A bidding official negotiates peace in Ukraine and Gaza. Who is Josh Gruenbaum?

The official in charge of state procurement Josh Gruenbaum has unexpectedly emerged as a key figure in the Gaza-Ukraine peace negotiations, alongside Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, according to the Wall Street Journal. The daily also writes about suspicions that he favored a company associated with Kushner's brother in the tender.

“WSJ” describes the rapid and surprising career of 40-year-old Gruenbaum in Washington, who formally serves as the director of the branch of the government agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for the purchase of equipment, software and other goods for state institutions.

Gruenbaum, a former director at the investment company KKR, came to this position as one of Elon Musk's DOGE team members, and privately an acquaintance of Josh Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump.

Despite his relatively insignificant formal function, he became one of the key negotiators in the peace talks regarding the Gaza Strip and, more recently, the war between Russia and Ukraine. Gruenbaum was said to have reached this level by volunteering to help work out the details of the Trump peace plan being developed by Witkoff and Kushner. Without abandoning his position at GSA, he then moved to Israel, gaining the sympathy of both Trump envoys.

Despite his lack of foreign policy experience, Gruenbaum was later appointed senior advisor to the Trump-created Peace Council. Kushner and Witkoff also assigned him a role in talks on Ukraine, where he took part in, among others, participation in trilateral meetings in Abu Dhabi and in talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Volodymyr Zelensky in Florida.

According to “WSJ”, Gruenbaum from the beginning sought to play a greater role in the administration, submitting an idea – which was to raise eyebrows in the Pentagon – to acquire equipment for the hypersonic missile program, bypassing the bureaucratic procedures of the Ministry of Defense.

The newspaper also writes that doubts and suspicions of irregularities were also raised by Gruenbaum's actions in his main formal role in the GSA. This is about a tender for a pilot electronic payments program, in which the official's actions allegedly indicated favoritism for Ramp, and in which the investor is Josh Kushner and billionaire Peter Thiel's fund, Thrive Capital. According to “WSJ”, the tender may amount to an order worth USD 40 billion.

The case led to the initiation of an internal investigation and Gruenbaum's removal from the tender. The company itself, which competes for the contract with an American bank and other companies in the industry, claims that it neither sought nor received preferential treatment.

From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)

osk/ap/