May 31, 2017
DONALD IS JUST AN INNOCENT VICTIM...:
Here's why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner (PETER STONE AND GREG GORDON, 5/31/17, McClatchy)
Investigators are now trying to sort out a series of questions about Kushner's role, among them why he failed to disclose meetings with Russians on an application for a security clearance and his work with ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn, whose Russia dealings are at the center of multiple probes involving the Trump team's ties to Moscow.Kushner is the only active White House official known to be a focus of the broad investigation into whether Trump's campaign collaborated in Russia's unprecedented cyber and espionage offensive aimed at harming Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and aiding Trump's. NBC News and the Washington Post were the first to report that Kushner is drawing scrutiny, a development that two people familiar with the matter confirmed to McClatchy.During the campaign, Kushner helped oversee digital operations that unleashed social media barrages targeted at the local level in an attempt to shift the opinions of voters in key states, former Trump aides say. Russia similarly directed anti-Clinton or pro-Trump social media blitzes.After the election, he aroused suspicions when he met in New York with Sergei Gorkov, a former Russian intelligence official who is the powerful president of a Russian state-backed bank closely tied to Vladimir Putin - a meeting that one of the sources said "set people's hair on fire." The bank has been under U.S. sanctions since Russian-backed separatists invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.This month, Kushner was a force behind Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, who had refused Trump's entreaties to pledge loyalty to the president as he led the investigation and publicly confirmed that Trump associates were under scrutiny. It remains to be seen whether Kushner's role could draw him into a debate about whether the firing and Trump's related actions amounted to obstruction of justice.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2017 11:54 AM
