President Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is moving closer to the eye of the storm surrounding Trump and Russia, The Hill reads.
Calls for Kushner to be stripped of his security clearance have mounted, as congressional investigators probe whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation — run by the president’s son-in-law — coordinated efforts with Russian bots spreading fake news about Hillary Clinton.
Kushner is also a figure in Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Clinton.
He and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort both attended the meeting, as did a Russian-American lobbyist with past ties to Russian intelligence. Kushner reportedly left the meeting after 10 minutes.
Most of the attacks on Kushner have been partisan, but even some Republicans fed up with the drama surrounding Trump’s family are now calling for Kushner’s exit.
“I’m going out on a limb here, but I would say that I think it would be in the President’s best interest if he removed all of his children from the White House,” Texas Representative Bill Flores, a former chairman of the powerful conservative Republican Study Committee, told local radio Thursday morning.
“Not only Donald Trump, but Ivanka and Jared Kushner.”
Kushner, who works on a broad foreign policy portfolio, has now had to amend his security clearance form twice to account for previously-unreported meetings with Russian individuals.
“It’s very hard for me to imagine anyone else being allowed to continue their clearance if they participated in a meeting like the one that just became public,” Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Hill in an interview.
Schiff is also probing whether the Trump campaign’s analytics operation made any attempt to help Russian social media trolls push negative stories about Clinton to certain valuable segments of voters. He declined to name Kushner specifically, but the first son-in-law headed that arm of the campaign. The data and digital director for the campaign, Brad Parscale, said Friday that he will speak to the panel as part of its investigation.
Democrats have trained their fire on Kushner’s security clearance.
The discovery of the emails led Kushner to amend his security clearance form, which in turn sparked federal investigators to interview him for a second time.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called for Kushner’s security privileges to be revoked “immediately.”
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, put forth two appropriations amendments crafted to revoke his clearance; both failed along party lines.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham both in the past have raised questions with Kushner’s security clearance. They have yet to receive an answer to a letter about the status of Kushner’s clearance and the circumstances surrounding his eligibility, sent to Marcia Lee Kelly, director of the office that handles White House security clearances, and acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner said that his committee will ask Kushner and Trump Jr. for additional documents, while Grassley has said that he wants to speak with Kushner.
Other Democrats took it a step further, calling for Kushner to resign.
“You don’t think the Republicans would be calling for the resignation of an Obama official who allowed the president and vice president to openly lie about a major national security issue?” Senator Chris Murphy told reporters. “
He watched his father-in-law on TV say no one in [the Trump] campaign talked to the Russian government.”
The Kushner-led campaign digital operation has provided another thread for federal and congressional investigators.
In the lead-up to Election Day, a loose network of hackers, bloggers and other online figures helped spread false and negative reports about Clinton on Twitter and Facebook to million of voters living in key states, cities and precincts.
The network used armies of social media “bots,” that run automated functions, to accelerate the spread of reports.
Investigators are looking into whether Russia identified its targets with the help of the Trump campaign’s cyber operation, which had detailed information about voters, according to McClatchy.
Kushner has long been seen as central to unraveling any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
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