Jared Kushner calls the Mar-a-Lago raid 'an issue of paperwork' and promotes his memoir in interview defending Donald Trump

• Jared Kushner called the Mar-a-Lago raid "an issue of paperwork" in a Sky News interview.
• Kushner decried "leaks to the media" and plugged his memoir while defending Donald Trump.

Jared Kushner downplayed the federal investigation into former President Donald Trump as "an issue of paperwork," while also deflecting blame onto the media and plugging his memoir in a new interview with UK-based news channel Sky News.

Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and former senior White House adviser, spoke to Sky about the Department of Justice's investigation into Trump taking classified and sensitive documents from the White House to his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

"You have to ask him that question," Kushner told host Kay Burley when asked why Trump took the top-secret documents home. "What I will say is that if you look at my book, you'll see that he was under constant attack."

"But he took top-secret documents home, potentially risking the security of the United States," Burley countered.

"I think that it's something that seems like it's an issue of paperwork that should have been able to be worked out between DOJ and him," Kushner said. "I don't know what he did or what he didn't take, but right now we're relying on leaks to the media."

Kushner's new book, "Breaking History: A White House Memoir ," came out on August 23.

Both of Kushner's assertions in his answer to Burley, however, are misleading. News reports, publicly-released documents, and court filings show how the National Archives and the DOJ spent well over a year negotiating with Trump and his lawyers for the return of several boxes of classified and sensitive documents and obtained some via a grand jury subpoena.

And the key facts of the probe, including how many classified documents and other items the FBI found in its search of Mar-a-Lago, have not been "leaked" to the media, but publicly disclosed in the government's filings in federal court.

"We've seen the photograph, haven't we, where it says top-secret," Burley pointed out. She was referring to a photograph showing several documents clearly marked as classified that the DOJ revealed in the affidavit it submitted to a federal judge in seeking a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago.

"Yeah, like I said, I've seen a lot of allegations over my four years by the media that turned out not to be true," Kushner said.

"So the fact that we've seen photographs that say top-secret — we should wait and see whether they were? Even though we're being told by the FBI that they were?" Burley asked.

"Look, like I said, I go into my book, the accusations that were made of Trump —" Kushner said

"If you could answer that question," Burley pressed.

"First of all, he was the president of the United States, he had the highest clearance in the world, so I don't know — this could be a paperwork issue — I don't know, like I said, I haven't been involved in the details of it," Kushner said.

Trump and his lawyers have argued that Trump declassified all the documents in question. But in addition to evidence clearly showing documents marked as still classified, classification status doesn't make a difference under the three criminal statutes that Trump is being investigated for violating.