Jared Kushner Makes Hunter Biden Look Like a Boy Scout

Oh well, so you have a new piece up today in Mother Jones.

Great piece, everybody should go read it.

We'll put the link down below.

It's a selection from this book, basically all about Jared, what Jared's been up to.

To my shame, I will admit, I've lost a little bit of sight of Jared.

There are a lot of these guys, uh, to keep tabs on.

I knew he was doing the diplomacy abroad.

I knew he was, uh, involved in a lot of this stuff.

But when I think, like, Trump family corruption, usually the people who spring to mind for me are Don and Eric, who are, you know, much more entangled with Trump's own personal, uh, uh, sort of self-enrichment [laughs] schemes, all of the stuff that's running through the Trump organization and all of that.

Uh, but I, I learned a lot from this, this piece today.

We talk a lot about how much more blatant and open a lot of this corruption has been under Trump 2.0, but, but it really did strike me just reading through what you've written, just how entangled Jared Kushner's business interests have been with the, the diplomatic moonlighting he's been doing, uh, under his father-in-law, the president, even since Trump 1.0, since 2016 really.

Can you just kinda give us the quick readout of what Jared was up to during the first Trump term?

Yeah, so it's funny to think back to the first Trump term and think about just how relatively straightforward, I suppose, some of the corruption was then, or at least how much it appears like, like it was child's play back then compared to what it is now.

But again, the beauty of writing a piece like this, and of course the beauty of writing a book like this, is it gives me the opportunity to really go back and revisit some of what we thought at the time were these earth-shattering and era-defining scandals, which now of course appear microscopic compared to what we're dealing with right now.

But, but Jared Kushner began so many of these networks, so many of these relationships, and so many of these, of course, patterns of what certainly appear to be corruption, or at a very baseline conflict of interest, not during Trump's second term, not over the last year and a half, but going all the way back to Trump's first term.

And frankly, many of these have been going on for a decade now.

If we can go back to 2016, 2017, again you'll see in the piece and you'll see in the book if you get the chance to pre-order it, that Jared Kushner was right there from the very beginning of Trump's presidency, Donald Trump's go-to diplomat, go-to point person for many different things around the world, but most especially Middle East policy under Donald Trump.

And of course, Jared Kushner himself has no diplomatic history.

He has no regional expertise.

He doesn't speak any of the local languages, and he's far from any kind of scholar on the region.

And he was something that, uh, folks from the very beginning, out of the Gulf, out of Saudi Arabia, out of the United Arab Emirates, out of places like Israel as well, saw as someone who is perfectly pliable, someone that they can pocket, someone they can target, someone they can in many ways also finance to do their bidding.

Again, the, the piece has all these details that I forgot about from the very first term of Donald Trump, of figures like Mohammed bin Salman or other officials in the region saying, "Look how gullible this guy is.

Look how h- easy he is to buy off." And of course, look what that means for a pro-Saudi or pro-Emirati or pro-Israeli policy, and we've all been paying the price for it in the decades since.

Yeah, yeah.

So h- h- here's a guy who had obviously business dealings that predated, uh, a lot of, a lot of his [laughs] diplomatic things, but who had just been going around shaking a hat to many of these same countries for his personal business dealings even prior to really getting involved with any of them in a diplomatic capacity at all, right?