The disclosure rules governing White House officials, and whether they were followed, sit at the center of a fresh controversy surrounding Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. An excerpt of an upcoming book, published Thursday by Vanity Fair, alleges that Kushner for years had access to at least two secret foreign bank accounts in Israel and the United Arab Emirates whose combined deposits totaled roughly $2 billion, none of which was ever disclosed.
The book, titled Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, was written by journalist Matthew Cole. According to the excerpt, UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed and future Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “put at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner” at the start of Trump’s first term.
The accountability questions raised by the reporting are considerable. Cole wrote that although Kushner’s position as senior adviser to the president was unpaid, he was an official government employee. That status required financial disclosures under ethics regulations, and each year he worked in the White House he had to file both a public and a confidential financial form known as the Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report.
“Because he had access to classified government secrets,” Cole added, “Kushner was required to disclose any bank account to which he had signatory, or beneficiary, access.”
Cole went further, arguing that even if Kushner had properly disclosed the accounts, he would still likely have had to register as an agent of a foreign government, given that the UAE and the Saudis were “paying for his influence within the US government.”
A prosecutor who worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election told Cole that Kushner “may have violated federal bribery laws” if he told Saudi or UAE officials that he would do any favors for them after the accounts were set up, even if it was “just speaking to his father-in-law.”
The two accounts themselves, as described in the excerpt, functioned differently. The first, which Cole called the “Alpha” account, was opened at First Abu Dhabi Bank and served as a “foreign policy fund” partially managed by Kushner and bin Zayed, advancing specific foreign policy goals. The “Beta” account moved money from a bank account in Azerbaijan to what appeared to be a government bank account in the Israeli Central Bank. One source told Cole that unlike the Alpha account, the Beta account was set up “for Kushner’s personal benefit.”
Kushner responded forcefully shortly after the excerpt appeared, denying the allegations in a social media post. “The allegations made by this author are completely insane, categorically false, and never happened,” he wrote. “We denied every one of these claims on the record, yet the author failed to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of them. No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided to support these extraordinary accusations.”
He added: “These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism. This is not journalism. It is a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.”
The allegations land at a sensitive moment for Kushner’s official standing. He currently serves as a “special envoy for peace” under the second Trump administration, where he has been tasked with several vital foreign policy initiatives, including negotiating an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as an end to the illegal war with Iran started by his father-in-law in February.
Meanwhile, the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington last week filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia intended to block Kushner from serving as a foreign policy official without Senate confirmation. That legal challenge, along with the disclosure questions raised by the book, keeps the focus on whether the rules binding White House officials were honored, and what mechanisms exist to enforce them when they were not.