Jared Kushner Made More Than $20 Million Due to Special Provision in Trump's 2017 Tax Break
March 6, 2020
Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a lot of explaining to do after a $5 million investment in a firm called Cadre recently ended up making him at least a $20 million profit after selling his equity stake a short time ago. It appears that the value of his share of Cadre stems in large part from a provision that he got Trump to include in the 2017 “tax break” bill.
According to a March 3 article in Syracuse.com,
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has sold his stake in a company investing in Opportunity Zone projects offering tax breaks he had pushed for in Washington, sparking criticism that he was benefiting from his White House role.
A filing at the Office of Government Ethics released Monday shows that Kushner received permission to defer capital gains taxes on the sale of his stake in Cadre, a digital platform for smaller investors in commercial properties. Kushner's holding in the private Cadre was worth between $25 million and $50 million, according to a financial disclosure report he filed with federal ethics officials last year….
Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, pushed for the Opportunity Zone tax breaks to be included in Trump's 2017 tax overhaul. The breaks offer investors big cuts in capital gains taxes if they put money into businesses and buildings in 8,700 poor, struggling neighborhoods across the country that otherwise might not attract the money.
The article states that some of Cadre’s investors were concerned that the firm might be tainted by Kushner’s relationship to Trump and role in getting the tax loophole passed. This is just one example of how the Trump family have cashed in on connections to the President of the United States. Some might call it corruption.
On March 2, BuzzFlash ran an article on how the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) just released a study that detailed that Trump has amassed 3,000 conflicts of interest since taking office. Furthermore, this is not inclusive of all the insider influence and grifting that benefited his children, two of whom now ostensibly run the Trump Organization Inc., while Donald Trump is still CEO of the organization and thus directly profits from taxpayer money that flows into his organization. All of his children are beneficiaries of The Trump Organization Inc., and they benefit from the presidential profiteering and influence peddling.
BuzzFlash has noted before that if you want to understand Trump’s attacks on people, it is best to to understand that he is projecting his own corrupt and unlawful behavior onto others.
The Trump campaign, if Biden is the Democratic nominee, is promising to once again bring up the debunked claim that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, engaged in what appears to be non-existent corruption related to the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. That this is the essence of the shakedown with Ukrainian President Zelensky that Trump was impeached for doesn’t phase him. In his mind, the impeachment only amplifies his drummed up charges against the Bidens and casts a sinister innuendo on Joe Biden, should he be Trump’s opponent.
Why? Because as with the the demonization of Hillary Clinton by focusing on her “missing” emails, Trump knows the trick of the demagogue that if a big lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth. That evolved into the ugly, menacing chant of “Lock her up” [Hillary Clinton] at Trump rallies, beginning with his 2016 campaign. This is a technique that was common to Hitler and currently to Trump’s sometimes BFF, Kim Jung Un. So, if Biden is the nominee (and that has yet to be determined), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is already seeking to subpoena “witnesses” for yet another “investigation” of the Bidens and Burisma.
Were Bernie Sanders to become the nominee, Johnson’s resurrection of the discredited accusations would disappear immediately, as Trump would switch to running against, as he said today, Sanders as an alleged “Communist.” You could expect a resurrection of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn’s (Trump’s nefarious mentor) red baiting. It will be as ugly as his violent rhetoric stirring up hatred and scapegoating among his cult base to hate the “enemy” as a threat to “Making America White Again.”
Kushner’s hefty multi-million dollar profit will go largely overlooked by the corporate media in the firestorm of Coronavirus coverage (and Trump’s gross ineptitude and wilful playing down of the threat to try and keep the markets from tanking) and the Democratic primaries.
However, it should not be underemphasized that the media is allowing Trump to not be held responsible for runaway corruption because he knows how to divert the media by returning to the same false claims of corruption against his “enemies,” while he and members of his family, such as Kushner, are making out like bandits.
UPDATE: A 2019 Guardian article revealed an additional conflict of interest between Kushner’s official White House role and Cadre as mentioned in the story’s headline: “Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017. Overseas investment flowed to Cadre while Trump’s son-in-law works as US envoy, raising conflict of interest questions.” The Guardian pegs Kushner’s equity interest at the time as having a value of $50 million.
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