Back in March, former first son-in-law Jared Kushner penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he offered President Joe Biden policy advice on the Middle East like only one of history’s foremost overconfident morons can. Reducing the multi-decade Israeli-Palestinian conflict to “nothing more than a real-estate dispute,” Kushner explained that his Abraham Accords had “set the table” to “unleash the Middle East’s potential, keep America safe, and help the region turn the page on a generation of conflict and instability,” and if the Biden administration was “smart,” it would embrace the opportunity the Trump administration had served up to it on a silver platter. Naturally, Kushner did not mention that his deal establishing formal relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain “fell short of full peace deals as the three countries already maintain significant informal ties and have not been at war,” or that the agreements make “little mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” which might have something to do with Kushner calling Palestinian leadership “hysterical and erratic.” Oh, he also forgot about the part in which, despite reading 25 books on the matter, the best idea he apparently could come up with re: bringing peace to the Middle East was that people should just stop “doing terrorism.” And that was when he unveiled his economic plan for peace in the region, the reviews from actual Middle East experts included such appraisals as: “The authors of the plan clearly understand nothing” and “Leaving aside that this reads like an investment prospectus for a project that an intern conceived of a week ago, literally none of it is actionable…it is the Monty Python sketch of Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives.”

But no matter! Kushner obviously views himself as the leading expert on such matters now—you saw the part about the whole 25 books, right?—hence his next venture.

Per Axios:

Jared Kushner is founding an organization called the Abraham Accords Institute for Peace, to work on deepening the normalization agreements he helped strike between Israel and Arab countries…. The non-partisan, non-profit organization will have a five-year mandate and be funded through private donations. According to a statement, it will focus on increasing trade and tourism between the five signatory countries—Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan—and developing programs to foster people-to-people connections between the countries. It will also “provide analysis of the benefits of normalization and the potential benefits additional Arab countries can receive if they join the Abraham Accords.”

Kushner is founding the institute with former White House envoy Avi Berkowitz, who helped negotiate the agreements; Israeli-American businessman and Democratic donor Haim Saban; and three heavy hitters from the region: the Emirati and Bahraini ambassadors to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba and Abdulla R. Al-Khalifa, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi…. The executive director will be Rob Greenway, formerly the top Middle East adviser on Donald Trump’s national security council.

The Institute is not the only project Kushner is currently working on. In addition to reportedly serving, along with Ivanka Trump, as an informal adviser to a new group whose mission is to “perpetuat[e] former president Trump’s populist policies,” Jared is reportedly working on a book about his “White House experiences,” including “his role in negotiating normalization deals between Israel and Arab states.” It will also apparently address trade deals, prison reform, the U.S.’s relationship with China, the Russia probe, Trump’s impeachment, the border crisis, the “events surrounding the death in police custody of George Floyd,” and the U.S. response to the coronavirus. Presumably, much of it will be fiction.

In other Kushner news, a judge recently and scathingly declared that his family real estate business violated a whole host of tenant laws, which is not entirely surprising given their reputation as slumlords. Per The Baltimore Sun:

The apartment company of Jared Kushner violated Maryland’s consumer protection laws numerous times at Baltimore-area properties by collecting debts without the required licenses, charging tenants improper fees, and misrepresenting the condition of rental units, a judge has ruled. In a 252-page decision issued Thursday, Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker found that violations by Westminster Management and the company JK2 were “widespread and numerous.” Kushner—the son-in-law of former president Donald J. Trump—and his brother Joshua each held 50% interest in JK2, according to the legal filing. Westminster is the successor to that company.

Daneker heard months of testimony, from September to December. Witnesses included government officials and numerous current and former tenants and employees of the apartments in question…. Daneker found Westminster charged illegal fees thousands of times.

The judge found that tenants were misled frequently about the conditions of the apartments before they moved in. Often, they were only shown model units and weren’t allowed to see their actual apartment until move-in day. One man described his experience at the Charlesmont apartments in Dundalk in 2014. He was shown a unit that looked like it had just been remodeled, but the unit he got “had dirty carpet and smelled like a litter box.” His kitchen ceiling collapsed the night he moved in. Management never made repairs despite repeated complaints, so the man bought supplies at Home Depot and fixed the ceiling himself. His employer paid for the carpet to be cleaned. Another woman testified that in 2013, she was shown a nice, newly painted and updated unit at the Carriage Hill apartments in Randallstown. But when she moved in, she found mouse holes in the apartment they gave her. The rodents were an ongoing problem, with the woman finding droppings on her stove and counter, and hearing mice in the walls.

In 2019, before his time was consumed by downplaying the coronavirus and trying to overturn the election, Donald Trump went on a racist rant attacking the late Congressman Elijah Cummings for representing, in the then president’s words, a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” Baltimore district where “no human being would want to live,” a diatribe that failed to touch on Kushner’s local properties.

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