Jared Kushner says a fake Guccifer tried to extort the Trump campaign for Bitcoin

The revelation was part of Kushner's statement Monday.
 By 
Colin Daileda
 on 
Jared Kushner says a fake Guccifer tried to extort the Trump campaign for Bitcoin
The Kush. Credit: REX/Shutterstock

Jared Kushner -- prince of the United States and future savior of the Middle East -- wants you to know that not all computer crazies worked to help his father-in-law during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Kush sat before investigators in Congress on Monday to talk about his meetings with Russian folk leading up to last year's election, and he wanted the committee to know that at no point was he colluding with Moscow to elect Donald Trump. He may not have disclosed some of the meetings he had with Russians when he filed for his security clearance, but this does not mean the meetings were nefarious.

Also, Kushner wanted the investigators and the general public to know that some hacker types were trying to damage his father-in-law, just like those hacker types succeeded in damaging Hillary Clinton by dumping Democratic emails on the internet.

In his statement to investigators in Congress, Kushner mentions that a "Guccifer400" sent him an email trying to blackmail the campaign for Bitcoin. He wrote:

On October 30, 2016, I received a random email from the screenname "Guccifer400." This email, which I interpreted as a hoax, was an extortion attempt and threatened to reveal candidate Trump's tax returns and demanded that we send him 52 bitcoins in exchange for not publishing that information. I brought the email to the attention of a U.S. Secret Service agent on the plane we were all travelling on and asked what he thought. He advised me to ignore it and not to reply -- which is what I did. The sender never contacted me again.

See, Kushner is now being so thorough about his previously unmentioned contacts with Russian folk that he even told the investigators that, 'hey, maybe this random email person was a Russian, I don't know, but I just wanted you people to know in case that turns out to be true!'

The Guccifer name of this apparent hoaxer refers most immediately to Guccifer 2.0, the suspected front of Russian government hackers who helped dump Democratic National Committee emails online and posed as a single outspoken Romanian.

This Guccifer400 character seems to have hoped that the Trump campaign would fall for his trick. Perhaps Kushner is hoping for some of the same. Or maybe Kushner is just telling the truth! We live in a world of possibilities.

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Colin Daileda

Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.

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