Jared Kushner stuck taxpayers with massive hotel bill weeks before leaving White House

Jared Kushner left taxpayers with a hefty bill for his last official trip to Israel just weeks before his father-in-law Donald Trump left the White House.

The former White House senior adviser billed taxpayers $24,335 in room and board for the visit, which also raised new questions about Kushner making deals on the government dime that benefited him and his family’s business interests, reported The Daily Beast.

The expenditure was filed under “Accommodation and Food Services” in a publicly available spending database maintained by the federal government, and Kushner took part in a ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, where a courtyard was named in his honor.

“Jared Kushner was there to cement his 5th peace deal for Israel in 4 months,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller told The Daily Beast. “How much did John Kerry’s trips cost where he accomplished nothing?”

But a week after Kushner’s visit, his family’s real estate business filed records with Israeli regulators showing they planned to raise around $100 million by selling bonds on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

There’s no explicit link between Kushner’s visit and the bond filing, but his White House tenure was marked by blurry lines between personal and government business.

Kushner also ran up huge travel expenses during other government trips, including a $58,000 bill when he and his wife Ivanka Trump took a luxury vacation in the Dominican Republic in 2018.