Man behind Trump’s unravelling cabinet
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner finds himself in the spotlight for a 20-minute meeting with him. Attorney general Jeff Sessions met him twice during the course of 2016 and is in all sorts of trouble. And Michael Flynn lost his job as National Security Adviser for phone calls with him.
How could one man cause so much trouble for the US ?
Sergey Kislyak, the 66-year-old Russian ambassador to the United States, has said in his defence is that he was only doing his job, what all diplomats do.
Kushner and Flynn had a previously undisclosed meeting with Kislyak in December to establish a line of communication with Russia, the White House said while confirming reports of the meet. It was not known if Kushner could face questions about impropriety similar to those that were raised about Sessions and Flynn’s interactions with Kislyak. The crucial difference: Flynn and Sessions were less than forthcoming about their meetings while under scrutiny, and had even denied them. The White House immediately confirmed Kushner’s meeting.
Kislyak, a career diplomat who started out in the Soviet Union, has been Russia’s envoy to the US since 2008. But the US is getting to know him better for the troubles he seems to have caused the Trump administration. And the first reports about him tended to portray him as a shadowy spymaster, a wily recruiter to fit the narrative of him making backroom deals with some of the incoming administration’s similarly disposed people.
Moscow reacted with anger and exasperation. Holding CNN responsible for that mischaracterisation, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, according to the network, “He was deputy minister of foreign affairs in Russia, who has communicated with American colleagues for decades in different fields, and CNN accused him of being a Russian spy...of recruiting? Oh my God!”
The portly Kislyak was deputy foreign minister before he was sent to Washington as ambassador. In the 1990s, he was deputy head of the USSR’s department of international scientific and technical cooperation. He also served in the departments of security affairs and disarmament.
As a Ukrainian who decided to stay on in Russia after the break up of the USSR, Kislyak is considered a traitor in Ukraine, which is at the heart of the resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent designs to recapture the lost glory associated with the Soviet Union .