White House senior advisor Jared Kushner is interviewed on “Axios on HBO.” Image by HBO/YouTube

By Aiden Pink June 3, 2019

White House senior advisor Jared Kushner repeatedly refused to say in an interview with Axios aired on HBO Sunday whether his father-in-law President Trump’s conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s heritage were racist.

After Kushner told interviewer Jonathan Swan that he had never seen Trump say or do anything racist, Swan asked, “Was birtherism racist?”

“Look, I wasn’t really involved in that,” Kushner responded.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

“I know you weren’t,” Swan said. “Was it racist?”

“Like, I said, I wasn’t involved in that,” Kushner said.

Pressed a third time if it was racist, Kushner responded, “Look, I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So again, I was not involved in that.”

When asked if he wished Trump hadn’t promoted those theories, Kushner echoed himself: “Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.”’

In the years leading up to his 2016 presidential run, Trump was one of the leading proponents of the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States.

Jared Kushner deflects when asked if he disapproves of Donald Trump’s promotion of birtherism, saying he wasn’t involved with it. @DCTVny @HBODocs pic.twitter.com/YTYaDCJJVa

— Axios (@axios) June 2, 2019

In another segment of the interview, Kushner, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, said that his family’s rescue from “the precipice of life and death” showed “how great this country is.” But he defended the administration’s decision to lower the cap on refugee entries by 72%. “You can’t have all of them come into your country,” he said.

Kushner also discussed his long-gestating peace plan, saying that Palestinians “should have self-determination” but not going into detail about what that would look like. When asked whether Palestinians would be free from Israeli governmental or military control, Kushner responded, “I think that it’s a high bar.”

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter at @aidenpink.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount