Jared Kushner flew home from Rome on Thursday with his wife Ivanka, after a week viewed as a badly needed win. In advance of President Donald Trump’s first trip abroad—a reality show-esque odyssey that took him from kings in Saudi Arabia to the Prime Minister in Israel to the Pope at the Vatican to world leaders at the NATO Summit in Brussels and finally to Sicily for the G7 Summit—Kushner spent weeks in daily meetings to present the most camera-ready view of his father-in-law and boss to the wider world. He briefed the president, a political neophyte who rarely travels to places without Trump-owned properties (something that none of the destinations he visited this week had), on what he needed to know about the people he would be meeting and the landmines he needed to avoid. And, by and large, he avoided them, a little off-tempo Arabian sword-dancing notwithstanding.
Kushner appeared largely pleased with his efforts. He even applauded his job well done with a rare on-the-record statement, proclaiming the administration's “great progress” and noting that he “[looked] forward to continuing to accomplish the president’s ambitious objectives.”
Kushner’s presumptive victory plane-ride home was largely upended, however, by the latest beat in Trump’s ongoing Kremlin crisis. He returned to Washington amid reports that he is a focus of the F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election. While Kushner has not been named as a target or accused of wrongdoing, according to a story published by The Washington Post on Thursday evening, he is being investigated on account of his interactions with Russians official during the campaign and the transition.
On Friday evening, just before Kushner and his family began observing Shabbat, *the Post published another rattling report about the First Son-in-Law. According to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports, Kushner and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak talked about setting up a secret, secure communication channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin at Russian diplomatic facilities at a meeting in Trump Tower in December—a move that the Post notes would allow their discussions to continued unmonitored. An hour after sundown, Reuters reported that Kushner had at least three more, previously undisclosed, conversations with Kislyak during the campaign. (An attorney for Kushner told Reuters that Kushner has no recollection of the calls, since he participated in “thousands of calls in this time period,” and asked for the news organization for the takes of the alleged calls so they could look into them.)
This is the second time that Kushner’s meeting with Russian officials has overturned a rare positive news cycle. In late March, the White House announced that Kushner would have his own office in the White House, with his own veritable SWAT team, to tackle an unbelievably broad slate of issues from overseeing infrastructure policy to addressing opioid crisis to reforming Veterans Affairs. “We should have excellence in government,” Kushner said in an interview to the Post. “The government should be run like a great American company.”
About 12 hours later, however, The New York Times broke the news that the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to question Kushner about his December meeting Kislyak, and another meeting he took at Kislyak’s request with the chief of a Russian bank that had been placed on a sanctions list by the U.S. government. Kushner failed to disclose both of these meetings on his security clearance forms—an omission his lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said was an unintended error and one that he would correct. On Thursday, Gorelick said in a statement that Kushner “previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings” and that “he will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”
This, of course, is more than just a bad case of bad timing. Kushner, a 36-year-old real-estate heir with no prior political experience, may be coming to terms with the reality that there is no such thing as a sustained good-news cycle in any White House, but particularly one that defies even the most pedestrian conventions of modern management. The other challenge of this organization style, indeed, is that distracting investigations cannot easily be pushed aside or relegated to deputies. When the president runs the administration like a family office, the problems are more likely to affect the principals, and those principals are more likely to be bound by blood or law.
This is especially challenging for Kushner. In the early days of Trump’s transition and presidency, Kushner was heralded as a calm, steadying foil—a reasonable businessman who could balance out his mercurial boss. Where the rest of Trump’s inner circle could be up one day, down the next, and headed out the door the day after that, Kushner was the one person foreign and business leaders could count on to be there. But what will those leaders think now that Kushner’s name is linked to F.B.I. scrutiny and allegedly, and inexplicably, suggesting secret communications with Russian officials? That is not the image of mild-mannered stability they bought into.
If this recalibration has been felt in the White House thus far, the White House isn’t saying. One White House official told me that it is “business as usual” this morning. Staffers are still focused on the final day of President Trump’s trip abroad at the G7 Summit in Sicily; they are preparing for a convocation of tech heavy-hitters at the White House on June 19. Kushner is also teaming up with chief of staff Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon on a “war room” of sorts, made up of loyal Trump-ers and campaign veterans used to hunkering down and rallying around the president, to handle the Russia investigation.
This is notable for two reasons. First, Bannon and Kushner, who were locked in a West Wing feud, are playing nice on this matter, the official said. And second, this means that Kushner, who is a focus of the investigation, is part of a war room established to try to contain the investigation within the West Wing.
Kushner has always been exceptional within the administration, and this crisis is no different. While the rest of staffers have jockeyed for job security and the president’s ear, Kushner, a loyal member of the family, has apparently felt none of that anxiety. While Bannon was taken off the National Security Counsel and Kellyanne Conway off the airwaves she once dominated, Kushner’s portfolio continuously expands. While the rest of the staff white-knuckled during Trump’s first attempt to pass health care legislation, Kushner was spring-breaking in Aspen with his family.
In the president’s first week back after the trip, one in which he returns home to a new era with a special counsel investigating Russia’s involvement and congressional inquiries pushing ahead, Kushner, a Modern Orthodox Jew, will likely spend most of the week observing Shavuot, a holiday that celebrates God giving the Torah to the Jews. It’s also a celebration of the Jews pledging their loyalty to God, one in which observers stay up all night to study the law and traditionally read the Book of Ruth, which states that sins are forgiven when clear repentance action is taken.
