The Troubled In-Laws of the 2016 Race

There’ll probably be a felonious father-in-law visiting the White House.

Ivanka Trump is married to Jared Kushner, heir to a billion-dollar New Jersey real estate empire, whose Orthodox Jewish family has been both a philanthropic pillar of the state’s Jewish community and a force in its political life. But the family’s reputation was indelibly scarred after a longstanding feud between Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, and his brother, Murray, spun out of control and landed Charles behind bars.

The two brothers, heirs to their Holocaust survivor father’s thriving businesses, spent years filing lawsuits against each other, which led to government investigations of illegal behavior surrounding campaign financing, taxes and charitable contributions. Filial anger and a desire for revenge ultimately threatened Charles to the extent that he resorted to measures more characteristic of a New Jersey mob boss than a mild-mannered businessman. Furious that his sister Esther and her husband were providing information against him, he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, videotaped their sexual encounter and had the tape delivered to Esther.

Enter Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and former presidential hopeful and current endorser in chief of Donald Trump. Christie was the prosecutor who put Ivanka’s father-in-law behind bars.

As an ambitious U.S. attorney, Christie aggressively went after Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the IRS, making false statements to the federal government and witness tampering. He served 14 months of his two-year sentence at an Alabama prison and was permitted to spend the remainder of his sentence in a New Jersey halfway house.

In 2009, not long after Charles became a free man and resumed his business activities with a far more subdued public profile, Jared and Ivanka were wed and the proud Trump and Kushner papas stood beside them at their wedding.

The families appear to get on famously. Indeed, family loyalty overtook traditional Kushner Democratic Party ties last summer when Charles jumped parties long enough to donate $100,000 to Trump’s PAC and host a Jersey Shore reception for Trump at his seaside mansion.

Ivanka and Jared are also very close to their respective fathers, both personally and professionally. It seems to be a quality the ambitious overachieving young couple shares along with their extreme ambition—a strategic ability to rise above their flawed legacies while preserving unswerving family loyalty. As far as The Donald is concerned, his daughter and son-in-law’s squeaky-clean image as a tasteful New York power couple clearly more than balances out Jared’s dad’s prison record, and it is clear Trump views his son-in-law as a campaign asset, not a liability. He loves to show him off. At a town hall meeting last month, when asked about Israel, Trump responded that “my son-in-law is Jewish, and he’s fantastic.”