Did Jared Kushner Just Get A $2 Billion Bribe?

By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer

There was a notorious 20th century criminal by the name of Willie Sutton who’s best remembered for what he told an interviewer who asked him why he liked to rob banks. “Because,” Sutton replied, “that’s where the money is.”

The Willie Sutton mindset was apparently in full force for Donald Trump and his family after they unexpectedly landed in the White House. In a world brimming with big problems, Team Trump made its No. 1 project getting to know the oil-rich despots of the Persian Gulf — none more so than the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, whom the American president blessed with his first foreign visit in early 2017.

Trump’s eager point man on the Saudi project was his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose brief career bringing his family’s East Coast real estate empire to the brink of bankruptcy made him the perfect candidate to bring peace to the Middle East after 75 years of trauma. Kushner barely budged the region’s core conflicts like resolving the future of Palestine, but he did dote on his new best friend Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the Saudis’ young crown prince and de facto ruler.

Kushner palled around with bin Salman in the marble luxury of Riyadh and chatted late at night with the prince on encrypted platforms like WhatsApp — coincidentally or not, right as MBS was deciding which rivals to lock up and detain in a swank-hotel-turned-prison. When bin Salman’s goons disappeared the body of Saudi-dissident-turned-Washington-Post-columnist Jamal Khashoggi with the help of a bone saw, Kushner ran interference to preserve America’s special relationship with the blood-soaked regime. When some in Congress began to question why U.S. weapons were powering Saudi war crimes in the endless conflict in Yemen, Kushner and his father-in-law touted an $110 billion U.S. weapons deal (the actual amount is disputed) with Team Bone Saw.