Stop the presses
Jared was so concerned with pardons that he wasn’t really paying attention to the coup? Maybe. But he was one of the first to push the Big Lie:
Jared Kushner knew his father-in-law and boss Donald Trump had lost to Joe Biden. But that didn’t stop Kushner from trying to help his wife’s dad cling to power.
Nowadays, as Kushner seeks investments for his firm and attempts to launder his image, the former senior White House aide would like everyone in the public and the press to believe he had nothing to do with the January 6 insurrection or Team Trump’s most scandalous efforts to overthrow the American democratic order. However, there is one problem: Kushner absolutely was intimately involved with Trump’s scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. It’s just that he bailed on the mission early to save himself.
According to four people familiar with the matter, in the week following Election Day in early November of that year, Kushner took charge in overseeing the development of plans to keep Trump in office — Kushner just wasn’t publicly ostentatious about it in the way Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others were. During that first week, Kushner repeatedly met with Trump and other high-ranking aides to the then-president to discuss and map out possible strategies for multi-pronged legal battles and a scorched-earth messaging war against the victorious Biden campaign, the knowledgeable sources tell Rolling Stone.
Despite all the strong evidence to the contrary, Kushner told Trump that there could still be a path for the then-president in a number of critical states, including Arizona, that had already been called for Biden. In those early days of the scheme to overturn the election, two of the sources say, Kushner also personally encouraged Trump to fight on and ignore people who were saying it was over, and to stick to the burgeoning plans and court challenges spearheaded by the 2020 campaign attorneys and senior staff. Kushner was, of course, in the room with these fellow Trump lieutenants when the plans were first being crafted. (Axios reported this at the time as the trusted son-in-law urging Trump to explore and pursue “legal remedies” to the election results.)
Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article titled, “How Jared Kushner Washed His Hands of Donald Trump Before Jan. 6” — renewing questions of just how complicit Kushner was in his father-in-law’s months-long attempted coup d’état.
“Jared was directly involved,” one of these sources, a former senior Trump aide who worked on the effort to nullify the election outcome, said. “There was a [brief] window…when it seemed like he was positioning himself to be the Jim Baker of this fight … It didn’t last long. He backed away from it, but he was there and got his hands dirty like everyone else did.” (Baker, a towering figure in the Republican Party, helmed the legal team for George W. Bush during the chaotic Florida recount that ultimately handed Bush the presidency.)
“Jared helped create what then morphed into the Rudy clown show,” the source added.
Rolling Stone’s calls and messages to Kushner were not returned on Thursday. But five days after Election Day 2020, and the day after major outlets had already called the election for Biden, Trump adviser Jason Miller told The Daily Beast: “Jared has been more hardcore in fighting back on this than anybody.”
He backed off later out of self-preservation — in fact, he left town! But he’s as guilty as any of them.