The Senate Judiciary Committee panel is demanding that White House senior aide Jared Kushner produce evidence of his email correspondence about WikiLeaks that he failed to disclose to investigators.
President Trump’s son-in-law received emails about WikiLeaks and a “Russian backdoor overture” and forwarded them to another Trump campaign official last year but withheld the information. Two senators, Republican Charles Grassley and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, sent Kushner a letter demanding that he send additional documents regarding the emails as part of the investigation into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 US election, the BBC reports.
Kushner was asked to turn over documents last month but the senators say the emails were omitted from his documents.
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The news follows Donald Trump Jr., Kushner’s brother-in-law, revealing earlier this week that he communicated with WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that released damaging information surrounding Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, over private Twitter messages during the campaign. U.S. intelligence agencies believe the damaging emails and information had been hacked by the Russians and supplied to the website.
“Committee leaders said Kushner also withheld from the committee documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ that he had forwarded to other campaign officials,” the Washington Post says. “And they said Kushner had been made privy to ‘communications with Sergei Millian’ — a Belarusan American businessman who claims close ties to the Trumps and was the source of salacious details in a dossier about the president’s 2013 trip to Moscow — but failed to turn those records over to investigators.”
The senate panel says there are several documents known to exist because other witnesses in the investigation provided documents that Kushner was copied on but did not provide himself.
“If, as you suggest, Mr Kushner was unaware of, for example, any attempts at Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, then presumably there would be few communications concerning many of the persons identified,” the senators wrote in the letter.
Kushner’s lawyer, who has until 27 November to provide the requested documents, says Trump’s son-in-law is “open to responding to any additional requests.”
GQ writer Luke Darby says, "Even if nothing hard turns up as far as collusion with Russia goes, Kushner’s constant failure to be transparent is alarming."
