Closing In: White House Official a “Person of Interest”

The Post tilts toward the son-in-law
No sooner had President Trump embarked on his nine-day swing through the Middle East than the Washington Post broke the story that "a person of interest" had emerged in the investigation into possibleMay 27: The Russian ambassador told Moscow that Jared Kushner wanted a secret communications channel with the Kremlin and from inside the Russian embassy, explaining why the FBI considers him a "person of interest".
    
collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, a person not identified by name but called "a current White House official" and "someone close to the president". That's few enough to be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Much as "Follow the money" was the advice of the mysterious figure called "Deep Throat" by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Post's Watergate investigative reporting in 1973, that seems to have become the emphasis in the current probe into the Russia connection. (That mysterious figure turned out 33 years later to be William Felt, deputy director of the FBI those years before).

Despite having isolated someone in the White House as the person of interest, the Post article considers all in the Trump entourage who have had contacts with the Russians other than Trump himself — which includes Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner. Only the last of them, Donald Trump's son in law and a favorite adviser, qualifies as a "current White House official".

The Post piece gives a quick rundown on a few of these but, without singling him out, mentions that Kushner met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower in New York in early November and says Kushner admits to having met with the head of a Russian bank that has been under sanctions since 2014, a New York-based employee of which was in 2015 arrested as a spy, pleaded guilty and was ultimately deported. On a security questionnaire Kushner had also originally failed to list contacts with foreign leaders. We are left to speculate.