Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
The Kremlin Announced It. We Called It A Rumor.
What Moscow said out loud last Saturday night
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,018: Monday, September 7th, 2026.
Let’s be adults about this for eight minutes.
You have been trained by fifty years of American political scandal to wait for the reveal. The tape. The memo. The whistleblower. Some brave soul walks out of a building with a folder and everything changes.
That instinct is now…a liability. It is the single most effective thing working against you.
Because nobody is hiding this. And a thing that isn’t hidden can’t be exposed.
Here’s what happened last Saturday…and I want you to notice who told us.
The Russians Announced It
September 5th. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner land at Vnukovo airport in Moscow.
Waiting for them is Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin’s special envoy for economic affairs.
Dmitriev posts video of the arrival on X with the caption “Welcome to Moscow, peacemakers.”
The three of them…then sit down to a business lunch…that runs about three and a half hours. Then Witkoff and Kushner go to the Kremlin and spend another three hours with Putin.
Afterward, Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov tells reporters the conversation went beyond the battlefield…into economic issues and potential major Russian-American projects.
Read that again. The Kremlin volunteered that. Nobody pried it out of anybody.
(Go ahead…tell me which favorite news host/anchor you’ve heard this story from. I’ll wait. It seems no one wants to connect the dots on stories like this.)
And…one more detail that almost every outlet who at least wrote about it… buried in paragraph nine: the American delegation included officials from Treasury.
Treasury does not attend ceasefire talks to discuss lines on a map. Treasury attends to discuss sanctions.
So…there’s your negotiation, announced by both sides…in public…within hours. Peace terms on one side of the table. Money…on the other.
Now, The Caveats, Up Front
Once again…I’m not going to bury these where nobody reads them.
Real things happened.
Putin ordered a three-day halt on strikes against Kyiv. Ukraine reciprocated. Robert Gilman came home from Russian custody last month. Those are not nothing…and…if you can’t say so…you’re not analyzing…you’re rooting.
Back channels are normal.
Kissinger built a career on private conversations with people Americans despised. The existence of a channel is not the scandal.
And I have no evidence of a specific deal.
None. I’m not going to tell you Kushner sat in that room and cut terms for his own fund….because…I can’t demonstrate it…and…right now, neither can anybody else.
The kompromat theory has been kicking around for a decade without producing a document. So, for newsletter/article purposes…I’m leaving both of those alone.
The problem, however… is worse than either, and it’s fully disclosed.
The Man In The Room Is A Fund Manager
Jared Kushner runs Affinity Partners. Roughly $6.16 billion under management.
Approximately 99 percent of it foreign money. Two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund…plus fees from Qatar and the UAE.
He never divested. He is collecting management fees from foreign governments…while negotiating American foreign policy with a foreign government.
He also promised, in December 2024…that he’d preemptively avoid conflicts and wouldn’t raise capital during his father-in-law’s term. He did both anyway.
None of this is alleged by me. Congressman Jamie Raskin opened a formal investigation in April…writing that acting publicly for the government and privately for profit creates a conflict that cannot be cured.
Robert Garcia and Ron Wyden sent Affinity a demand letter in March raising Foreign Agents Registration Act questions.
Those letters are on House committee servers right now. You can download them.
The old scandals required concealment…because concealment implied shame…and shame…implied a rule. Stop hiding…and you retire the rule.
Yeah…go ahead. Sit with that one for a minute. Now…here’s something even more mind-jarring.
