Jared and Ivanka Made Up to $640 Million While Working in Washington, or 457,142 Stimulus Checks

Earlier this month, we learned that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made up to $120 million between January 1, 2020 and January 20, 2021. While that was less than what they’d made the year prior, it was still quite a lot, particularly given that Kushner’s father had angrily claimed in 2019 that people should cut his son some slack because he’d allegedly made “a substantial financial sacrifice” to work at the White House. But as it turns out, this could have been merely a drop in the bucket, or a drop in the Scrooge McDuck–style pool of money that the couple raked in during their four years in Washington, a sum that financial disclosures reveal may have been well over half a billion dollars.

Government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) ran the numbers, and its analysis found that while working in the White House, the former first daughter and son-in-law reported between $172 million and an astonishing $640 million—or 457,142 $1,400 stimulus checks—in outside income. (If we’re calculating based on the $1,200 checks Americans got last spring—some of which may have been held up because Donald Trump insisted on putting his name on them—the figure climbs to 533,333.) When Javanka first started working as senior advisers to the president, they announced they wouldn’t be taking salaries, seemingly in the hopes of casting themselves as selfless public servants. But, of course, $18,000-a-month Kalorama mansions don’t rent themselves, and $30 million plots of land in areas subtly dubbed “Billionaire’s Bunker” don’t buy themselves either. So the couple had to find sources of income elsewhere and luckily for this boot-strapping duo, they did:

One major factor in their outside profits came from Ivanka Trump’s ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in D.C., just blocks from the White House and the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration. Before business slowed down due to the pandemic, the couple paid a combined 23 visits to the hotel. All told, Ivanka made more than $13 million from the hotel since 2017.… The hotel was far from Ivanka Trump’s only controversial source of income while working in the White House. In 2018, Ivanka announced she was shutting down her namesake brand, and she later filed a disclosure with the government that “[a]ll operations of the business ceased on July 31, 2018.” But [CREW] discovered that she still made up to $1 million from it in 2019 despite the fact that she claimed it no longer existed.

In what would become the defining scandal of her time in office, in October 2018 Ivanka’s brand won 16 new trademarks from the Chinese government, including for voting machines. These approvals came about three months after Ivanka announced that her brand was shutting down, and mark the largest number of new Chinese trademarks she received in a single month during the Trump presidency. Six months after the company officially shut down, it received a new trademark to sell the Ivanka brand in Canada. In all, CREW found at least 28 foreign trademarks approved for Ivanka Trump while in the White House.