Washington Post exposes Jared Kushner’s attempt at planting Syria excuse for Russia backchannel
What happens when you get caught red-handed having done something incredibly suspicious? You float an innocuous excuse, no matter how unlikely, and hope it sticks. Even better, you try to float the excuse in such a way that it sounds like it’s coming from outsiders instead of from yourself. And it turns out Jared Kushner almost got away with doing that when it came to his recently exposed attempt at a secret Russian backchannel.
After the media exposed Kushner’s highly irregular and suspicious Russian dealings, a report came out in the New York Times which asserted that Kushner had been trying to establish the backchannel for the purpose of dealing with Syria (link). That sounded like rather harmless, if naive, reason for having wanted to secretly communicate with the Russian government. The trouble: the Syria story was planted by Kushner.
We know this because after the Syria claim was published, Washington Post National Editor Scott Wilson revealed why his newspaper took a pass on the same story: “We talked to these ‘people’ too. We would not publish their account unless we could signal they were speaking for Kushner. They refused.” (link). In other words, Jared Kushner, through his own people, was the anonymous source for the claim that his own Russian backchannel was about Syria. This only serves to make him look more guilty.
At this point the following has been established: Jared Kushner secretly met with the Russian Ambassador during the transition period to try to set up a secret backchannel with the Russian government. Immediately afterward, he met with the head of a Russian government-controlled bank. He then committed a felony by lying about those meetings on his SF-86 security clearance form. And after it all came out in the media, he tried to anonymously plant a story in the media that the backchannel was about Syria. Kushner is in a hole, and he just keeps digging.
