Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As

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Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As West Wing Pressure Mounts

Source: Vanity Fai

On Friday, Reince Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump—and his family. Is Kushner nervous? He has added Charles Harder to his legal team.

by Gabriel Sherman
October 17, 2017 7:49 pm

When Reince Priebus departed from the West Wing in July, after months of rumor and acrimony, he didn’t let the door hit him on the way out. “A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it’s a good time to hit the reset button,” he told CNN. “I’m always going to be a Trump fan.”

But the graceful exit and months of public silence were very far from the end of the story. On Friday, Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who are probing possible Russia collusion and a host of other matters, including obstruction of justice in Trump’s decision to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey.

While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump and his family. “He was champing at the bit to testify,” a Republican familiar with Priebus’s thinking said. Priebus declined to comment to me about what he told Mueller’s lawyers, but his attorney, William Burck, told Politico that his client “was happy to answer all of their questions.”

According to sources familiar with the matter, the person in Trump’s orbit who may have the most to be worried about in Priebus’s testimony is Jared Kushner.

Priebus has knowledge of Kushner’s proximity to the controversial decision to fire Comey during a weekend at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in early May, which, hypothetically, is the lynchpin of an obstruction case against the president and his advisers.

Trump was accompanied for the weekend by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller. At the club, Miller drafted an angry letter to Comey justifying his removal. (White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump to revise the letter, which people who viewed it likened to a “screed.”) The following Monday, after returning to Washington, Trump told other advisers, including Priebus, of the decision to oust Comey during an Oval Office meeting.
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Kushner’s legal team has said that their client complied with federal ethics laws when he met with investors. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, agrees. “At the time that Kushner had them, he was not an official,” Painter told me. But Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chair of the government watchdog group CREW, says Kushner’s real-estate meetings with foreign investors are problematic. “They raise issues under the transition’s own ethics code,” Eisen told me in an e-mail.

“We have a very senior White House adviser whose family is facing an enormous looming liability on 666 Fifth. While he may have divested his personal interest, his family members are at risk, and you can’t divest your gene pool. The situation has given and continues to give him and his family . . . an enormous possible incentive to curry favor with potential investors.”

Read more: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/jared...ure-mounts

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