Here Is What Jared Kushner Will Tell Congress Today

The president’s son-in-law said he had four contacts with Russian officials, but rejected claims of collusion.

Olivier Douliery/ZUMA

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Ahead of his closed-door interview with the Senate intelligence committee Monday, Jared Kushner released a statement confirming four contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he denied any accusations of collusion or wrongdoing. 

“I had no improper contacts,” the president’s son-in-law wrote in his statement. “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government.ā€ 

One of the contacts was a previously undisclosed April 2016 meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which Kushner claimed lasted “less than a minute.” He also downplayed the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-tied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, arranged by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., calling it a “waste of time.” 

“I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting,'” Kushner said. “I had not met the attorney before the meeting nor spoken with her since. I thought nothing more of this short meeting until it came to my attention recently.”

Kushner has come under fire for initially failing to disclose his contacts with Russian officials on his application for a security clearance, with some Democrats calling for Kushner’s clearance to be revoked. And he also failed to provide a complete picture of his assets and liabilities on his financial disclosure forms. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kushner had failed to disclose at least $1 billion in loans to companies and properties he partly owned. 

Read his full statement below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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