I’d imagine I’m one of many, perhaps millions of people wondering which person in the whole Russia/Trump Campaign (and now White House) mess will sell out everyone else – the old “first person to cooperate & serve up the others gets the best deal” thing. Stories have been written in about every forum including here. In fact I’ve published a couple of diaries speculating on two key figures (Mike Flynn & Jeff Sessions) highly placed enough and involved far back enough in the campaign to know where an awful lot of the proverbial bodies are buried. Yes, Paul Manafort (and some others) figure in to this equation but Manafort got pushed out, and wasn’t brought in to run the campaign until long after it began. I still believe it’s the folks who were involved for the long haul AND made it into the actual administration that will matter most, and who can be the most damaging to this President.
And now I have to add Jared Kushner & even the President himself to the list.
Let me explain why I say that. If it wasn’t all that apparent during the campaign since three of the President’s children did so much “surrogate” work on the campaign trail, it became apparent after the Inauguration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has had what can only be described as outsized influence with his father-in-law. We got a hint of his influence right after the election when a well prepared transition effort headed by New Jersey Governor (and spurned at the last second running mate) Chris Christie was turned upside down was fired from the effort. Not only did Kushner probably have a role in keeping Christie off the ticket, but we know pretty much for certain it was Kushner who had Christie cutout of the transition. And the whole thing became what when we had to be polite (back during my jarhead days) call a “Charlie Fox.” Under the best of circumstances an outsider like our President who had no clue how much he didn’t know would have had a difficult transition and roll-out of his agenda once President. But it has been every bit as bad, if not worse because the well-prepared transition team was cut out of things and even with his actual Washington experience Mike Pence was hamstrung by having to abandon all that prep work and start from scratch. Not to mention the fact Pence increasingly seems to have his own issues with the Russia mess & had to also worry about covering his own butt.
It’s fair for those who may not know (or have forgotten) to ask why Kushner seemed so eager to put the screws to Chris Christie. And the answer is that when Christie was a U.S. Attorney he presided over the prosecution and imprisonment of Kushner’ spersonal hero – his father! Kushner’s father is cut from the same cloth as our President – someone used to ignoring rules & even laws to get what he wanted, browbeating and bullying people along the way. Both have been ruthless and not cared who got hurt as long as their own wants & needs were satisfied, and willing to stick it to even family members. In the case of the elder Kushner, for all the legal trouble he was already in he wound up getting a charge of witness intimidation tacked on. Upon learning his brother-in-law was cooperating with authorities on the various financial charges, the elder Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce the guy. It turned out she was successful, and the encounter was taped. And the elder Kushner sent the tape to his own SISTER to try and shut up her husband! That’s the man Jared Kushner worships. And it’s no secret he’s always carried a grudge over his father being convicted of federal crimes and sent to prison.
Any chance to humiliate Christie was an opportunity for Jared Kushner to extract personal revenge. One can argue what might have happened (or not) had Christie been the running mate instead of Pence, but there’s no doubting the disaster that unfolded by sacking him as head of the transition and scrapping all the advance work. In (continuing to) settle a personal score Kushner, with his outsized influence gave his father-in-law some spectacularly bad advice. And while this administration was going to be bad for the country under the best of circumstances, the country (and the world) have been paying for it ever since. Pooh Bah had no clue just how involved the job was, including all the appointments he’d have to make. And while they whine about unfilled positions the Senate can’t confirm people who haven’t even been nominated! Not to keep harping on this point, but as with so many things that have gone wrong a large part traces back to the transition which was screwed because Jared Kushner wanted to settle a personal grievance.
It’s not the only spectacularly bad piece of advice we know Jared has given his father-in-law. I won’t go into all of them, but Kushner also “counseled” firing James Comey and that it wouldn’t be a big deal. We all know how that bit of advice has worked out! There is more I could get in to but I’ll skip to the most recent one, which is Jared apparently convincing his father-in-law that the meeting he, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. had with that Russian lawyer on June 9, 2016 would be no big deal. You have to wonder when even someone like this President who doesn’t like to think things through will start to connect the dots of all the spectacularly bad advice he’s gotten from his darling daughter’s husband – the guy who he’s put in charge of more stuff than Alexander Haig (if you’re old enough to remember the Reagan years you’ll get it) could have ever dreamed of. The guy who looks like he’s still in college has enormous power, and more importantly influence. More than his wife, the apple of daddy’s eye has in fact. But keep in mind Jared Kushner is very much his father’s son. Our President has probably always looked at him and seen the same things he sees in his own sons. Certainly Uday & Qusay (or is it Beavis & Butthead?) are, like Jared “Princes” of their (NYC) city in both their own and their father’s minds. All three of these guys sure as hell have acted that way.
But I believe there’s a difference, that goes back to Jared’s dad getting convicted and doing actual prison time, while Donald Trump Sr. who has more than once been in danger of the same thing has managed to skate. All the way to the White House in fact. Unlike the Trump boys, Jared had to face some hard truths, and “grow up” a lot more quickly with dad in prison. That he wasn’t ready to take over his family’s business is apparent given some of the dubious purchases/investments he made. Frankly, its probably one of those mistakes that led him to go ahead and be a formal part of the administration – his hope that actually being part of this White House would (like his father-in-law’s family has surely done with Russia) allow him to find an “angel investor(s)” who would bail his family business out from the purchase of that NYC property that has the street number 666 (I kid you not) as part of the address. Jared’s own petulance (at Qatar) has not only undercut our military capability in the Persian Gulf (it only houses our largest base!) but just might wind up causing a war – another piece of spectacularly bad advice he’s given his father-in-law btw.
If Donald Jr. & Eric Trump are very much their father’s sons, so is Jared Kushner HIS father’s son. But again I say there’s a difference. Kushner has, via the conviction and imprisonment of his father experienced real world consequences of playing fast & loose (if not outright breaking) with rules and laws and that lawyers can’t always keep one out of jail, and/oror at least negotiate a deal with a hefty fine & no admission of guilt like the President’s done more than once in the past. That brings me to the point I raised at the beginning of this diary.
Better than all the Trump family he knows full well that it IS possible for “Masters of the Universe” and “Princes of the City” to actually get nailed cold and go to prison. More importantly, he’s smarter than his brothers-in-law and has surely combed through all that happened to his dad with a fine tooth comb, and thought (probably correctly) that if his dad had realized early enough that he was screwed, he might have cut a deal that at least didn’t involve prison time. Keep in mind that all of these folks are used to getting away with things that land other people in all kinds of trouble including prison. But Jared knows up close & personal that even someone like him can find himself unable to squirm his way out of trouble. More importantly, keep in mind two things. First, from what I know the Kushner’s have paid their legal bills along the way. Second and more importantly, Jared Kushner might be a New Yorker but unlike his in-laws he realizes that DC is a different game. There is a long rivalry between the two cities about which one is “bigger” as in more important. That’s a different debate for a different time & forum. But Jared Kushner has been smart enough to realize that the two city’s “industries” are quite different, and while crimes are crimes in both places the kinds of high-end white collar crimes and therefore high-end lawyers are different. Someone from a DC centric firm that deals with government contracts, international relations and of course the crimes & potential ways to run afoul of the law would be lost in the NYC financial & real estate world – just as the guys that the President trusts to represent him in this Russia mess (mostly NYC guys who are real estate-finance pit-bull types) are out of their element in the DC world.
I’m kind of surprised that Jamie Gorelick didn’t quit representing Kushner after the stunt with lying (by omission) on his SF-86. He was smart to hire her, but not so much in not being upfront with her. But that appears to have been his only mistake when it comes to his ever increasing legal woes. He has retained additional (DC)counsel to handle his growing criminal liabilities, and they are good. He also appears to be listening to them, which for him is better. If some of the bad advice I’ve talked about has been due to letting personal grudges overwhelm his judgment or in other cases simply not having the knowledge, experience& skill set for politics & especially White House level politics at least he came to recognize the fact he wasn’t home in NYC. More critically (for him) he seems to have gotten over the notions of superiority folks like he and the circles he moved in up there look down on DC as “rubes” or “second class” he is in fact playing in the major leagues – albeit a different one than he knows.
Most importantly (I think) is that he shares a key trait with his father-in-law in that he will look out for himself no matter who he has to throw under the bus. That bad advice he gave about the June 9, 2016 meeting wouldn’t be a big deal? I’m convinced that was him following his lawyer’s advice to give them as much lead time as possible to do what lawyers like them do behind the scenes. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious, but it sure looks like they were confident that the “rube” New York lawyers the President relies on got played – they too seem to think that the June 9 meeting wouldn’t be much of an issue either politically or legally once it became public. It even seems like Kushner and his lawyers believed that the President and his lawyers thought it might not ever even become public, at least for a week or so. But a week allows for a LOT of billable hours for team Kushner to lay groundwork on his behalf with Mueller and Congress.
When you look at who has been on the team (to get Trump elected) pretty much all along & also assumed key roles in the administration, more than Jeff Sessions & even more than Mike Flynn Jared Kushner knows where the bodies are buried. If he doesn’t know firsthand what the view from inside prison bars looks like, all those visit to his dad in prison showed him more than he ever wants to know. I don’t believe he will do so unless he has to, but keep in mind how things work behind the scenes in this type of legal morass. Lawyers have all kinds of “hypothetical” chats that are the legal equivalent of a pair of Bridge or Pinochle players telling their partner what cards they hold while bidding. Mike Flynn is clearly the one furthest down the legal trouble rabbit hole, but Kushner’s legal troubles now that his oversight of the Trump Campaign’s digital operation is under scrutiny by Mueller’s team are as great or greater than Flynn’s.
Flynn has been trying to cut a deal for months now. There are even signs that those who know about such things that prosecutors are working out details to give him some type of deal if and/or when they are sure he’s given up every bit of dirt he knows. But as I’ve said, Kushner has (probably, because he’s got a lot more money than Flynn) superior legal representation. Kushner’s lawyers have no doubt been taking the measure of how close Flynn is to being that “first one through the door & therefore gets the best deal for being first” and given how good they are they’ve probably got a pretty good idea. That’s why they (I believe) played, with Kushner himself apparently playing his role perfectly that game of “the June 9 meeting was no big deal & no one will care if they find out.” IF they think Flynn is going to get the sweetheart deal, they will advise Jared to jump ahead and get it for himself. They might even be floating such a thing behind the scenes right now.
Jared Kushner is very much his father’s son. He knows better than anyone named Trump that even folks like them can lose the game of “flirt with & even break the law ”and wind up in prison. So Jared Kushner, who is still a pretty young man will throw his wife and his wife’s entire family & everyone else involved in the Trump Campaign under the bus to save his own butt – or at least minimize the time he (like his dad) has to spend looking out from inside prison bars.
That poses another interesting question. Most of the President’s legal team is, as I said NYC lawyers who are badly out of both their element and their league. He does however have one guy on the team who is a DC type and has handled (even if he lost) DC/political type cases. In fact, since the one guy who has knowledge and experience in DC political law has a losing track record, he might well pick up on (if he hasn’t already) what I’ve been talking about with Kushner and Kushner’s lawyers. Not being one of the President’s NYC cronies I doubt he has any influence. Even if he does, I’m not sure Kasowitz (head of the President’s legal team) or the others will admit that some DC (which to them might as well be Podunk, USA) guy knows better than they do how to handle all this. But the President has a pretty well honed survival instinct of his own. If no reputable DC lawyer/firm will represent him and what he’s got is the best he can get, he might still at some point want to talk to the one guy on his team who knows DC and how the law works there. And if it happens without any of the NYC guys he will hear stuff he doesn’t want to hear. He’ll probably yell and scream & fire the guy, but if it ever gets spelled out to him, or if he figures out for himself that Jared might screw him (we know the President isn’t given to deep thought or analysis but stranger things have happened) this will all get uglier than we ever imagined.
I think this is a very real possibility – that Kushner won’t be the only one who realizes they aren’t in Kansas NYC anymore & that the President will realize it too. I think that sometime in the months ahead (especially with this new lawsuit that I’ve seen Rachael Maddow talking about) we will witness the spectacle of the President and his son-in-law fighting to see which one gets thrown under the bus. That’s a battle the President can’t win, either legally or politically. As bulletproof as he’s been with his base, that will be more than even they can take. A Mike Flynn (or Paul Manafort) cutting a deal and spilling the beans is one thing, and something they could and would rationalize. His son-in-law being the one to do it would be quite another. And it’s a good bet that if/when it gets to such a point the President would have a “China Syndrome” melt down – it would be out of control and unstoppable.