White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview that aired on HBO late Sunday that he doesn’t know if he would contact the FBI if contacted again by Russians seeking a meeting.
Kushner, who is President Trump’s son-in-law, was pressed by Axios reporter Jonathan Swan on why he didn’t originally contact the FBI after receiving an email that offered the Trump campaign a meeting with Russians offering dirt on rival Hillary Clinton.
“We’re in a place now where people are playing Monday morning quarterback and they’re being so self-righteous,” Kushner said.
{mosads}He said he was running three companies and helping with the presidential campaign in the summer of 2016 when he got an email that told him to show up for a “meeting that I had been told about earlier that I didn’t know what the hell it was about.”
“I show up at the meeting, I stay for 15 minutes, it’s a clown show,” Kushner said, referring to the meeting in Trump Tower where he reportedly met with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.
“I never would have thought about that meeting again,” he added. “Had there been something that actually was nefarious at that meeting that came up, maybe we would have done something different.”
Kushner’s Trump Tower meeting, which then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. also attended, was documented and investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Kushner during the new interview called the meeting a “total waste of time” but was noncommittal when pressed on whether he would report hypothetical future meetings to the FBI.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to do hypotheticals, but the reality is is that we were not given anything that was salacious.”
He was then asked by Swan if seeing an email from Russia offering campaign help set off “some alarm bell.”
“The email that I got on my iPhone at the time basically said show up at 4. I didn’t scroll down,” Kushner said.