Charles Kushner arrives at the Kintock halfway house in Newark in 2006 photo. (NOAH K. MURRAY/THE STAR-LEDGER)
By Chris Sheldon and Ted Sherman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Charles Kushner, the father of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared, who is a senior advisor to Trump, was granted a full pardon Wednesday night by the president.
Kushner was one of 26 people granted a full pardon by Trump, who also commuted part or all of the sentences of an additional three people.
Kushner’s history in the Garden State is long and involves a nearly two-year prison sentence for a bizarre tax fraud case.
A son of Holocaust survivors, Kushner grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Elizabeth, where his father Joseph worked as a carpenter and later as a builder who acquired and managed small properties.
A 1976 graduate of New York University, Kushner earned an MBA and law degree, and practiced law for four years before leaving to open a real estate business with his father and his wife’s brother.
Together, they built a sprawling real estate empire, with more than $3 billion in property in New Jersey and beyond. The business built itself mostly on acquisitions of existing properties, making money by renovating or improving the structures to generate higher rents.
But the structure of Kushner’s varied businesses and its Byzantine array of partnerships also turned out to be an efficient political fund-raising mechanism known as “bundling” that Kushner took to new levels, allowing him to use his real estate empire to fuel a political agenda on high octane.
He supported Gov. James McGreevey, Cory Booker in his first run against Newark Mayor Sharpe James, and the Bill Clinton campaign.
He was a player in state and national politics and would host fundraising events for President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who all paid calls to his offices in Florham Park, or his home in Livingston.
Kushner was the single largest campaign contributor to McGreevey when he ran in 2001 and was later named by the governor to become the powerful chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Charles Kushner in a 2002 photo. (WILLIAM PERLMAN | THE STAR-LEDGER)Star-Ledger file photo
What was Charles Kushner’s scandal?
Kushner came under federal investigation after a bitter family dispute with former partner and brother, Murray, over the accounting for campaign contributions in a case was pursued by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie.
Kushner later admitted to defrauding the IRS of between $200,000 and $325,000 by filing 16 tax returns that claimed those political contributions as “office expenses” and acknowledged that he lied to the Federal Election Commission when he reported $385,000 in political contributions from his business partners. The partners claimed they were unaware of the donations.
Authorities also charged that Kushner had paid $25,000 to arrange for a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and then had the videotape of the motel tryst sent to his sister.
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