Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, joined MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Thursday night to discuss his recent request that Congress subpoena documents related to Saudi Arabia’s $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s advisory fund immediately following Kushner leaving the White House.
“Congressman, what is your, what are you after here with your colleagues on this committee?” Hayes asked Raskin to begin the interview.
“Well, we’ve been trying to get this information for more than a year, Chris. We know that Kushner pocketed $2 billion and a $25 million a year management fee from the Saudi government. And the UAE and the Qatar government have also kicked in money,” Raskin replied, adding:
So there’s more than $3 billion in there. We want to be able to reconstruct what exactly those countries got out of it. Remember that the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund advisers recommended against giving that money to Jared Kushner on the grounds that he was inexperienced and they were asking a ridiculous sum of money and their advisers were overruled by the homicidal crown prince himself, Mohammed bin Salman, who, of course, had been essentially bailed out of his situation that he’d gotten himself into when he ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi back in 2018.
So, you know, the Trumps did a lot for them. And I think Donald Trump bragged about it, saying, in essence, he saved the prince’s posterior multiple, multiple times, and he wanted to continually remind him of that.
Well, we know that Jared Kushner created a business the day after the Trump administration ended, and within a few months, he had brought home billions of dollars from the Saudi government.
“So we want all the information in the same way that the committee is going for all the information about Hunter Biden, who, after all, never worked for the government, was not in the Biden administration,” Raskin continued, drawing a comparison between Hunter Biden and the ongoing GOP-led investigations into the president’s family.
“He is the adult emancipated son of President Biden. They want all that information. We should get the information about Jared Kushner, who’s not just President Trump’s son-in-law, but he was actually managing Middle East foreign policy at the time,” Raskin argued.
“You know, there’s two details there that I that I had, one I had forgotten and one I didn’t know. I had forgotten the excoriating recommendation from the oversight committee being like, absolutely not. There’s no reason to give this dude this money that was overridden, we think personally by MBS,” Hayes replied.
“I’d forgotten that crucial detail. I didn’t know the $25 million management fee, that you’re meeting like it’s not just the you know you get billions for your fund but like the management fee that they’re charging is a lot of money. And that’s like, that’s like basically direct income for the guy running it,” Hayes added, regarding Kushner’s salary for managing the Saudi money.
“I mean, that looks like a straight-up payoff to me, a quid pro quo. $25 million a year. I mean, like that’s the interest you would have basically on a half a billion dollars that he’s, you know, pocketing directly from Mohammed bin Salman, who was obviously expressing his gratitude to the Trump administration for going there first in Trump’s foreign travels for the cover up of the assassination of Khashoggi, for tilting towards Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war and on and on, the Saudis basically got whatever they wanted,” Raskin replied.
“Now, the foreign emoluments clause, which we’ve talked about before, applies not just to the president, but anybody holding an office or trust to under the federal government. So it’s clear to me that if that 2 billion had gone to Kushner a few months before the administration was over, that would be a direct violation of the foreign emoluments clause. I think it’s the same thing, if the deal was made during the administration and the money just shows up a few months later, it’s like, you know, somebody’s paying a bribe to a city councilman. But they say, well, when you stepped down from office, that’s when you’ll get paid. That’s still a bribe,” Raskin concluded.
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.
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