BLOOD MONEY / VELOCITY | SPECIAL REPORT
THE MEN AT THE TABLE
A documented history of Witkoff, Kushner,
and why Iran asked them to leave
OldGoat InTheHood | April 11, 2026
When Iran sent word through Pakistani intermediaries that it would only negotiate with JD Vance, the American press treated it as a diplomatic curiosity, a quirk of Persian pride, perhaps, or a calculated snub of Trump's inner circle.
Iran was more direct than that. An Iranian source said plainly: “If the negotiations are going to have any outcome, JD Vance should join. With Witkoff and Kushner, nothing will come out of it. We have seen that in the past.” A separate diplomatic source was more pointed: “With the previous negotiating team, there’s no chance. The Iranian side regards any further request for negotiations as another round of deception by the US-Israeli regime to find a loophole to aggravate the strikes again.”
Iran’s assessment was not born of pride. It was born of a documented record. And that record deserves to be laid out in full, because the men who helped start this war are now at the table trying to end it, and the financial architecture underneath them has not changed.
JARED KUSHNER — THE SAUDI PAYROLL
When Kushner left the White House in January 2021, he had no meaningful private equity experience. View Dashboard →¹ What he had was five years of relationships with Gulf sovereign wealth funds, built during his first stint as Trump’s Middle East envoy, relationships he immediately monetized.
Six months after leaving the White House, the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund invested $2 billion in Kushner’s new firm, Affinity Partners. By far the biggest investor, Saudi Arabia was joined by Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other foreign sovereigns. Ninety-nine percent of Affinity’s approximately $3 billion in funding came from overseas sources. There are no significant American investors.
Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25 percent of its investment annually as a management fee. The other investors pay even more, 2 percent annually. Through 2024, Affinity had collected approximately $157.5 million in management fees from foreign investors, including $87 million from Saudi Arabia alone. Through July 2024, Affinity had invested only about $1.1 billion of the money it raised and had returned no profits to any investor.
The Saudi PIF’s own investment committee objected internally to the deal, with professional staff finding Affinity’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects,” noting that the proposed management fees “seem excessive,” and stating that “the expertise of the general partner isn’t relevant to the objective of the fund.” Saudi Arabia’s professional money managers told their own government the investment made no commercial sense. The investment was made anyway.
Senator Ron Wyden’s Senate Finance Committee investigation concluded what the numbers already suggested: Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations, but rather by the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family.
Saudi Arabia has the right to renegotiate its agreement with Affinity or withdraw its funds in August 2026, in the middle of Trump’s second term, giving the country considerable ongoing leverage over the finances of the president’s son-in-law.
Then, after publicly pledging in February 2024 that he would not seek additional foreign investments during Trump’s second term and would not rejoin the administration, Kushner’s firm recently met with Saudi officials about raising additional funds while simultaneously serving as a special envoy representing the White House in Iran negotiations. The New York Times reported that this commitment “appears to have changed.”
The Trump administration has tried to avoid legal issues by classifying Kushner as a “volunteer” rather than a government official. A volunteer who collects tens of millions annually from the governments he is negotiating alongside, on behalf of a country whose interests he is supposed to represent.
The Saudi government has reportedly encouraged Trump to move forward with combat operations in Iran, Saudi Arabia’s longtime enemy. Saudi Arabia is Kushner’s largest investor. Saudi Arabia’s investment window expires in August 2026. These facts sit in the same sentence without requiring editorial commentary.
STEVE WITKOFF — THE UAE ARCHITECTURE
Witkoff’s financial entanglement is, if anything, more structurally complex than Kushner’s, because it runs through multiple channels simultaneously, all pointing toward the same Gulf governments.
Witkoff struck two deals with UAE Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees about $1.5 trillion in sovereign wealth. View Dashboard →¹ One deal involved Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency startup co-founded by the Trump and Witkoff families. Two weeks after that announcement, the White House agreed to allow the UAE access to some of the most advanced AI chips, most of which would go to G42, a company controlled by the same sheikh.
Witkoff, acting as Trump’s Middle East envoy, supported giving the UAE access to those AI chips at the same time World Liberty received billions in Emirati funds. In May 2025, World Liberty said Witkoff would divest entirely from the company. A financial disclosure released in August showed he still held a financial interest. The White House responded that he was still in the process of divesting.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Elissa Slotkin wrote to federal inspectors general that “in the history of our country’s foreign policy, one is hard-pressed to find two senior officials with such significant conflicts of interest involved in decisions regarding national security.”
Witkoff’s son Zach, meanwhile, was running the crypto side of the family enterprise. While the elder Witkoff continued to ink major deals with Gulf Arab investors, Zach built relationships particularly in the UAE that led to billions of dollars in investment in World Liberty Financial. As one reporter who covered the story put it: there is no question that these relationships and these allegiances carry over between business and politics.
In April 2026, Forbes reported that Witkoff had increased his wealth by 15 percent over the course of one year in the Trump administration.
There is also the matter of the Pakistan connection this series has logged since early dispatches. In April 2025, World Liberty Financial struck an agreement with Pakistan’s Crypto Council. Zach Witkoff visited Islamabad to meet with officials and praised Pakistan’s economic potential. Pakistan is now the country brokering the Iran peace talks. The Witkoff family’s financial relationship with Islamabad preceded their diplomatic one by roughly a year.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NEGOTIATIONS — BEFORE THE WAR
Iranian officials point specifically to the negotiations in Muscat and Geneva in February 2026, and to how the United States started bombing Iran even as those talks were ongoing. Witkoff and Kushner were the American faces at both sessions.
The Arms Control Association’s analysis concluded that by the time the third round of talks ended in Geneva, Trump had likely already made the choice to go to war, and that it is unlikely any outcome short of complete Iranian capitulation would have averted the military strikes. Trump’s dissatisfaction with the negotiating process appears to have been fed, in part, by Witkoff’s and Kushner’s accounts of those talks.
After the talks collapsed and the bombs fell, Witkoff blamed Iran for trying to “strong-arm” the US team and claimed the Iranians boasted about having deceived monitors. A Gulf diplomat described Witkoff and Kushner as acting like “Israeli assets,” accusing them of manipulating Trump into the 2026 Iran war. Oman’s foreign minister, who led the mediation, said after hostilities began that the US-Israeli operation was solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favor.
Iran sat across from these two men. The bombs came anyway. They were then asked to return to the table to negotiate the peace terms.
Iran said no.
THE STRUCTURAL QUESTION
What Iran understood, and what the American press has largely declined to state plainly, is that the men negotiating the terms of any settlement are men whose Gulf financial patrons stand to benefit from particular outcomes. A deal that includes sanctions relief on Iranian oil increases global supply and potentially lowers oil prices. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are part of OPEC, an organization that works to keep oil prices elevated by restricting supply. A deal that leaves Iran weakened and its oil infrastructure damaged or under external control serves those same patrons directly.
Kushner collects his management fees regardless of what deal is reached. But the terms of the deal determine whether his clients withdraw their money in August 2026 or deepen their investment. That is not a subtle leverage point. It is a structural one, built into the financial architecture before the first negotiating session ever began.
The question Rachel Maddow asked in March 2026 has still not received an adequate answer: how is Jared Kushner’s role in the US attacking Iran, and now in negotiating the peace, not more of a show-stopping scandal?
One explanation fits the documented evidence: because the institution constitutionally empowered to make it a scandal is on recess, the media architecture covering the war was shaped by a man who personally lobbied for the war, and the Justice Department now runs on personal loyalty rather than institutional obligation.
The men at the table in Islamabad are there. Vance is there because Iran demanded him. Witkoff and Kushner are there because Trump sent them.
Watch what they come back with. Watch the fine print on oil infrastructure, on sanctions timelines, on the Board of Peace’s reconstruction role. The financial architecture tells you precisely what to look for.
The scaffolding is the story. It has always been the story.
— OldGoat InTheHood
April 11, 2026