Jared Kushner and Donald Trump: Like Father, Like Son-in-Law

If there’s one thing Kushner has learned, it’s that if you get hit, “you have to make sure you hit them harder the next time,” says a former associate.
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Jared Kushner stands back as Trump speaks with business leaders in the White House's Roosevelt Room on January 23rd.By Nicholas Kamm/Afp/Getty Images.

Naveed Jamali spent four years working with the F.B.I. as a double-agent, allowing himself to be recruited by Russian intelligence. So he has taken keen interest in the investigations swirling around the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. “I’m intimately aware of the Russians’ methodology, and my sense all along has been that Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort had been targeted long before they met Trump,” Jamali says. “But there still seemed to be a missing piece.”

No one in Trump’s orbit has been charged with anything, of course, and all have denied wrongdoing. But modern Russian tradecraft of the kind Jamali describes, often an extension of the business world, is increasingly at the center of the case. And federal investigators are increasingly curious about meetings between Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest White House advisors—and Russian officials. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Kushner has become “a focus” of the F.B.I. probe, which is now being overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The first meeting in question, at Trump Tower, included two men who have become the Leonard Zeligs of this affair: Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security advisor. Kushner’s second chat, at the behest of Kislyak, was with Sergey Gorkov, the chief of Vnesheconombank, a favorite financial institution of President Vladimir Putin’s that just happens to be on a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions list.

White House spokesmen have characterized Kushner’s role in the conversations as routine, merely part of his duties during the transition period, in which Kushner served as an emissary to dozens of foreign governments and officials. His failure to disclose the meetings when applying for top-secret security clearance in January was an error made out of haste, according to his lawyer. Yet Kushner was also the rare presidential-transition functionary whose family company was searching for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to redevelop a struggling Manhattan skyscraper it owns. Senate investigators intend to ask Kushner whether he discussed financing with the VEB executive. “Real-estate investment is an obvious and long-running angle with the Russians,” says Joe Pelcher, who worked major international money-laundering cases during his 26 years as an F.B.I. agent. (“Mr. Kushner previously volunteered to share with Congress what he knows about these meetings. He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry,” Jamie Gorelick, Kushner' attorney, noted in a statement.)

“I don’t think the Russians are investing in buildings, per se,” Jamali says. “They invest in people. They buy people. The desire to suborn Americans has not abated with the end of the Cold War. It’s just shifted, over the past 10 years or so, from trying to recruit C.I.A. officers to recruiting Americans of importance, using things like banks.”

Kushner, who has voluntarily agreed to talk to the Senate Intelligence Committee, has lately given investigators another subject to explore. According to The New York Times, he apparently encouraged Trump to make the disastrous decision to fire James Comey—and then, when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein surprised the White House by installing Mueller as special counsel, Kushner is said to have urged Trump to fight the appointment.

Investigators will try to determine whether Kushner’s actions were attempts to obstruct the Russia investigations. But even short of any possible criminality, Kushner’s choices are fascinating insights into his character, especially because they contradict what had been the prevailing conventional wisdom about him.

“If somebody’s in the way of what you want or what you need, you destroy them.”

In his public appearances, the impeccably dressed, bedimpled Kushner comes across as resolutely calm. And the media has extended that image to Kushner’s worldview: he’s been portrayed as a moderating influence on his tempestuous father-in-law, to the fury of Steve Bannon, his bitter rival for White House influence, who has reportedly scorned Kushner as a “globalist” and a “Democrat.”

Kushner’s true policy beliefs remain vague. What’s more important, though, is what the Comey episode reveals about his thought process. “This whole notion that Jared is a moderating influence on Trump is wrong,” a former Kushner associate says. “That’s probably what happened with Comey—he didn’t mitigate Trump’s terrible instinct. He’d be egging Trump on. Jared could not possibly read a guy like Comey as anything but a supreme poseur. If Comey was telling Trump, ‘Sir, I’m not comfortable with you asking for my loyalty, but I’ll give you my honesty’—that’s Jared’s least favorite kind of person. His reaction to that would be, ‘Get him out of here. This is not a guy we can do business with.’ ”

Elizabeth Spiers was the editor-in-chief of the Kushner-owned New York Observer for 18 months. “Part of the reason Trump and Jared missed the blowback they were going to get from firing Comey was they are very single-minded about stuff like this: if somebody’s in the way of what you want or what you need, you destroy them,” she says. “They’re both reactionary. Jared’s not as extreme as Trump. But he’s not thinking several moves ahead, either. And when bad things happen, it’s never his fault—he’s being victimized by somebody. That’s the way he perceives what happened to his father."

In 2005, Charles Kushner, a wealthy New Jersey real-estate developer, went to prison. A feud with his brother over a business deal escalated into a bizarre revenge scheme in which Charles hired a prostitute and arranged to videotape her having sex in a motel room with his brother-in-law. After his father’s conviction, on charges of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering (and at the hands of U.S. Attorney Chris Christie and Kushner relatives who cooperated with the government), then-24-year-old Jared stepped in to run the family real-estate empire. “That experience is totally formative, in terms of Jared not trusting anyone and not trusting the media and not trusting friends and barely trusting family,” the former Kushner associate says.

Part of his strategy to redeem the family name was buying the Fifth Avenue skyscraper that may now have him in the F.B.I.’s crosshairs. Another legacy of the scandal seems to have been Kushner’s advice to Trump to fire Comey and lash back at the special counsel. “Jared sees Comey as an incipient Chris Christie, who brought down Charlie,” the former Kushner colleague says. “He never, ever, ever thought his dad did anything even a little bit wrong, and one lesson he took from it was that you have to make sure you hit them harder the next time.”

It will all keep the F.B.I. and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees plenty busy. “It’s an investigation, so there are several strings being pulled at the same time, and you don’t know which ones are going to end up being significant,” a Senate source says, sounding both amazed by and a bit weary of the ongoing Trump drama. “There's so much raw material, every day leads to different shit.”