Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway defended senior adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday, saying his reported proposal to establish a secret channel with the Kremlin in December, using Russian facilities, was part of “the regular course of business.”
In an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Conway referred to the national security adviser and homeland security secretary’s dismissal of the Washington Post’s reporting.
“The facts are that Jared Kushner has said from the very beginning he is willing do go and share any information that he has with Congress, with the FBI,” she said. “And as you heard Gen. McMaster, as you heard Sec. Kelly over this weekend say, they are not concerned. Backchannels like this are the regular course of business.”
However, as some have pointed out, Kushner’s reported suggestion that the channel be established using Russian facilities in the United States is abnormal.
“Obviously, the relationships that Jared was able to establish during transition helped develop this phenomenal international trip that they just came back from,” she said, though it is unclear if she was making a direct reference to the reporting on his attempts to secretly communicate with the Kremlin.
Host Brian Kilmeade asked about an unbylined report from his network, which claimed, citing a single unnamed “source familiar with the matter,” that the Russians had raised the idea of a establishing a secure line of communication with Kushner, rather than the other way around. President Donald Trump retweeted the report from his personal Twitter account Tuesday morning.
Kilmeade also asked about a Monday New York Times report that investigators were looking into the motivation for Kushner’s meeting with the Putin-aligned Russian banker Sergey Gorkov in December.
Conway dismissed the entire question immediately, citing “many news reports very recently that had the facts wrong.”
“I’m not going to comment on any of that, because there’s no reason to, frankly,” she said.
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