Jared Kushner, international stupid spy

| 11:25 pm EDT May 26, 2017
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There’s a scene in one of the prequels to Hunt For Red October in which U.S. intel agent Jack Ryan has a conversation about keeping the “backchannels” open with the Russian government. It was supposed to be an effort at finding ways to avoid nuclear war. Jared Kushner must have instead watched that scene and mistakenly thought it was an instruction manual for how to get away with conducting criminal behavior across international lines.

This weekend it’s come to light that Kushner spent the transition period trying to negotiate a secret backchannel with the Russians, and that his proposals were so preposterously over the line, even the Russian Ambassador was said to have been taken aback by it (source: Washington Post). Somehow, Kushner thought this wouldn’t leak out, because apparently he’s the world’s most clueless wannabe spy.

It’s also come to light that Kushner had been making secret phone calls to the Russian Ambassador during the campaign, dating all the way back to April of 2016 (source: Reuters). Anyone with even a basic familiarity with relations between the United States and Russia would have known that the U.S. has had Ambassador Kislyak’s phone tapped for years, and that any phone calls to him would end up being intercepted by the U.S. intel community and the European intel communities. But Kushner somehow didn’t know this, because he appears to be as uninterested in doing his homework as his father-in-law.

Up to now it’s sort of made sense that the other Trump campaign players would have handled things in such sloppy and careless fashion. Michael Flynn appears to have been unstable since 2014, so it’s not shocking that he was stupidly acting against his own interests. Carter Page appears to simply be stupid. Jeff Sessions seemed to think that his status as a Senator was sufficient cover for his own meetings with the Russians. But Jared Kushner? He was supposed to be the intellectual one. Instead it turns out he’s spent the whole time being the biggest idiot of the bunch. Who knew?