Anatomy of a Smear

This week, a story caught fire. It accused Jared Kushner, former Senior Advisor to President Trump, of advocating for the dislocation of Palestinians in Gaza and the seizing of their “valuable” water-front land, presumably to be exploited by Israelis, and possibly some entity with which he is associated.

The accusation is almost unspeakably ugly. It’s also completely false.

This is the story of exactly what really happened. It reveals the twisted way even the most obnoxious falsehood makes it into the pages of respectable titles that presumably have journalistic standards, not to mention umbrella policies subject to libel judgments.

I am not an objective observer here. Jared Kushner is my close friend of almost 25 years, and I have worked for him and with him in different capacities over that time. However, I will support everything I assert here with facts and receipts that can be independently verified, so the reader can see exactly how this unfolded.

In late November 2023, Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, reached out to Kushner to “invite him to speak at the university on the current crisis in Gaza and his experiences as a Middle East peacemaker.” Masoud would conduct a “fireside chat” interview of Kushner as part of his Middle East Initiative at Harvard.

As the architect of the Abraham Accords, Jared unsurprisingly received hundreds of invitations to speak and share his insights about the region after the attacks of Oct. 7 and the outbreak of war. He mostly turned them down. Jared has preferred to limit his appearances in the media and at public events because that suits both his personality and his strategic goals. On the other hand, he sat for several hours for the Lex Fridman podcast and another couple for the All In podcast, and wrote an entire book about his time in Trump‘s White House, so if people want to know what he thinks, there is plenty of material available.

And yet, when the Harvard invitation arrived, it was viewed by Jared and his advisors (including me) as a meaningful opportunity. Harvard is Jared’s alma mater, for one thing. More importantly, the university had become the site of high-profile anti-Semitic incidents, including the physical intimidation of Jewish students, as well as a symbol of the unwillingness of people, even in the very epitome of intellectual excellence, to hear from those who might offer a differing point of view.

Jared and his staff spoke to the professor, including about security arrangements, which were not a trivial matter given the intense emotion surrounding this topic. Jared eventually accepted the invitation. Jared prepared hard, took it seriously, flew up to Boston, and met with a packed crowd in Cambridge. Other than a few manageable protesters, the audience was completely receptive to his message, respectfully listened to his remarks, and even submitted a few tough-but-fair questions. We all watched the video and thought Jared had performed beautifully, and were pleased to hear from the professor that the event was considered a smash success.

The Harvard Gazette covered the appearance with an extensive and fair article a couple days later:

As he planned the Kennedy School’s spring semester Middle East Dialogues, Tarek Masoud, director of the School’s Middle East Initiative, had in mind people with “varied and vital perspectives” on how to bring prosperity and peace to the region. First on his list was Jared Kushner ’03.

“That’s because he was the architect of the Abraham Accords, which I personally believe to be one of the most significant developments in the Middle East in recent memory,” Masoud, also the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, said Thursday before a conversation with Kushner at the Kennedy School.

“And he’s just generally a dealmaker par excellence. And if there’s any part of the world that I think needs really excellent dealmakers right now, I think it’s the Middle East.”

Jared’s appearance occurred on February 15. Remember that date. And it’s easy to remember because Harvard publicly posted the entire interview on YouTube, and its very first sentence of description reads “On February 15th, Middle East Initiative Faculty Chair Professor Tarek Masoud and former senior advisor to President Trump Jared Kushner discussed American policy on Israel/Palestine, the ongoing events in Gaza, and more.”

On Tuesday, March 19—32 days after this event—there suddenly appeared the first whiff of controversy.

The Daily Beast posted a story headlined “Kushner Pitches Moving Palestinians Out of Gaza’s ‘Valuable’ Waterfront.” Written by Breaking News Intern Edith Olmsted, she writes of Jared:

“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable to—if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said, without clarifying who exactly would profit off such a project. He added that the area could’ve had great potential if “all the money” in Gaza had gone into “education and innovation,” instead of its tunnel network and munitions.

To anyone who watches the video instead of just the dozen words she quotes, it is 100% clear that Jared was lamenting that the billions in aid and economic opportunities over decades hasn’t benefitted the Palestinian people and instead has been spent on, as he said, tunnels and munitions.

But in addition to selectively quoting him and distorting the context, Ms. Olmsted also deceives about the timeline.

She writes, “Kushner’s statement comes on the heels of warnings from the United Nations that the people of Gaza are facing an “imminent famine” as Israel continues its offensive.”

Her story, which ran on March 19, refers to Kushner’s statement coming “on the heels” of a UN report that was published on March 18. In other words, the Daily Beast is saying Jared responded after reports of famine by insensitively implying that Palestinian land should be stolen by greedy developers. In fact, his remarks were made more than a month before the report she cites.

Other publications were even more dishonest.

The Guardian story also appeared on Tuesday March 19. Making sure to jam the click-worthy word “Ivanka” into his graph, reporter Patrick Wintour asserts that Jared “made the comments in an interview at Harvard University on 8 March.”

Then Politico followed up, writing “in a March 8 event at Harvard University…”

All of this was false. Jared had never in any way implied that property currently part of Gaza should be taken over and developed for the benefit of Israel or anyone else. Yes, he did lament the fact that billions of western aid have been sent to Gaza and the West Bank, and a large portion of that funding seems to have winded up funding an extensive tunnel system, and the private wealth of Hamas leaders who are mainly in hiding outside of Gaza.

But the truth didn’t matter. These sites included a tiny clip of his remarks without the context, and then provided their own false context, so that when he says the phrase “very valuable” about waterfront land, the reader is left to draw the false conclusion he was talking about making it valuable for others, when, in fact he was lamenting, correctly in my view, that Palestinians themselves have been unfairly denied the opportunity to improve their lives because their leadership has failed to take advantage of the potential there.

So the essential dishonesty here is a complete false characterization that has Jared saying basically the opposite of what he said. Jared was sticking up for the interests of the Palestinian people. But his words were twisted to imply not only that he advocated the displacement of a downtrodden people, but that he did so for possible personal gain. It’s a disgusting libel.

But it’s worse than just that main thrust. There’s also the piss-poor journalism. Remember, this appearance took place on February 15. But the Guardian reported that it occurred on March 8. Politico then reported in its own story that it occurred on March 8.

This is not a simple error like a misspelling or saying something occurred Tuesday when it was actually a Thursday. The point here is that writing an article on March 19 about an incredibly outrageous and newsworthy thing that a high-profile public figure was alleged to have said on March 8 is almost believable. It may have taken 11 days to sort through the video. But Jared had actually spoken on Feb 15. It was covered in Harvard’s magazine days later (Feb 20). These writers and their editors understood that a high-profile figure advocating for the outrageous idea they were suggesting would not have sat unnoticed for 32 days. So they simply subtracted three weeks from the time between when he actually gave the speech and when they reported he did.

Readers might be wondering why Jared didn’t simply correct that date when the reporters called him for comment before publishing their story. Funny. Not a single reporter called Jared before publishing. Let me repeat that. No one from any of the publications I just named — The Guardian, Politico, Rolling Stone, Daily Beast – called Jared’s team for comment before accusing him. The date was wrong in their stories because they didn’t want the truth.

And there’s even more proof of that. As soon as the stories appeared, Jared’s team started calling around and saying “What the hell, how could you not call us, at the very least, get your date right.” This is not open to interpretation. Three hundred people saw him in Cambridge on February 15, and Harvard’s own YouTube clearly posts the date. At 10:45 AM on Wednesday, March 20, Cassidy Luna from Jared’s team was told by Politico they would correct the date. By 3 pm, they still had not. (They finally did later that afternoon.)

But the Guardian changed their story from “8 March” to “earlier this month.” Unbelievable. That actually makes it worse. Because by then it was March 20, and the story said the speech happened “earlier this month.” That implies that it could’ve been just days ago in mid-March. In fact, by March 20, the February 15 speech was 33 days old. In other words, the Guardian changed their story and continued to provide false information to its readers, and it was false information that served their narrative, not the truth. (They too finally corrected the date by the morning of Thurs March 21.) The story in Rolling Stone, where I worked as a factchecker 30 years ago, still contains the false “earlier this month” formulation, as of this morning.

That cannot be an accident.

For someone like me who has watched the standards of news gathering collapse over the past few decades, this distressing incident provokes a feeling of hopelessness. Because it’s not just libeling a guy who did so much for peace in the region that he was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize (and many think he would have been a lock had he done the exact same work under a president not named Trump).

What’s particularly distressing to me about this series of events is that the whole point of the invitation Jared accepted —at his own expense, and with virtually no conceivable benefit to him–was to foster greater understanding among people who might hold different points of view. Jared’s team completely understood that an audience of college students in Massachusetts would contain a plurality of people sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view. That was a feature not a bug. Jared wanted to hear from those who hold points of view other than his own, and he hoped maybe they would benefit from hearing his point of view.

And that’s essentially what happened. The event itself was non-controversial and well-received, as the article in the Gazette indicated.

But once the media decided, in a coordinated way at the exact same time 32 days after the event, that it would serve their interests to distort Jared’s message, all pretense of fairness, or even accuracy, was abandoned. No call, date completely wrong in a narrative-serving way, and most of all, the central accusation completely false.

I cannot say for sure that the publications and twitter influencers who simultaneously decided 32 days later that there was a story here did so to benefit a particular candidate or cause. But it’s worth noting that this coordinated attack appeared after Joe Biden’s polling reflected widespread dissatisfaction on the issue of his handling of the war in Gaza.

That is the message right now. Anyone who doesn’t share a viewpoint completely embraced by a university’s loudest protesters, and their cheerleaders in the media, dare not show their face. They will be libeled, they will be lied about, the facts will be disregarded, and their supporters on social media will amplify that false message.

As mentioned, a couple of these outlets finally got around to correcting the date. And to their credit, a few outlets who called Jared’s people to say, “Hey, I read this thing on Daily Beast and want to follow up” decided not to run any story once they learned—amid the novelty of actually calling the subject of an outrageous accusation — that he had said nothing of the kind, and not on the date they originally believed. Some, like the AP, covered the non-story essentially honestly, and plenty have come to Jared’s defense on Twitter and elsewhere, including the New York Sun and Dr. Eli David, who pointed out that this libel was akin to the way the entire MSM twisted Trump’s “bloodbath” comment about the American auto industry into some kind of national security threat. So maybe there’s some hope after all.

But I don’t think so.

The mainstream media has become such an automatic, robotic tool for reputation destruction that people like me who believe in quaint niceties like calling a subject before accusing him of war crimes, or getting dates right, or straightforwardly correcting mistakes, are obsolete.

Today’s journalism is all about warfare. It is a Saul Alinsky model where any points that can be put on the board that hurt a perceived enemy are valuable and it doesn’t matter if your central accusation or your supporting facts are just objectively wrong. The point is you hurt somebody. That’s a good day.

I realize that there is a very powerful network of interests acting in concert to discredit Jared, and therefore also to discredit anyone who dares defend him. It’s easy to see how I can be attacked for having raised these issues. I’ve already disclosed that I’m not an objective observer, and people will call me a sycophant or say that I am in the tank for Israel or whatever. (And just so it’s said, although I did call Jared Kushner for comment, I did not disclose to him the contents of this article, and he had no say in its direction.)

Personal attacks aside, the screenshots don’t lie. The calendar don’t lie. Can any of the journalists I’ve named show evidence of an email or outgoing phone call proving that they did reach out to Jared for comment on this? And then, of course, the few people who have been doing this as long as I have remember Warner Wolf and his immortal catchphrase. Let’s go to the videotape.

Go to 13:01 of the video of Jared’s appearance and be fair. Here’s the full version of what he said:

Gaza is waterfront property. It could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and all the munitions. If that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done? It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up, but I don’t think Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterward. 

Think whatever you want about President Trump, Jared Kushner, or little old me. The tape doesn’t lie.  Jared was talking about the shame of Palestinians having been denied the opportunity by their own leaders to actually help uplift their people.

The fact that that hasn’t happened, a fact that has led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, is the real tragedy here.