"I'm sorry,” Kushner replied, “which email are you talking about?"

There’s not a zero chance that Kushner knew exactly which email Swan was asking about, just as there’s not a zero chance that the sun will suddenly vanish at noon on Wednesday. Maybe Kushner has so effectively externalized questions about the Trump campaign and Russian interference that he has only limited recollection of even the most-talked-about aspects of that issue, like this particular email chain. Or perhaps Kushner was deploying a tactic with which we’re all familiar: trying to downplay the importance of something by feigning ignorance about it.

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"Ah, the email from, uh, Rob Goldstone,” Swan replied, identifying the music promoter who had initially reached out to Donald Trump Jr. with the request for a meeting on behalf of his client, a Russian developer and pop star named Emin Agalarov. The email we know Kushner received wasn’t from Goldstone but, instead, had been forwarded by Trump Jr.

"FW: Russia — Clinton — private and confidential,” the email subject line read. “Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices,” Trump Jr. wrote, with the rest of the email chain following beneath it. That included Goldstone's initial pitch for the meeting, which was “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton]” that was “part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

“Let me put you in my shoes at that time,” Kushner said to Swan, full memory of the moment returning in a flash. “Okay, I’m running three companies, I’m helping run the campaign. I get an email that says show up at 4 instead of 3 to a meeting that I had been told about earlier that I didn’t know what the hell it was about.”

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This is broadly in line with what Kushner said in his prepared testimony offered to Congress in July 2017.

“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 p.m.,” he said. “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 p.m. That email was on top of a long back and forth that I did not read at the time.”

Trump Jr., for his part, told congressional investigators that he had “asked Jared and Paul [Manafort, then the campaign chairman] if they could attend but told them none of the substance or who was going to be there since I did not know myself. Because we were in the same building Paul, Jared and I would routinely invite one another to attend meetings at a moment’s notice."

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At another point in Trump Jr.'s testimony, he said that he remembered having told Manafort and Kushner about the meeting over email only. Presented with a record of a series of calls he made June 7, Trump Jr. claimed not to have remembered making them — though he spoke to both Manafort and Kushner in the 45 minutes before emailing Goldstone to confirm that original 3 p.m. meeting time. We’re asked to believe that Trump Jr. either called both of his colleagues to invite them to a meeting without explaining what his understanding of the meeting was or that he called them to talk about something else entirely at a remarkably coincidental moment.

The next morning, Kushner emailed his assistant to set up the meeting — before receiving the email from Trump Jr. When the time was changed, Kushner forwarded the message to his assistant to adjust his calendar.

The report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III includes a reference to an interview with Rick Gates, the campaign’s number two at the time of the meeting. Gates told Mueller’s team that “in the days before June 9, 2016, Trump Jr. announced at a regular morning meeting of senior campaign staff and Trump family members that he had a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation.” This information, Gates said, was coming to Trump Jr. from “a group in Kyrgyzstan and that he was introduced to the group by a friend.” Agalarov’s development company, Mueller’s report says, “has done substantial work in Kyrgyzstan.” Kushner attended that meeting at some point.

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Kushner described to Swan the meeting itself, again in line with what he has said in the past. Instead of being offered dirt on Clinton, as promised, the meeting instead apparently focused heavily on the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Barack Obama that imposed sanctions on a number of prominent Russian officials.

“I show up at the meeting,” Kushner said. “I stay for 15 minutes. It’s a, it’s a clown show. . . . I text my assistant and say can you give me a call and get me the hell out of here. This is a waste of time. I leave. I never would have thought about that meeting again.”

One has to wonder why Kushner was so frustrated with the meeting if he had no expectations for it. He arrived late, according to various attendees, and quickly expressed his frustration with the information that was being offered. In a context in which Kushner knew about what was being offered, that frustration makes sense. In a scenario in which he didn't know what it was supposed to be about, that reaction seems a little less justified.

When House Intelligence Committee Republicans released a summary of their investigation last year, they implied that both Kushner and Manafort had known about the subject of the meeting in advance, as Just Security noted at the time.

Why does this matter now? Swan’s question was centered on the fact that the Trump campaign had received this offer of information from a hostile foreign power without informing U.S. authorities. Kushner’s response was entirely predicated on the idea that he didn’t know in advance what the point of the meeting was.

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"Does it not set off at least some alarm bell when you see an email saying that the Russian government wants to help the campaign?” Swan asked.

“Like I said, the email that I got on my iPhone at the time basically said show up at 4,” Kushner replied. “I didn’t scroll down; I never would’ve thought about that email.”

"It had Russia in the subject line,” Swan said.

“Again, I would get about 250 emails a day, and so I literally saw show up at 4,” Kushner said. “I showed up at 4.”

The evidence above suggests that this is a misrepresentation of what happened. But there's a reason for it.

Swan pressed Kushner to, essentially, admit that taking the meeting had been a mistake.

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"Would you call the FBI if it happened again?” Swan asked.

“I don’t know,” Kushner responded. “It’s hard to do hypotheticals, but the reality is, is that we were not given anything that was salacious.”

The implication is that the meeting was fine to take — even with the predication that Russia was trying to aid the campaign — because what was offered wasn’t useful.