HuffPost reports:

Jared Kushner, ex-President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser, isn’t the first one to get a big payout after leaving his position as a senior adviser in the White House. Nor is he the first family member of a president or ex-president to use his position to get money. But the $2 billion stake invested by the Saudis in Kushner’s new private equity firm dwarfs all previous post-presidential money grabs in both size and scope.

The New York Times reported on April 10 that a Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman contributed $2 billion to Kushner’s Affinity Partners over the objections of advisers who warned of Kushner’s “inexperience” and the risk involved due to “unsatisfactory” due diligence (a hallmark of Trump’s personal business investments) and “excessive” asset management fees.

In his role as White House adviser to Trump, Kushner was a close ally of the crown prince, offering him advice and defending him after Saudi military and intelligence officers murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Embassy in Instabul.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that bin Salman ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the Saudi regime. While Kushner remained in the White House, he kept in touch with the crown prince through off-the-books WhatsApp text messages.

As with so many things done by Trump and his family, Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi payout highlights a preexisting malady in American life by taking it to its extreme. In this case, that malady is the commercialization of the post-presidency that has taken hold over the past 40 years.

The “commercialized former presidency,” as the writer Thomas DeFrank called it, began in the late 1970s, at the dawn of the neoliberal age, when Gerald Ford took positions on corporate boards and hit the paid speaker circuit following his brief stint as an unelected President of the United States. [Continue reading…]