Nicholas Grossman: The thing we should be taking ultra-seriously is Jared Kushner’s—and other members of the Trump administration’s—corruption. That doesn’t mean that we should ignore something from Hunter Biden or anybody else, but the comparison of them . . . is often used as a sort of whataboutism. . . .
Hunter has some degree of sleaziness that kind of reminds me of Roger Clinton, or maybe some other sleazy presidential relatives that have maybe traded on the family name.
And Kushner puts this into sharp relief. . . . He was somebody who, first, could not pass his security clearance applications because of concerning foreign ties. And Trump gave him a top White House position anyway—which is the president’s legal authority to do so. They can give any classified information to anybody at will. That’s within presidential power. So, it’s legal, but it’s really not good for the country. And the way that we saw it was not good for the country is that Kushner became a prominent consumer of U.S. intelligence—of things that didn’t even pertain to foreign policy he was working on—and he ran a sort of shadow foreign policy going around the State Department and the Defense Department.
He met with MBS [Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia], then trying to rise to and consolidate power, and . . . quite possibly gave him some classified U.S. intelligence. Because the next day, after [Kushner and MBS] had stayed up all night together, there was a big purge, a lot of Saudi arrests and consolidation of power and kind of generational turnover within Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. also, in part thanks to Kushner, transferred some nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, that went around Congress and might not be totally legal. It also helped cover up MBS’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist.