Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are already insanely rich. But even though they’re (insert heavy air quotes) not working in the private sector, their wealth keeps magically growing somehow. Weird!
The Washington Post reports (emphasis mine):
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, brought in at least $82 million in outside income while serving as senior White House advisers during 2017, according to financial disclosure forms released Monday.
Trump earned $3.9 million from her stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington and more than $2 million in severance from the Trump Organization, while Kushner reported over $5 million in income from Quail Ridge, a Kushner Cos. apartment complex acquired last year in Plainsboro, N.J.
Last year, according to the Post, the couple’s combined assets were listed at anywhere between over $230 million to nearly $800 million.
According to the Post, Trump made $12 million in outside income last year, with over $5 million coming from her clothing brand. Back in May, China approved five trademarks for Ivanka Trump’s businesses the same week that Donald Trump tweeted an order to bail out the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE.
As for Kushner, he gleaned at least $70 million in profits from his family’s businesses. In May, the New York Times reported that Kushner’s father was nearing a deal with a company backed by the government of Qatar to sell control of the building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which Jared and his father Charles bought in 2007 for $1.8 billion. (Kushner sold his stake before entering the White House.) And in April, Kushner Companies was subpoenaed by the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office over falsified paperwork for over 80 permits, stemming from a period when Jared Kushner was still the company’s CEO.
“Since joining the administration, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump have complied with the rules and restrictions as set out by the Office of Government Ethics,” a spokesman for the couple’s ethics lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told the Post. “As to the current filing which OGE also reviews, their net worth remains largely the same, with changes reflecting more the way the form requires disclosure than any substantial difference in assets or liabilities.”
In May, Charles Kushner told the real estate publication The Real Deal that ethics watchdogs were “jerks.”
“They’re guys who can’t get a real job,” Kushner said. “What [my children] have sacrificed, and the daily barrage of negative media, and the attacks they get, and they had a perfect, beautiful life and they still have a very good life, but they sacrificed a lot.”
As an unknown person in China once said, presumably about being the beneficiary of nepotism and disregarding any preconceived notions of ethics in government: