House speaker plays down Jared Kushner's involvement in Trump administration

Mike Johnson going out of his way to say Jared Kushner isn't "directly involved" in the day-to-day is one of those denials that raises more questions than it answers. Nobody asked because they thought the answer was nothing. Kushner spent four years brokering Middle East deals, running point on Saudi relations, and building a private equity fund stuffed with money from the same governments he used to negotiate with. Pretending he's just a guy who shows up for Thanksgiving now requires a straight face Johnson doesn't quite manage.

Here's the thing though: the actual concern isn't that Kushner has influence. Family members advising presidents is as old as the republic. The concern is the money. Two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund into a firm run by the sitting president's son-in-law is the kind of arrangement that would get torn apart if it involved literally anyone else in Washington. Johnson's answer dodges that entirely by talking about org charts instead of conflicts of interest.

We're not interested in relitigating 2020 by pretending nepotism only exists on one side of the aisle. Hunter Biden's laptop and board seats were treated as a five-alarm scandal for years, and rightly scrutinized. Fair's fair. If Kushner's business dealings with foreign governments deserve a pass just because he's not on the White House payroll anymore, then the standard everyone claimed to care about was never really about influence peddling. It was about who was doing it.