Vicky Ward has a very compelling profile of Jared Kushner over at Esquire. Below are a few choice excerpts.
In The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden notes that officials at Jared Kushner's high school were "dismayed" when Kushner was accepted to Harvard, since, as one former school official put it, "his GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it." Other students in Jared's class, the official said, were far more deserving. But Jared had a weapon that his classmates did not: his father. According to Golden, Charles donated $2.5 million to Harvard the year his son applied. Just to be safe, he also donated to Cornell and Princeton.
All of the influence peddling and lobbying to establish the Kushner family name in the upper echelons of power was expensive. The scandal that eventually sent Jared's father Charles to prison began in 2001, when Murray discovered that his brother had used several of the family partnerships to make political contributions without informing his relatives. Murray sued Charles in court, and not long after Chris Christie became the U. S. Attorney for New Jersey, in 2002, he launched a criminal investigation.
As Christie's case gained traction, Charles attempted to blackmail one of his sisters and her husband to keep them from cooperating as government witnesses. He paid a prostitute $10,000 to have sex with his brother-in-law, and then sent a videotape of the encounter to his sister. The vindictive effort was for naught: In August 2004, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he had evaded taxes, made illegal campaign contributions, and retaliated against a federal witness, Charles pleaded guilty to eighteen felony counts.
As Charles headed off to prison in 2005, Jared was still working on a joint business and law degree at NYU. Since a convicted felon cannot, as a matter of practice, sign a contract as a fiduciary, he felt that he had no choice other than to take over the family business.
In the wake of the scandal, Jared increasingly depended on an expanding network of older male advisors. The demographics of the group—which today includes Rupert Murdoch; Michael Ovitz, the legendary former Hollywood executive; Martin Sorrell, the head of WPP; Marc Holliday, the CEO of SL Green; Joel Cutler, a venture capitalist; Kevin Ryan, an Internet entrepreneur; and Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor—were reflected at Jared's thirty-fifth birthday party earlier this year. As one guest observed, the median age of the guests at the party, which was held at the top of the Gramercy Park hotel in Manhattan, seemed to be somewhere near seventy.
Though Charles is no longer the face of the Kushner Companies, he remains omnipresent in the hallways of the firm. Each Tuesday at 8:30 a.m., everyone at the company who is not a secretary gathers in a conference room on the fifteenth floor to discuss acquisitions, financing, and construction. Charles and Jared sit next to each other at the center of a long table, and other family members fan out from there. No one at the Tuesday meeting, and no one who deals with the company from the outside, is allowed to forget who built the firm. When I called one of the Kushners' underwriters to ask about Jared's business prowess, he seemed startled. "None of it's been him," he said. "It's been his dad."
Many people who have dealt with Jared in the past suspect that his embrace of Trump's political posturings carries a strong whiff of pure ambition. Jared is especially proud of an article he wrote for the Observer in July , after his father-in-law's anti-semitic Star of David tweet. It was a response to an open letter by Dana Schwartz, an entertainment writer for the Observer, that had criticized Jared for standing "silent and smiling in the background" while Trump made "repeated accidental winks" to white supremacists. "You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees," Schwartz wrote. "Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don't understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty."
In his response, Jared insisted that his father-in-law "is not anti-Semitic and he's not a racist." He defended Trump by detailing his grandparents' harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. "It's important to me that people understand where I'm coming from," he wrote. "I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points."
It's not surprising that many of Jared's relatives did not appreciate his efforts. Two of his cousins complained on Facebook about Jared's willingness to invoke their grandparents' suffering to defend Donald Trump. "Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you've handled this campaign," wrote Jacob Schulder, Jared's cousin. "Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night. It is self-serving and disgusting."
