Jared Kushner's alleged attempts to set up a back-channel communications with the Kremlin is probably not, as far as I can tell from listening to the pundits, in and of itself criminal. However, there are a number of points to be made.
1) It is quite different from Obama's comment to Medvedev in 2012 which was a communication between two heads of state in public, not between an advisor and a spy in private.
2) As John Brennan pointed out in has riveting testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last week, there are very well developed protocols for setting up such communications, including bringing into the loop senior civil servants who can ensure that no compromising information is divulged. These protocols were ignored.
3) Until more information emerges, there seem to be two possible explanations for this very odd request to Kislyak (and these could be two ends of a continuous spectrum of nefariousness). The first and most benign is that this was a genuine if naive attempt to improve relations with Russia, but that the relatively young and inexperienced Kushner was in over his head. It was arrogant and foolish of him to think he could pull this off, but given his father-in-law's world-view, not completely surprising. At the other end of the scale we have the possibility that influence was being sold, literally, or that a means of 'repayment' in favors for handing Trump the election was being established.
It it's either of these last two, well that's not good.
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