Jared Kushner Reportedly Blew Off Plea To Defuse Trump's 'Coup' Plotting

Jared Kushner rebuffed a desperate plea from the chief of staff of then-Vice President Mike Pence to intercede with Donald Trump on his “dangerous” push to overturn the presidential election, according to ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Kushner told Pence aide Marc Short he had neither the time nor the interest because he was working on “Middle East peace,” Karl recounted Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“Please, Jared, can you talk to your father-in-law?” Short pleaded ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to Karl. “This is getting dangerous. Somebody’s got to tell him that Mike Pence can’t single-handedly overturn the election.”

Kushner and other Trump aides who “knew better ... simply took a step back and did nothing,” Karl said.

“It’s like John Stewart Mill’s quote all that it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing,” Karl continued. “There were a lot of people doing nothing around Trump at that time.”

Short believed Kushner fully understood that Trump was “flat-out wrong” about Joe Biden’s election victory and said he knew that Trump had been defeated, according to Karl.

The incident is described in Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” out on Tuesday.

Karl also talked on “Morning Joe” of plots “right in the White House” involving then chief of staff Mark Meadows “outlining a very specific plan with dates and times that was all centering on Mike Pence obeying the orders of Donald Trump. It was a plan that if Pence had gone along with would have resulted in a much bigger constitutional crisis than what we saw,” Karl said.

During the presidential transition, Meadows’ job was to “chase down, to pursue, every harebrained scheme that Donald Trump had, every conspiracy theory, to try to undo what is really the central miracle of American democracy ― a peaceful transition of power,” Karl said.

“Meadows was using the intelligence agencies, was pressuring the Pentagon, the Justice Department ... to use all means necessary to effectuate what really would have been a coup. I mean, let’s call it what it would have been. It was a coup — overturning a proper election.”

Meadows could not be reached for comment.

Check out Karl’s full “Morning Joe” interview in the clip up top. He talks about efforts to overturn the legitimate presidential election beginning at 14:00.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.