Jared Kushner, President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law, says he did not engineer the ouster of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie from the transition team.
Speaking to Forbes’ Steven Bertoni in his first national interview since he helped run the campaign, Kushner said he worked well with Christie despite the fact that, as a U.S. attorney, Christie jailed Kushner’s father in 2005.
“Six months ago Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together,” Kushner told Forbes. “The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don’t talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people.”
The husband of Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka is one of the president-elect’s closest advisers and one of the key players on his presidential campaign.
Kushner, who rarely speaks publicly, said he became a trusted liaison to Trump because people felt confident he would not leak details to the media.
“People were being told in Washington that if they did any work for the Trump campaign, they would never be able to work in Republican politics again,” Kushner told Forbes. “I hired a great tax-policy expert who joined under two conditions: We couldn’t tell anybody he worked for the campaign, and he was going to charge us double.”
Bertoni noted that, when he visited campaign headquarters in Trump Tower a year ago, there was no furniture, computers or staff. Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, and Hope Hicks, his longtime spokeswoman, were the only two staffers there. It was Kushner who built the campaign in Nov. 2015 from a skeleton operation into a bustling political team.
Kushner said Trump was careful about the way his campaign spent its relatively modest war chest.
“Donald kept saying, ‘I don’t want people getting rich off the campaign, and I want to make sure we are watching every dollar just like we would do in business,'” Kushner said.
Bertoni described Trump as a “Luddite” whose knowledge of technology is shallow. The president-elect relies on newspapers and television programs to get his news.
Kushner is responsible for the digital campaign that targeted voters on Facebook with a simple, powerful message that helped deliver Trump the White House.
