Gage Skidmore.
Jared Kushner isn’t just denying the explosive Vanity Fair report about his finances anymore. His legal team is now threatening the magazine.
Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, posted a letter on X Saturday that Kushner’s lawyers sent to Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast.
“We formally put Vanity Fair and Condé Nast on notice regarding the false and defamatory allegations published about our client, Jared Kushner,” Mizelle wrote.
The letter is signed by Thomas Clare and Eric Hageman of Clare Locke, a firm best known for defamation cases. It demands that Vanity Fair take down the excerpt and preserve every record of how it was reported, fact-checked and edited.
The Oct. 22 excerpt comes from journalist Matthew Cole’s forthcoming book, “Princes and Thieves.” According to the letter, it accuses Kushner of secretly gaining access to at least $2 billion from the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while he worked in the White House. It says he hid the money in accounts in Abu Dhabi and Israel, moved it through Cyprus and traded American foreign policy influence in return.
“Every one of these accusations and characterizations is as false as it is outrageous,” the lawyers wrote. They called the claims “defamatory per se” because they accuse Kushner of serious crimes.
The letter says Kushner was never connected to an “Alpha” account at First Abu Dhabi Bank. It adds that no “Beta” account was ever held for him at Israel’s central bank, and that he has no account in Cyprus.
“There are no accounts and never were,” the letter says, quoting what Kushner’s counsel previously told Cole and his publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The lawyers argued the excerpt “rests on unnamed sources and secondhand accounts of what foreign intelligence officers supposedly saw on a phone screen.” They said Cole refused to name any sources or produce bank records when Kushner’s team asked.
They also pointed to the scrutiny Kushner faced during his White House years, including congressional inquiries, a special counsel investigation and more than 30 hours of his own testimony. None of that, they wrote, “surfaced any trace” of the deals Cole describes.
The letter also cites a ruling from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Sidney Powell, arguing that publishing “inherently improbable” claims can support a finding of actual malice. That’s the high bar public figures must clear to win a defamation case.
Mizelle also went after the magazine directly.
“@VanityFair, people assume you reviewed this story. So confirm for us, did you independently verify these allegations or just republish without checking?” he wrote.
The letter comes a day after critics pointed out that Kushner’s first denial on X didn’t threaten legal action. Journalist Michael Weiss wrote at the time that “given the gravity of the allegations, that decision will only draw more scrutiny.”
The letter demands a takedown but doesn’t say Kushner will sue. Mizelle ended his post with “More to come.”
Vanity Fair hasn’t publicly responded.
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