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Jen Psaki Pans, Joe Scarborough Praises Jared Kushner's Work On Gaza Deal
Two MSNBC hosts, two wildly divergent views on Jared Kushner's work on the Gaza peace deal.
Last week, on The Briefing show she hosts on MSNBC, former Biden spox Jen Psaki blasted Kushner's involvement as inappropriate. Her beef? That Kushner has had significant financial dealings with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.
But on Tuesday's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough argued that it was the very experience that Kushner has gained in the Middle East, the contacts that he made while working on the Abraham Accords, that have made him such a valuable player on the Gaza peace deal team.
Scarborough reported that when the peace deal seemed doomed to fall apart after Israel's attack on Qatar, it was Kushner, along with Steve Witkoff, who was able to bring the Qataris back to the table.
David Ignatius was even more explicit in describing the importance of Kushner's role:
"He does understand the issues. He has the contacts . . . This peace plan came together really because Kushner, with Trump's backing, took all the elements that Arab countries, Israel, all the players had been working on, sometimes for more than a year, and pushed them together and demanded that they be acted on."
Speaking of the Abraham Accords that Kushner helped engineer, and in which four Arab countries, including the UAE, signed normalization agreements with Israel, they alone could well have merited a Nobel Prize for President Trump. If a Dem president had managed to make the Accords happen, the liberal media's trumpeting of the historic event would have been turned up to 11. The MSM couldn't totally bury such a momentous milestone, but gave it the shortest possible shrift.
And lest he be seen as cozying up too close to President Trump, Scarborough took the occasion to make invidious comparisons between Kushner's experience and Pete Hegseth's and RFK Jr.'s alleged lack thereof.
Here are the transcripts.
MSNBC
The Briefing
10-1-25
9:53 pm EDT
JEN PSAKI: Okay, Shawn McCreesh from the New York Times. Go ahead.
SHAWN MCCREESH: How did the White House decide that it is appropriate for Jared Kushner to be working on matters that involve Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm?
PSAKI: Now, I don't normally show Karoline Levitt's responses to these briefing questions. It's important, so I can answer more questions. But this is a response you should really see. So we're going to play this one.
KAROLINE LEAVITT: I think it's frankly despicable that you're trying to suggest that it's inappropriate. Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the President of the United States, to secure world peace.
PSAKI: I mean, okay. I don't know how Karoline thinks donating your time works, but typically, donated time doesn't not come with financial returns, like, huge ones. I mean, just this Monday, we learned that Jared Kushner's private equity firm has teamed up with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund for the largest private equity buyout ever, buying the video game company EA Games for $55 billion. That, of course, comes on top of the $2 billion Saudi Arabia has already invested in Kushner's private equity fund, and the $1.5 billion Kushner got from the UAE and Qatar late last year.
[Sarcastically] But how dare a reporter suggest that it's inappropriate for Jared to be involved in White House discussions impacting those countries? What an outrageous question.
. . .
MSNBC
Morning Joe
10-7-25
6:20 am EDT
JOE SCARBOROUGH: And you know, David Ignatius, speaking of Jared Kushner, Jared is an example of actually, of how actually experience pays off, right? You have a White House that has a bunch of people who are in cabinet agencies that seem ill-equipped because of a lack of experience in those positions.
. . .
You had Kushner flying around the Middle East for the first four years, putting together the Abraham Accords, dealing with all these people. He knows them
as well as anybody in the United States. He's been doing it again with Steve Witkoff. They have been flying around.
And, you know, even UN Week, when after the Qatar attack, and people thought the deal was dead. My reporting is that's when they all sat in a room with the Qatari leadership during UN Week and said, come on, now is the time to do a deal.
And because they knew the party so well, they were able to say when the Qatari said Netanyahu's not going to do anything, they reportedly said, we'll take care of Netanyahu. You take care of Hamas.
And so now here's Kushner, who's been around doing this with the Abraham Accords, and now here's part two of it. I mean, it seems to me a very clear message should make it into the Oval Office is that, yeah, experience matters.
DAVID IGNATIUS: So you're right, Joe, in that Jared Kushner does have contacts across the Middle East. He jumped into business with Saudi money after Trump's first administration ended. Some say he's too close, but he does understand the issues. He has the contacts.
I remember two years ago in the immediate aftermath of October 7, traveling to Israel and hearing Israelis say, and you could see it in their body language and everything they did, a sense that the country was so shaken and traumatized by what had happened, that as one senior official put it to me, we can't find ourselves out of this on our own. We need American help. And they finally got it in a very firm, insistent push from Donald Trump, backed by the expertise of Jared Kushner.
This peace plan came together really because Kushner, with Trump's backing, took all the elements that Arab countries, Israel, all the players had been working on, sometimes for more than a year, and pushed them together and demanded that they be acted on.
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