Kushner 'got his hands dirty' and initiated Giuliani's election fraud 'clown show': senior Trump advisor

Contrary to a report from the New York Times' Peter Baker that Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner wanted nothing to do with his father-in-law's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Rolling Stone is now reporting that the husband of Ivanka Trump was plotting with her dad to conduct a "scorched earth" campaign to keep him in office.

Rolling Stones' Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley are reporting that four sources confirmed that Kushner had a big part in developing the "Big Lie." The news comes hours after the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection kicked off the first of six televised hearings on the Trump White House with a clip of Ivanka Trump saying she was believed that the election fraud claims were bogus.

The select committee on Thursday sought to persuade a divided country of the existence of a deep-rooted and ongoing plot -- orchestrated by the former president -- to overturn the result of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.

"President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack," the Republican vice chair of the panel, Liz Cheney, said in her opening remarks at the first in a series of hotly anticipated summer hearings.

RELATED: Ginni Thomas’ attempt to overturn Trump’s loss was even broader than previously thought

Minutes earlier, Democratic committee chief Bennie Thompson accused Trump of being "at the center of this conspiracy."

According to the new Rolling Stone report, "Kushner absolutely was intimately involved with Trump’s scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. It’s just that he bailed on the mission early to save himself."

With the committee initially focused on proving that Trump knew he had lost but continued to push the false narrative which, in turn, led to the "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the insurrection, the new report sheds light on Kushner's involvement.

According to one source described as a senior Trump advisor, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would not have initiated all the election result legal challenges that were uniformly smacked down by the courts if not for Kushner's counsel.

IN OTHER NEWS: Conservative faces furious backlash for complaining about Ivanka Trump’s video testimony

The source, who admitted they were part of the effort, told Rolling Stone, "Jared was directly involved. There was a [brief] window…when it seemed like he was positioning himself to be the Jim Baker of this fight … It didn’t last long. He backed away from it, but he was there and got his hands dirty like everyone else did," later adding, "Jared helped create what then morphed into the Rudy clown show.”

The report goes on to note that the Trump insiders were displeased with the New York Times report absolving Kushner, which is why they came forward.

As one of their sources put it, "If the plan had worked, and if Pence had done what the [former] president wanted him to do, Jared would be jumping up and down … or calling reporters to take credit for being the man behind it all [and] the guy who made it all happen," adding, "Come on. Spare me.”

The House select committee aims to demonstrate that the violence was part of a broader -- and ongoing -- drive by Trump and his inner circle to illegitimately cling to or regain power, tearing up the Constitution and more than two centuries of peaceful transitions from one administration to the next.

READ MORE: House Judiciary GOP ripped to shreds for declaring Jan. 6 hearing ‘old news’

Thursday's session and five subsequent hearings over the coming weeks will focus on Trump's role in the multi-pronged effort to return him to the Oval Office by disenfranchising millions of voters.

Trump has defiantly dismissed the probe as a baseless "witch hunt" -- but the public hearings were uppermost in his mind Thursday as he fired off a largely false tirade on his social media platform, defending the insurrection as "the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again."

With additional reporting by AFP