Jared Kushner may have finally convinced the White House to give him a permanent security clearance, but his lawyer still couldn't say Wednesday what Kushner’s status was in the Russia probe after news broke that he sat for a second interview with investigators last month.
In Kushner's six-plus hours in the chair, his finances and businesses reportedly didn't come up. Here's what did, according to CNN:
Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators questioned White House senior adviser Jared Kushner about potential Russian collusion, his contacts with foreign nationals and potential obstruction issues, including the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Kushner's lawyer said Wednesday.
MSNBC's Ari Melber read a statement from Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell stating that the kinds of questions Mueller's team asked reflected that "they understand Kushner is a witness to these events, but I don't use those terms."
Lowell’s apparent effort to thread the needle of implying Kushner is a “witness” (as opposed to being a subject or a target of the investigation) without technically stating it left Melber's legal panel with the impression Kushner certainly wasn't out of the woods yet.
"I read that to say that [Lowell] asked them, 'Can you assure me that he's not a subject or a target?' And they said, 'No, I can't.' That's the only way to read that," observed Steven Brill, American Lawyer magazine founder. "If [Lowell] had been told he was just a witness, he would have said, 'I was told he's just a witness.'"
Of course, the other possibility is that Kushner has flipped and struck a deal with the special counsel. We simply have no way of knowing since his lawyer surely doesn't want to say.
Whatever the case, Kushner's first interview only lasted three hours while his second was double the trouble. Investigators clearly had more questions rather than fewer.