The House Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into whether Jared Kushner used his White House position to attain a $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian wealth fund.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the Oversight and Reform Committee, wrote Kushner a letter on Thursday offering him a two-week deadline to provide documents related to the deal.
Six months after Kushner left the White House, his newly formed private equity firm Affinity Partners secured a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s state-owned sovereign wealth fund, according to a New York Times report.
‘Your support for Saudi interests was unwavering, even as Congress and the rest of the world closely scrutinized the country’s human rights abuses in Yemen, the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi assassins tied to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on political dissidents at home,’ Maloney wrote in her letter to Kushner.
‘This investigation will inform the Committee about whether federal ethics laws should be strengthened to prevent senior public officials from taking advantage of their position within the federal government to reap a financial windfall—before, during, or after government employment.’
A veteran GOP strategist said that the investigation was ‘utterly unreasonable.’
‘It is traditional for people who gain expertise in a certain field while in government to then specialize in that area in their post government lives,’ the strategist told DailyMail.com.
‘There are so many examples. Off the top of my head I can think of Karl Rove, George Stephanopoulos, Jen Psaki, Al Gore, Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew and Anita Dunn to just name a few.’
Meanwhile, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has filed a FOIA request with the State and Defense departments for records on Kushner’s official trips to Saudi Arabia in September 2020, November 2020 and January 2021, just before Trump left office.
‘If Jared Kushner used taxpayer funds to advance his business dealings with Saudi Arabia, Americans should know,’ CREW said.
Source from: Daily Mail
