BUSTED: Jared Kushner Hid Private Email From Senate Investigators (TWEETS)

By
Darrell Lucus
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In the last few days, Donald Trump has gotten a long-overdue dose of karma. After spending almost two years kneecapping Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, word got out that First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner used a private email account for government business. Less than 24 hours later, The New York Times reported that at least six current and former White House advisers occasionally used private email to discuss administration matters. Among those advisers were the two top people in the White House org chart, then-chief of staff Reince Priebus and then-chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Soon after this broke, Aaron Blake of The Washington Post suggested it might be too early to compare this White House’s email issues to those surrounding Hillary. Well, a new wrinkle arose on Thursday. It turns out that Kushner didn’t tell the Senate Intelligence Committee about his private email account when he spoke with them earlier this summer.

Committee chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and vice chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, learned about Kushner’s private email account at the same time that the rest of us did–when the press broke the story on Monday. Needless to say, they were not happy about it. They wrote Kushner to insist that he turn over all potentially relevant documents related to that account, as well as all potentially relevant documents from “all other email accounts, messaging apps, or similar communications channels you may have used,” if he hasn’t done so already.

This may have turned into merely another item in a late-afternoon news dump if not for the “Email Prankster,” a British man who has rooked several members of Trump’s inner circle into some highly embarrassing email exchanges in recent months. Among those pwned by the prankster–Jon Huntsman, the soon-to-be ambassador to Russia, former communications director Anthony Scaramucci, cybersecurity expert Tom Bossert, and presidential son Eric Trump.


The prankster told CNN what makes him tick.

“The original prank’s intention was to meet hypocrisy and cronyism with levity and a soupçon of embarrassment, instead of giving into the well worn grooves of anger and frustration. There’s a dash of modern-day surrealism creeping in at times, and this is evolving the more friends I make in the US.”

It turns out that this latest episode provided that and more. On Tuesday, the prankster, posing as Kushner, emailed the real Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, to discuss some potentially lurid emails that he may have sent to White House officials.

Fast forward to Thursday. When Lowell received the “what the hell is going on here?” letter from Burr and Warner and tried to forward it to Kushner, the fake account set up by the prankster ended up in Lowell’s auto-fill. So when Lowell hit “forward,” Burr and Warner’s letter ended up in the prankster’s hands. So the prankster decided to share it with the rest of us.

He also forwarded the letter to CNN’s Jake Tapper. Lowell subsequently told Tapper that when he and the other members of Kushner’s legal team reviewed the emails from Kushner’s private account, they found “no responsive or relevant documents.”

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this. After all, Kushner initially didn’t disclose his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign. Additionally, he tried to get a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and Moscow.

Tapper has an idea what this says about the supposed effort to drain the swamp.

It’s hard not to agree.


Given Kushner’s past history, this revelation raises the obvious question–what else is he hiding?

(featured image courtesy North Charleston, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Darrell Lucus
Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.

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