A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Friday for the White House got even worse just before the close of business for the week. Hours after former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russians, the effort to get to the bottom of Russia’s attempt to hack the presidential election may have reached the White House’s doorstep.
Multiple sources close to the investigation told Bloomberg News, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News that Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, told Flynn to approach Russia about a United Nations vote on Israeli settlements.
According to the timeline set forth in Flynn’s plea agreement, Flynn contacted a number of governments, including Russia, in hopes of persuading them to either delay a vote on the resolution or kill it. Flynn had denied pushing other countries to derail the resolution, but now admits that he approached the Kremlin and other governments at the direction of “a very senior member” of the Trump transition team.
Early on Friday afternoon, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reported that “very senior member” was Kushner. Watch here.
Lake said that according to a source who had been on the transition team, Kushner directed Flynn to call every country on the Security Council and urge them to reject the resolution, or at least delay it until Trump took office. He speculated that Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and Kushner’s order to initiate those contacts, may have a two-century-old law known as the Logan Act. It bars unauthorized citizens from undermining the foreign policy of a sitting president by negotiating with foreign governments.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria raised the possibility that something else may have been at play–returning a favor. Watch here.
Zakaria said a key question that remains unanswered in this affair is whether Trump’s effort to change American policy toward Russia was “payback for something during the campaign.” He thought it was “odd” for an American president to reach out to Russia first, rather than to our longtime allies and/or China. He also didn’t think that it made sense for anyone to lie about it “if there is nothing here.”
MSNBC chief legal correspondent Ari Melber believes this revelation puts Kushner firmly in the hot seat. Watch here.
Melber told anchor Katy Tur that Kushner was now “in the line of coordination or plotting” with Russia. The obvious questions in Melber’s mind were “how high these orders came?” and “was Jared Kushner speaking on behalf of the president of the United States?”
Using guarded language, Melber noted that Flynn lied about his involvement in easing Obama’s 11th-hour sanctions on Russia, as well as contacts with Russia regarding Middle East diplomacy at the UN. If those situations are of interest to Mueller, Kushner could potentially face exposure to criminal charges–either for Logan Act violations or for illegally colluding with Russia.
What is beyond dispute is that Kushner is potentially in very hot water. We already knew that Kushner had a lot of skeletons in his closet. He was busted earlier this year for lying about his contacts with Russian officials. On one of those contacts, he asked for a secret communications link between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin.
He was also on hand for the now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower where his brother-in-law, Donald Jr., hoped to get Russian-flavored “opposition research” on Hillary Clinton. Additionally, he has yet to get a permanent security clearance, and a number of experts think his foreign business interests will keep him from ever getting one.
In other words, Kushner faced a lot of exposure even without Flynn’s plea. But if he was indeed involved, this investigation will be firmly in “what did Trump know, and when did he know it?” territory. After all, it is literally impossible to get any closer to Trump than to Kushner.
We have yet to see any angry tweets from Trump regarding this development. Perhaps Trump knows that the walls are closing in on him–even without his son-in-law potentially being in on it.
(featured image courtesy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
