President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner failed to disclose to the federal government his position as the co-director of a foundation that funded an Israeli settlement considered to be illegal under international law, according to a Newsweek report published Sunday.
This latest failure to disclose is one in a growing list that includes:
- Kushner’s failure to disclose to the Senate judiciary committee emails sent to Trump’s campaign team about WikiLeaks and a “backdoor overture” from Russia during the 2016 presidential election campaign, according to The Guardian.
- And Kushner’s failure to disclose business ties to a Russian oligarch who helped Russian government institutions invest in the social media platform companies Facebook and Twitter, according to a November report in the HuffPost.
The latest disclosure revelation was unearthed by researchers at American Bridge, a progressive research and communications organization, and shared with Newsweek, which independently confirmed Kushner’s omission on various financial disclosures.
“The researchers suggested Kushner’s failure may have been more than an inadvertent mistake, but instead an attempt to avoid ‘potential conflicts with his job negotiating Middle East peace,’” according to Newsweek.
Kushner served as a co-director of the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, and failed to disclose this to the Office of Government Ethics earlier this year, Newsweek found.
The information comes on the heels of reports on Friday that indicated that Kushner may have attempted to influence a United Nations Security Council vote against an anti-settlement resolution that condemned the structure of West Bank settlements. The resolution passed shortly before Trump took office.
Experts and officials told Newsweek that Kushner’s failure to disclose his “role at the foundation — at a time when he was being tasked with serving as the president’s Middle East peace envoy — follows a pattern of egregious omissions that would bar any other official from continuing to serve in the West Wing.”
Kushner has receded from the public view and taken on a “more limited role behind the scenes,” according to colleagues who spoke to the New York Times . The Times also reports, however, that Kushner is still “forging ahead on a plan to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”