what people might refer to as down-market apartment rentals that are frequently the subject of complaints. Yeah, the Kushners are slumlords.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That’s a loaded term.
Erin Ryan: I’ve got some reasons to back this up. It’s based on a long rap sheet of alleged slimy behaviors, like the tenants of 18 Sidney Place in Brooklyn Heights, sued Kushner companies for illegally charging market rate rent on apartments that should have been rent stabilized. Between 2013 and 2016, Kushner Companies allegedly filed false paperwork claiming that buildings they owned didn’t contain rent stabilized tenants. They did this 80 different times across 34 different buildings.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Why would they do that?
Erin Ryan: To dodge city oversight for renovations. They also allegedly would try to use noisy and disruptive construction work as a way to force tenants out. Funny story, when I was in NYC, I dated a guy whose building was bought buy a Kushner company. And basically right away the long-term super was kicked out for renovations.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh.
Erin Ryan: That were incredibly loud and seemed unsafe.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I remember hearing about this one. Kushner Village in the East Village was subject to a lawsuit alleging unsafe conditions, like non-working fire sprinklers, neglected repairs and generally unlivable conditions. Residents at one point wanted to withhold rent because their apartments were so crappy.
Erin Ryan: Best city in the world [laughter] New York. In 2018, the Kushner Company was fined $210,000 for filing false paperwork while Jared was in charge. They’d claimed that buildings were empty in order to obtain construction permits when in fact they’re full of tenants, some of which are rent controlled. They did that over and over again.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Seems like a favorite trick of theirs.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, so that’s why I call them slumlords.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Fair enough.
Erin Ryan: Okay, let’s skip ahead a bit to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I know, we don’t wanna go there, but we’ve got to. Once Trump was elected, Jared immediately joined the transition team. The transition team was chaired by none other than Chris Christie, the former prosecutor who had thrown Jared’s dad in prison a little more than a decade prior. Now, Jared had a problem with this. According to an interview Chris Christie gave to the Fifth Column podcast, Lil Kushner immediately whined about the appointment to Trump and kept whining about it until Christie was fired.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Revenge is his.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, it’s like an anticlimactic version of The Sopranos where instead of killing Christopher, Tony complains about him to HR. [laughter] It’s always kind of seemed like Donald Trump talked about Jared Kushner, like he wanted to fuck his daughter vicariously through him.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s so gross.
Erin Ryan: I know, but it’s true. But during his first term in office, it became clear that Donald Trump also doesn’t know anybody smarter than Jared Kushner. When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Jared was named senior advisor and granted an interim top secret Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI, Clearance.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Right. An interim clearance isn’t weird by itself. Lots of senior officials of incoming administrations get temporary clearances while the process unfolds. Here’s where it gets weird. He had initially submitted his background paperwork in 2016, but in 2017 he submitted at least three revisions that stated that actually he’d omitted extensive details of meetings with foreign officials, including Russian nationals. Team Kushner had said that the omissions weren’t on purpose. And that he corrected them once he discovered the errors. Still, his full clearance wasn’t granted until 2018. And you know I have some experience with these matters.
[clip of reporter]: The agent brought in my form and soon she asked how many times had I smoked pot. I said, I didn’t know. More than 20? Yes. I replied, more than 20. More than 100? Yes. I said more than 100. More than 500? Just write unknown. They were finally satisfied with more than 500 would be fair. Because she told the truth. Because she didn’t lie about the 500 plus times she had smoked pot Alyssa Mastromonaco did get her security clearance.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Tell the truth, just have to tell the truth.
Erin Ryan: [AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: Jared’s disclosure of slipperiness didn’t stop him from being given a Barbie-adjacent number of jobs, but he’s just Ken.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He is pretty Ken-like.
Erin Ryan: I don’t think he has genitals, Alyssa. Under Jared’s pants, the outline of molded plastic underwear, and him and Ivanka kiss by mashing their faces together.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I believe that.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, Jared’s most daunting job was being put in charge of the Middle Eastern peace process. This raised some alarm bells.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Not disclosing foreign contacts, he had no experience in diplomacy, hadn’t even been to most of the countries that he was supposed to be dealing with, although he had gone on a star-studded trip to Jordan once. Second, Benjamin Netanyahu was a family friend who stayed over at Jared’s house.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, that’s a problem. It’s a problem. Navigating the politics of the Middle East is a complicated job requiring somebody with vast historical knowledge and the ability to manage conflicting sensitivities. Giving the job to Jared Kushner made about as much sense as choosing a heart surgeon based on how many hot dogs they can eat in under five minutes. But that didn’t matter. Smartest guy President Trump knows. President Trump’s leadership style is similar to the way a button-mashing three-year-old plays video games. He wildly flails around, sometimes he randomly hits a button that does something good. And because the game is so often rigged in his favor, even when he mashes the wrong button, he’s usually insulated from the consequences of his mistakes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: To be fair, the more we learn about how unremarkable the super-rich are, the more it seems like a lot of them are just button-mashing through life and being lauded as geniuses by people who want their money.
Erin Ryan: I mean, Elon Musk. Peter Thiel.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Right?
Erin Ryan: They’re all button-mashing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Critics of Kushner’s handling of Middle East peace, a hilarious collection of words to say in that order, pointed out that Jared frequently skipped over the State Department entirely in pursuing his goals, which broke protocol but, more importantly, is just an inefficient way to conduct yourself as a member of the executive branch.
Erin Ryan: Like trying to fix a broken bone with a little duct tape. Kushner enjoyed a cozy relationship with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, which got a bit awkward when, on October 2, 2018, the Saudi American journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi Arabians consulate in Istanbul and never left. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered with a bone saw by a 15-man goon squad, ostensibly in response to Khashoggi’s vocal criticism of the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia has denied that MBS was directly involved, but both Turkish and American intelligence have independently concluded, to the point of near certainty, that the operation was carried out with the approval of MBS, if not at his direction.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Whenever Jared has been asked about this, he’s given one of his trademark pageant answers. Of course we don’t like murder, it’s very bad. Saudi Arabia is a strategic partner. MBS is a dude I work with on things. Money please, interviews with him sound like a shareholder call for a company that has had a bad quarter.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, so after all this toe-stepping and learning curving in the Middle East, Jared brokered a peace agreement called the Abraham Accords, but it’s a stretch to call it a peace agreement when Israel had to make zero concessions to Palestinians. Palestinians weren’t even initially involved, and critics say it actually resulted in more arms sales between countries, which made an already volatile region even more militarized, but great for Raytheon shareholders, I guess.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But don’t just trust us. We’re professional haters. Let’s see what the people who study this day in and day out have to say. Writing for Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Middle East policy expert Omar Rahman said the agreement, one, lacks intrinsic value, two, is over-reliant on the US, three, produces too much risk for Gulf states, four, is tremendously unpopular in the Middle East, and five, is facing the headwinds of a changing regional context.
Erin Ryan: Okay [laughs] still, the accords take up a huge portion of Jared Kushner’s Wikipedia page like it’s the Harvard diploma his dad bought him. President Trump put Jared in charge of something called the Office of American Innovation. It was a job made up just for Jared to have. In theory, it was supposed to increase government efficiency and eliminate waste. In practice, the OAI kind of functioned like a middle manager, eager to take credit for processes that had already been underway when they took them on as projects.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: One function of OAI was supposed to be streamlining government agencies and cutting down on overlap. Functions that were not performed at all by OAI and would go on to be performed with great clumsiness by the poorly behaved children of DOGE eight years later.
Erin Ryan: Steve Bannon once told me that he thinks Jared Kushner is dumb as a stick.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Broken clock.
Erin Ryan: Jared was also, also put in charge of immigration reform because why not? He set out to find a path forward in a divided country for funding border security, how to handle ongoing protections for DACA recipients, and reforms to the visa process. He tried to accomplish all of these goals at once, therefore he accomplished none of these goals.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This might have been because he didn’t involve actual key players in the immigration picture. He cut out career DHS officials, advocacy groups, actual experts, and Congress.
Erin Ryan: I’m seeing a pattern here. Jared’s biggest White House face plant was in helping handle the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, like just about everybody in the administration, while he paid lip service to readiness and deference to experts, reality didn’t bear his posturing out. This interview with Bloomberg that he did in January 2020 makes me feel a little sick to my stomach to watch today.
[clip of reporter]: How’s the administration monitoring coronavirus? This is something that’s on the minds of a lot of Americans.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: The answer is very closely. President Trump’s been getting briefed regularly. In the U.S. Government, we have so many tremendous resources and incredible people, and the president’s been meeting with them constantly. He’s reached out to China to offer any support they may need. They’re being very transparent so far, we believe, in terms of the information they’ve been sharing with us. And the hope is, is that we’ll continue to work the problem, and hopefully it will get under control.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Confidence-inspiring. By mid-March 2020, when life was shutting down and the pandemic was spiraling out of control, Jared was put in charge of supply chain logistics for things like PPE and ventilators. On March 19th, he was front and center at a press conference about the Trump administration’s response to supply shortages.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: You have instances where in cities, they’re running out, but the state still has a stockpile. And the notion of the federal stockpiles was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to state stockpiles that they then use. So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them. The same thing with the masks. What the president and the vice president were able to do with Congress was to get the waiver so that you could expand the pool, because a lot of them masks. Were used to defer the construction industries. Now there’s a much bigger pool of masks in the country. There was a stockpile, they distributed that based on where they anticipated a lot of the need would go, but a lot that still is stuck with the states and it hasn’t trickled down to the right places within the states. So I would just encourage you, when you have governors saying that the federal government hasn’t given them what they need, I would urge you to ask them, well, have you looked within your state?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What is the federal stockpile for if not for US citizens?
Erin Ryan: And also so many words that—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Word salad.
Erin Ryan: —say nothing. But behind the scenes, Jared was screwing the pandemic pooch. According to a report in Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban, during those early days of the pandemic, private sector business leaders were eager for direction on how to redirect their industrial output toward providing essential medical supplies. But they needed President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act in order for the plan to work. That plan ran into a Jared Kushner-shaped pothole. I’m going to read from Eban’s reporting of how one particularly crazy Kushner-led meeting went. Quote, “Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. The federal government is not going to lead this response, he announced. It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do. One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction. Free markets will solve this, Kushner said dismissively. That is not the role of government. The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his desperate call for supplies. That’s a CNN bullshit, Kushner snapped. They lie. According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor. Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state. His people are gonna have to suffer and that’s their problem.” End quote. So, essentially Jared Kushner used his role at the center of the federal government’s COVID-19 response to be like, hey, we’re not going to do anything to help. That’s for the states. Kafkaesque corporate nonsense.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Eban reported that later that summer Jared, quote, had commissioned a robust federal COVID-19 testing plan only to abandon it before it could be implemented. Why would anyone do that?
Erin Ryan: For the most gross and evil reason imaginable, politics. 2020 was an election year. Some in the White House believed that the virus was hitting democratic states and cities the hardest, and that when federal government allowed those states to twist in the wind, Republicans could blame democratic elected officials. Yuck.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay.
Erin Ryan: Eban called Kushner’s approach to COVID the consultant state as opposed to the deep state, which I think is brilliant. That description paints a picture of a bunch of useless McKenzie types circling back around and putting a pin in it and ideating on deliverables, which makes Kushner’s waxy grimacing through COVID seem even more sinister.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is is that but by July the country’s really rocking again. Federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and and I think that that’s really you know what needs to be told.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Rocking. Whenever you get mad about how 2020 screwed our lives up, remember, it was kinda, a little bit Jared Kushner’s fault, kinda. Informally, Jared was also a White House communication coordinator, which is code for sticking his nose into everything and mucking up the gears.
Erin Ryan: Kushner is one of those business boys who doesn’t know anything about the world and surmises with a bunch of MBA brainiacs that, hey, maybe it is time to reinvent the wheel, you know? Now let’s check back in with the Kushner family business. Remember 666 Fifth Avenue?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Of course.
Erin Ryan: Well, yeah, the family was growing increasingly desperate to restructure the debt on that building because it was such a terrible investment that it could have taken the whole company down with it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Luckily, and I’m sure completely coincidentally, during the first couple of years of Trump 1.0, what do you know, Kushner companies secured a Freddie Mac-backed refinancing deal with incredibly favorable terms. For 10 years, they would only need to pay the interest on the $786 million loan, which covered servicing of 666 Fifth Avenue in addition to other properties in the Kushner portfolio.
Erin Ryan: In 2018, the property was sold to a few different entities, and the Kushner family’s original investment was basically wiped out. Now, there’s no smoking gun here to prove that Jared Kushner’s sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, invoked her brother’s name at any stage in the negotiating process with Freddie Mac, or that Jared himself was directly involved in lining up financing or buyers. But the appearance of impropriety when the family business of a high-level government official secures a ridiculously favorable loan backed by the government doesn’t look great.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This showcases how susceptible Jared was to influences from foreigners because his family business needed access to capital. Foreign entities could offer that capital, why wouldn’t they ask for a little something extra? Favorable treatment by a high ranking member of the administration perhaps?
Erin Ryan: Perhaps. By the end of Trump 1.0, Jared Kushner was trudging along with the burden of his duties and scrutiny like Florence Pugh at the end midsummer. And he was tired of all the attention. You won’t have Jared Corey Kushner to kick around anymore, America. Soon after departing the White House, his brand new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, nabbed a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund. The face of the other side of this deal was none other than his not-murderer-but-not-not a-murderer, not-a-friend-but not-not a friend, Mohammed bin Salman.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bonesaw Boy, allegedly.
Erin Ryan: Yep, and according to Andrea Bernstein in The Atlantic, MBS invested in Jared’s business against the advice of his own advisors. This was mainly because Jared’s firm was unsatisfactory in all aspects, according to their analysis.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Makes sense, Jared and his partners had barely any experience in private equity before starting his post-Trump fund.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, but MBS wanted to invest because they wanted to maintain a friendship with Kushner.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Well, well, well well well, what were we saying about susceptibility to foreign influence?
Erin Ryan: Apparently Jared’s marked status is the worst kept secret in international relations.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In interviews during the Biden years, Jared swore off participating in politics as he scurried around the world collecting money from shady foreigners like a squirrel on a nut farm. But the siren’s call of political involvement drew him back in.
Erin Ryan: Jared Kushner is now Schrodinger’s secretary. He is a government official when he needs access to state secrets and foreign leaders, but he’s not a government official when he wants to use that access to make money. Bernstein writes, without title or remit or any kind of official designation, only presidential son-in-law, Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That is bananas.
Erin Ryan: I know.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You don’t need security clearance when you’re not an official official. He’s getting all the access that comes with working for the government with none of the constraints. It’s like meeting somebody’s parents and then they still refuse to call you their girlfriend.
Erin Ryan: Except this is exactly what Jared wants. He’s free of the pesky headline risk that came with working in the White House in an official capacity, and now he can do what he probably always wanted to do anyway, which is enrich himself by playing a game that has never been more rigged for him. He can cosplay as JFK and Joseph Kennedy at the same time. He’s not a special government employee, like Elon Musk was. He’s not an employee at all, according to the White house. He’s a volunteer. Alyssa, is that, is that a thing?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I can confirm volunteer is not a real thing. Volunteer is not real job in the White House. Look, whatever Jared is, he’s doing some very sensitive shit. He went to Davos presenting a plan for the future of Gaza, but also while at Davos, he was soliciting cash for his private equity firm.
Erin Ryan: Jared has said some weird things about Gaza, like during this interview wherein he mused about the valuable waterfront property was the site of hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian deaths at the hands of the Israeli military.
[clip of reporter]: There are real fears on the part of Arabs, and I’m sure you talk to a lot of them, who think once Gazans leave Gaza, Netanyahu’s never gonna let them back in.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: Maybe, but I’m not sure there’s much left of Gaza at this point. So, you know, if you think about even the construct, like, you know, Gaza, Gaza was not really a historical precedent, right? It was the result of a war, right. You had tribes that were in different places, but then Gaza became a thing. Egypt used to run it. And then, you know, over time you had different governments that came in different ways. How do we deal with the terror threat that is there so that it cannot be a threat to Israel or to Egypt, right, I think that both sides are spending a fortune on military. I think neither side. Really wants to have, you know, a terrorist organization enclave right between them and Gaza’s waterfront property. It could be very valuable to, if people would focus on kind of building up, you know livelihoods, you think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done? And so I think that it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up, but, I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Waterfront.
Erin Ryan: What a soulless—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Everything we always—
Erin Ryan: I like, oh my god, jaw on the floor. Now, does Jared Kushner’s family stand to benefit financially from other unrest in Israel? Also, yes, according to analysis from Jacobin magazine. The Trump administration recently lifted sanctions against settlers in the occupied West Bank in East Jerusalem. These settlers are responsible for at least a thousand attacks on Palestinians in the last year. Just before the Israeli ceasefire was announced, Kushner’s private equity firm received regulators’ approval to double its stake in Phoenix Financial Limited an Israeli insurance behemoth that among other things finances and ensures construction of settlers’ homes and businesses in Palestinian territory. Jared has said the investment has already returned ninefold. Congrats, dude, I guess.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Way to go. By the end of 2024, Kushner’s private equity enterprise was 99% funded by foreign money. In the run up to the 2024 presidential election, a Senate committee looked into Kushner business and discovered that they’d been paid $157 million in management fees by foreign clients and they hadn’t paid anything out.
Erin Ryan: Hmm, why would somebody invest in something that doesn’t pay out unless they’re getting something besides money from the arrangement?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Ethics disclosures? We don’t need no stinking ethics disclosures.
Erin Ryan: Here is Jared bullshitting his way through an explanation about why it’s okay for him to be jetting around the world acting like a government official by traveling on government planes with special envoy Steve Witkoff.
[clip of Jared Kushner]: What people call conflicts of interest. Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world. If Steve and didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal that we were able to help get done that freed these hostages would not have occurred.
Erin Ryan: Worst episode of couples therapy ever.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Truly. [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Through all this, Jared found time in 2022 to write.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Write a book.
Erin Ryan: New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner described Kushner’s breaking history as lengthy and soulless. Garner wrote, Kushner looks like a mannequin and he writes like one. And now I’m gonna read an excerpt from this review because Alyssa, as you know.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Mm-hmm
Erin Ryan: Bitchy takedowns are my favorite genre of literary and fluid criticism. Just beautiful. This is great. This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on and rejoices in what’s left amid the ashes, the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway, and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo. The tone is college admissions essay, typical sentence, in an environment of maximum pressure I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives. Every political cliche gets a fresh shampooing, quote, “even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes, and quoting the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Chris Liddell, “every day here is sand through an hourglass and we have to make it count. So true for these are the days of our lives,” end quote.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yum, delish.
Erin Ryan: It’s so good. You have to read the whole review.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2026, Forbes estimated that Kushner has joined the ranks of American billionaires. That’s up from 900 million in 2025.
Erin Ryan: And he did it all on his own.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yup, nobody helped him at all, all on merit, like his Harvard and NYU admissions and that job in the White House and that loan his family business got when he was working for the White House, and the two billion the Saudis gave his fledgling fund. All hard work, all grit.
Erin Ryan: Now, he’s not the first Kushner to hit a billion, though. That distinction belongs to both his dad and his father’s second favorite son, Josh Kushner, founder of Oscar Health and husband of supermodel Karli Kloss, otherwise known as the less terrible Kushner. He was photographed at the Women’s March in 2017, which is slightly more than the least he could possibly do.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I stood next to him.
Erin Ryan: That is so wild.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I know, it’s so weird.
Erin Ryan: Okay, and what became of Charles Kushner the felonious patriarch? Well, everything turned out just fine for him. In one of his last acts before leaving office the first time, President Trump gave Daddy Kushner a full pardon. Chris Christie has suggested that the only reason that Jared joined the administration in the first place was so that he could make that happen. And after Trump was inaugurated a second time, Charles Kushner, who had once hired a prostitute to seduce his own brother-in-law in order to get revenge on his sister, was nominated to be ambassador to France. One Democrat voted to approve the appointment, New Jersey’s Cory Booker. A long ago recipient of some of that sweet, sweet Kushner political donation money. So there you have it, folks. Jared Corey Kushner, the silver spoon slope shouldered favored son of a crook who has been handed everything and earned nothing except, of course, our collective derision. Grandma Rae, the one-time refugee who lived in a hole to escape the Nazis, is shaking a rolling pin at these clowns from the afterlife.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes, she is.
Erin Ryan: Alyssa, where does Jared lie on our matrix of fucking guys?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Alright, so we’ll go with scheming sociopath and opportunist, right? He doesn’t believe in anything, does he, other than money.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, I think that he is an opportunist and a little bit of a dumb ass, but if you’re really, really rich, like the opportunities you get just like keep coming and you keep thinking that you like made them happen.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, he really does think he made it all happen.
Erin Ryan: That about wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. if you like what you see and hit the like button, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future F*cking Guy subject. This episode was written and researched by me, Erin Ryan, with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. Caroline Reston is Hysteria’s senior producer. All of the rest of our credits, as well as links to our sources, like Andrea Bernstein’s work in The Atlantic, and Craig Horowitz’s banger of a piece on Jim McGreevey from New York Magazine, can be found in our show notes. Trust me guys, the bibliography is always a fun read. Take care, be well, don’t hire an MBA to do a diplomat’s job, and fuck that guy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Fuck that guy!
Erin Ryan: Fuck that guy.
