Why Is Trump’s Son-In-Law Jared Kushner Redacted From Epstein Files?
By Mehdi Hasan\Zeteo Photos: Wikimedia Commons There is a page on the White House website headlined ‘The Most Transparent Administration in History!’ Like almost everything else that is published on the White House website these days, that’s complete and utter bollocks. This is an administration, lest we forget, that has refused to release President Donald Trump’s financial and medical records and is currently engaged in what might be the biggest political cover-up in US history. The Epstein Files Transparency Act required Trump’s Department of Justice to release all of the 6 million Epstein files, and to do so with minimal redactions. Instead, the DOJ released 3.5 million files last month and did so with heavy redactions. Take Donald Trump. If you or I search his name in the library of redacted files released to the public on the DOJ website, his name appears almost 5,000 times. But this week, when Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, searched for the president’s name in the unredacted files that only members of Congress can access, Trump’s name appeared “more than a million times.” So at least 99.5% of the references to Donald Trump in the DOJ Epstein files have been redacted. “The most transparent administration ever”? Seriously? The Trump administration’s addiction to redactions extends far beyond the Epstein files. Remember the “highly classified” whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a complaint so classified that it was “said to be locked in a safe” because what it might contain was so critical to US national security? Yesterday, we learned that the whistleblower complaint relates to a conversation intercepted by US intelligence last spring in which two foreign nationals were discussing… wait for it… Jared Kushner. Senior Trump administration officials say the claims about Kushner in that intercepted conversation are demonstrably false, but… guess what?… they won’t tell us anything more about the conversation. It is clear they never wanted Kushner’s name to ever see the light of day. As the New York Times reports: “Mr. Kushner’s name was redacted in the original report from the National Security Agency, but people reading it, including the whistle-blower, were able to determine that the reference was to him… The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration. At a time last year when Mr. Kushner’s role in Middle East peace talks was less public than it is now, the foreign officials were recorded saying that he was the person to speak to in order to influence the talks…. While the whistle-blower believed that information should be circulated, the N.S.A.’s general counsel, Ms. Gabbard and the intelligence community’s inspectors general disagreed.” First off, which countries are the two foreign nationals from? We don’t know. Second, what on Earth was Jared Kushner, a private citizen, doing involving himself in Middle East peace talks to begin with, given his own financial ties to Gulf governments and illegal Israeli settlements, as well as his long-standing relationship – since childhood! – with Benjamin Netanyahu? What was this private citizen doing meeting with Vladimir Putin before even Trump Cabinet officials did? Why has this walking conflict of interest been inserting himself into US diplomatic affairs after telling the media in 2024 that he had no intention of returning to government work? “He gets involved with government-run investment funds, and those governments also happen to want things from the American government,” Jordan Libowitz, a vice president with the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Bloomberg News in December. “So you have a president’s son-in-law financially entangled with foreign governments, and what’s good for him might not be what’s good for the American people.” The word “might” is doing some serious heavy lifting in that sentence. Third, the Republicans, their allies on Fox, and their useful idiots in the so-called ‘liberal’ media spent four long years absolutely obsessing over Hunter Biden’s financial scandals – and yet here is Jared attending high-level, international government meetings, something Hunter never did. It is also worth remembering that Kushner was a failed property developer prior to 2016, but he and Ivanka reportedly increased their combined wealth by $82 million by the end of Trump’s first term in office. Now, barely a year into his father-in-law’s second term, Kushner is a billionaire, according to Forbes. So, where is the outrage from the people who got mad about Hunter Biden’s paintings? Where are the planned investigations from Rep. James Comer, the Hunter Biden-obsessed GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee, into Kushner’s myriad conflicts of interest? Will Democrats in Congress, at least, make so
Black News 
By Mehdi Hasan\Zeteo
Photos: Wikimedia Commons
There is a page on the White House website headlined ‘The Most Transparent Administration in History!’
Like almost everything else that is published on the White House website these days, that’s complete and utter bollocks.
This is an administration, lest we forget, that has refused to release President Donald Trump’s financial and medical records and is currently engaged in what might be the biggest political cover-up in US history.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required Trump’s Department of Justice to release all of the 6 million Epstein files, and to do so with minimal redactions. Instead, the DOJ released 3.5 million files last month and did so with heavy redactions.
Take Donald Trump. If you or I search his name in the library of redacted files released to the public on the DOJ website, his name appears almost 5,000 times. But this week, when Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, searched for the president’s name in the unredacted files that only members of Congress can access, Trump’s name appeared “more than a million times.” So at least 99.5% of the references to Donald Trump in the DOJ Epstein files have been redacted.
“The most transparent administration ever”?
Seriously?
The Trump administration’s addiction to redactions extends far beyond the Epstein files. Remember the “highly classified” whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a complaint so classified that it was “said to be locked in a safe” because what it might contain was so critical to US national security?
Yesterday, we learned that the whistleblower complaint relates to a conversation intercepted by US intelligence last spring in which two foreign nationals were discussing… wait for it… Jared Kushner.
Senior Trump administration officials say the claims about Kushner in that intercepted conversation are demonstrably false, but… guess what?… they won’t tell us anything more about the conversation. It is clear they never wanted Kushner’s name to ever see the light of day.
As the New York Times reports:
“Mr. Kushner’s name was redacted in the original report from the National Security Agency, but people reading it, including the whistle-blower, were able to determine that the reference was to him… The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration. At a time last year when Mr. Kushner’s role in Middle East peace talks was less public than it is now, the foreign officials were recorded saying that he was the person to speak to in order to influence the talks…. While the whistle-blower believed that information should be circulated, the N.S.A.’s general counsel, Ms. Gabbard and the intelligence community’s inspectors general disagreed.”
First off, which countries are the two foreign nationals from? We don’t know.
Second, what on Earth was Jared Kushner, a private citizen, doing involving himself in Middle East peace talks to begin with, given his own financial ties to Gulf governments and illegal Israeli settlements, as well as his long-standing relationship – since childhood! – with Benjamin Netanyahu? What was this private citizen doing meeting with Vladimir Putin before even Trump Cabinet officials did? Why has this walking conflict of interest been inserting himself into US diplomatic affairs after telling the media in 2024 that he had no intention of returning to government work?
“He gets involved with government-run investment funds, and those governments also happen to want things from the American government,” Jordan Libowitz, a vice president with the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Bloomberg News in December. “So you have a president’s son-in-law financially entangled with foreign governments, and what’s good for him might not be what’s good for the American people.”
The word “might” is doing some serious heavy lifting in that sentence.
Third, the Republicans, their allies on Fox, and their useful idiots in the so-called ‘liberal’ media spent four long years absolutely obsessing over Hunter Biden’s financial scandals – and yet here is Jared attending high-level, international government meetings, something Hunter never did. It is also worth remembering that Kushner was a failed property developer prior to 2016, but he and Ivanka reportedly increased their combined wealth by $82 million by the end of Trump’s first term in office. Now, barely a year into his father-in-law’s second term, Kushner is a billionaire, according to Forbes.
So, where is the outrage from the people who got mad about Hunter Biden’s paintings? Where are the planned investigations from Rep. James Comer, the Hunter Biden-obsessed GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee, into Kushner’s myriad conflicts of interest?
Will Democrats in Congress, at least, make some noise about this latest Kushner scandal? Will they seek to get the whistleblower complaint out of that safe and into the open? Will they call Kushner to testify over his financial ties to foreign governments if they take back the House in November?
Back in Trump’s first term, my former colleagues at The Intercept reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had bragged to his Emirati counterpart that Kushner was “in his pocket.” Within six months of leaving the White House, in 2021, Kushner had secured a $2 billion investment from MBS for his new fund (against the advice of even the crown prince’s own advisers). Last September, on the same day that Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu met in the White House to announce their Saudi-approved plan for Gaza, the video game publisher Electronic Arts revealed it had agreed to a record $55 billion buyout from a group of investors that included Kushner’s firm and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
How is any of this normal?
This is the most shamelessly, brazenly, openly corrupt and compromised government in modern American history and, astonishingly, the person who sits at the center of much of that corruption and compromise isn’t even a member of the government: It’s Jared Cory Kushner, First Son-in-Law.
