As the controversy over the murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi raged on Monday, Jared Kushner, who is arguably the American official closest to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was being afforded gentle treatment at an invitation-only CNN event in New York. “You have, like, the dopest job in the world, the secretary of everything,” Kushner’s interlocutor, Van Jones, a social activist and a former Obama Administration official who has his own show on CNN, began. “You’re a business guy; how did you wind up in this position?” Later in the televised interview, Jones reminded the audience of business leaders and advertisers that Nikki Haley, the former U.N. Ambassador, had referred to Kushner as the Trump Administration’s “hidden genius,” and he also gushed about Kushner’s ability to use the “cell-phone approach” rather than his father-in-law’s “megaphone approach” to work across the aisle on a prison-reform bill.

Jones’s softball questions brought down upon him a predictable outpouring of venom on social media. But it was in keeping with the normal ethos of corporate “thought leader” conferences, where the trick is to make the attendees feel like they have been granted temporary access to an élite circle of super-smart insiders. Despite the obvious shortcomings of the interview, however, it wasn’t entirely unenlightening. In a rare public appearance, Kushner revealed himself as a soft-spoken but supremely self-confident figure, a person who clearly doesn’t consider his thin résumé to be a handicap in tackling some of the world’s thorniest issues. And, after about seventeen minutes, Jones finally got down to business, asking him whether he believed the Saudi account of what happened to Khashoggi.

“We’re obviously getting as many facts as we can from the different places, and then we’ll determine which facts are credible,” Kushner said. That was flannel, but then things got kind of interesting, as Kushner provided what appeared to be a strategic rationale for going soft on the crown prince or, at least, giving him some more time to come up with a less risible cover story for Khashoggi’s murder: “I’ll also say that we have to be able to work with our allies,” Kushner said. “And Saudi Arabia has been a very strong ally in terms of pushing back against Iran’s aggression, which is funding a lot of terror in the region, whether it’s the Houthis in Yemen or Hezbollah and Hamas, we have a lot of terrorism in the region. The Middle East is a rough place. It’s been a rough place for a very long time, and we have to be able to pursue our strategic objectives, but we also have to deal with what obviously seems to be a terrible situation.”

If this was pragmatism, it was pragmatism colored by a very particular and one-sided view of the world. Yes, the Middle East is a troubled place, but it is also a complicated one. Until pretty recently, Iranian-backed militias were fighting inside Iraq alongside U.S.-backed forces in the war against ISIS. In casting the overriding issue in the Middle East as Iranian aggression, Kushner was promulgating a simplistic, ahistorical line favored by the Saudi monarchy, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, and many of the same Washington foreign-policy “experts” who dragged the United States into the war in Iraq.

To portray the many Saudi atrocities in Yemen as “pushing back against Iran’s aggression” isn’t merely misleading: it is outrageous. Jones didn’t pick up on that one. But he did ask Kushner whether he trusted the Saudis to investigate themselves, given that the crown prince “is like the prime suspect who is also the prime investigator.” Kushner confirmed that he had spoken personally to the prince, advising him to be “fully transparent,” because “this is a very, very serious accusation, and a very serious situation.” However, Kushner then declined to take Jones’s invitation to say that Khashoggi’s murder had shaken his confidence in his Saudi partner. Instead, he returned to his previous theme, saying Saudi Arabia is a “critical partner” in the fight against terrorism, praising some of the domestic reforms the crown prince had introduced, and concluding by saying, “We are hopeful we can keep pushing forward with a lot of the initiatives that further American interests and push back against Iran’s aggression, and we are going to stay focussed on that.”

Before moving on to other subjects, Jones raised another thorny question: To what extent, if any, is the Trump Administration culpable, at least by association, for the crown prince’s brutal policies, including what happened to Khashoggi? Jones didn’t phrase his question precisely in this way. Instead, he asked Kushner how he reacted to people who “are mad at Jared Kushner,” because they believe that the crown prince killed Khashoggi and “it’s your fault because if you hadn’t been friends with him he wouldn’t have felt like he could get away with it.”

Kushner quickly brushed the question aside, saying, “Look, I don’t respond to the critics.” But, of course, he had already responded in his previous statements, and in what he had chosen not to say. Without prejudicing the outcomes of the various investigations into Khashoggi’s death, Kushner, a former newspaper proprietor, after all, could surely have asserted the principle that the United States shouldn’t embrace dictators who order the killing of journalists employed by American newspapers. He didn’t do it, and the omission spoke volumes.