Kushner’s Financial Ties to Israel Deepen Even With Mideast Diplomatic Role<br />Connecting any of his well-publicized trips to the Middle East to anything to do with Kushner Companies or its businesses is nonsensical<br />and is a stretch to write a story where none actually exists.”<br />But Mr. Sanderson, the lawyer who specializes in government ethics, said, “Their standard seems like<br />some version of ‘It’s a conflict when I think it’s a conflict, and I’ll make that judgment myself.’”<br />One issue, said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics group, is<br />that “the ethics laws were not crafted by people who had the foresight to imagine a Donald Trump or a Jared Kushner.”<br />“No one could ever imagine this scale of ongoing business interests, not in a local peanut farm or a hardware store but sprawling global businesses<br />that give the president and his top adviser personal economic stakes in an astounding number of policy interests,” Mr. Weissman added.<br />It “does no business,” she said, “with foreign sovereigns or governments,<br />and is not precluded from doing business with any foreign company simply because Jared is working in the government.”<br />Menora, which is also Israel’s largest manager of pension funds, has done numerous other real estate deals, including<br />several in the United States, said the Menora executive, Ran Markman, who is the company’s head of real estate.
