Jared Kushner Is a Very Cool Guy

Jared Kushner is just one of a whopping 14 people privy to the contents of Donald Trump’s “top-secret” daily intelligence brief, the New Yorker’s Adam Entous and Evan Osnos report, making him one heck of a very cool guy.

Cool guys, you see, have access to information: It is cool to know things, and, more specifically, to receive the “digest of the U.S. government’s most closely held and compartmentalized intelligence reports.” Most importantly, it is extremely cool to get the briefing when you don’t even have full security clearance—which Kushner did not!—and which is, apparently, “unprecedented” during at least the last six decades of life in the Oval. Very cool.

Aside from Kushner, there are 13 other very cool guys who also get the briefing every day. That is precisely double the number of White House officials given access to the President’s Daily Brief during Barack Obama’s time in office, in case you’re keeping count.

You might wonder why so many folks now receive the PDB (as it’s known among the cool guys). Entous and Osnos have answers:

Some people in the office of the director of National Intelligence questioned the expansion [of PDB recipients], but officials who reported to Trump didn’t want to risk irritating him by trying to exclude his son-in-law and other new additions.

While it’s not cool to risk irritating the president, it is cool to make Jared Kushner feel more cool. Also from the New Yorker:

A former senior official said, of the growing P.D.B. distribution list, “It got out of control. Everybody thought it was cool. They wanted to be cool.”