President Donald Trump's son-in-law senior adviser Jared Kushner deferred questions about whether his father-in-law's birtherism attacks against former President Barack Obama were racist, insisting that he "wasn't involved" in the controversy.
"Look, I wasn't really involved in that," Kushner, who married Trump's daughter, Ivanka, in 2000, said during an interview on "Axios on HBO," after reporter Jonathan Swan pressed him on the birtherism question and asked him "was birtherism racist?"
“I know you weren’t," Swan responded, asking Kushner again, “Was it racist?"
“Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that,” Kushner repeated.
And when Swan asked him yet again and if he thought Trump's behavior was racist, Kushner replied that he knows "who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So again, I was not involved in that," and added, "that was a long time ago.”
Trump famously pushed Obama for five years for proof whether he was born in the United States, finally abandoning the idea in September 2016 when he was running for president, notes The Washington Post.
During the wide-ranging interview, which first aired on Sunday, Kushner defended Trump while not taking responsibility for all of his politics.
"I was not the person who was elected," said Kushner. "I'm here to enforce his positions."
Kushner also on Sunday questioned whether Palestinians are able to govern themselves.
"The hope is that over time, they can become capable of governing,” said Kushner, his father-in-law's Middle East czar and one of the architects of the president's upcoming plan to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict."
His comments came after The Washington Post reported Sunday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had told Jewish leaders during a closed-door meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that Kushner's plan "may be rejected."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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