At the time, Kushner had already spent months trying to arrange fresh financing for a troubled building his family owns, 666 Fifth Avenue.
After one of those meetings, Kislyak arranged a meeting between Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, the powerful chief executive of a major Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB.
The U.S. had imposed financial sanctions on VEB because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military incursions in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. (During this period the Russians were also meeting with Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser.)
VEB has close ties to the Kremlin, and Gorkov attended a training academy for members of Russia’s security and intelligence services. A Trump spokeswoman has described Kushner’s meetings with the Russians as routine, which they may have been given his role at the time as Trump’s liaison to foreign powers.
But given the significance of 666 Fifth Avenue to Kushner and his family’s fortunes, it’s also possible that he saw the Russians as potential investors.

It’s worth recalling that Kushner had spent the prior months lobbying Anbang, an insurer and prolific deal-maker close to China’s government, for a major investment in 666 Fifth Avenue. Anbang had considered investing $4 billion in the building.
Kushner overpaid for the building in 2007, when he bought it with the help of bank loans for $1.8 billion. When the financial crisis landed a year later, occupancy rates in the building plummeted and Kushner had to be rescued by outside investors.
Anbang’s investment would have valued the building at a handsome $2.85 billion, and also refinanced about $1.15 billion in debt.
The possibility of a transaction brought scrutiny from two Bloomberg reporters, Caleb Melby and David Kocieniewski, as well as from Congress and the New York Times. I discussed it in a column here and here. The Anbang deal faded after the Bloomberg report.
There’s good reason for all the attention being paid to these things: Kushner is a senior White House adviser and a pivotal voice on foreign policy issues. Kushner was also reportedly one of the leading voices telling Trump to fire James Comey from his job as FBI director.
“Mr. Kushner previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings,” Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, told CNN on Thursday. “He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”
Kushner, at 36 years old, had little diplomatic or global business experience prior to the president giving him one of the White House’s most powerful and multi-faceted portfolios. The prospect that he may have been jockeying for Chinese or Russian financiers to bail out him and his family from a potentially disastrous investment at 666 Fifth Avenue presents complex but obvious conflicts of interest as well as the prospect of injudicious or self-serving White House policymaking.
The Trumps and the Kushners have also played fast and loose with the norms of ethics and conflicts of interest standards as they’ve gone about mingling their political and business lives. It’s visible in the Washington hotel that they continue to own and run not too far from the White House; it’s visible in the Kushner family’s recent fundraising tour in China for a New Jersey property, and it’s visible — in the very lack of visibility — around the president’s own financial holdings and tax payments.
Trump is insulated from some of this, legally. As he said just two weeks after his November election victory: “The law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
The president can have a financial conflict, of course. But no federal ethics laws apply to the president. (There are anti-bribery clauses of the Constitution that do, however.)
Regardless, the president is, indeed, in a privileged legal position when it comes to financial conflicts.
Trump’s advisers and relatives are not immune to those laws and others, however. To the extent that the FBI is knocking on Kushner’s door with financial questions, the president’s son-in-law could be in a very difficult situation.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Timothy L. O’Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net

CARLSON: Two days ago comment news broke that a key figure in the Mueller investigation, a longtime FBI official named Peter Strzok had been removed from his job for sending highly political text messages to his mistress, whose another FBI official.
Apparently, those texts attacked President Trump and expressed affection for Hillary Clinton. Ordinarily, this would not rate a headline. Even career government officials are allowed to have political views. But this is no ordinary moment. Peter Strzok is at the very center of the two most politicized Justice Department cases in a generation.
Strzok was first of all deeply involved in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server last year. At the conclusion of that investigation, it was apparently Strzok who changed the FBI’s description of what Hillary did from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” Now, the first description is a crime, the second is merely a blunder. So in effect, Peter Strzok exonerated Hillary Clinton in the middle of a presidential campaign.

Carlson said when Strzok interviewed Flynn, the one that resulted in his guilty plea, the then-National Security Advisor did not have a lawyer present because he had no idea he was being officially interviewed.

CARLSON: In effect, Peter Strzok exonerated Hillary Clinton in the middle of a presidential campaign. But then he kept going. Strzok went on to sign the document, the official document that opened an investigation into Russian meddling in an election. The very same investigation the Hillary campaign was calling for at the time. The one that has now completely overwhelmed to the Trump presidency.
And if that wasn’t enough, it was also Peter Strzok who, according to news accounts this afternoon oversaw the FBI’s interviews in January with general Mike Flynn at the White House. The ones that resulted in Flynn pleading guilty to felony charges on Friday. Apparently, Flynn had no idea he was being interviewed and that would explain why he didn’t have a lawyer present. If true, that would qualify as trickery, it would be unethical.