Report: Jared Kushner Was “Directly Involved” in Trump’s Early Attempt to Overturn the Election
Since moving to Florida on January 20, 2021, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have spent a considerable amount of time attempting to scrub the “stink” of Donald Trump and January 6 out of their reputations. That exercise in image rehabilitation culminated last Wednesday with what Javanka scholars believe may be the most Javanka-y stunt of all time, wherein the couple attempted to insist, via anonymous sources, that despite working for the Trump administration until the bitter end, they had absolutely nothing to do with the sordid false election claims and knew, even before it was called for Joe Biden, that Trump had lost. That might have made the couple look okay-ish if not for the fact that, if true, it meant that they were fully aware of Trump’s wrongdoing, and chose not to speak out against him. But the even bigger problem with the whole “we had no part in this” narrative? That the former first son-in-law was apparently extremely involved in Trump’s early attempts to stay in power.
Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report that in the week following the 2020 election, Jared Kushner “took charge in overseeing the development of plans to keep Trump in office,” according to four people familiar with the matter. While he didn’t go on TV and make crazy allegations like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell, Kushner apparently had the very same goal as the two disgraced lawyers, and “repeatedly” met with the then president and other top advisers to game out potential strategies for “multi-pronged legal battles and a scorched-earth messaging war against the victorious Biden campaign.” Kushner, Suebsaeng and Rawnsley report, told his father-in-law that there could still be a viable path to a second term via a number of states that had already been called for Biden. And despite the recent New York Times headline that he’d “washed” his hands of Trump by November 5, 2020, Kushner reportedly urged his wife’s father to ignore the people who were saying it was over.
“Jared was directly involved,” a former senior Trump aide told Rolling Stone, claiming Kushner was “positioning himself to be the Jim Baker of this fight,” referring to the Republican attorney who headed up George W. Bush’s 2000 legal team. (As Trump adviser Jason Miller told The Daily Beast in November 2020, the president’s son-in-law was “more hardcore in fighting back on this than anybody.” At some point, as Trump began to lean harder into the deranged lies spread by Giuliani and the like, Kushner reportedly told Trump that he would have no part in the effort. But while the Boy Prince of New Jersey would seemingly like people to believe he never had any part in the attempt to keep Trump in power, a source told Rolling Stone that’s not actually true at all. “Jared helped create what then morphed into the Rudy clown show,” one of them said.
And then, of course, there’s this uncomfortable fact:
“If the plan had worked, and if [Mike] Pence had done what the [former] president wanted him to do, Jared would be jumping up and down…or calling reporters to take credit for being the man behind it all [and] the guy who made it all happen,” says a former senior Trump administration official who was present for the tumultuous presidential transition. “Come on. Spare me.”
Kushner did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
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