A former White House official who worked with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoys, was aghast at their lack of preparation for negotiations with Iran.
A former White House official who handled Iran's nuclear file told The New Yorker he was appalled by how little Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had prepared for the Geneva talks that came just before the U.S. went to war with Iran.
The criticism appears in a long profile of President Donald Trump's son-in-law by Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer Dexter Filkins, published this week. The magazine casts Kushner as a Washington operator who has turned government service into a personal fortune.
Neither envoy had a technical adviser alongside him at the February sessions, according to the report, even though the Department of Energy had assigned a specialist to Witkoff who never made it into the room. The White House disputed that account.
A former diplomat briefed on the talks said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi put concessions forward that the two Americans were unable to evaluate. They looked for help from Rafael Grossi, who runs the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Grossi was there as a neutral broker rather than as an adviser to the American side.
With nobody in the room qualified to judge what Tehran was offering, the former official said, the U.S. delegation had no way to separate a meaningful concession from a cosmetic one.
"For them not to have technical advisers there is just total malpractice," he said.
Kushner and Witkoff returned to Washington and reported that Iran would not give in, per the magazine. Within hours, American and Israeli forces launched strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with much of the country's senior leadership.
Filkins also reports that during the same stretch, Kushner was quietly working with Middle Eastern investors for a fresh $5 billion for Affinity Partners, the private equity firm he started after leaving the first Trump White House. Once the bombing of Tehran began, the magazine notes, questions surfaced about whether the fundraising and the diplomacy were connected. The firm's foreign money has drawn congressional scrutiny before, including a Senate Finance Committee investigation into the $2 billion it took from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.
CNN reported in July that Witkoff had assured wary Republican leaders on a phone call that he and Kushner had just visited the Oak Ridge nuclear lab and lined up specialists ready to join the effort. Three weeks after that call, CNN found, substantive technical negotiations had hardly gotten off the ground, and the underlying framework was coming apart.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has questioned why the two are running talks with Russia, Iran and Israel at all, telling ABC News that neither man went through Senate confirmation and neither answers to congressional oversight.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner told CNN's Erin Burnett this month that the envoys made a "ludicrous" choice when they accepted a ride in a Russian government vehicle to their Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin, warning that Russian equipment can strip a phone of its contents without the owner ever noticing. Financial Times columnist Edward Luce has argued that the pair keep selling opponents on visions of postwar economic windfalls instead of engaging with what those opponents are actually fighting over.