Jared Kushner, senior advisor to President Donald Trump, publicly rebuked CNN on Friday over a report he called “deeply misleading,” arguing the network buried key exculpatory information behind a paywall while running a headline that implied his Middle East diplomacy benefited his firm’s investments in Israeli defense-linked companies.
The CNN report, published Thursday under the headline “How Jared Kushner’s firm’s investment in an Israeli company could be a major conflict of interest,” examined Kushner’s role as a key negotiator in the Gaza war while his company, Affinity Partners, held the largest stake in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv-based firm backing businesses tied to Israel’s military campaigns.
Using Israeli financial transparency laws, CNN traced some of Phoenix’s military-linked holdings, reporting that the firm had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, along with stakes in at least eight other companies supplying equipment ranging from drones to warships to demolition machinery. CNN noted Affinity’s stake in Phoenix doubled last year, shortly before Trump returned to office, and that all nine companies it identified saw their stock values climb amid wartime demand.
Kushner, who rarely criticizes the press, took to X to argue that CNN’s own reporting undercut its headline.
“Buried behind a paywall, it acknowledges: ‘CNN found no indication that Kushner’s actions as a diplomat directly affected the investments reviewed,'” Kushner wrote.
That disclaimer did in fact appear in CNN’s story, roughly ten paragraphs in, accessible only to paid subscribers.
Kushner pushed back on the characterization of Phoenix as a defense company, describing it instead as one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions.
“It is one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions, highly regulated and managing approximately $220 billion across thousands of investments,” Kushner wrote. “Think of Phoenix as the Israeli equivalent of Vanguard or Fidelity. It manages the retirement savings of millions of Israelis. The savers don’t choose the individual investments, and neither do I.”
He added that he has “no role in deciding what Phoenix buys or sells,” and said the investment has performed well, growing more than fivefold since Affinity’s initial stake. Kushner noted the investment predates both Trump’s re-election and his own return to public service, and said Affinity does not directly own any of the defense companies CNN highlighted.
“Those facts make for a less provocative headline, but a much more accurate story,” Kushner wrote. “Misleading stories will not distract me from the work President Trump asked me to do: help end wars, bring people together and pursue peace. That work is too important.”
A CNN spokesperson told Fox News Digital the network “stands by our reporting.” CNN also published, behind its paywall, a statement from Kushner’s attorney stating that “any suggestion that Jared’s diplomatic work influenced Phoenix’s investments in the companies you identify, or vice versa, is incorrect.”
A White House spokesperson separately told CNN the implication that Kushner’s business activities were connected to his diplomatic work was a “tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”
In a follow-up post, Kushner said he has ignored “false and misleading stories” for the past decade but felt compelled to respond now because “the cycle has gotten out of control where old lies get repeated as fact, new ones get added, and the record becomes increasingly distorted.”
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