For months, we and plenty of other commentators have speculated that prosecutors are slowly but surely moving in on Jared Kushner.
The sequence for Mueller seems to be strategic. He’s working from the outside of the Trump orbit and moving inward, the idea being that by the time the risk-reward asymmetry is skewed enough to force Trump’s hand (i.e. by the time the legal risk inherent in allowing the investigation to proceed apace outweighs the political risk associated with moving against Mueller), it will be too late.
Obviously, indicting Kushner would likely be a red line for Trump, so that’s a move no one is going to make until someone has him dead to rights on something – the only question is what.
As a reminder, Robert Mueller’s office interviewed Kushner last month and during that interview, Michael Flynn came up.
Given that, and given reports that Mueller was probing Kushner’s ties to foreign governments, it came as no surprise that in the wake of Flynn’s guilty plea, Kushner was identified as the man who instructed the disgraced former national security adviser to make contact with Russian officials.
“This is relevant now because one of Flynn’s lies to the FBI was when he said that he never asked Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, to delay the vote for the UN Security Council resolution,” Bloomberg’s Eli Lake explained following the Flynn plea, before adding that “one transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the UN Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution.”
Kushner is also under scrutiny for any possible role he might have played in the dismissal of James Comey and in addition to all of the above, there are serious questions as to why he failed to disclose what he knew about the Trump campaign’s contact with WikiLeaks.
Well now, according to a piece out Friday afternoon in the New York Times, prosecutors from the United States attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York have subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records related to entities associated with the family company of Kushner.
Deutsche has lent Kushner’s family businesses hundreds of millions of dollars over the years and Kushner and his mother have a personal line of credit with the bank worth between $5 million and $25 million. Although the Times notes that “there is no indication that the subpoena is related to the [Mueller] investigation”, the piece also says this:
The Brooklyn United States attorney has been investigating the Kushner businesses’ use of a program known as EB-5. It offers visas to overseas investors in exchange for $500,000 investments in real estate projects.
But Deutsche Bank does not appear to have been involved in Kushner real estate projects financed through the EB-5 program. That suggests the prosecutors’ subpoena may be unrelated to the visa program.
Here’s where this gets particularly interesting. The Times notes that Deutsche “provided a $285 million mortgage to Kushner Companies last year to help it refinance a loan to purchase several floors of retail space in the former New York Times building on 43rd Street in Manhattan.”
The seller there was Lev Leviev who has “an extensive real estate portfolio in Russia.”
All of this comes on the heels of disputed reports that Deutsche has received a subpoena from Mueller himself regarding Trump’s bank records. Jay Sekulow denied the reports, but there’s still quite a bit of ambiguity there. Essentially, The White House is trying to claim that the subpoena doesn’t directly relate to the Trump family’s accounts.
So make of this what you will, but we would suggest that you’d be naive to think this isn’t connected in some way shape of form to the Mueller probe.
After all, as the Times also reminds you, “three prosecutors on Mr. Mueller’s team previously worked at the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, one as recently as this year.”
I doubt Mueller is doing this to just fish thru those records. He is on the trail of something and already knows what he is going to find. The picture of Jared above 🙂 he is watching his life flash by. He has his dad’s DNA and will be going to jail OR trump will do a favor for Princess Ivanka and pardon him and then will have to resign as president. But I do have some doubt that trump would do that, even for her — he is far too self-centered.
We already know that trump is most likely guilty of obstruction – perhaps he will pardon himself and no one else. haha!
Wonder what his personal assistant, Rhona Graff that has spent 30 years with him will have to say!? “While Queens native Graff remained in New York after Trump’s rise to the White House, she still arranges many of Trump’s private meetings.” “I’d never leave him,” Graff once told the New York Times.” I assume he still pays her a salary. If she is smart, she will not lie to Mueller.
http://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-rhona-graff-trumps-assistant-2017-07
“I assume he still pays her a salary. If she is smart, she will not lie to Mueller.”
I think she will swallow cyanide before she rolls over on him. The most she would get is Contempt and Der Fuehrer would pardon her.
I think she is intertwined in the emails with Jr. and the meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian woman so it depends on how much she may know about how much trump knew about that meeting before the meeting…could be more than contempt if she does not cooperate. But I also think you are right about trump pardoning her. It is just so wrong that he would have the power to pardon people directly connected to covering up his crimes. I think Mueller would have an offer for her to tell him what she can. She has a family, a teenage daughter, so she does not want to go to jail, even for trump. I don’t understand why anyone would feel like he is worth that!
The number one thing Trump values in anyone he employs is loyalty. She has been with him for over 30 years. I say she swallows the pill. She knows her daughter will be taken care of.
Nope, a mom would not leave the kid – but I do think she will cut a deal with Mueller if it comes down to the nitty gritty – she will leave trump before she will leave the kiddo. Trump and his loyalty only goes one way – he has no loyalty to anyone. If she really knows him well, she knows him well enough to know that he would not be loyal to her if the tables were turned.
If she’s smart, she won’t talk to any federal investigator ever.
she may not have a choice…hard to find someone closer to his business than she would be.
Mueller has a grand jury and knows how to use it. He can compel her to testify and then grant a letter of limited immunity to knock down taking the fifth.