Jared Kushner dodges questions on Mar-a-Lago raid in Fox interview: ‘I am not familiar’

‘There have been so many things that have been hyperventilated about over the last years that turned out to be nothing’

Jared Kushner dodged questions on the Mar-a-Lago raid during an appearance on Fox & Friends.

The former adviser to ex-President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he was “just as shocked as most people were” by the FBI raid on Mr Trump’s Florida residence earlier this month.

Mr Trump had more than 300 classified documents at the private club, according to The New York Times.

“Why would the former president have that many classified things at Mar-a-Lago?” host Steve Doocy asked Mr Kushner on Tuesday.

“So I’m not familiar with what exactly the contents were,” Mr Kushner said, switching the topic to the aftermath of the 2016 election. “But what I will say from my personal experience is that in the transition, we had a very innocent meeting with the Russian ambassador and then four months later you’re reading that the intel agencies are leaking to The Washington Post that we requested this secret backchannel and then The New York Times and CNN go crazy for a weekend accusing us of treason.”

“And then it turns out, such a thing never really happened,” he added.

“So I just think you have to be very careful with what you read and obviously just wait for the facts to develop,” he added. “But there have been so many things that have been hyperventilated about over the last years that turned out to be nothing.”

Mr Kushner was on Fox News to promote his new memoir Breaking History.

“That’s again why I wrote this book ... I wanted people to really understand what it was like to be living through that when you know you’ve done nothing wrong, you’re there trying to get good things done,” he said.

“People are out there accusing you of all these crazy things and you have to prove that those things didn’t happen,” he claimed.

“Right, and know that they didn’t and almost took you down,” host Brian Kilmeade said. “And knowing that you’re innocent you gave all your time and all those interviews and still had to wonder if the process would work.”

Mr Kushner claimed on Fox that the “relentless attack” on Mr Trump started before he won the 2016 election.

“I think transparency will be the friend of the process,” Mr Kushner said of the investigation into Mr Trump’s handling of classified information.

He said that former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly “didn’t understand that Trump is an entrepreneur, he’s a businessman. He came from an environment of getting results done”.

“Kelly was really more part of the system, and he just thought he knew everything and was not open to dialog, discourse,” he added.