After meeting with Jared Kushner, head of Russian bank flew straight to meet with Vladimir Putin
Donald Trump’s White House and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin are providing conflicting explanations for why Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner secretly met with the head of a Russian bank during the transition period, meaning that at least one of them is lying. But it’s what happened right after the meeting that may signal what the meeting was really all about, and just how suspicious or illicit the discussion may have been.
According to flight tracker logs, a private plane arrived in New York City on December 13th and left on December 14th which the Washington Post is almost certain belongs to Russian VEB Bank head Sergey Gorkov (link). That serves to further narrow down the date of his mid December Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner. But buried all the way down in the fifteenth paragraph of that article is the real story.
When that same private plane departed New York on December 14th, it flew directly to Japan – where Russian President Vladimir Putin just happened to be at the time. In other words, whatever Kushner and Gorkov discussed in their meeting, Gorkov must have felt compelled to immediately share it with Putin in person, even if it meant flying halfway around the world. Discussing it with Putin over the phone could have been intercepted and eavesdropped.
It’s still not known whether the Kushner-Gorkov meeting was a continuation of Kushner’s earlier meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about setting up a secret backchannel, or if it was an attempt at securing Russian bank loans in exchange for sanctions relief, or some combination of all of the above. But it is clear that the discussion was important and suspicious enough that Korkov felt compelled to immediately deliver the news securely in person to Putin. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report
