CNN’s Phil Mudd Blasts Jared Kushner for Ducking Pledge to Contact FBI: ‘Are You Kidding Me?!’

On The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, CNN contributor Phil Mudd unleashed a tirade on Jared Kushner for his notable refusal to commit to contacting the FBI if any foreign country offered President Donald Trump campaign assistance again in 2020: “Are you kidding me?”

Kushner’s comments were made to Axios’ Jonathan Swan in a wide-ranging interview that has drawn intense heat and scrutiny across the media landscape because of Kushner’s stubborn evasiveness and constant hedging on numerous topics. Among the most notable, the president’s son-in-law repeatedly refused to say whether he thought Trump’s years-long promotion of the insidiously false Birther conspiracy theory  — which Trump only formally abandoned three months before Election Day 2016 — about President Barack Obama was “racist.”

But it was Kushner’s intentionally ambiguous answer about a potential repeat of the Russian election meddling from 2016 and the Special Counsel investigation it spawned and his campaign that set Mudd off. “I mean we go through two-and-a-half years,” Mudd ranted, “where his father-in-law’s administration is damaged by comments from the left and right, including conservatives, about the inappropriateness of even considering accepting dirt from people representing a foreign intelligence service.

“In the past couple of years, more than two dozen Russians, including defense intelligence officers, are indicted and he can’t figure out how to pick up an iPhone and say, if you’re approached again, you would think you would let your family go through that again? How about pick up the phone, as [former FBI] Director Mueller said publicly: ‘Every American should be concerned about Russian intervention.’ Pick up the phone if a Russian offers dirt about your opponents.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.