I have a lot of people who haven’t called you, yet. He’s had every single donor in person I know call me. And McConnell says to me, he says look, I have to say, Jared’s one of the best lobbyists I’ve seen. He’s been working on this so hard for two years. And so Trump calls me into the Oval Office, and McConnell, you know, Trump says Mitch, you have to tell Jared the news. Now with McConnell, there’s a scene I write about in the Oval Office where he comes to tell the President sorry, we’re not going to have a chance to get Jared’s bill done, and we just don’t have time on the calendar. So we were calling anyone who had the wrong information to try to get them down. So we just had to take these people and get them onto the right track in order to make communities safer. The recidivism rate, meaning people who left prison and committed crimes, was in the 70% range, and so we knew where a lot of our future crimes were coming from. What the bill was doing was it was bringing job training programs into the prison so that people who were in the prisons would get, you know, training, and they’d get mental health treatment and drug addiction treatment so that when they went out of prison, they would actually have a chance to reenter society and not go back to prison. But unfortunately, or fortunately, that wasn’t what the bill actually did. What they were saying is that this bill would release violent felons from prison, and that’s a pretty hard thing to argue against if it gets out. But they were spreading a lot of misinformation about the bill, and we had to jump on it right away. We took what we thought was an ember approach where anytime there was a voice of dissent against the bill that was based on misinformation, our opponents were very formidable. JK: So I was reaching out to yourself and anyone else who had a voice. So why did McConnell think you were so effective?
Did we lose you there, Jared? Are you there? I am not surprised to find that Mitch McConnell thought you were the best lobbyist in Washington, D.C. The only time I heard from you during the presidency is when you were lobbying people, including media members, to pass the First Step Act. Jared Kushner, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show. I’ve spent the last three days combing through it. His new book, Breaking History, is number three on Amazon this morning. HH: This is the first part, and the second part will be tomorrow, of a long conversation with Jared Kushner. The uninterrupted audio is available at my Podcast, “Highly Concentrated Hugh” Jared Kushner joined me to discuss his new book “Breaking History.” Part one of the interview played on air Thursday, Part two today and part three will be Monday.