Did Jared Kushner Meet Russian Oligarch Over Business Or Politics — Or Both?
Image by Getty Images
By Dave Goldiner May 30, 2017
Jared Kushner’s meeting with a Russian banker with close ties to President Vladimir Putin is reportedly drawing intense scrutiny from investigators who want to know what the real purpose of the meeting was.
President Trump’s son-in-law and top advisor says was seeking a so-called back channel to the autocratic Russian leader when he met in December with Sergey N. Gorkov, who runs a state-tied bank that is under U.S. sanctions, The New York Times reported.
Gorkov is a close associate of Putin and is suspected of a wide range of financial misdeeds — but he has no known diplomatic profile.
That raises big questions about the White House’s claims that the meeting was part of an effort to establish a way of communicating with the Russians outside the normal channels that would possibly be monitored by U.S. intelligence — an effort that in itself is highly unusual.
Gorkov himself claimed that the meeting was part of a push to establish business ties betweeen Kushner’s real estate firm and his bank, which is prevented from doing business with American firms under sanctions designed to punish Russia for annexing the Ukrainian province of Crimea.
Kushner did not initially disclose the meeting on disclosure forms that are required to obtain security clearances, raising even more eyebrows.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
