HAS JARED KUSHNER BEEN TARGETED BY CHINESE SPIES?

Intimate meetings with Chinese officials have raised concerns that Kushner is the subject of an influence operation.

Earlier this month, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal published a curious article about Wendi Deng Murdoch, Murdoch’s ex-wife. According to the paper, United States counter-intelligence officials had warned White House senior adviser Jared Kushner that Deng might be using her friendship with him and his wife, Ivanka Trump,to advance Chinese interests in the U.S. Of particular concern was a planned $100 million construction project in Washington, D.C., which would have included a 70-foot tower that officials worried could be used for surveillance. The warning, reported the Journal, was part of a larger effort in early 2017 by national-security officials to alert Kushner that Chinese nationals and other people linked to China, like Deng, might target him as part of an influence operation. (A spokesperson for Deng told the Journal that she “has no knowledge of any F.B.I. concerns or other intelligence agency concerns relating to her or her associations” and no knowledge of the D.C. project. Neither she, nor Kushner, have been accused of any wrongdoing.)

Some government officials also flagged Kushner’s meetings with Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., according to The New Yorker. Ever since Henry Kissinger introduced the two during the election campaign, they have met multiple times, reportedly raising concerns that Beijing has attempted to use Kushner’s ready access to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, to sway policy. In past administrations, such meetings were attended by “a retinue of China specialists and note-takers.” Kushner’s meetings, however, were more intimate. On at least one occasion, he met with Cui alone. Other encounters with Cui included ex-national-security adviser Michael Flynn, who has since pleaded guiltyto lying to F.B.I. agents about his contacts with Russian officials.

From Cui’s perspective, the meetings seem to have been fruitful. Following a discussion on February 1, 2017 (the same day Ivanka took their daughter, Arabella, to a lunar New Year celebration at the Chinese Embassy), Kushner persuaded Trump to drop his threats to abandon the “One China” policy, which affirms mainland control over Taiwan. He also passed along proposals from Cui to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who made his first official trip to Beijing in March.

Kushner’s decision to exclude top China specialists from the meetings was met with misgiving because his lack of political experience was thought to make him vulnerable to Chinese demands. “He went in utterly unflanked by anyone who could find Beijing on a map. It was a dream come true. They couldn’t believe he was so compliant,” a former member of the National Security Council told The New Yorker. Some officials who were uninvited to the meetings apparently resorted to scouring intelligence reports to see how Chinese diplomats detailed their dealings with Kushner. (A spokesperson for Kushner told the outlet that none of the specialists in the region told him “he shouldn’t be doing it the way he was doing it at the time.”)

Others worried that even if Kushner was well prepared for the meetings himself, the unusual setup might have given the Chinese unnecessary leverage. “There’s nobody else there in the room to verify what was said and what wasn’t, so the Chinese can go back and claim anything,” a former senior U.S. official who was briefed on the meetings said. “I’m sorry, Jared—do you think your background is going to allow you to be able to outsmart the Chinese ambassador?” Kushner, the official explained, “is actually pretty smart. He just has limited life experiences. He was acting with naïveté.”

The New Yorker report has raised new questions about Kushner’s continued inability to acquire security clearance, despite receiving the top-secret President’s Daily Brief. Kushner has been forced to update his application multiple times, after repeated failures to divulge all of his foreign contacts during the Trump campaign and transition period. He was also present at the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, with Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, in which the Trump campaign had been promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton from Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Concern about Kushner’s business ties to China could also be an obstacle. During the transition period, when he was still C.E.O. of the family business, Kushner met with multiple foreign officials to discuss the incoming administration. At the same time, he needed to find an investor for a building Kushner Companies had bought for $1.8 billion, the highest price ever paid for a building in Manhattan at that time. In November 2016, he had dinner with Wu Xiaohui, chairman of China’s Anbang Insurance Group, to discuss Wu’s possible investment. When the meeting was revealed months later, and Bloomberg reported that the Kushner family stood to make as much as $400 million from the agreement, lawmakers criticized it as a possible conflict of interest, and the negotiations were discarded. This month, it emerged that New York federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Kushner Companies, after they reportedly told potential Chinese investors that they would be eligible for green cards through the E.B.-5 visa program if they invested half a million dollars each in a development in New Jersey. Kushner’s White House role was mentioned in pitches. Although the family denies it was using his position to attract investment, Axios notes that Kushner reported receiving between $1-5 million in capital gains from the development.

In March 2017, Bill Priestap, the F.B.I.’s chief of counter-intelligence, reportedly warned Kushner that he was among the top intelligence targets worldwide—not only for China, but for every other major spy agency, too. They discussed some of Kushner’s contacts, including Deng Murdoch, whom some U.S. officials suspect has ties to the Chinese government. Kushner, however, was frustrated by the implication. “Why do I have more of a risk of telling her state secrets than anyone else?” Kushner said, according to The New Yorker. “Either I’m qualified to handle state secrets or I’m not qualified to handle state secrets. I think I understand my responsibilities.”