Jared Kushner became the latest member of Donald Trump’s inner circle to publicly break with him on the issue of 2020 election fraud in testimony played by the January 6 committee on Monday.
In video of his testimony, Mr Kushner was asked by an investigator for the panel whether he had ever shared his own personal beliefs about Rudy Giuliani, the president’s former attorney and champion of his falsehoods about the election, with Mr Trump himself.
After an extremely long pause an a sigh, Mr Kushner answered shortly, “I guess...yes.”
Asked by the investigator what he told the president, the former senior White House adviser responded that it was “not the approach I would take, if I was you”.
That makes the second high-ranking White House official, behind his wife Ivanka, to publicly refute Mr Trump’s embrace of Mr Giuliani and the wild conspiracies he and his legal team spread after the 2020 election.
On Monday, committee members painted a picture depicting just how many people in Mr Trump’s close orbit were actively dismissing the false claims of voter and election fraud that Mr Giuliani and others were spreading. Mr Giuliani himself was allegedly inebriated when he advised Mr Trump to declare victory on election night, according to witnesses.
Mr Giuliani, and others like Sidney Powell, spread a wide range of wild, baseless assertions about voting systems, machines used to record votes at precincts, and other issues throughout the fall and winter of 2020. Mr Giuliani would go on to publicly humiliate himself with a bizarre press conference erroneously organised at a landscaping company, and would make provably false claims in a number of interviews and speeches.
Ms Powell’s claims went even further down the conspiracy rabbit hole, leading to her own attorneys defending her in a defamation trial by claiming: “No reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”
Justice Department officials testified on Monday and added that they investigated numerous claims about the election made by Mr Giuliani and Mr Trump, which they all determined to be “false” or unprovable.
