President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is one of Trump’s top advisors, said that the media was obsessed with the “conspiracy theory” that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
Kushner noted that most media outlets got the election wrong, with a heavy majority predicting Hillary Clinton was going to beat Trump.
Then, the media got another big story wrong, the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into a theory that relied heavily on unsubstantiated rumors compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Clinton.
“Well, look, the media got the election wrong. They thought for sure Hillary Clinton was going to win,” Kushner told Fox News on April 1.
“They didn’t see what we were seeing out in the country and the field. Their data was wrong, their analysis was wrong and then it happened. Not a single person got fired, not a single person apologized … I think people sometimes let their hatred for Trump overtake their rational ability to kind of look at things objectively.”
Kushner said that the focus on the Russian-Trump collusion theory has enabled the administration to get things done.
“On the other hand, you could look at it and say that because the media’s been so distracted with Russia, Russia, Russia and all of these crazy conspiracy theories, we’ve been able to operate underneath that level and just be really effective,” Kushner told Fox host Laura Ingraham on her show “The Ingraham Angle.”
Kushner called out CNN for its slew of fake stories about Trump and the administration. Among the most egregious examples: three CNN reporters resigned in June 2017 after a story they reported that cited a single anonymous source was retracted; a purported bombshell regarding Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks based on two anonymous sources was corrected in December 2017 because the date was wrong; and earlier this year, a CNN report making a big claim about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was later corrected after the story was undercut.
“The number of times that CNN wrote things about me that I would then call and say, ‘That’s not true,’ [and] they would say, ‘Well, we have a source,'” Kushner said. “It is what it is … I just hope that going forward, everyone will look at it and maybe have a little bit of cooler heads and focus that we’re all on the same team. We’re all here for America.”
Kushner’s comments came after Mueller submitted his report on alleged collusion to Attorney General William Barr, telling Barr that his team couldn’t establish collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Barr submitted a four-page summary of the most pertinent findings in the report and said he expects to release the full report, with necessary redactions, by mid-April at the latest.
The report was almost 400 pages plus tables and appendices. The redactions will be related to sensitive material that by law cannot be made public and material that intelligence officials identify as potentially compromising to sources and methods.
