Jared Kushner, an informal Middle East envoy to the White House, said Thursday that Iran had not been serious about reaching a nuclear deal with the United States before President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, chose to attack the country in a joint military operation with Israel.

“We basically saw that there was no seriousness, and that they were trying to play different games to just get beyond President Trump in order to preserve their capabilities and pathway to get to a nuclear weapon in a way that would have been very, very hard to be stopped in the future,” Kushner said at Saudi Arabia’s exclusive FII Priority summit, held in Miami this week.

Kushner, whom Trump tapped alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to help lead talks with Iran amid the ongoing conflict, told the crowd of political and financial leaders gathered in South Florida that the Iranians’ public statements on the war should not be trusted.

“The one thing with the Iranians, and we’re seeing this even now, is you have to just ignore a lot of what they say publicly, because I think that their statements are usually more for their domestic audiences,” explained Kushner, who had met for indirect negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva two days before the war began in late February.

Likening Iran’s military tactics to a player losing at backgammon, Kushner said the Islamic Republic is now seeking “to create as much chaos as possible” across the region, as it has fired “indiscriminately” at nearby Gulf states and beyond. “That basically describes what they’ve been trying to do there.”

“President Trump’s focus is to try and get to a good outcome with them,” Kushner added. “He wants to just be in a position where they act like a normal country.”

Kushner said that he had expected to “go back” to his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which has raised funds in the Middle East, after he had helped broker the Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza last year and amid ongoing negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in which he has continued to play a central role.

But he added that he “didn’t anticipate that there’d be a war in Iran,” and chose to put one fundraising effort on hold after Trump asked him to “stay on” in what he called a “volunteer capacity” to work on the negotiations alongside Witkoff.

“Right now, my big focus is going to be on trying to see if we can get this war concluded,” Kushner said.