Kushner, Ivanka still benefit from business empire
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, will remain the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $741 million, despite their new government responsibilities, according to ethics filings released by the White House on Friday night.
Ivanka Trump also will maintain a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The hotel, just down the street from the White House, has drawn protests from ethics experts who worry that foreign governments or special interests could stay there in order to curry favor with the administration.
It is unclear how Ivanka Trump would earn income from that stake. Kushner’s financial disclosures say that Ivanka Trump earned between $1 million and $5 million from January 2016 to March 2017, and puts the value of her stake at between $5 million and $25 million.
The disclosures were part of a broad document release by the White House that exposed the assets of as many as 180 senior officials to public scrutiny. The reports show assets and wealth that senior staff members owned at the time they entered government service.
Those disclosures were to include the assets of Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. who now leads the National Economic Council, and Stephen Bannon, the counselor to the president.
Bannon disclosed $191,000 in consulting fees he earned from Breitbart News Network, the conservative media organization; $125,333 from Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for the Trump campaign; and $61,539 in salary from the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization.
Bannon’s most valuable asset was Bannon Strategic Advisors Inc., a privately held consulting firm into which income from his other investments appeared to flow. It was valued at between $5 million and $25 million. He also held bank accounts valued at as much as $2.25 million, and rental real estate worth as much as $10.5 million.
The Trump administration is considered the most wealthy in U.S. history, with members of his senior staff and Cabinet worth an estimated $12 billion, according to a tally by Bloomberg News.
Until January, Kushner was the chief executive of Kushner Cos., a family-run real estate investment firm with holdings across the country, a growing business that has taken part in at least $7 billion of acquisitions during the past decade.
Late Friday, the White House released details of the plan devised by his advisers to avoid conflicts of interest between his government role and the wide-ranging business empire Kushner ran with his father. That business depends on foreign investment from undisclosed sources, as well as billions of dollars in loans from the world’s biggest financial services firms.