Jared Kushner claims Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went around gossiping about him so much in New York City that his mother became distraught.
In an interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast on Wednesday, the former president’s son-in-law recalled testifying for the federal investigation into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Describing the allegations of collusion as “ridiculous,” Kushner lamented that his mother had been caught up in the controversy.
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“My poor mom, I told her to stop reading whatever. I said, ‘Mom, I promise you, we didn’t do anything wrong. It’s good.’ But she’d call me and say, ‘Well, our friends were on the Upper East Side, were talking with Chuck Schumer, who says, ‘Jared’s going to jail. We know for sure that he colluded with the Russians.’ And this is a leading senator saying things like this,” Kushner said, without specifying when this allegedly happened.
He went on to say he felt “radioactive” over the intense scrutiny of his dealings with Russia. While Kushner was present for several interactions probed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team—including an infamous 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-linked lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton—investigators ultimately did not find sufficient evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, though they did conclude that Moscow had gone to great lengths to try and help Trump win.
The former White House adviser also spent a great deal of the Fridman interview praising Trump.
“My hope and prayers are that President Trump is re-elected and that he’s able to then restore order and calm and peace and prosperity to the world,” Kushner said, adding that when “Trump was president, we had a peaceful world.”
He went on to say Trump’s biggest strength as president was his “unpredictability.” “From a foreign policy point of view, in particular, his unpredictability just meant that everyone was always on their back foot,” Kushner said. “People were afraid to kind of cross America. And what I would tell people who don’t like Trump is I would say, ‘Think about how crazy he’s making you and his enemies. He did that to the enemies of America.’ Yeah, so he was a very, very strong president and I think did a great job.”
While Kushner hyped Trump’s supposed foreign policy successes and argued that President Joe Biden being “weak” enabled renewed violence in the Middle East and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many foreign policy experts warned that Trump’s policies had actually emboldened America’s adversaries and undermined U.S. standing.
