Maybe the Russians shouldn\u2019 t have gone to Jared.<\/b>
\nJared Kushner really wants everyone to believe that he did nothing wrong.
Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law and top aide released a public statement about the Russia scandal on Monday morning, a preview of what he\u2019s going to say in closed-door congressional testimony this week .
\u201cI did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector. I have tried to be fully transparent, \u201d Kushner writes. \u201cHopefully, this puts these matters to rest.\u201d
But a close read of the letter suggests that it does not, in fact, put these matters to rest. By Kushner\u2019s own account, he met with Russian nationals four times during the presidential campaign and transition. His descriptions of these meetings are incomplete, full of unconfirmed details, and at times directly contradictory of other sources\u2019 accounts of the same events.
The statement is carefully constructed; the whole thing reads like it was put together by a very talented legal team. But shady behavior is still shady no matter how good the lawyers \u2014 and even Kushner\u2019s very precise defense of his actions raises big new questions for the Trump-Russia scandal. What follows are three of the biggest issues it brings up.
On December 1,2016, Kushner met with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump\u2019s now-disgraced National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was also present at the meeting.
At this meeting, the Washington Post reported back in May, Kushner had asked Kislyak if it would be possible to set up a secure communications line between the Trump camp and Russia inside the Russian Embassy in Washington. The Post reported that this was \u201can apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to US officials briefed on intelligence reports.\u201d
In his statement on Monday, Kushner confirms that this meeting took place. He also confirms that he asked Kislyak about communicating through a secure line at the embassy. But he says it was a one-time proposal for receiving information about the Syrian conflict during the transition and denies that there was any effort to hide communications between the Trump camp and Russia from US snooping:
To be clear, experts believe even this limited proposal was a bad idea. Anyone familiar with spying knows that sending a US citizen into a secure Russian communications facility would be rejected by both US and Russian intelligence as too risky. Kushner\u2019s defense, in essence, is ignorance: He briefly proposed a really bad idea, it was shot down by Kislyak, and that was the end of it.
But this is a very different account of the meeting than what appeared in the Post. A number of US intelligence officials, according to the Post, seemed to believe the effort was a far more ambitious attempt to hide the Trump team\u2019s communications from the US\u2019s own spies. This would be incredibly nefarious: It would suggest that there was some information Kushner wanted to share with the Russians (or vice versa) but did not want anyone in the US government, let alone the American public, to know about.
There are only three possible options: The Post\u2019s report is wrong, American spies misread the meeting, or Kushner is lying.
This isn\u2019 t an unresolvable conflict. According to the Post, US intelligence officials based their assessment on an intercept of a phone call between Kislyak and his superiors at the Kremlin, wherein he recounted his version of the meeting.
\u201cKislyak reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate, \u201d the Post\u2019s Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous, and Greg Miller write . \u201cOfficials said that it\u2019s unclear what Kislyak would have had to gain by falsely characterizing his contacts with Kushner to Moscow.\u201d
So far from clearing things up, Kushner\u2019s letter has now raised a series of new questions: Why does his account of the meeting differ so sharply from what the intercept of Kislyak\u2019s call seemed to suggest? What did Kislyak actually tell the Russian government about the call? And how does Flynn, who has offered to testify in exchange for immunity for prosecution, recall the meeting?
After the December 1 meeting, Kislyak and Kushner stayed in touch. According to Kushner, he turned down multiple requests to meet with Kislyak again, once even arranging a meeting between Kislyak and his assistant to avoid having to sit down again (which seems odd, given Kislyak\u2019s stature) .
The ambassador repeatedly insisted that Kushner meet with a man named Sergey Gorkov, the head of the state-connected Russian bank Vnesheconombank (VEB) . Gorkov is known to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and graduated from the Russian FSB\u2019s spy academy; his bank had been directly targeted by sanctions imposed by the Obama administration after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet Kushner decided to have a sit-down with Gorkov at the Russian government\u2019s urging.
\u201cI agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov because the Ambassador has been so insistent, said he had a direct relationship with the President [Putin] , and because Mr. Gorkov was only in New York for a couple days, \u201d Kushner says.
This meeting has been public knowledge since March. But the details in Kushner\u2019s statement raise new questions about the nature of the meeting itself.
In a statement, Gorkov said the meeting was part of a broader strategy of sitting down with \u201cbusiness circles of the US, including with the head of Kushner Companies, Jared Kushner.\u201d This would suggest that the meeting was about potentially doing business together \u2014 which would raise serious conflict of interest questions given Kushner\u2019s role doing policy work for his father-in-law. If they chatted about potentially providing loans to VEB, as my colleague Alexia Fern\u00e1ndez Campbell explains, Kushner could face 20 years in prison under US sanctions law.
Kushner flatly denies all of this.
\u201cAt no time was there any discussion about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements or any private business of any kind. At the end of the short meeting, we thanked each other and I went on to other meetings, \u201d he writes in his statement.
Instead, he says, Gorkov gave him some gifts, \u201ctold me a little about his bank and made some statements about the Russian economy, \u201d and \u201csaid that he was friendly with President Putin, expressed disappointment with U. S.-Russia relations under President Obama and hopes for a better relationship in the future.\u201d
That sounds extremely boring. So why would Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, badger Kushner \u2014 for days, Kushner\u2019s account suggests \u2014 to take such a boring meeting? And why does the Putin-linked banker in question have an account of the meeting\u2019s agenda that\u2019s different from Kushner\u2019s? And what \u201cstatements about the Russian economy\u201d did Gorkov allegedly make, exactly? Did they suggest investment opportunities for the Kushner Companies, perhaps loans?
Again, Kushner\u2019s statement doesn\u2019 t really resolve anything \u2014 instead, it raises a host of significant new questions about his links to the Kremlin.
These two meetings, with Kislyak and Gorkov, took place during the transition. But there\u2019s another key meeting that Kushner took, this time during the campaign: Donald Trump Jr.\u2019s now-infamous June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer to try to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Kushner\u2019s defense of attending the meeting is that he had no clue what it was really about.
He claims not to have read to the bottom of the email chain in which it was written that the meeting was \u201cpart of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump.\u201d He claims to have been \u201ca little late\u201d to the meeting, and that when he arrived they were talking about \u201cthe issue of a ban on U. S. adoptions of Russian children, \u201d implying that he missed the part where they discussed Russian dirt on Clinton (which according to Trump Jr. happened at the beginning) .
He then claims to have been super bored for the whole thing: \u201cI actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote \u2018Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.\u2019 \u201d
This, yet again, is an odd account of the meeting in question. It would lead us to believe that Kushner never asked Donald Trump Jr. why he brought Kushner into this waste of time meeting during a vital period in the campaign (right after they secured the nomination, shortly before the Republican National Convention) .
But perhaps more fundamentally, Kushner\u2019s account provides a lot of details that can be checked by reporters, FBI agents, and congressional investigators. For example, was Kushner actually late enough to the meeting to miss every mention of potential assistance with the campaign? There were seven other people there, and you can bet the FBI will be talking to all of them to confirm Kushner\u2019s story.
Indeed, the entire section of the letter focusing on the campaign is like this: Kushner sets up very specific factual assertions, many of which can be easily checked by reporters and federal investigators.
For example, Kushner specifically contests a report, from Reuters, that he had two calls with Kislyak during the campaign (specifically, between April and November 2016) .
\u201cI do not recall any such calls with the Russian Ambassador, \u201d he writes. \u201cWe have reviewed the phone records available to us and have not been able to identify any calls to any number we know to be associated with Ambassador Kislyak and I am highly skeptical these calls took place.\u201d
This is a very specific factual assertion: There were no calls between Kushner and any number that could be traced back to Kislyak or one of his associates during a seven-month time frame. The FBI can review the same phone records and see who\u2019s telling the truth.
His first conversation with Kislyak, Kushner claims, took place at a Trump foreign policy speech delivered in April 2016 in Washington. Reportedly, Dimitri Simes \u2014 the CEO of the Center for the National Interest, which convened the speech \u2014 introduced the two men.
\u201cHe [Simes] introduced me to several guests, among them four ambassadors, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, \u201d Kushner writes. \u201cWith all the ambassadors, including Mr. Kislyak, we shook hands, exchanged brief pleasantries. … Each exchange lasted less than a minute; some gave me their business cards and invited me to lunch at their embassies. I never took them up on any of these invitations and that was the extent of the interactions.\u201d
Again, these are all specific assertions that investigators can look into, to see if they are outright false or at very least omit important context. And there\u2019s every indication that Congress and the FBI will do just that.
\u201cHis description of his financial relationships with individuals and businesses tied to Russia appears incomplete, at best, \u201d Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a statement emailed to press after the letter\u2019s release. \u201cThere should be no presumption that he is telling the whole truth in this statement.\u201d
Kushner\u2019s legal team may have hoped that this letter would help put suspicion surrounding Kushner\u2019s links to Russia to bed. It seems more likely that the opposite will be true: that the unanswered questions in this statement will lead to even closer scrutiny of one of the president\u2019s top advisers.<\/p>\n

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