JARED IS BACK

Welcome to the Kleptocracy

Jared Kushner wisely decided to remain out of the limelight. However, he has not remained out of the self-dealing. 

We discussed his “private equity” firm making big investments in the Balkans here. Briefly,  Kushner is partnering with Serbia’s  authoritarian President Aleksandar Vučić. He’s getting all kinds of lifts from inside the Trump circle and from the Serbian government, as you might expect. His company, Affinity Partners, is chasing in America’s reputational capital for its benefit. 

Maybe favors are also getting paid back to the firm’s investors, including the Saudi royal family. Given the paucity of public information beyond brief disclosure documents, it’s hard to say.

Enter Rod Blagojevich

Because it had to get even seedier. 

Disgraced Governor Blagojevich, whose 14-year prison sentence President Donald Trump commuted in February 2020, recently re-emerged in the news as the Foreign Agent Registration Act--registered lobbyist for Serbia after Trump handed him a full pardon on February 10, 2025.

You may recall that he originally landed in prison for trying to sell former Senator Barack Obama’s senate seat. As governor of Illinois, Blagojevich had the duty to appoint a temporary replacement to fill the newly elected Obama’s Senate seat – but not to sell it. The federal government also charged him for attempting to extort the Chicago Tribune, wire fraud, extortion, conspiracy, attempted extortion and making false statements to federal officers. A jury found him guilty of 17 charges. 

The Illinois legislature removed him from office in January 2009.

An Echo of 2020

The Balgojevich affair matters to Kushner’s Affinity Partners because Kushner played a “leading role,” together with, ahem, now Attorney General Pam Bondi and Ivanka Trump, overseeing the Trump administration’s clemency process. 

Or perhaps Trump felt bad for firing him from the Celebrity Apprentice? 

Recall that, at the time, Kushner was in charge of criminal justice reform and, according to news reports, drove this process and overruled strenuous objections from the Justice Department. Mark Vargas, Blagojevich’s spokesman at the time, suggested that Kushner had played a middleman role in the commutation. Fast forward five years later, and Kushner lobbied Trump for the full pardon. 

Trump Tower Belgrade

Again, I covered this project in detail in the earlier post about Affinity Partners. It has significant investments in the Balkans region. One project will involve leasing the Trump name from The Trump Organization. And, in a deeply controversial move that provoked protests in Belgrade, one will be built on the site of a former Serbian Army baracks that the US bombed in 1999 as part of its military campaign to stop the Serbian genocide of Kosovar Albanians. Affinity Partners has received a lease for the building site free of charge. 

Here, once, such arrangements might have raised eyebrows. 

What is Serbia Getting Out of This?

We may never know. But we can make some educated guesses. Serbian officials have some sanctions that they’d like to see lifted. For example, Russian energy giants Gazprom and Gazprom Neft own Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS), the Serbian oil conglomerate and the second largest company in the country by revenue. Throughout the Ukraine war, Serbia has balked at any solution that might limit Russia's influence in Belgrade. 

In neighboring Bosnia, a raft of sanctions also target Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik’s patronage network. Vučić has long used Dodik and his patronage network to destabilize Bosnia. 

And the Deputy Prime Minister Aleksander Vulin remains under 2023 sanctions for "corrupt and destabilizing acts that have also facilitated Russia's malign activities in the region" that he conducted while head of Serbian intelligence. 

A Happy Ending

The president’s senior advisor and son-in-law engages in substantial business dealings in a country for which an individual he helped facilitate a pardon now lobbies. The episode raises clear issues of abuse of power and self-dealing, and that’s before you consider the authoritarian money backing Kushner’s venture. It’s a gross example of what our emerging kleptocracy looks like. 

Bringing it back to local politics and decisions, which I will always attempt to do: Here, we have less of an action to take and more of a decision to make. This episode is rife with gross self-dealing that should have the Department of Justice poring over documents late into the night and Pam Bondi contemplating hiring an independent counsel.  The actions of Jared, Rod and their associates also trample all over the Constitution’s separation of powers. So, we need to ask ourselves, at what point should America’s political opposition give up on trying to fix things using federal authorities and withdraw to defensible lines at the state level? 

I mean, this was Blagojevich’s surreal yet on-brand quote upon release from prison: “Nobody is working harder to do more to fix this broken and racist criminal justice system than President Trump and Jared Kushner.” 

States have plenty of authorities that can disrupt many of the actions that Affinity Partners  has undertaken to create this situation, if not end it. Plus, as my crypto posts have discussed, capital from inside the blue state fuels these curruption fires. California is, for example, America’s crypto capital. California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta could start tying that in knots. So, why isn’t he? In other words, can we all collectively decide that the federal government is not redeemable at this point and fight for the rule of law from the state capitals? 

In February, Politico reported that Trump was considering naming Blagojevich ambassador to Serbia, where the former governor remains something of a celebrity. In a way, that would have been almost too perfect. Instead, Trump went for former Arizona General Mark Brnovich as Ambassador. 

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he led the infamous Arizona “review” of Maricopa County’s electoral irregularities. You remember the one that lasted six months, was riddled with errors and found nothing. The Cyber Ninjas, and all that. At the end of the day, the President of the United States chose the guy that hired sham auditors to find non-existent fraud over the guy who went to jail for 17 counts, including fraud. 

And that’s the happy note. 

Pity poor Gen Z, most of whom probably have no memories of America not being this shady. But, thanks to Trump, they get to experience things getting dumber every day.