So, at least as best we can tell from the prepared statement he released prior to his being questioned by congressional staffers, behind closed doors, the Princeling has managed to throw the Dauphin under the oxcart fairly convincingly. I love this bunch. They would sell their siblings for a zoning variance. This, by far, is my favorite passage from the Jared Kushner Declaration of Guileless Stupidity. From CNN:

In June 2016, my brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. asked if I was free to stop by a meeting on June 9 at 3:00 p.m. The campaign was headquartered in the same building as his office in Trump Tower, and it was common for each of us to swing by the other's meetings when requested. He eventually sent me his own email changing the time of the meeting to 4:00 p.m. That email was on top of a long back and forth that I did not read at the time. As I did with most emails when I was working remotely, I quickly reviewed on my iPhone the relevant message that the meeting would occur at 4:00 PM at his office. Documents confirm my memory that this was calendared as "Meeting: Don Jr.| Jared Kushner." No one else was mentioned.

I arrived at the meeting a little late. When I got there, the person who has since been identified as a Russian attorney was talking about the issue of a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children. I had no idea why that topic was being raised and quickly determined that my time was not well-spent at this meeting. Reviewing emails recently confirmed my memory that the meeting was a waste of our time and that, in looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work, 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." 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. I did not read or recall this email exchange before it was shown to me by my lawyers when reviewing documents for submission to the committees. No part of the meeting I attended included anything about the campaign, there was no follow up to the meeting that I am aware of, I do not recall how many people were there (or their names), and I have no knowledge of any documents being offered or accepted. Finally, after seeing the email, I disclosed this meeting prior to it being reported in the press on a supplement to my security clearance form, even if that was not required as meeting the definitions of the form.

There's so much ducking and dodging and weaving and blame-shifting in that one section that you can see how young Jared became so favored within the Trump inner circle. The ability to cram such sheer connivance into every sentence must have been what first attracted Trump to his son-in-law. I suspect that the president* is secretly chuckling at how deftly Kushner sold out the president*'s own flesh and blood. In fact, I suspect Pops positively reveled in what Kushner did. Suck it up, Junior. Deal or die. Being a Trump spalpeen must be like being born into a family of Sand Tiger Sharks, where you have to cannibalize your siblings in order to survive.

And so, mad props to The Guardian for dropping this little pearl into the general festering Monday morning. It remains all about the money, and the symbiosis between the needs of the Trump ego and the alleged desire of Russian gangstercrats to clean money, a symbiosis that has succeeded beyond everyone's wildest dreams.

A Guardian investigation has established a series of overlapping ties and relationships involving alleged Russian money laundering, New York real estate deals and members of Trump's inner circle. They include a 2015 sale of part of the old New York Times building in Manhattan involving Kushner and a billionaire real estate tycoon and diamond mogul, Lev Leviev. Leviev, a global tycoon known as the "king of diamonds", was a business partner of the Russian-owned company Prevezon Holdings that was at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched in New York. Under the leadership of US attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump in March, prosecutors pursued Prevezon for allegedly attempting to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury. The scam had been uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who died in 2009 in a Moscow jail in suspicious circumstances. US sanctions against Russia imposed after Magnitsky's death were a central topic of conversation at the notorious Trump Tower meeting last June between Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

And, at the end of the day, Kushner emerged on the White House grounds to remind us all what an epic democratic miracle his father-in-law's campaign had been, and that anybody who says otherwise is disrespectful to the 65 million suckers who fell for the greatest con of all. This whole administration is a wilderness of straight lines, even though very few of the jokes are funny.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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