WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received and forwarded emails about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” during last year’s campaign that he kept from Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, according to lawmakers demanding that he produce the missing records.
Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking Democratic member Dianne Feinstein, Calif., sent a letter Thursday to Abbe Lowell, Kushner’s attorney, charging that Kushner has failed to disclose several documents, records and transcripts in response to multiple inquiries from committee investigators.
Lowell disputed the committee’s characterization of Kushner’s compliance, saying Thursday that he has “been responsive to all requests” and provided the Judiciary Committee with all relevant documents.”
In their letter, Grassley and Feinstein instruct Kushner’s team to turn over “several documents that are known to exist” because other witnesses in their probe already gave them to investigators. The correspondence include a series of September 2016 messages to Kushner concerning WikiLeaks, the website that published hacked Democratic emails at the height of the campaign. The committee leaders say Kushner had forwarded those messages to another campaign official. Earlier this week, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. revealed that he had had direct communication with WikiLeaks through private Twitter messages during the campaign.
Committee leaders said Kushner also withheld from the committee “documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite'” that he had forwarded to other campaign officials. And they said that Kushner had been made privy to “communications with Sergei Millian” — a Belarusan American businessman who claims close ties to the Trumps and was the source of salacious details in a dossier about the president’s 2013 trip to Moscow — but failed to turn those records over to investigators.
Spokesmen for Grassley and Feinstein did not offer additional information about the missing records when asked about them.
According to two people familiar with the exchanges, in one of the disputed emails Rick Clay, a conservative Iraq War contractor, passed on a request for Kushner or other campaign officials to meet with people connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kushner told a campaign aide to “take a pass.” Kushner wrote that he feared people exaggerated their connections and could later brag about access to the Trump campaign, these people said.
No meeting happened, at Kushner’s direction, according to the people familiar with the exchanges. Maria Butina, a Russian gun rights activist, was part of a group that sought Clay’s help in arranging a meeting with the campaign in June 2016 to discuss persecution of Christians around the world.
Clay said “they made the right call” in turning down the meeting.
The second email is one that Donald Trump Jr. forwarded to Kushner and other top aides, the two people said, after he received a direct message from the WikiLeaks twitter account in September 2016.
