11/16/2017
Jared Kushner is in hot water. He seems to be a bit forgetful when it comes to documents.
In addition to refusing to supply all the required documents for his security clearance, Jared Kushner has now been remiss in submitting all documents relating to Russia connections as requested by a Senate committee investigating Russian ties to the 2016 election. Inquiries are also being conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Senators said that a disclosure of files to their committee by Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, “appears to have been incomplete” and was missing “documents that are known to exist but were not included”.
In a letter sent to Kushner’s attorney, Senators said that they knew of emails received by, and then forwarded by Kushner during the campaign that appear relevant to inquiries into alleged collusion between Moscow and Trump’s team.
“Other parties have produced September 2016 email communications to Mr Kushner concerning WikiLeaks which Mr Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official,” said senators Charles Grassley and Dianne Feinstein. “Likewise, other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ which Mr Kushner also forwarded,” said the senators, who are the chairman and ranking member of the Senate judiciary committee. They also told Kushner’s attorney: “You also have not produced any phone records that we presume exist” in relation to several of their lines of inquiry.
Grassley and Feinstein disclosed in their letter to Lowell that Kushner was refusing to turn over certain documents that he believed “might implicate the president’s executive privilege”, which allows Trump to withhold some information from Congress.
WikiLeaks published emails hacked from Democrats during the 2016 campaign, causing chaos in the party as it worked to elect Hillary Clinton as president. US intelligence officials have said the emails were stolen by Russian operatives.
Details of the “backdoor overture” were not made clear in the senators’ letter. Kushner has denied reports that in the weeks after the election, he proposed setting up a secure communication channel between Trump’s team and Moscow to avoid snooping by the US before the inauguration.
Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the US, reportedly told his superiors in Moscow, during conversations intercepted by American intelligence, that Kushner had asked for the back channel during a meeting at Trump Tower last December.
Grassley and Feinstein said other people in contact with the committee had also turned over communications with Sergei Millian, the head of a Russian-American business group, which the senators knew had been copied to Kushner.
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