The genius of representative government is its ability to persuade self-interested people to act on behalf of the general good. The celebrity summit between Kim Kardashian and President Trump provides a good example.
“Prison reform,” Emily Jane Fox wrote in Vanity Fair when she broke the story Wednesday morning, “is an issue near and dear to [Jared] Kushner whose father, Charles, spent more than a year in a federal prison camp in 2005 and 2006 on charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering.”
Those charges are accurate, but the truth is more complicated.
Charles Kushner was once a respected real-estate developer, generous philanthropist, and a whale of a Democratic donor. Then, he made some illegal political contributions. Then, he hid money from the IRS. And then, worst of all, he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law business partner, taped the encounter, and attempted to blackmail his sister’s husband to keep him from talking to the FBI.
“It is difficult for me to reconcile the generous man with the revengeful, hateful man,” Judge Linares said in 2005 weighing the difference between the benevolent Kushner, who gave World Series tickets to ailing children and the malevolent Kushner who sent a VHS tape of the sexual encounter to his own sister. “But I must take into consideration the vengeful nature in which this was done. In light of all the relevant circumstances, I find that you be imprisoned for 24 months.”
The two-year sentence was the maximum possible, the New York Times reported at the time. The prosecutor, a little-known U.S. Attorney named Chris Christie, praised the punishment.
“It shows that no matter how rich and powerful you are in this state, you will be prosecuted and punished for crimes you commit,” Christie said after the trial. “This sends a strong message that when you commit the vile and heinous acts that he has committed you will be caught and punished.”
That sentence set two things in motion. First, it turned Jared against Christie, eventually driving the former New Jersey governor from President Trump’s transition team. Second, as Vanity Fair recounted, it piqued Jared’s interest in criminal justice reform.
The father and son were in almost constant contact, New York Magazine reported, from the moment the elder Kushner reported to a federal prison camp in Alabama to the last six-months he served in a halfway house. No doubt that experience will be on the mind of the president’s son-in-law when he meets with Kim Kardashian Wednesday.
Sons shouldn’t be forced to answer for crimes of their fathers, and there is no evidence of wrongdoing on Jared Kushner’s part. But the episode and the complicated, even morally dubious, motivations that stem from it could end up helping to solve a very real problem with the prison system.
