Officer, Employee or Volunteer

Since mid-August Jared Kushner has met Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran’s foreign minister and a Hamas leader on behalf of the United States, according to a lawsuit filed in Washington on Wednesday 14 October. He has not been nominated to any office, has not been confirmed by the Senate and has not filed a public financial disclosure for his work in the President’s second term. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, says that combination is unlawful whichever way the government describes him.

The complaint, CREW v. Kushner, No. 26-cv-3580 in the District of Columbia, was assigned on Thursday to Judge Amir H. Ali. Its defendants are Kushner; Steven Witkoff and the White House Office for Special Peace Missions he heads; the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office and the chief of staff, Susie Wiles; and the State and Defense Departments with their secretaries, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth. The facts in it are CREW’s allegations, drawn mostly from public statements and news reports. The government has not yet answered.

Three descriptions, three claims

The suit is built so that each possible account of Kushner’s position leads to a different legal problem.

If he is an officer of the United States, the first count says, he holds his post in breach of the Appointments Clause, which requires officers who hold continuing positions and exercise significant authority to be appointed with the Senate’s advice and consent. CREW asks the court to bar him from exercising those powers until he is, and to bar the other defendants from supporting him in them. The complaint points to the posts his work overlaps with, among them ambassadors at large and special envoys, and to vacant posts whose functions it says he performs, including the ambassadorships to Russia and Ukraine. This publication has written about how a vacancy can become the appointment; the suit argues the reverse case, an appointment that never needed a vacancy.

If he is an officer or an employee, the second and third counts say, the Ethics in Government Act requires him to file public financial disclosures, which senior officials must file within thirty days of taking up a position and annually afterwards. The act covers several categories, among them anyone in the Executive Office of the President who holds a presidential commission, and the complaint says a declined salary and the absence of a formal title do not take him out of them. It asks for an order, by injunction or by mandamus, that he file.

If he is neither, and is the private citizen he has said he is, the fourth count says he is exercising delegated government power in breach of the private nondelegation doctrine. The complaint relies on the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in FCC v. Consumers’ Research and on the principle that negotiating with foreign powers is a core executive function. Here the relief would be the same as under the first count, reached from the other direction.

The word “volunteer”

The fourth count turns Kushner’s own account into an argument. The complaint quotes him, at an investment conference in Miami in March, describing himself as not “technically” a government official but “just a volunteer like other businessmen who . . . volunteer to help the government when asked.” Against that it sets the President’s statement at a Board of Peace event on 19 February 2026: “And we’re making Jared an envoy also, envoy of peace.” It also quotes Witkoff, in a 60 Minutes interview with Kushner, saying the President had given the two of them “a lot of authority to negotiate.”

The disclosure point has a history. During the first Trump administration Kushner worked in the White House without a salary and filed disclosures under the same act, the complaint says, and CREW published analyses of them. Since leaving government in 2021 he has built an investment firm, Affinity Partners, which the complaint, citing press reports, says manages more than $6 billion, about 99 per cent of it from foreign investors including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It quotes Kushner’s response to a New Yorker article on 8 October, in which he wrote that he has “never taken a diplomatic action to benefit Affinity, [him]self, or any investor.” A disclosure form would not settle that argument either way. It would put the holdings on the record, which is what the act is for.

Standing, and the records

A watchdog group has to show its own injury to sue. CREW’s is informational: it says it routinely obtains, analyses and publishes the disclosures that the act requires, and is denied them. It adds an allegation, made on information and belief, that Kushner is not preserving the records of his diplomatic work as the Presidential Records Act or the Federal Records Act would require of an official. A volunteer has no such duty, which is the other consequence of the word.

Courts have been reluctant to tell a President whom he may send to talk to a foreign government, and the government can be expected to say this suit asks for exactly that. CREW’s answer is in its structure. It does not ask the court to choose Kushner’s title. It asks the court to choose one, and to apply the law that goes with it.