Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, upset Jared Kushner’s mother by telling her friends her son would go to jail over his ties to Russia, Kushner said on Wednesday.
“My poor mom, I told her to stop, you know, reading whatever. I said, ‘I promise you, we didn’t do anything wrong, it’s good,’” Kushner told the Lex Fridman Podcast. “But you know, she’d call me [to] say … ‘Our friends on the Upper East Side were talking with Chuck Schumer, who says Jared’s going to jail.’”
Schumer, the senior senator from New York, was Democratic minority leader in the US Senate during the presidency of Donald Trump, Kushner’s father-in-law and White House boss. Since 2021, Schumer has been majority leader.
Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Kushner became his father-in-law’s chief adviser on the campaign trail and then in the White House.
Trump’s first two years in power were dogged by investigations and speculation over his links to Russia and interference by Moscow in the 2016 US election.
Kushner’s interactions with high-placed Russians were placed under the national spotlight. The former Washington Post editor Marty Baron recently said, in a memoir, that Kushner tried to have him fired over the paper’s reporting.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department, secured multiple indictments and issued a detailed report. Though he did not establish collusion between the Trump camp and Moscow, Mueller said he did not exonerate Trump, while also laying out extensive evidence of possible obstruction of justice. Aided by his second attorney general, William Barr, Trump claimed vindication regardless.
Since Trump’s defeat in 2020, Kushner has distanced himself from his father-in-law’s political operation, even as Trump dominates the Republican primary for 2024, despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.
But Kushner, a real-estate and investment magnate in his own right, has continued to draw attention, not least over lucrative links to Saudi investors which critics say are linked to his time as a White House aide.
Fridman is a computer scientist and podcaster. His conversation with Kushner was released on Wednesday.
Of the Russia investigations by Mueller and congressional committees, Kushner said: “I felt like this is one of those things where they’re going to try and catch you and then if you step on the line, they catch with one misrepresentation, they’re gonna try to put you in jail or worse … and so, for me, that was a big concern.”
Of the comments by Schumer which upset Kushner’s mother, Kushner added: “This is, like, a leading senator saying these things.
“And so it was just interesting for me to see how the whole world could believe something and be talking about it that I knew with 1,000% certainty was just not true. And so seeing that play out was very, very hard.”
