Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump‘s son-in-law and senior adviser, refused to say in an interview this week whether he would call the FBI if Russia ever tried to contact Trump’s campaign via email again, as records pertaining to the 2016 election cycle revealed.
Speaking on Axios on HBO on Monday, 38-year-old Kushner didn’t explicitly say he would refuse and report the Russian government’s efforts to help him or the president.
“I don’t know, it’s hard to do hypotheticals but the reality is that we were not given anything that was salacious,” Kushner replied when Axios’s Jonathan Swan asked him point-blank about whether he would ever alert federal investigators should Russia try to reach out to him or anyone else on Trump’s campaign team. Swan also noted that the words “Russia” and “Clinton” appeared in the subject line of the email Kushner reportedly received.
“We’re in a place now where people are playing Monday morning quarterback and they’re being so self-righteous,” Kushner also said in the interview, before launching into an explanation of his many duties as a member of a real estate family and how he juggled these with his responsibilities to Trump’s campaign.
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Kushner’s answer has already caused concern among many Trump critics who fear Russia may attempt to help the president win re-election in 2020.
Kushner also called the meeting with the Russians a “total waste of time.”
Following the conclusion in March of former special counsel Robert Mueller‘s two-year probe on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s inner circle claimed victory after Mueller found no evidence of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin. Kushner was one of several Trump allies to say that he believed the investigation ultimately hurt the country.
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Kushner was interviewed for multiple hours last year by Mueller’s team about his communications with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
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