Reporter Asks Jared Kushner Why Anyone Should Have 'Any' Trust In His Negotiations

Jared Kushner on Sunday was asked directly why his lacking track record should inspire “any confidence” in his abilities to negotiate an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompting the U.S. special envoy and son-in-law of President Donald Trump to get defensive.

“You have been involved in numerous negotiations around the world,” said NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel during a press conference in Kyiv. “Why should people have any confidence in your capacity to succeed here?”

Kushner, who married the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump in 2009, has been involved in high-stakes peace talks in recent years to help end several international conflicts — including the Israel-Gaza conflict, the war on Iran and Russia’s offensive against Ukraine.

“You were involved in the Gaza negotiations, but Gaza remains a wasteland,” Engel noted. “There’s been really no progress there. Iran, you were involved in those negotiations. The war is still going on.”

He continued, “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?”

Kushner has been under scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest in his dual role as a Trump adviser handling U.S. diplomatic efforts with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while running a private equity firm heavily funded by those same governments.

He also has close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said during a 2024 Harvard event amid the ongoing attacks in Gaza that the waterfront property there “could be very valuable” and that Israel should “move the people out and then clean it.”

Kushner was rather defensive Sunday about his skills as a negotiator.

“I think 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,” he told Engel. “Obviously, Steve [Witkoff] and I bring different approaches to these things, but we work very well together as partners.”

Witkoff, a billionaire real estate investor whom Trump made U.S. special envoy for the Middle East, from his family’s cryptocurrency company while negotiating with some of its biggest foreign investors on behalf of the United States.

“But we’re not bringing our approaches,” said Kushner. “We’re really representing President Trump, and we’re doing it the way that he wants to see these things done. And working with President Trump the first term, obviously we achieved a lot of unthinkable things.”

Kushner went on to tout his role in negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords, a series of agreements among several Arab League nations and Israel, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade — as well as the 2026 World Cup — in defending his record.

“The tone of your question was a little bit like, ‘Why haven’t you done every single impossible thing possible?’” Kushner told Engel. “We are very honored to be able to have the opportunity to work on these [matters] under President Trump’s leadership.”

Trump vowed ahead of his 2024 reelection to end Russia’s invasion on day one of his administration. As for Kushner and Witkoff’s abilities to negotiate an end to the war, Russia reportedly resumed its airstrikes Tuesday on Kyiv — killing at least two people.