After Donald Trump returned to the White House, his son-in-law and former senior adviser Jared Kushner declined to take a job in the new administration and instead planned to focus on running his Miami-based private equity firm. Kushner said he would also forgo raising more money for his company while Trump was in office, to avoid any appearance of a conflict.
But since last summer, Kushner has re-emerged as a high-level peace envoy for Trump, helping broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; steering negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine; and, most recently, playing a central role in the aborted negotiations between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear program. Kushner still doesn’t hold an official government position – he’s a private citizen who has been negotiating some of the most important foreign policy agreements on behalf of the Trump administration, with a direct line to the president.
And Kushner is once again trying to solicit foreign investments for his firm, Affinity Partners, which he largely built with billions of dollars in funding from three authoritarian Arab states and US allies: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In recent months, as he continued his freelance diplomacy for the Trump administration, Kushner has approached investors, including foreign governments that have an interest in his diplomatic work, about securing at least $5bn in new financing for his company, according to the New York Times.
The White House insists that Kushner’s role as one of Trump’s top negotiators in the Middle East – while he continues to own and manage a company mainly funded by three Arab petrostates that are dependent on US weapons and protection – poses no conflict of interest. Kushner “only acts in the best interests of the American public”, a White House spokesperson said in response to the Times’s revelations.
Despite the administration’s denials, it’s hard to avoid the perception that Kushner is leveraging his influence over US policy – and his proximity to the president – to drum up new business for his company. It’s also clear that Kushner is raising money for his personal benefit as Trump has plunged the US into a war against Iran, which has caused immense destruction across the Middle East and global disruption in energy prices and supply.
Even Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, saw an opportunity to criticize Kushner’s perceived profiteering during a military conflict, when he posted a screenshot of the New York Times headline on Twitter/X: “Jared Kushner Solicits Funds for His Firm While Working as Mideast Envoy.” The minister wrote that a “fair and equitable deal” between the US and Iran “was within reach” – an apparent reference to Kushner’s role in the failed negotiations with Iranian officials, which included Araghchi.
The Times reported last month that Kushner’s representatives had already met with officials from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which under an earlier deal must get the first chance to invest whenever Affinity tries to raise additional funding. The Saudi Public Investment Fund is controlled by the kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who is close to both Kushner and Trump. Six months after Kushner left the first Trump administration in 2021, his fledgling firm secured a $2bn investment from the Saudi fund – despite Kushner and his team having little track record in private equity. That investment, which was reportedly made after Prince Mohammed overruled a panel of advisers who had objected to investing in Kushner’s new project, made the Saudi fund the earliest and largest investor in Affinity.
During Trump’s first term, Kushner cultivated a friendship between the president and Prince Mohammed, and Kushner helped convince Trump to make Saudi Arabia the first stop of his maiden foreign trip as president in May 2017. Trump later reportedly boasted that he had protected the crown prince from US sanctions and pressure from Congress over the 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In December 2024, weeks before Trump returned to the White House, Kushner revealed that Affinity had raised an additional $1.5bn earlier that year from wealth funds controlled by Qatari and UAE officials. The company had also disclosed that nearly 99% of its funding came from foreign sources – mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE – prompting an investigation by Ron Wyden, a Democrat who chaired the Senate finance committee at the time. In a letter to Kushner’s firm, Wyden questioned whether the company was a way for foreign powers to buy influence with a second Trump administration, noting: “Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family.”
To assuage his critics, Kushner said in a podcast interview in December 2024 that he had decided to “preemptively try to avoid any conflicts” by raising new funds from his foreign investors months before Trump won the election. Kushner also suggested that he would not solicit additional money for Affinity during Trump’s second term. “We don’t have to raise capital for the next four years,” he told the podcaster, Patrick O’Shaughnessy.
Earlier in the presidential campaign, Kushner faced questions about whether his firm accepting billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and other Arab governments would make it difficult for him to take on a leading foreign policy role in a second Trump White House. In February 2024, he told a conference hosted by Axios that he would not join a future Trump administration. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable,” Kushner said. “Now I’m a private investor.”
But Kushner has now backtracked on both promises he made in 2024. He ended up working for Trump, as an unofficial peace envoy with substantial power but little scrutiny of his personal and financial relationships with foreign governments and leaders like Prince Mohammed. Kushner is also trying to raise funds for Affinity – from some of the same governments and leaders who have a stake in the negotiations he has led, especially on Gaza and Iran.
Since the Gaza negotiations accelerated in September, Kushner has played a prominent role as Trump’s all-around troubleshooter, along with Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump friend who serves as the president’s special envoy for peace missions. And it’s difficult for Kushner to keep his diplomatic work from overlapping with his business interests. For example, in January, Kushner attended the World Economic Forum in Davos as part of an official US delegation that included Trump, Witkoff and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. At Davos, Kushner outlined a fanciful, US-led “master plan” for rebuilding Gaza, presenting a slideshow filled with high-rise luxury towers and beaches packed with tourists.
Aside from laying out the Trump administration’s vision for Gaza, Kushner also met with foreign leaders and officials to drum up $5bn in new investments for his firm, according to the New York Times. That’s one of the clearest examples of Kushner blurring the line between his work as a Trump envoy and his personal interests. And if Kushner is able to attract more foreign capital, Affinity can rake in larger management fees. (The US Senate investigation found that, by September 2024, Kushner’s firm had been paid $157m in management fees over three years without returning any profit to its foreign investors.) Those fees, and Kushner’s full ownership of Affinity, also increased his personal wealth and turned him into a billionaire last year.
One way for Kushner to avoid questions about his financial conflicts would be to take a leave from running his firm while he works for the Trump administration, even in an unofficial capacity. Affinity could also forgo soliciting investments from sovereign wealth funds and other entities connected to governments in the Middle East, for the rest of Trump’s term.
But Kushner shows no sign of stepping away from Affinity or adjusting its strategy. Instead, he seems intent on continuing to do business with foreign governments and leaders who also have interests in the military conflicts that Kushner is trying to resolve on behalf of his father-in-law.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
