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Jared Kushner claimed Tuesday morning that he is ‘not familiar’ with the contents of the 300 classified documents the FBI took during its raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Former President Trump took 300 classified documents with him when he left the White House, according to the New York Times, and the scale of the former president’s cache of files is what pushed the Justice Department to launch their unprecedented raid on August 8.
‘Why would the president have that many classified things at Mar-a-Lago?’ Fox News’ Steve Doocy asked Kushner on Fox and Friends Tuesday.
‘So I’m not exactly familiar with what the contents were,’ the former president’s son-in-law said.
‘What I’ll just say is from my personal experience is that we had a very innocent meeting with the Russian ambassador then four months later you’re reading that the intel agencies are leaking to the Washington Post … that we’re requesting this secret back channel, then it turns out that never happened Kushner said.
He was referencing a December 2016 meeting Trump had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, ahead of taking office. In May 2017 the Washington Post reported, citing U.S. intelligence officials, that the ambassador told Trump the Kremlin wanted a secret back channel with the Trump transition team.
Jared Kushner claimed Tuesday morning that he is ‘not familiar’ with the contents of the 300 classified documents the FBI took during its raid of Mar-a-Lago
‘There’s so many things that have been hyperventilated about over the last years that have turned out to be nothing,’ Kushner said Tuesday
In the August search of Mar-a-Lago, FBI agents removed 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified
A member of the Secret Service is seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on August 9, 2022.
‘There’s so many things that have been hyperventilated about over the last years that have turned out to be nothing,’ Kushner said Tuesday. He claimed that the raid had caused Americans to lose ‘faith in the fairness of the legal system.’
And as Kushner has spent the last few days making Fox News appearances to defend his father-in-law, others have suggested he could be the one who tipped off the FBI about the whereabouts of the documents. Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a longtime critic of her uncle, suggested it could be Kushner and so did Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen.
‘We need to start with who would have access to this stuff. I don’t think Mark Meadows would have access to it,’ Mary Trump said in a radio interview earlier this month.
‘I think we need to look very hard at why Jared got $2 billion,’ she said, referring to an investment into Kushner’s firm by a state-owned Saudi Arabian fund.’We need to look very hard at why he has been so quiet for so many months now.’
‘And we need to think about who could also be implicated in this that would need as big a play as turning Donald in in order to get out of trouble, or at least to mitigate the trouble they’re in,’ she continued. ‘It sounds like somebody in Jared’s position. I’m not saying it’s Jared, but it could be.’
‘It’s definitely a member of his inner circle,’ Cohen told Insider, adding he ‘would not be surprised to find out it is Jared or one of his children.’
In the August search, FBI agents removed 26 boxes, including 11 sets of material marked as classified.
One set had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
It remains unclear what the classified material discussed. A receipt made public following the August search said there were classified documents relating to French president Emmanuel Macron and documents detailing the clemency Trump granted to his longtime backer Roger Stone.
The paper reported the 15 boxes Trump handed over in January – nearly a year after he left office – included documents from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.
The documents detailed multiple topics of national security interest, a source told the paper.
Trump reportedly went through the boxes himself in late 2021 before handing them over.
On Monday, Trump sued the federal government and asked for a special master to determine what materials seized from Mar-a-Lago can be used in the investigation into him.
The former president filed the lawsuit in the US District Court in the Southern District of Florida saying his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated by the seizure of certain documents, including two of his passports.
It comes as a magistrate in Florida prepares to decide whether to unseal the search affidavit that led to the raid earlier this month.
‘Politics cannot be allowed to impact the administration of justice. President Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run’, the lawsuit reads.
It adds that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was ‘shockingly aggressive’ and the move showed ‘no understanding of the distress that it would cause most Americans.’
‘Like all citizens, (Trump) is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Property seized in violation of his constitutional rights musty be returned forthwith’.
The lawsuit pivots between constitutional arguments about rights to protection from unreasonable search and seizure to some of Trump’s long-held grievances.
‘The Government has long treated President Donald J. Trump Unfairly,’ reads one subject heading in the lawsuit.
It says the DOJ and FBI have treated Trump ‘differently than any other citizen.’
‘Two years of noisy ‘Russian collusion’ investigations led to a Special Counsel’s finding of biased FBI agents and officials,’ the suit says.
It says ‘text exchanges between the lead agent (Peter Stzrok) and his paramour (Lisa Page) reflect their complete disdain and bias against President Trump and his supporters, while they were entrusted with probing the farcical Russian collusion claims.
That is a reference to the FBI ‘lovers,’ lawyers who worked on the probe who were found to have exchanged anti-Trump tweets.
A background preface leading up the extraordinary raid describes the move by Trump and former first lady Melania Trump to Mar-a-Lago after the 2020 election.