Former White House senior aide Jared Kushner dismissed his father-in-law’s current troubles with top-secret documents as a mere “paperwork issue” on Friday.
Last month, the FBI confiscated boxes of documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort, including top secret information. Everything was supposed to go directly to the National Archives after Trump left office, under the requirements of the Presidential Records Act. Trump is now under investigation for possible violations of the Espionage Act.
Yet Kushner calmly shrugged off Trump’s stash of documents and the significant security risk it posed in an interview with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News.
“Why did the president take home top secret documents?” Sky News host Kay Burley grilled Kushner.
“You have to ask him that question,” Kushner responded. “But what I will say is that ... he was under constant attack,” he added.
“Yeah, but he took top secret documents home, potentially risking the security of the United States,” Burley shot back.
Kushner replied: “This seems like it’s an issue of paperwork that should’ve been able to be worked out between DOJ and [Trump]. I don’t know what he took or what he didn’t take, but I think right now that we’re relying on leaks to the media.”
The information about what Trump was storing at Mar-a-Lago isn’t coming from media leaks. The Justice Department, in fact, has released a detailed list of documents pulled from his home.
Trump hasn’t denied that those records were stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Court filings demonstrate that government officials had been attempting to collect the documents from him for well over a year.
Burley reminded Kushner that one of the pieces of evidence was a photo of several documents marked classified and top-secret on the floor at Mar-a-Lago.
“We’ve seen the photo, haven’t we, where it says ‘Top Secret’?” Burley asked. She wondered if Kushner was suggesting that people “wait and see” if the documents were top secret “even though we’re being told by the FBI that they were?”
Kushner answered: “This may be a paperwork issue. I don’t know; like I said, I haven’t been involved in the details of it.”
Kushner landed in the hot seat with Sky while plugging his upcoming book, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir.”
He also noted in the interview that Trump is “obviously thinking” about another run for the presidency. Kushner said, however, that he would not work in another Trump administration because he’s “enjoying the private sector” so much.
Watch the full interview below: