Over the last year or so, when Jared Kushner has generated headlines, the news has largely focused on his Saudi Arabia ties and the extent to which he might have leveraged his position while serving as a top official in his father-in-law’s White House. But as The New York Times reported on Thursday, Kushner is still relevant in other ways, too:

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have questioned multiple witnesses in recent weeks — including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — about whether Mr. Trump had privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had lost, according to four people briefed on the matter.

According to the Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the line of questioning suggests “prosecutors are trying to establish whether Mr. Trump was acting with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power.”

In other words, there’s no longer any question about whether Trump was lying about his defeat as he tried to cling to power. What prosecutors are apparently exploring is the extent to which the outgoing president knew his bogus claims were false while he made them.

The Times’ account added that Kushner, who testified last month, told grand jurors that it was his impression that Trump genuinely believed his own ridiculous claims.

If this line of inquiry sounds at all familiar, it’s because this dimension to the larger controversy has been lingering for quite a while. Indeed, last fall, the bipartisan House select committee investigating Jan. 6 focused heavily on this detail, concluding that Trump knew he was lying while he was lying, pointing to a variety of witnesses — each of whom had close interactions with the former president after his defeat — who heard the Republican privately acknowledge his loss, even as he told the public he’d won.

And what does this have to do with Kushner? For one thing, he was in a position to know what Trump was arguing, behind the scenes, as the outgoing president launched his failed scheme to claim illegitimate power.

But just as important is the fact that Kushner was directly involved in Team Trump’s post-defeat fundraising. Indeed, as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin explained last night, “Other than Trump and Jason Miller, no one was more involved in post-election fundraising and related messaging than Jared.”

Let’s not forget, the Times reported in April that federal prosecutors have been “drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results.”

It’s against this backdrop that Kushner, a man with few rivals when it came to Team Trump influence, appeared before the Jan. 6 grand jury and was asked questions about whether the former president believed his own lies.

Last summer Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic member of the House Jan. 6 committee, was asked about this angle to the larger controversy. “It’s clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist, and used the money raised for something other than what he said,” the California congresswoman told reporters.

Lofgren added, “Now it’s for someone else to decide whether that’s criminal or not.”

Watch this space.