Voter database error showed Jared Kushner was registered as a woman

[Updated] A clerical error left many wondering if Kushner was keeping a secret

Published September 27, 2017 2:49PM (EDT)

Jared Kushner (AP/Alex Brandon)
Jared Kushner (AP/Alex Brandon)

This story has been corrected since it was originally published. Kushner did not fill out the paperwork incorrectly, but the error was made by the New York Board of Elections.

[UPDATE] According to the New York Daily News, Jared Kushner did identify himself as a man on his voter registration forms. The original story is below.

Jared Kushner has been tasked with an immense portfolio of responsibilities, from reforming the criminal justice system to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. So you’d think Kushner would have the smarts to follow instructions.

But according to Wired, President Trump’s son-in-law and close advisor has been listed as "female" on voter rolls since at least 2009.

While there’s no way to know if Kushner filled out the form incorrectly, the idea is supported by a pattern we’ve seen from the 36-year-old beneficiary of his father’s real estate empire and connections to the Trump clan.

It took Kushner three attempts to accurately (as far as we know) fill out his security clearance application, which, upon first filing, did not mention a single meeting with a foreign contact. His application was later emended to list more than 100 telephone or in-person meetings with foreign contacts. Kushner blamed minions for sending his initial application prematurely, but that didn’t explain the incorrect dates of his graduate degrees or that he omitted his father-in-law’s address on the form. Later, he had to emend the form again for failing to disclose his presence at a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Russian security service ties.

"Kushner can't even fill out the most basic paperwork without screwing it up, so it's a mystery why anyone thinks he's somehow going to bring peace to the Middle East," Brad Bainum, spokesman for the liberal opposition research group American Bridge, told Wired.

Kushner’s voter registration flub won’t lead to any charges of wrongdoing – incompetence isn’t usually a crime, after all – but it does raise questions as to his ability to accomplish the lofty goals he’s been tasked with by his father-in-law. If he can’t follow instructions, how can he reinvent federal government?

Kushner’s admission to Harvard University has long been cited as an example of how the country’s rich and powerful gain an extra edge for their children, which puts them ahead of others regardless of merit. In the 2006 book “The Price of Admission,” author Daniel Golden interviewed Kushner’s high school administrators, who expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision to admit him. His academic performance was average, they said — as in, not Ivy League material.

“His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it,” said one former official of The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, where Kushner attended.

According to Golden’s research, Kushner’s parents, Charles and Seryl Kushner, donated $2.5 million to Harvard not long before their eldest son was admitted to an institution that, at the time, accepted one out of every nine applicants. If Kushner was as attentive to his SAT college entry exam as he has been to filling out important forms, that $2.5 million was well spent.

Whatever Kushner does in this administration – which so far has been almost nothing – he’ll be just fine. He can always go back to running his daddy’s legacy at Kushner Companies, which has just been sued for allegedly gouging low-income tenants in Baltimore.

Being an alleged slumlord is certainly an easier job than being the point person for solving the nation’s opioid epidemic, yet another of Kushner’s many tasks.


By Angelo Young

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