Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reported to have uncovered evidence that affiliates of the Russian government repeatedly sought the audience and favor of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest advisers, throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.
By: David Dennison
However, Mueller’s records relating to those efforts, which are fully described in the 448-page report released on Thursday, shows that Kushner turned away most of those attempts at contact.
“Communication records show formal and informal associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin pursued inroads with Kushner through a network of shared contacts. While Kushner acknowledged to investigators that he was seeking better relations with Moscow after Trump’s November 2016 election, most Russian intermediaries failed in attempts to directly communicate with him, McClatchey News Service reports.
The report “contains revelations about a 2016 meeting between the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and a Russian envoy. It also provides details about how the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and other members of the president’s inner circle reacted after learning about eldest son Donald Trump Jr.’s emails setting up the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians; and it confirms correspondence between Donald Jr. and WikiLeaks about hacked Clinton campaign emails,” according to NBC News.
“In 265 references to Kushner throughout the report – many of which are footnotes documenting text, phone and email exchanges – Kushner is on the receiving end of unsolicited emails and requests for meetings,” notes McClatchey. “The report recounts only two exchanges between Kushner and Russian nationals throughout the 2016 race: a handshake at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – whom Kushner did not recognize by name until after the election – and the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer held on June 9 of that year.”
During the campaign, “Ivanka received an email from a Russian whose husband “has done Putin’s political campaign,” reports New York Magazine. “In November of 2015, Ivanka Trump received an email from a Russian woman named Lana E. Alexander, who offered the support of her husband, Dmitry Klokov: “If you ask anyone who knows Russian to google my husband Dmitry Klokov, you’ll see who he is close to and that he has done Putin’s political campaigns.” At the time, Klokov was working for a Russian utility company, “and had been previously employed as an aide and press secretary to Russia’s energy minister.” Ivanka told Michael Cohen about the email, and Cohen looked up Klokov. Cohen “conducted an internet search for Klokov’s name and concluded (incorrectly) that Klokov was a former Olympic weightlifter.”
