Murdering kleptocrat Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of
Saudi Arabia with grifters Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
Sometimes reality is just too strange for anyone to make it up. This one is a total hoot, but with one serious lesson in American politics for all to absorb. The lesson is that the Republican Party is not just neo-fascist, morally rotted and corrupt. It is incompetent to its core. Kushner could not even set up a reasonable-sounding investment vehicle to hide a $2 billion political payback in.
Dessert second. The New York Times writes about a business deal where MBS puts his political payback into a sham investment run by the grifter Kushner:
Before committing $2 billion to Mr. Kushner’s fledgling firm, officials at a fund led by the Saudi crown prince questioned taking such a big risk.Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.
A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.
Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.
But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.
Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.
The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.
This is how Republicans routinely do their business, as quietly and opaquely as possible to always maintain plausible deniability for their crimes and ethics sleaze. The NYT article points out that ethics experts say that Kushner's investment deal creates the appearance of a possible political payback. It looks like a $2 billion political payback because that's what it is.
Fortunately for corrupt grifters like Jared and Ivanka, the Democratic Party and the Biden administration has mostly or completely given up on applying the rule of law to elite criminals, especially Republicans. That leaves ethics rules, which are mostly non-existent or toothless mirages. Republican Party elites do not care one iota about the rule of law or their own ethics, so their own crooks and thugs get to run free and wild with impunity. Republicans, elites and rank and file, are complicit by their stone cold silence about the crimes of the Republican ex-president, his criminal family and other elite Republican Party crooks.
Not surprisingly, the GOP cares a whole lot about the ethics and crimes of Democrats. They are happily expressing hypocritical partisan outrage at Hunter Biden and all the horrors he committed doing whatever it was that he did (allegedly, tax fraud, money laundering, unregistered foreign agent). Who knows, maybe the Democrats will prosecute their own criminals, which they should, while letting Republican criminals off the hook, which they should not.
Maybe Jared and Ivanka should be investigated for tax fraud, money laundering and being unregistered foreign agents while in the White House, which is what they actually were. Of course, that is just a pipe dream. Republican elite's crimes are immune from prosecution. Ethics for elite's sleaze is a cynical joke. Case closed, the people and the rule of law lose, while the crooks win.
Why aren’t there any significant institutional investors from the US?
The Affinity principal would like to avoid media attention at this time. Accordingly, Affinity has approached international institutional investors on a very discreet basis (especially PIF as Affinity’s cornerstone LP) to anchor the launch of their inaugural fund.
Saudi staff wrote that Mr. Kushner was trying to avoid public attention by initially courting only international institutions like the Saudi Public Investment Fund for his new venture.
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