Senior White House adviser and shitty businessman Jared Kushner is the subject of a New York Times report that suggests he is exactly the kind of person you’d assume him to be: a witless and corrupt cretin desperately trying to use his elevated position in the White House to keep his failing real estate business from collapsing around him.
The story concerns various meetings Kushner has had at the White House with businessmen who just happened to loan him huge amounts of money shortly after those meetings. Sports fans may recognize the name of one of the businessmen who engaged in this very corrupt-seeming dance with Kushner:
Early last year, a private equity billionaire started paying regular visits to the White House.
Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy. During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said three people familiar with the meetings. Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Mr. Harris.
The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Mr. Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper.
Hey, that’s Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils co-owner Josh Harris! The Times goes on to note that a $184 million loan was unreported and was “triple the size of the average property loan made by Apollo’s real estate lending arm.” But a spokesman from Apollo assured the paper that the deal with Kushner was done above-board, and that Harris was not directly involved with it.
It’s unlikely anything will actually come of this, because corruption, self-dealing, and shameless graft are just things that the government does out in the open now. But at least we know Josh Harris sucks even harder than we already assumed he did.