Kushner Asked to His Face Why Anyone Should ‘Have Any Confidence’ In His Negotiations

 (Ludovic Marin, Pool photo via AP, File)

NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel grilled President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and foreign policy envoy, Jared Kushner, during a press conference in Ukraine over the weekend, asking why anyone should have confidence in him, given his track record.

“This is for Mr. Witkoff and Jared Kushner. You have been involved in numerous negotiations around the world. Why should people have any confidence in your capacity to succeed here?” Engel began, adding:

You were involved in the Gaza negotiations, but Gaza remains a wasteland. There’s been really no progress there. Iran, you were involved in those negotiations. The war is still going on. You’ve been involved in several rounds of negotiations in this conflict. It’s only getting more intense. So you’re relaunching negotiations now. What’s the likelihood they will succeed, when other negotiations you’ve been involved in have not?

“These are some of the hardest problem sets in the world, and I think that you have to try and you have to bring to it. Obviously, Steve and I bring different approaches to these things, but we work very well together as partners. But we’re not bringing our approaches. We’re really representing President Trump, and we’re doing it the way that he wants to see these things done,” Kushner replied after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday and Vladimir Putin on Saturday. Kushner added:

And working with President Trump in the first term, obviously, we achieved a lot of unthinkable things, whether it was achieving the Abraham Accords, which nobody thought was possible. We achieved, the USMCA, the biggest trade deal in history, made a great deal with China, and the list just goes on and on. We just celebrated the World Cup in America. That was a deal that I led on President Trump’s behalf, to win for America.

The same thing with the Olympics that’ll be coming up. So, you have to take on hard things. The tone of your question was a little bit like: “Why haven’t you done every single impossible thing possible?” We are very honored to be able to have the opportunity to work on these, under President Trump’s leadership, and we’re very committed to giving it everything we can. And I think President Trump has a track record of doing impossible things. I think the last administration, they didn’t go to Russia. I mean, I think they had one visit with the CIA director.

But, you know there’s a war. I mean, every day there are soldiers on the front line from both sides, and they wanna go home to their families, and there are people in these cities who have bombs dropping, and their lives are very disrupted, and they wanna see that put to an end. And so, if the answer was simple, then somebody would have solved it.

But I think President Trump’s general framework is that if something is worthy and important and will have a big impact he doesn’t matter how much he’ll get criticized by people in the press or different critics. He wants to go after it, and he’s asked Steve and I to do that on his behalf, and we’ll do our best to try to get an outcome. And so I know that if we don’t try, we will not succeed, and nothing will change and it’s just important to try, and that’s what we’re gonna try to do.

I can’t guarantee that there will be success, but what I can promise you, and promise everyone here in Ukraine and even everyone in Russia is that on behalf of President Trump Steve and I are gonna be doing everything we can. We have been doing everything we can to try and find a way out of a mess that was created before President Trump’s time which has had a huge toll. And so we’re gonna do our best to try and make progress.

Watch the clip above.

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