Just because Jared Kushner doesn’t talk doesn’t mean he’s marshaling great thoughts. He may simply have nothing to say. And the more time passes, the more Donald Trump’s son-in-law seems to be nothing but what he appears to be: a rich kid whose biggest achievement was being born into the right family.
However, there are times when Kushner really is failing to speak up about something he knows. Like how he just forgot to mention his involvement with a real estate startup with ties to, who else, Goldman Sachs and real-life vampire Peter Thiel.
Kushner turns out to be co-founder of Cadre, a start-up company that is meant to attract investors for high-budget real estate projects. The other two founders are Jared’s brother and a 29-year-old friend. Being one of three founding partners in a firm might not amount to much if Cadre was nothing more than a hobby business or an idea that went nowhere. However, in this case …
To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent supporter of Mr. Trump, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre's website. Other backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Jack Ma of a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
And just how much money is Jared on the line for in this little afterthought of a business?
The Cadre stake is one of many interests -- and ties to large financial institutions -- that Mr. Kushner didn't identify on his disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
There’s forgetful and then there’s deceitful. A billion dollars is definitely on one side of that line.
Perhaps Kushner was hiding his $1 billion involvement and $300 million personal debt because he didn’t want Steve Bannon to find out where he got some of his money.
Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of George Soros, a top Democratic donor whom Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros's family office is also an investor in Cadre.
$250 million from George Soros? Does this mean that Jared Kushner is one of those professional paid protesters?
Not exactly. It just means that Kushner is on the hook to a lot of people—a lot of people—in a lot of different countries. And hiding those connections means that Trump’s son-in-law failed to reveal a big part of his conflicts of interest when supposedly detailing his affairs.
It’s another example of how “disclosure forms” that have almost no checking and no enforcement mechanism are no substitute for tax returns and other documents that show were these people are really hiding their money. And their debts.
How much has Kushner distanced himself from this multi-billion dollar entity that can swing real estate deals around the world?
While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to "influence the [firm's] management or policies," according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Jared Kushner's company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owing 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said.
Ah. So Jared Kushner is only hiding a controlling interest in a secretive real estate start-up that shuffles money around between billionaires, investment banks, and foreign interests. That shouldn’t get in the way of his establishing peace in the Middle East, or solving the opioid epidemic, or ...