Jared Kushner is even more of a liability than we thought

| 2:31 pm EST February 15, 2018
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The deeper Donald Trump and his White House sink into the Rob Porter domestic violence scandal and coverup, the more it appears that they kept Porter on the job because they didn’t want his inability to get a security clearance to become a public scandal. Why? Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner can’t get a security clearance either, partly due to the lies he’s told about his involvement in the Trump-Russia scandal. Now it turns out Kushner is even more of a security liability than we thought, because he appears to be broke.

Kushner has real estate assets worth billions of dollars. But his primary holding, 666 Fifth Avenue, has faced notorious financial troubles. Now we’re learning that over the past year, Kushner has been taking out loans along the lines of five million dollars here, twenty million dollars there, according to documents obtained by Politico (link). Billionaires do sometimes strategically take on new debt into order to get new ventures off the ground. But these dollar amounts are closer to a rounding error for a billionaire; it would be like a millionaire taking out a series of five thousand dollar loans.

Kushner’s new debt feels more along the lines of what people with a lot of assets do when they’re cash poor. They’re upside down on their assets, they’re paying out more money to service their debt than they’re bringing in, so they have no cash on hand and they have to borrow comparatively small amounts here and there that they can. In other words, it sounds like Kushner is broke.

That’s his problem, but it’s also our problem, because here’s a guy who’s desperately taking on debt in a manner which suggests he has his back financially against the wall, even as he’s handling the most sensitive of classified U.S. intel, all without a permanent security clearance. These kinds of clearances specifically exist to keep liabilities like Kushner from having access to classified information – and that’s before getting to the part where he secretly met with Russian diplomats and bankers and lied about it.