Jared Kushner Meets With Senate Intelligence Committee Over Russia Investigation
Jared Kushner, a top White House advisor and son-in-law of President Donald Trump, reportedly met with Senate Intelligence Committee investigators in a closed-door meeting on Thursday. The meeting comes as the Intelligence Committee continues to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
CNN first spotted Kushner leaving the meeting room and reported that the secret meeting was later confirmed by an unnamed senator on the intelligence committee.
This is the second time Kushner has met with the SIC as part of the Russia investigation. The first meeting, in September of 2017, was a comprehensive interview by committee staff. This time around, the committee was simply interviewing central figures for a second time, both to gather more information and take advantage of other news released in the intervening period. Senators were reportedly sitting in on this second interview.
This second interview also comes just a few days after Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s exhaustive report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. Barr summarily cleared President Trump of any collusion with foreign actors in his summary letter, stating in his letter that the Mueller report “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
On the other hand, he left things significantly more open as to whether or not the president was involved in obstructing justice during the course of the investigation, only saying that the special counsel “did not draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and infamously that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
And though the Mueller report might be wrapped up, that does not preclude the Senate Intelligence Committee and other congressional parties from conducting independent investigations on the same topics. The House Intelligence Committee has also conducted a separate investigation into Russian interference — though the committee is currently in turmoil as Democratic chairman Adam Conway faces Republican calls to resign in the wake of the Mueller report. Conway had repeatedly claimed there was evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, in contrast to the findings of the Mueller Report, per NBC News.
It remains to be seen what may come of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, and whether or not the final results will implicate Kushner in any misconduct. But as a high-ranking presence in the White House, the repeated scrutiny of Kushner could lead to significant information for the final conclusions.
