The Hunter Standard, Part 1. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is negotiating two wars as a “volunteer,” which means nobody gets to see what he owns. Reporters found out anyway.
Republicans “nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships” and “should not unplug it now.” — Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 22, 2026
Even people who have never cracked a Bible know the story of the Good Samaritan. A man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho gets jumped by robbers, stripped, beaten, and left half dead in a ditch. A priest comes along and crosses to the other side of the road. So does a Levite. Then a Samaritan, a member of a group the story’s audience despised, stops, bandages the man’s wounds, puts him on his own animal, hauls him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper two silver coins out of his own pocket, promising to cover whatever else it costs.
The point of the parable is that being a neighbor costs you something.
The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is still there. It runs through the West Bank. And the man the President of the United States sent to bind up the wounds of the region has worked out a much better arrangement with the innkeeper.
The volunteer
Jared Kushner holds no government job. He has spent the second Trump term negotiating over Gaza, Iran, and now Ukraine alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff, the President’s longtime friend and fellow real-estate developer. Kushner does it as an unpaid “volunteer.”
It sounds selfless. It’s actually the whole trick. Government officials file financial disclosures — volunteers don’t.
All 50 states have Good Samaritan laws that shield people who stop to help in an emergency from liability for whatever happens next. Kushner’s volunteer status works like a Good Samaritan law for his portfolio: it shields him from having to tell anyone what he owns while he decides how wars end.
So reporters had to find out the hard way. In the first week of October, they found two things.
Table one: Gaza
On October 1, CNN reported that while Kushner was negotiating an end to the war in Gaza, his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, was the largest shareholder in Phoenix, one of Israel’s biggest insurers and asset managers. Affinity held 7.4% of the company, a stake worth more than $1 billion.
Continue reading The Bad Samaritan — The Hunter Standard, Part 1: Jared Kushner