The establishment press have largely brushed aside the notion that Kushner may have wanted to set up the “back channel” to discuss Syria policy, especially if he feared that the Obama administration may have been spying on Trump’s campaign team. Fox News reported that the idea for a “back channel” was not even Kushner’s idea in the first place.
.. The media have also downplayed the fact that Russians often embellish things to engage in disinformation campaigns.
.. There are certainly more questions that need to be answered—like whether Kushner met with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov as a representative of his private company or as a representative of Trump’s transition team.
.. If Kushner did not realize it already, he should be well aware by now that the Democrats, the institutional left, and the left-wing establishment media seek to destroy, do not give an inch, and play for keeps. And they may just be warming up.
s Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up
The White House and a Russian state-owned bank have very different explanations for why the bank’s chief executive and Jared Kushner held a secret meeting during the presidential transition in December.
The bank maintained this week that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House says the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
.. The discrepancy has thrust Vnesheconombank, known for advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin and for its role in a past U.S. espionage case, into the center of the controversy
.. And it has highlighted the role played by the bank’s 48-year-old chief executive, Sergey Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic intelligence arm of the former Soviet KGB
.. A diplomatic meeting would have provided the bank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014, a chance to press for rolling back the penalties even as the Obama administration was weighing additional retaliations against Moscow for Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.
A business meeting between an international development bank and a real estate executive, coming as Kushner’s company had been seeking financing for its troubled $1.8 billion purchase of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York, could raise questions about whether Kushner’s personal financial interests were colliding with his impending role as a public official.
.. Practically speaking, according to experts, the bank functions as an arm of the Kremlin, boosting Putin’s political priorities.
.. “Basically, VEB operates like Putin’s slush fund,”
.. “It carries out major Kremlin operations that Putin does not want to do through the state budget.”
.. While Gorkov was a deputy head of Sberbank, it was one of the sponsors of the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow produced by Trump, who owned the pageant.
.. Experts on Russia’s security services said that it would have been unlikely for Gorkov to meet with Kushner and not discuss sanctions.
How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans meant for job-starved areas
They worked with state officials in New Jersey to come up with a map that defined the area around 65 Bay Street as a swath of land that stretched nearly four miles and included some of the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods. At the same time, they excluded some wealthy neighborhoods only blocks away.
.. The tactic — critics liken it to the gerrymandering of legislative districts — made it appear that the luxury tower was in an area with extraordinarily high unemployment, allowing Kushner Companies and its partners to get $50 million in low-cost financing through the EB-5 visa program.
.. Apartments in the Bay Street building, marketed as Trump Bay Street, rent for up to $4,700 a month and offer sweeping views of Lower Manhattan. A nearby commuter train shuttles passengers to the World Trade Center within minutes. The area within a roughly three-block radius around the building had an unemployment rate of just 2.6 percent in 2015, according to census data.
..Under the EB-5 program, a wealthy foreigner can get a fast-track residence visa by investing at least $500,000 in a project in a “targeted employment area.”..Kushner Companies, meanwhile, is rushing to raise $150 million in low-cost financing through EB-5 for a separate project in Jersey City: a pair of luxury towers in an area called Journal Square...He also said jobs created by the project could be filled by workers from the depressed areas only miles away...Developers typically pay only 4 to 8 percent interest annually on money raised through EB-5, experts said. Conventional financing can carry interest rates of between 12 and 18 percent.
John Sununu Argues Russia Investigation Should Have Produced Evidence By Now
CNN invited former Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu to defend President Donald Trump’s handling of the deepening Russia scandal, but he spent most of the time denying that Trump or his team had done anything wrong — much to the amusement of CNN’s Alisyn Camerota.
During the interview, Camerota asked Sununu what he thought about Jared Kushner during the transition arranging both a back channel to communicate with Russian government officials using their own equipment and to meet with the head of a Russian state bank.
Sununu’s response was that there was nothing improper about it at all.
“I don’t think there is anything there,” Sununu said. “So you’re implying — you’re implying — because during the ten weeks [of the presidential transition] everybody is trying to meet the administration. Everybody who is involved in business. Everybody who is involved in politics. I can’t tell you how many people tried to meet with me between the time I was named chief of staff.”
Camerota then asked Sununu, who served as chief of staff to former President George H.W. Bush, if he’d ever met with the head of a Russian bank during a presidential transition.
“No, but I had breakfast with the vice president at the Russian embassy, and a lot of folks there started talking to me!” Sununu said, which prompted Camerota to snicker.“Would you have carved out time to meet with a Russian banker with ties to Vladimir Putin if he asked?” she then asked him.
“I’m not even sure what would have happened,” he said. “First of all, Putin wasn’t there. Look, you’re asking hypotheticals on hypotheticals.”
At the end of the interview, Camerota struggled to keep herself from laughing as she told Sununu that “we appreciate your perspective that there is nothing to see here, and that the investigation is, I don’t know, silly.”