After Donald Trump returned to the White House, his son-in-law and former senior adviser Jared Kushner declined to take a job in the new administration and instead planned to focus on running his Miami-based private equity firm. Kushner said he would also forgo raising more money for his company while Trump was in office, to avoid any appearance of a conflict.

But since last summer, Kushner has re-emerged as a high-level peace envoy for Trump, helping broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; steering negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine; and, most recently, playing a central role in the aborted negotiations between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear program. Kushner still doesn’t hold an official government position – he’s a private citizen who has been negotiating some of the most important foreign policy agreements on behalf of the Trump administration, with a direct line to the president.

And Kushner is once again trying to solicit foreign investments for his firm, Affinity Partners, which he largely built with billions of dollars in funding from three authoritarian Arab states and US allies: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In recent months, as he continued his freelance diplomacy for the Trump administration, Kushner has approached investors, including foreign governments that have an interest in his diplomatic work, about securing at least $5bn in new financing for his company, according to the New York Times.

The White House insists that Kushner’s role as one of Trump’s top negotiators in the Middle East – while he continues to own and manage a company mainly funded by three Arab petrostates that are dependent on US weapons and protection – poses no conflict of interest. Kushner “only acts in the best interests of the American public”, a White House spokesperson said in response to the Times’s revelations.

Despite the administration’s denials, it’s hard to avoid the perception that Kushner is leveraging his influence over US policy – and his proximity to the president – to drum up new business for his company. It’s also clear that Kushner is raising money for his personal benefit as Trump has........

© The Guardian