For Kushner, Criminal Justice Has Been a Personal Issue and a Rare Victory

The day after President Trump announced his support for a bipartisan criminal justice overhaul bill in the Roosevelt Room, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, arrived in the Oval Office to give him a dose of political reality. He was not going to bring the bill to the Senate floor until next year, Mr. McConnell told the president.Mr. Trump called for his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the administration’s driving force behind the bill, to join the meeting and hear the news himself. As Mr. Kushner entered the Oval Office, Mr. McConnell joked that he felt like he had heard from everyone Mr. Kushner knew.

“That’s not true,” Mr. Kushner replied, according to administration officials. “I have a lot more people.”

And he did.

Because Mr. Trump agreed that the bill had to wait, according to administration officials, Mr. Kushner enlisted Vice President Mike Pence to explain to the president that waiting until next year, when a House controlled by the Democrats would then vote on the bill, would most likely result in a version that he would not like. Mr. Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch and Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director who is now a senior executive at Fox, to release a statement backing his bill.