Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who has pressed questions about Jared Kushner’s foreign financial ties since 2017, on Sunday called on Congress to investigate whether foreign governments bought influence in the White House, citing a new report alleging Kushner had access to $2 billion in secret, Gulf-funded accounts while helping shape U.S. foreign policy.
Krishnamoorthi posted his statement on X at 3:38 p.m. on Oct. 25, 2026. The full text reads:
“A new report alleges Jared Kushner had access to $2 billion in secret, Gulf-funded accounts while shaping U.S. foreign policy. These allegations demand answers. Congress must investigate whether foreign governments bought influence in the White House.”
The report Krishnamoorthi cited
The post links to an exclusive excerpt published Oct. 22 by Vanity Fair under the headline “The Art of the Deal: Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations—Including More Than $700 Million in Transfers.” Written by journalist Matthew Cole, it is drawn from his forthcoming book, “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East,” to be published by One Signal Publisher/Atria Books.
The excerpt says the Netherlands’ military intelligence service, the MIVD, gained a view of Kushner’s iPhone screen by early 2018 after a Russian GRU operative who had been turned by the Dutch gave them access to stolen screenshots. It says the Dutch watched Kushner log in to a United Arab Emirates bank account that had received hundreds of millions of dollars, all in U.S. dollars, through a bank in Azerbaijan. The author describes that account as the “Alpha” account at First Abu Dhabi Bank, and says it received roughly $750 million beginning in 2017.
The excerpt goes on to allege that the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia put at least $2 billion into at least two accounts for Kushner. It says Kushner was a signatory on the Alpha account, which it says was owned by an Emirati charity called the Watani Al Emarat Foundation. It also describes a second, “Beta” account of roughly $1 billion that it says was routed to Israel’s central bank, and says Kushner would have been required to disclose any such account on federal financial and tax forms.
The excerpt includes denials. Kushner’s counsel said Kushner did not make agreements with foreign leaders that the President did not approve, and a lawyer for Kushner said he had no connection to the charity or a UAE bank account and complied with all legal requirements. Kushner’s counsel also said “there are no accounts and never were.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, named in the excerpt as a conduit for messages, called the allegations about him “100% false.” The allegations come from unnamed sources and have not been independently verified.
Krishnamoorthi’s record on Kushner and foreign influence
The post revives a line of inquiry Krishnamoorthi began early in the first Trump administration. In July 2017, as a member of the House Oversight Committee, he asked the acting FBI director to brief Congress on the counterintelligence implications of Kushner’s failure to disclose more than 100 foreign contacts on his security clearance application. That October, he questioned the head of the National Background Investigations Bureau about errors in Kushner’s clearance paperwork during an Oversight hearing.
In letters and statements in 2018, he argued that Kushner’s family business debts created vulnerability to foreign influence. He joined Rep. Mark DeSaulnier in urging then-Chief of Staff John Kelly to weigh that risk in reviewing Kushner’s clearance, asked the Office of Government Ethics to evaluate more than $500 million in loans to Kushner Companies that followed meetings with the lenders’ executives, and in October 2018 demanded that the White House say whether it knew of Kushner’s tax-avoidance activities and potential Saudi ties during his clearance review.
On Gulf money specifically, Krishnamoorthi said in May 2018 that Kushner should release all records of his meetings with the Qatari government after a Qatar-linked firm was reported to be nearing a deal on Kushner Companies’ 666 Fifth Avenue property. He tied the matter to his CONFLICT Act, which would require White House staff to report any request for a waiver of conflict-of-interest recusal requirements.
On Saudi Arabia, he called on the administration in October 2018 to give Congress a briefing on intelligence about the plot against journalist Jamal Khashoggi, including any communications between Kushner and Saudi leaders, and asked then-Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy whether Kushner had made commitments to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that gave him a free hand against dissidents abroad. In February 2019, after the Oversight Committee released a whistleblower-based report on an effort to transfer sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, he said Congress must fully investigate the matter and named Kushner, Michael Flynn and Thomas Barrack. He repeated that charge on CNN on March 1, 2019.
Prior congressional scrutiny of Kushner’s Gulf ties
Krishnamoorthi’s call for an investigation follows earlier House inquiries into Kushner’s Gulf financing. In June 2022, Reuters reported that the House Oversight Committee, then led by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, was investigating whether Kushner had improperly traded on his government position to obtain a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in his firm, Affinity Partners, which he founded after leaving the White House. In April 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, opened an inquiry into what he called Kushner’s foreign entanglements and conflicts of interest, writing that Affinity had amassed about $6.16 billion in assets under management and that 99 percent of its funding came from foreign nationals.
Krishnamoorthi’s more recent oversight demands
During the U.S.-Iran war, Krishnamoorthi wrote to House Oversight Chairman James Comer asking for a public hearing and a full committee investigation into potential trading on Iran war intelligence by senior administration officials. The letter cites Kushner’s failure to file a required public financial disclosure report, asks the committee to review the financial disclosures of officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Kushner, and asks that both testify under oath.
He has also questioned the administration’s dealings with the Gulf states from his seat as ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. In May 2025, he called congressional visibility into reported technology deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia unacceptable, and in November 2025 he called the authorization of advanced AI chip exports to Saudi and UAE firms with ties to Beijing an extraordinary national security mistake. Those statements focused on the risk of technology reaching China rather than on payments to administration figures.
Krishnamoorthi’s post did not say which committee should lead an investigation or whether he would seek documents or testimony. The allegations in the Cole excerpt remain unproven and are denied by Kushner’s representatives.