Jared Kushner reportedly asked Michael Flynn to coordinate with Russia

(Image credit: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

published 1 December 2017

Two former officials on President Trump's transition team claim that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was instructed by Jared Kushner to coordinate a U.N. vote against the condemnation of Israeli settlements with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Bloomberg reports. Flynn was charged Friday with lying to the FBI, in part about his coordination with Kislyak on the U.N. vote.

From the report:

One transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the U.N. Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution. Much of this appeared to be coordinated also with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the resolution with the Trump transition team. [Bloomberg]

A senior intelligence officer told Fox News that Trump directed Flynn to contact Russia as well as "12 other countries." Earlier, The New York Times reported that "Mr. Mueller's investigators … learned through witnesses and documents that ... Netanyahu asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel." Flynn and Kushner were apparently jointly in charge of those efforts, although Reuters reported that Flynn was not directed directly by Trump, but by a "senior member of [the] Trump transition team."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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