Jared Kushner's explanations on Russia reveal a man wholly unsuited to his job

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who has been drawn into the billowing inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, told congressional investigators on Monday that he hoped his appearance before them would clear his name and “put these matters to rest”.

But in his presentation to members of the Senate intelligence committee, the 36-year-old husband of Ivanka Trump might have dug himself deeper into a hole by leaning so heavily on personal ignorance as the core of his defense. By doing so he raised a slew of new questions about how the US president could have entrusted someone with such little foreign policy ballast with a powerful international portfolio.

In an 11-page statement released before his closed-door Senate appearance, Kushner essentially argued that he could not have been involved in underhand relations with the Russian government because he was so poorly versed in Russian affairs. Over the 3,700 words of the statement, he mentions that he could not remember the name of the Russian ambassador to Washington not once, but three times.

“I could not even remember the name of the Russian ambassador,” he writes. He added that he had “limited knowledge about” Sergey Kislyak, who stepped down as ambassador on Saturday, even after Trump had won the presidential election on 8 November 2016 and was headed for the White House.

In the wake of that election victory, Kushner was instructed by his father-in-law to be the main contact point between the Trump transition team and foreign government officials. Kushner says in his statement that between election day and the inauguration on 20 January 2017, “I recall having over 50 contacts with people from over 15 countries”.

In the run-up to the election, he was similarly charged with acting as a point person on foreign affairs, but that was just one of a jaw-dropping list of duties that Trump heaped on to him. He also handled, as the statement makes clear, “finance, scheduling, communications, speechwriting, polling, data and digital teams”, conceding that “all of these were tasks that I had never performed on a campaign previously”.

Kushner argues that a steep learning curve was a benefit for the Trump campaign, calling it a “nimble culture” that allowed the team to “adjust to the ever-changing circumstances and make changes on the fly”. But it also led him, if his statement is to be believed, into some very perilous situations.

Not knowing the ambassador’s name was a mild challenge compared with his handling of the now notorious 9 June meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya. At that engagement, Trump’s eldest son Donald Jr invited Kushner and then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to meet four Russians including Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

Kushner insists he didn’t read the email chain in which Don Jr was offered dirt on Hillary Clinton as a pretext for the meeting. When he walked into the meeting, he goes on to say that he was confused by the topic of conversation that was under way – the Russian ban on Americans adopting Russian children.

“I had no idea why that topic was being raised,” he said, apparently unaware that the adoption ban is extensively used by Russian emissaries as a euphemism for US sanctions imposed on Russia. The subject of sanctions is central to modern diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Substantially more serious than Kushner’s apparent lack of understanding on sanctions was the similar naivety – if his statement is taken at face value – that he showed in his dealings with Kislyak and a prominent Russian banker. When the ambassador told him that senior Russian generals wanted to talk to Kushner to discuss policy on Syria, Trump’s son-in-law inquired about using an “existing communications channel” at the Russian embassy.

The suggestion was made during the transition period when Trump and all members of his inner circle were still ordinary citizens outside government. Kushner appears to have been unaware that setting up such a private line of contact with senior Russian military leaders could have violated the Logan Act that prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers.

Kushner claims in his statement that his 13 December meeting with the top Russian banker Sergey Gorkov had nothing to do with his business interests, despite the fact that as a New York real estate tycoon his business activities were intricately interwoven with Russian money. “At no time was there any discussion about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements or private business of any kind.”

That directly contradicts Gorkov’s own account of the meeting, which was convened, he said, to discuss new business opportunities, with Kushner in attendance as head of his family’s real estate entity, Kushner Companies. The president’s son-in-law expresses no awareness in his statement that Gorkov was trained by the Russian intelligence agency FSB or that his bank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), is widely accepted to be the finance house of the Kremlin.

“If the Kushner family has had zero financial dealings with the Russians or Russian banks, and are willing to open up their books to prove it, then maybe Jared Kushner will be able to put all this to rest,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W Bush.

“But until that happens we have to assume there’s a strong likelihood that when a prominent Russian banker goes to see a prominent member of the Trump transition team, finances will have been part of their discussion.”

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