Revenge Can Also Be Served Lukewarm - Jared Kushner

Ever wonder why NJ Gov. Chris “Krispy Kreme” Christie was dumped as the head of Trump’s Presidential transition team?

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared, most likely was the reason.

Christie was the US Attorney who put Jared’s father in prison. That is no surprise, this information has been out there for a good while. But what did Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, do that he plead guilty to federal charges? And not just him, his brother-in-law also.

My take on this is: Trump must have known the story behind the federal prosecution of Charles Kushner prior to announcing his decision last May to select Christie as leader of his transition team. Then right after the election he dumps Christie (and all of Christie’s buddies) and replaces him with Pence. Was this also a form of pay back?  Hmmm?

Story here.

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An excerpt from “Byron York: The sordid case behind Jared Kushner’s grudge against Chris Christie”
by Byron York | Apr 16, 2017, 6:14 PM 

By all accounts, Jared Kushner, the husband of President Trump’s favorite daughter, has become an extraordinarily powerful man in the White House. To formally appoint Kushner a senior adviser, with a top security clearance, the president sought and received a Justice Department opinion declaring the White House exempt from federal anti-nepotism laws. That meant Kushner could have an official White House title to go along with his trusted-member-of-the-family influence.

But Kushner wielded plenty of power before joining the White House staff. For one thing, he is thought to have been behind the purging of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie from the presidential transition. Of course, Christie, tainted by Bridgegate, had problems of his own. But opposition from Kushner is said to have blocked Christie at key points during the campaign and transition.

Kushner’s ire reportedly targeted others, too, for their Christie connections. After Christie was fired from heading the transition, two colleagues Christie had brought into the effort, Mike Rogers and Matthew Freedman, were dumped as well. “Both were part of what officials described as a purge orchestrated by Jared Kushner,” the New York Times reported on November 15. “Mr. Kushner, a transition official said, was systematically dismissing people like Mr. Rogers who had ties with Mr. Christie.”

The reason for the purging? “As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Christie sent Mr. Kushner’s father to jail,” the Times noted. Many other sources have confirmed the origin of Kushner’s animus was Christie’s prosecution of the elder Kushner. But most public mentions of the reason have been as brief as the Times’. It turns out the story behind the story is much longer, and more complicated. And ugly.

The short version is: In 2004, Jared Kushner’s father Charles, a real estate magnate in New Jersey and New York, pleaded guilty to a tax fraud scheme in which he claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars in phony deductions for office expenses at the partnerships he created to manage the apartment buildings he owned. Kushner, a major donor to the Democratic Party, also pleaded guilty to fraudulently making hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in the names of employees and associates who didn’t know their names were being used. Finally, Kushner pleaded guilty to retaliating against a cooperating witness in the case — his sister. He did so by setting a trap in which he hired a prostitute to lure his sister’s husband into a sexual encounter in a New Jersey hotel, where the action was secretly photographed and videotaped. Kushner sent the pictures and tape to his sister as revenge, apparently motivated by Kushner’s belief that she and her husband were helping U.S. Attorney Christie and his prosecutors.

Another Kushner brother-in-law, his wife’s brother Richard Stadtmauer, was charged in the tax evasion scheme, and was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Beyond that, the Kushner family also brought employees into the fraud, with three Kushner Companies’ workers charged in the matter. All pleaded guilty.

Gov. Chris Christie’s image has been tainted by the Bridgegate scandal. (AP Photo)

Given the extent of the criminal behavior involved — confirmed by guilty pleas and a conviction at trial — it’s hard to imagine that one could examine the Kushner family case and conclude that the prosecutor was the bad guy. But in the Trump campaign and presidency, Christie has apparently suffered for his role in bringing members of the Kushner family and their employees to justice.

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Charles Kushner was charged in July 2004. He had all the resources anyone would need to fight the charges, but instead chose to plead guilty. He was sentenced to two years in prison and served 14 months, at a facility in Alabama. His son Jared flew down to visit him every Sunday. Brother-in-law Richard Stadtmauer went to trial in 2009 and was convicted and sentenced to three years. The others charged in the case pleaded guilty and received lesser sentences.

While it was all going on, Jared Kushner was a student at Harvard and, later, studied for law and business degrees at New York University. He was not involved in the family’s criminal activity. His father’s spectacular flameout meant that Jared, who conferred with Charles constantly on matters of business, had to take a much bigger role in the family’s business affairs.

Who did Jared blame for what had happened? Not his father. “Charlie and Jared blamed papers in general and more specifically the Newark Star-Ledger for besmirching the family name,” Gabriel Sherman wrote in 2009:

And, the crimes notwithstanding, [Jared] sees his father as a victim. “His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office, and they took it to the government,” Jared maintained. “Siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing. He gave them interests in the business for nothing. All he did was put the tape together and send it. Was it the right thing to do? At the end of the day, it was a function of saying ‘You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.’”

Five years later, in a 2014 interview with the New York real estate publication The Real Deal, Jared called his father’s treatment “obviously unjust” and said the experience had soured him on an earlier ambition to become a prosecutor. “If you’re convicting murderers, it’s one thing,” Jared said. “It’s often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him.”

Now the pursuer, the prosecutor-turned-governor-turned-Trump-supporter Chris Christie, has paid a price for bringing a case in which every single defendant was guilty.

Both Jared Kushner and Christie deny there’s a problem. “That stuff is ancient history,” Christie told ABC two weeks ago, on March 29. Last November, Kushner told Forbes that, “Six months ago, Gov. Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together. The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don’t talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing him out or his people.”

Maybe. Maybe, as Jared Kushner maintains, all the reports of “differences” between him and Christie are inaccurate. But if the case of Kushner’s father, and his uncle, and his other uncle, and his aunt, and their business is any indication, putting aside differences is not the family way.

Read the entire article here  - http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-the-sordid-case-behind-jared-kushners-grudge-against-chris-christie/article/2620427