Twenty-five years ago, after a six-year stint working in New York government where I learned up-close how politics works, I began writing about politics and political corruption for the New York Observer. This book is rooted in the reporting that I embarked on in 1994 for the Observer and for WNYC; many of the same New York and New Jersey campaign contributors, real estate owners, financiers, lobbyists, and politicians that I covered are still working today, on a much larger stage. The thousands of people I’ve interviewed and countless records I’ve combed through in a quarter century’s coverage of money, power, and influence have served as an invaluable guide for this book.
In the past three years, I have read over one hundred thousand pages of documents—court cases, regulatory filings, land records, mortgage documents, government leases, email chains, campaign filings, tax filings, bank records, personal testimonies—more than a hundred books, and thousands and thousands of news articles. I have listened to weeks of hearings and testimony, mined audio archives, reviewed years’ worth of social media accounts, and watched scores of hours of videotapes, movies, and documentaries—including dozens of episodes of The Apprentice. I have consulted with top journalists, scholars, and historians who have shared documents, ideas, and frameworks of understanding, all of which have made my own reporting more complete.
One challenge of writing a story about individuals hailing from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union is the transliteration of proper names. Wherever possible I have followed the style of papers of record, official reports, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For reasons of simplicity and consistency I have chosen to use the Russian spelling of the town where Rae Kushner was born: Novogrudok. I have also chosen the most common spelling of the town where Yossel Berkowitz was raised: Korelitz.
Since November of 2016, writing and reporting about the Trump and Kushner families and their family businesses has presented a unique set of challenges. Their companies are private and closely held, with financial deals that stretch back decades and around the globe. Many of their holdings are in limited liability companies, or LLCs, whose secrecy US law protects. Both family businesses have demonstrated an aversion to disclosure of any kind, and both families have taken extraordinary steps to keep secrets and thwart perceived opponents.
Some of the ways they have done this have been obvious: President Trump uttered over twelve thousand lies and misrepresentations in his first thirty-two months in office, as documented by the Washington Post, the number accelerating from about five a day at the outset of his administration to roughly twenty a day by the summer of 2019. Lying and shading the truth have long gone hand in hand with American politics; what’s different now is that President Trump and his administration have no shame about lying when everyone knows they are lying; sometimes, even their denials or responses to questions can be so blatantly untrue that printing them without comment does a disservice to the truth.
President Donald J. Trump has issued near-daily attacks on foes, real and perceived, on Twitter. He has a decades-long history of pursuing opponents through the courts that extends through his presidency. He’s displayed an obvious propensity to use all tools available to him, including the use of his own Justice Department, to go after his perceived enemies. He plays favorites, and everyone knows it and almost everyone is afraid to speak on the record. They rightly fear for their reputations, their livelihoods, their jobs, their ability to freely navigate the world. Most of the more than two hundred people I interviewed for this book, scores of whom had firsthand knowledge of the events described in these pages, including many who consider themselves on good terms with the families, did not wish to be identified in any way.
For this reason, though my endnotes are copious, not everything in this book is annotated or attributed, and not all quotes identify the speaker. In those cases, I have vetted firsthand accounts with multiple sources, and have, wherever possible, relied on documents to corroborate these accounts.
None of the main subjects of this book—neither Donald nor Ivanka Trump, nor Charles nor Jared Kushner—agreed to be interviewed. I sent each of them scores of questions. Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump did not respond. Through his attorney, Charles Kushner answered some of the questions; his answers are reflected in these pages. Jared Kushner, through a White House spokesman, addressed some factual queries but otherwise did not answer my questions.
Some of the people who have associated with the Trumps or Kushners over the years have their own criminal or legal histories; some of them have been convicted of lying. I have taken extra care in those cases to vet their accounts, but have not shied away from relying on their statements when they are corroborated. No account of the history of the Trumps and the Kushners could be comprehensive without them.
My task has been made more difficult by the Trumps’ and Kushners’ extensive use of broad nondisclosure agreements that prohibit almost everyone who has worked with them from saying anything about their experiences: among those required to sign them were people who worked for the Trump Organization, for The Apprentice, for Ivanka Trump’s business, for the Kushner family business, for Donald Trump’s campaign, and even for the White House. Ex–White House employees have been given lucrative jobs in the Trump campaign, which extend the obligation to keep silent. Nondisclosure agreements have made writing this history all the more challenging.
Donald Trump had other, well-documented ways of trying to keep people silent; those included hush money payments and using the National Enquirer to “catch and kill” stories about alleged improprieties. As shown in these pages, he has tried to compromise and threatened to sue or actually sued journalists; his suit against journalist Tim O’Brien lasted five years.
The Trump White House has been an especially secretive White House: breaking with decades of tradition, Trump refused to release his tax returns. The administration has repulsed congressional subpoenas, it has asserted executive privilege to keep witnesses from testifying; the Trumps have sued bankers and accountants to hinder them from releasing information to congressional investigators. He has sued the Manhattan DA to prevenet a grand jury from reviewing his taxes. Trump has gone to court trying to prevent litigants from learning about payments from foreign governments; he has gone so far as to order the creation of false memos that would preserve an untrue historical record.
Dark money accounts support the Trump campaign; his inaugural committee has not explained how it spent more than a third of its funds; its deputy chairman, Rick Gates, tried to keep money off the books altogether by having donors pay vendors directly. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is in prison for fraud and conspiracy against the United States; Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is in prison for fraud, violating campaign finance laws, and lying to Congress; a campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos, served a sentence for lying to the FBI; Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Gates, and national security advisor, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to the same crime.
The White House no longer releases visitor logs; it doesn’t maintain records for visitors at the private clubs like Mar-a-Lago and the Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster that have operated as weekend White Houses. The Trump administration has decimated the ranks of government scientists and gutted databases.
The president’s disclosure forms list more than two hundred assets, most of them LLCs, but don’t require that he file information about partners, investors, or debtors. Jared Kushner amended his initial disclosure form thirty-nine times; his filings and Ivanka Trump’s filings list hundreds of limited liability companies but do not require information about partners or investors. In a court dispute in 2017, Kushner Companies went to court to keep the members of just one of its limited liability companies secret.
There has been one more challenge: writing a history as it unfolds before me. New news keeps breaking, new facts come to life that explain old ones, and new information emerges that expands and fills out our body of knowledge. I have done my best to account for all of this and to present this volume in a timely fashion. Given the nature of the times, I did not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. For this, I beg the reader’s indulgence.
Brooklyn, New York, Autumn 2019