Promoting His Memoir, Kushner Offers Tortured Defenses of Trump
Jared Kushner, who spent his years in the White House evading responsibility for his father-in-law’s most extreme moves, has had to answer for some of them on his book tour.
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By Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman
WASHINGTON — Making the rounds promoting his new memoir, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, this week ran into the question he has managed for months to avoid commenting on publicly: Did he agree with Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen?
“I think that there’s different words,” Mr. Kushner told the talk show host Megyn Kelly during a friendly interview on SiriusXM. He added, “I think there’s a whole bunch of different approaches that different people have taken, and different theories.”
Pressed to say whether Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Kushner demurred. “I believe it was a very sloppy election,” he said. “I think that there’s a lot of issues that I think if litigated differently may have had different insights into them.”
In reality, the words that election officials have used to describe the 2020 contest are “the most secure in American history,” and judges across the country rejected nearly all of the several dozen lawsuits that allies of Mr. Trump filed alleging fraud.
Mr. Kushner’s reluctance to concede as much reflected the contortions he is now attempting as he tries to sell a book whose success hinges on his close ties to Mr. Trump. At the same time, he is seeking to keep his distance from the lies and misdeeds that paved the way for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Like the memoir itself, titled “Breaking History,” the task involves a highly selective narrative that casts Mr. Kushner as a young star getting things done in the White House without getting his hands dirty.
“Before I came into office,” the unelected Mr. Kushner said on Tuesday, settling into the “Fox & Friends” couch, the “conventional thinking” had been that there could never be peace between Israel and Arab nations “until you have peace with the Palestinians.”
In that interview, Mr. Kushner, who was a senior adviser in the Trump White House, credited himself with helping to bring an “outsider’s point of view” to the world’s intractable problems.
In another interview, he noted that his father-in-law had “asked me to take lead on building the wall.”
During a virtual book event, Mr. Kushner even suggested he might be immortal, saying that he had prioritized exercising since leaving the White House because his generation could be “the first generation to live forever.”
When it comes to Jan. 6 and the election lies that spurred the riot, Mr. Kushner is less sure-footed. In the interview with Ms. Kelly, he labored to defend Mr. Trump’s feverish obsession with the 2020 election.
“What’s happened over the last year is that there has been a debate that’s been badly needed in this country about election integrity,” he said.
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