Jared Kushner Sought To Sell Newspaper To Trump's Political Enemies
Just weeks after helping elect Donald Trump, Kushner shopped the Observer to Media Matters founder David Brock, who was looking to build “the Breitbart of the left.”
Posted on March 8, 2018, at 3:34 p.m.
Charlie Warzel
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Just days before heading to a West Wing job, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was secretly engaged in talks to sell his struggling news organization, the New York Observer, to Clinton megadonor and Univision chair Haim Saban and Hillary Clinton ally David Brock — a progressive media figure with aspirations to turn the news outlet into “the Breitbart of the left.”
After the 2016 election, Kushner and Observer Media chair Joseph Meyer reportedly sought to offload the paper to Trump allies, including American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer, one of the media publications that portrayed Trump in a positive light during the campaign. But according to two sources, Kushner and Meyer found more attractive suitors in Hillaryland.
In the days after the election, Observer Media executives took part in discussions with Saban and Brock. A source familiar with the matter said that Kushner did not initiate the talks and largely recused himself after an initial discussion, though he did not have any apparent reservations about selling to his father-in-law’s sworn enemies. Ken Kurson, then editor-in-chief of the Observer, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that he and Meyer spoke with Saban on the phone that winter. In January 2017, Kurson met Brock one-on-one at the Greenwich Hotel, where the pair discussed the potential acquisition.
“I kept looking up to see if there was a black condor circling overhead, but in person this legendary Democratic assassin is perfectly friendly and reasonable. I was hoping a deal would happen, because for me personally, once Jared went to Washington, the fun of editing the Observer was diminished,” Kurson told BuzzFeed News of the meeting, adding that he hoped the family would find a buyer who could install a new editor and vision for the publication.
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