Congress Wants To Know If Kushner Hoped Russia Would Bail Out Manhattan Skyscraper

Jared Kushner Image by Department of Defense

By Aiden Pink June 6, 2017

Among the topics that congressional committees plan to ask presidential advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner is whether his meetings with Russian officials in December were to sell a loss-making skyscraper his business owns to a Russian firm, NBC News reported Monday.

Kushner originally neglected to disclose those meetings on his security clearance application form, drawing investigators’ interest when they were reported earlier this year. A Kushner spokesman said that his failure to include the meetings with the Russian ambassador and the head of a Russian state-owned bank was an oversight.

The White House has claimed that Kushner’s meeting with the Russian bank was in an official government capacity, but the bank has said that it was a business meeting.

Kushner set a Manhattan real estate record when he bought the 41-story skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for $1.8 billion in 2007. But the real estate bubble burst the following year, causing the Kushner Companies to lose a substantial amount of money on the property since then.

Anbang Insurace Group, a Chinese firm that NBC News called “murky ties to the country’s government,” was in talks to buy the building for $4 billion last year, but publicly backed out in March.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

Aiden Pink is the Deputy News Editor for the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

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