Once upon a time, Donald Trump apparently was not so crazy about his son-in-law Jared Kushner and went so far as to enlist a former friend and ally, Chris Christie, to supply him with damaging information about Kushner’s family.
Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and the leader of Trump’s 2016 transition team, revealed Trump’s plans to derail his daughter’s 2009 wedding during an event at Harvard Monday, the Daily Beast reported.
Christie alleged that Trump’s request came when he was still the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, an office he held from 2002 to December 2008, the Daily Beast reported. At the time, Ivanka Trump was planning to marry Kushner, who was born and raised in New Jersey. Kushner’s real estate developer father, Charles Kushner, had served 14 months in federal prison after Christie prosecuted him on charges of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.
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“It became clear to Donald Trump that they were going to get married,” Christie said at the event, the Daily Beast reported.
“He was not thrilled, let’s say, about this, and I was still the prosecutor at the time,” Christie continued. “And he asked me to go out to dinner, and he said, ‘Do you have anything more on the family, so I can break this up?’”
Christie said: “I thought to myself: ‘Haven’t I given you enough?’”
From Christie’s comments, it’s not clear what he thought he had already “given” to Trump. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Trump didn’t want Ivanka marrying into the Kushner family because of Charles Kushner’s felony conviction, and he believed that Christie had some additional compromising information about the developer.
Among the less savory aspects of Charles Kushner’s actions had to do with the witness tampering charge. It stemmed from Charles Kushner’s plans to blackmail his own brother-in-law, William Schulder, who was cooperating with the investigation against him. Charles Kushner aimed to record a sexual encounter between Schiller and a prostitute whom Kushner had hired, and then send the tape to his sister.
To promote his 2019 memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Christie told PBS that Charles Kushner had committed “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted,” referring to him hiring the prostitute and sending the videotape to his own sister, the Daily Beast also reported.
Whatever wedding sabotage schemes Trump allegedly tried to cook up, the wedding between his daughter and Charles Kushner’s son took place in October 2009 at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
A Trump administration official dismissed Christie’s story in a statement to the Daily Beast. Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary for Global Public Affairs at the State Department, quipped: “The only thing the president ever asked Chris Christie for is to have mercy on the Mar-a-Lago buffet line.” Reps for Jared Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, and Ivanka’s talent agency, WME, did not respond to a request for comment.
Over time, Trump has clearly warmed to his son-in-law, who has become a very rich man, given him three grandchildren, helped him win the White House in 2016 and served as a senior adviser during his first administration. During both administrations, Trump has viewed Kushner as a talented diplomat, giving him key roles in negotiating for Middle East peace, the end of Israel’s war with Gaza and Russian’s war against Ukraine, the Daily Beast said. Trump also dispatched Kushner to help lead nuclear negotiations with Iranian officials in January, though now the United States and Israel are at war with Iran.
Trump’s attitude towards Charles Kushner also has improved significantly, the Daily Beast said. In addition to pardoning him at the end of his first term, Trump announced after the 2024 election that he would nominate him for the prestigious job of ambassador to France and Monaco, a position he currently holds.
Meanwhile, Trump’s once-flourishing, transactional relationship with Christie began to flounder during the 2016 transition, as the New York Times reported.
One reason for the growing tensions between the two men has to do with Jared Kushner. Christie wrote in his book that the president’s son-in-law pushed him out of the transition team because he was “still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago,” the Daily Beast said. The men’s relationship devolved into open hostility, after Christie blasted Trump for making false claims about election fraud after he lost the 2020 election and when ran for president in 2024, the New York Times reported.
