Top White House adviser Jared Kushner lashed out at people playing “Monday morning quarterback” who criticized him for not reporting to the FBI a meeting he had with a Kremlin-connected lawyer at Trump Tower in 2016.
“Let me put you in my shoes at that time. OK, I’m running three companies, I’m helping run the campaign,” Kushner told Axios in an interview that aired Sunday. “I get an email that says show up at 4 instead of 3 to a meeting that I had been told about earlier that I didn’t know what the hell it was about.”
Kushner, who’s married to President Trump’s daughter Ivanka, said he stayed at the June 2016 meeting for about 15 minutes, describing it as a “clown show.”
”I never would have thought about that meeting again. Had there been something that actually was nefarious at that meeting that came up, maybe we would have done something different,” he continued. “In reality, the meeting was a total waste of time.”
Axios’ reporter Jonathan Swan asked Kushner why he didn’t pick up the phone and contact the FBI after receiving an email that had Russia in the subject line.
”We’re in a place now where people are playing Monday morning quarterback and they’re being so self-righteous,” Kushner responded.
He was asked how he would respond if it came up again.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to do hypotheticals, but the reality is that we were not given anything that was salacious,” he said.
Kushner was among several campaign advisers — including Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — who met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Veselnitskaya promised she had dirt on Hillary Clinton that would harm her presidential campaign.
