As previous posts have noted, special counsel Robert Mueller went very easy on Michael Flynn in the plea deal announced on Friday. The inference to many is that Flynn has apparently agreed to tell Mueller all that he knows and is poised to assist Mueller in indicting or flipping someone even higher in the Trump/Pence regime. Much conjecture suggests that the likely target of Flynn's information is Jared "Prince Jared" Kushner, Der Trumpenführer's son-n-law. A piece in Vox looks at Kushner's vulnerability. Here are article highlights:
[T]he Flynn plea bargain could also be a major problem for someone else extremely close to the president: Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law.
A court document in the Flynn case, released Friday, refers to a “very senior” transition official who told Flynn to try to get the Russian ambassador to the US to help stop a United Nations Security Council vote on Israeli settlement policy in late December.
Reporters from Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, and NBC News have all confirmed that this very senior official is Kushner. That makes perfect sense — by all accounts, Kushner was an extremely important figure during the transition, and reporting even at the time suggested that he was involved in Trump team deliberations on the settlements issue.
[T]he new reporting is just the latest of many, many times Kushner’s name has come up in connection with the Russia matter. There was the meeting he had with Ambassador Kislyak during the transition in which they reportedly discussed setting up a secret backchannel of communication. There was the Donald Trump Jr.-brokered meeting with a Russian lawyer who’d promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton during the campaign. And there are the reports that Kushner urged Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey.
Furthermore, as part of Flynn’s cooperation agreement with Mueller’s team, he is likely providing information that could incriminate someone close to Trump. That someone could well be Kushner.
To get top-secret security clearance, Kushner was supposed to list any foreign government officials whom he’d met with in the past seven years. But he left more than 100 meetings off his forms — including several with Russians. (His lawyer claims the forms were “prematurely submitted.”) · The most curious of these meetings occurred during the transition. On December 1 or 2, Kushner and Flynn met with Kislyak, and, according to the Washington Post, Kislyak told his superiors afterward that Kushner wanted to set up a secret line of communication between them, and suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities for this. This has raised questions about whether Kushner was seeking to shield his contacts with the Russian government from US intelligence.
· Later in the month, Kushner sent a deputy to attend another meeting with Kislyak. And in mid-December, he met with Sergey Gorkov, head of Vnesheconombank (a Russian bank currently under US sanctions). The White House claims Kushner took this meeting at Kislyak’s request, for diplomatic reasons, while the bank says it was about business.
· But before all this, there was the June 9, 2016, meeting Trump Jr. set up with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. forwarded Kushner an email thread with the subject “Russia - Clinton - private and confidential,” and further down in the thread, publicist Rob Goldstone clearly states he is setting up this meeting as part of “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Kushner attended the meeting, but according to recent statements by both Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya, he left after a few minutes.
· Then a Reuters report claims there were two phone calls between Kushner and Kislyak during the campaign, though Kushner’s lawyer said he had no recollection of these.
That’s not all. A report from McClatchy’s Peter Stone and Greg Gordon also suggests that investigators are taking a close look at the Trump campaign’s digital operation, which Kushner oversaw, with an eye toward whether there was any collaboration with Russian cyber operatives and bots targeting voters in key states or precincts.
Finally, it’s also worth noting that when President Trump was considering firing FBI Director Comey back in May, Kushner was reportedly one of the most prominent advisers arguing that he should go ahead and do it. That disastrous miscalculation led to the appointment of Mueller, the man who could eventually indict Kushner and other top Trump aides. Earlier this week — before Flynn’s guilty plea — the New York Times and CNN both reported that Kushner sat with investigators on Mueller’s team for an interview at some point in November. . . . . that interview also means that Mueller got Kushner on the record about his version of events that related to Flynn — before Flynn was known to have become a cooperating witness.
And since it is a crime to make false statements to the FBI, if Kushner was less than fully forthcoming about matters Flynn is now prepared to dish on, he could be in some legal jeopardy.
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