Jared Kushner is at the center of a highly classified whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard, an explosive new report has revealed.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law featured in a conversation between two foreign nationals about Iran, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
The phone call between the pair was intercepted by a foreign intelligence agency and handed to the US last May.
The exact contents of the call remain unclear but include claims about Kushner that would be ‘significant if verified,’ sources said.
A senior US official told the Daily Mail that the allegations ‘were nothing more than salacious gossip.’
Kushner’s previously unreported involvement deepens the mystery surrounding the whistleblower complaint which was deemed so sensitive that it was kept in a locked safe for eight months.
The timing could not be more fraught. Kushner, Trump’s Middle East envoy, is currently leading high-stakes negotiations with Iran to end its nuclear enrichment program. The 45-year-old real-estate investor also maintains business interests in the region.
Members of Congress were finally briefed last week about the complaint which accused Director of National Intelligence Gabbard of limiting who could access the intercepted conversation for political reasons.
Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump leave the St Regis Hotel on the wedding day of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sanchez, in Venice on June 27
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks on the phone while standing at the edge of a truck loading bay after the FBI executed a search warrant for the Fulton County Election Hub in Union City, Georgia, January 28
The complaint was made in May as Trump planned Operation Midnight Hammer, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities at the end of June.
Kushner’s name was redacted in the original report made by the National Security Agency (NSA), but those reading it – including the whistleblower – were able to understand that it referred him.
Kushner was discussed as pertained to his influence within the Trump administration, those familiar with the contents of the conversation told the Times.
The intercepted phone call included allegations about Kushner that was not supported by any other evidence, the intelligence sources said.
Officials refused to divulge the contents of the intercept on the grounds it would expose the top secret source of the intelligence.
Intercepts of this type are notoriously difficult for spies to interpret without more concrete information which can be provided by documents or agents on the ground.
The whistleblower believed that the information should be disseminated more broadly but Gabbard – along with the NSA’s top lawyer and the intelligence community’s inspector general – disagreed.
The complaint’s existence was first revealed last week, with the Wall Street Journal likening it to ‘a cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel.’
President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Thursday
A heavily-redacted version of the complaint was reviewed on a ‘read-and-return’ basis by the Gang of Eight last Tuesday – a select bipartisan group of lawmakers who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch.
Inspector General Christopher Fox told lawmakers in a letter approved for public release that the complaint was ‘administratively closed’ by his predecessor in June and no further action was taken.
‘If the same or similar matter came before me today, I would likely determine that the allegations do not meet the statutory definition of “urgent concern,”‘ Fox wrote.
Fox, an ex-Gabbard aide who took over as IG after Trump purged Joe Biden’s watchdogs, briefed Congress after receiving final approval from the DNI.
Fox said in the letter that the complaint was tied up for months while his office sought legal clearance to view the classified complaint.
He cited the ‘complexity of the classification’, a 43-day government shutdown that started in October and leadership changes at DNI.
IG Johnson, a career civil servant, had determined at the time of the initial complaint that the allegation met the legal threshold of ‘urgent concern’ if true.
But three days later, after receiving new information Johnson wrote another memo which concluded the whistleblower’s complaint was not credible.
A spokeswoman for Gabbard last week dismissed the ‘baseless’ complaint and denied stonewalling the whistleblower’s allegations.
DNI spokeswoman Olivia Coleman said: ‘This is a classic case of a politically motivated individual weaponizing their position in the Intelligence Community, submitting a baseless complaint and then burying it in highly classified information to create false intrigue, a manufactured narrative, and conditions which make it substantially more difficult to produce ‘security guidance’ for transmittal to Congress.’
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
