During Senate testimony, Jared Kushner thoroughly throws Donald Trump Jr. under the bus
Jared Kushner’s testimony before the Senate today was a private closed-door hearing, which makes some sense considering that he’s privy to classified information in his current White House role, and the questioning may have gone into that territory. It’s still not known what all Kushner may have said behind closed doors. But as is customary, he released a detailed public statement summarizing his position. Suffice it to say that he’s throwing his brother-in-law under the bus rather mightily.
Kushner’s full submitted testimony has been published on the CNN website and elsewhere (link). It’s extraordinarily lengthy. The portions that immediately jump out as being noteworthy are the parts where he tries to lay the blame for the meeting entirely at the feet of Donald Trump Jr., essentially painting the younger Trump as having been the colluding party.
Here’s the part where Kushner tries to make clear that the meeting was not what he thought it would be: “In looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work, I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.'” And here’s another fun part: “[Trump Jr] eventually sent me his own email changing the time of the meeting to 4:00 p.m. That email was on top of a long back and forth that I did not read at the time. As I did with most emails when I was working remotely, I quickly reviewed on my iPhone the relevant message that the meeting would occur at 4:00 PM at his office. Documents confirm my memory that this was calendared as ‘Meeting: Don Jr.| Jared Kushner.’ No one else was mentioned.”
The upshot is that Jared Kushner is flatly saying to investigators, ‘Don’t look at me, look at Donald Trump Jr. instead!’ It will be interesting to see how this plays within the Trump family in the coming days. Will Junior now try to throw Kushner under the bus in return? And where do Ivanka’s loyalties lie?
