Senior White House adviser and son-in-law of Donald Trump reportedly began etching his plans to flee the coop before the former president had officially even lost his bid for reelection in 2020, according to The New York Times.
“We’re moving to Miami,” Mr Kushner reportedly told his wife Ivanka Trump, also a senior adviser in her father’s administration, just a little more than 24 hours after the last polls had closed in Alaska at midnight on 4 November.
The revelation comes from reporting collected by New York Times reporter Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser for their new book, titled The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
The book, set to be released by Doubleday on 20 September, is based on conversations and interviews the reporters conducted with people who were close to both Mr Kushner and his father-in-law, most of whom requested anonymity during their meetings.
Sources interviewed by the reporters for the book paint a picture of the one-term president’s most trusted advisers relaying how within 24 hours of the polls closing, and at least a couple of days before US President Joe Biden would officially be declared the winner, they began to see the writing on the wall.
“No matter how vociferously Mr Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen, according to people close to them,” The New York Times reported.
In the days following the election, the Trump administration filed lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Philadelphia in trumped up legal battles largely championed by the former president’s trusted ally Rudy Giuliani.
According to sources who Mr Kushner confided in, The Times reports that the former president’s son-in-law approached him and informed him that he would not be involved in his attempt to thwart the election results if Mr Giuliani was leading the charge.
Though it’s still unclear what exactly Mr Kushner knew in the days leading up to the violent insurrection at the Capitol, a conversation between him and Senator Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff sheds new light on how the White House adviser viewed the results of what conspiracy theorists were by then labelling a “stolen” election.
“We’ll get through it, bear with us,” Mr Kushner told Josh Holmes, the former chief of staff for the Kentucky senator, hoping he’d pass the message along to his boss.
“We’ve got a couple of challenges that have some merit, we’ll see how they go, but there’s a pretty good chance we come up short,” The Times reported Mr Kushner said, while adding that the former adviser had suggested that once the Electoral Committee voted on the results on 14 December, the outgoing president would hopefully come to terms with his defeat.
The Independent reached out to Mr Kushner for comment but did not hear back before publication.
Both Ms Trump and Mr Kushner appeared remotely before the January 6 committee last month, committee sources revealed, and, like her husband, she provided the information by personal choice as neither was subpoenaed.
Though the couple isn’t scheduled to appear in person for the blockbuster hearings starting this week, The Washington Post reported that the recorded testimonies provided by the pair to the panel, both of which reportedly lasted for “hours”, may be featured in the public arena.
“Everybody will pay attention when Jared and Ivanka talk on video. It doesn’t matter how damning the presentations are,” a person close to the investigation told The Post.
The committee, the news outlet noted, has yet to make a final decision, but people familiar with the committee have indicated that if it were to be broadcast, it would likely include snippets from Ms Trump’s account of her father’s action in the West Wing on January 6.
Ms Trump’s role in the White House has been of particular interest to the panel for months and relaying what she and her husband testified to during their private interview with House members could help fill in the blanks around what exactly Mr Trump was doing, saying, and thinking as insurrectionists descended on the Capitol.
According to reporting gathered by The Times and other media outlets, Ms Trump did attempt to convince her father to intervene on at least two occasions over the course of the January 6 attack.
For his part, Mr Trump did release a video message to his millions of followers on Twitter at approximately 4.15pm, but in that message he continued to repeat the same lies about the so-called “stolen” 2020 election that provoked their anger in the first place.
The first public hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol riot is set to air on primetime at 8pm on Thursday 9 June and on 23 June. In between those two hearings, the committee will conduct additional public sessions at 10am on 13 June, 15 June, 16 June, and 21 June.
The hearings are expected to outline how Donald Trump and some of his associates violated the law as they tried to overturn the 2020 election, according to reports.
