Jared Kushner
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Jared Kushner is Donald Trump's son-in-law and was a senior adviser in the first Trump administration. In John Kiriakou's account he is the first person inside the White House orbit to open a channel on Kiriakou's pardon, and the first to close it.

How the channel opened

The route ran through television. Tucker Carlson put Kiriakou on air eleven times, telling him before each appearance to "look directly into the camera and speak directly to the president." One night the president was watching. Trump told Kushner to look at the clip and tell him what he thought. In an earlier telling Kiriakou puts the instruction more simply: Trump "called Jared Kushner and said there's a guy John Kiriakou on Fox News, you should get in touch with him."

The next day Kushner's attorney, Abbe Lowell, telephoned Kiriakou's attorney Bruce Fein and said: "My client wants to see your client." Kiriakou's reaction was undisguised, "I was so excited, I wanted to jump up and down."

The meeting

Kiriakou and Fein went to Lowell's office and met Lowell and Kushner there. Kiriakou's description of the man across the table is consistent across tellings and unflattering: "Kushner was very cold, he was very stiff, and not at all friendly, amiable, open." Summarising it years later: "he was not helpful, not helpful at all, and not even nice about it."

The meeting reduced to two sentences. Kushner asked "what do you want." Kiriakou answered "I want a presidential pardon."

The one-page paper

What Kushner wanted in return was a document with a fixed shape: "give me one page, I want three quarters of the page explaining your situation, your case, your background; the other quarter of the page I want you to tell me how a pardon for you helps Donald Trump get reelected."

Fein wrote the page. "We sent it to Kushner and never heard anything again." With the Kushner track dead, Kiriakou asked a friend what to do next and was told to get to Rudy Giuliani, the referral that produced the $2 million solicitation at the Trump International Hotel.

What the episode illustrates

Kiriakou uses the meeting as evidence that the formal clemency machinery had been bypassed rather than reformed. Asked how it compared with the ordinary process, his answer was that in the ordinary process "you wouldn't even know who Jared Kushner was."

His diagnosis of why the side door existed at all is that the front door does not work: the Office of the US Pardon Attorney "has seen it as its role to deny people's applications for pardons," and a system fielding ten thousand applications a year while recommending five or ten "is broken." Trump, on this account, recognised that it was broken and that he had unfettered authority to take care of his friends, "he did it in a really ugly, unethical way, but he did it," because for his associates "there was no way around it. They weren't going to go to the website of the pardon attorney and fill out a form. They were going to go directly to the president."

The reform he proposes follows from it: a bipartisan effort to move the pardon attorney out of the Justice Department and into the White House, independent of both the prosecutors and the attorney general.

Gaza

Kiriakou also cites Kushner's public remarks about Gaza's beachfront as evidence of intent rather than gaffe, comments "about beachfront property in Gaza making an incredible opportunity for a beachfront resort. That wasn't an accident. That was the plan."

Named as a source for the Iran war

During the 2026 Iran war, John Kiriakou recounted a presidential press appearance in which Donald Trump named Kushner, along with Steve Witkoff, as having supplied the information on which he decided to enter the war.

Kiriakou's response turned on Kushner's standing rather than the intelligence: "where does Jared Kushner come into this anyway? He doesn't hold an official position within the government." To say publicly that the country went to war on his assessment was, in Kiriakou's framing, an admission rather than a defence.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou pardon request
- Giuliani Pardon Solicitation
- Bruce Fein
- Donald Trump
