U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior adviser – and son-in-law – Jared Kushner, at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 23, 2017.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
In April, an anonymous Trump administration official said presidential adviser Jared Kushner had some bad press in his future. It wasn't so much a veiled threat as it was a prophecy.
A few weeks later, that prediction has been confirmed.
Harvard-educated, urbane and widely considered a key moderating influence on an unpredictable yet demanding President, the 36-year-old Mr. Kushner wields immense power as the point person on the Middle East, reinventing government, innovation, criminal-justice reform and the response to the opioid epidemic.
Mr. Kushner was memorably dubbed the "Secretary of Everything" by CNN, but exactly who is he?
Related: Trump hits out at 'fake news' following Kushner reports
The short answer, of course, is he's the privileged scion of a wealthy New Jersey real-estate family and Donald Trump's son-in-law – husband to the President's eldest daughter, Ivanka.
A picture is also emerging of a man whose youthful, composed bearing belies a tough-as-nails ruthlessness.
As his friend Strauss Zelnick, a Manhattan financier and long-time friend of Mr. Kushner told Politico , "he's tough. In an exceedingly polite way, he is as tough as anyone is in New York City real estate."
In the past seven days, Mr. Kushner has been the subject of a devastating series of articles, the most damaging of which – a scoop in the Washington Post – suggests that he sought to establish a secret communication channel last December with the Kremlin using Russian-secured facilities.
Perhaps a bigger problem is that Mr. Kushner omitted mention of his contacts with the Russians in filling out the documentation required to obtain his security clearance. And there may have been several of these contacts – Reuters later reported there had been at least three others.
It hasn't been established that he lied on the forms. But if that were proven to be the case, it's a criminal offence, punishable by up to five years in prison.
Other revelations that have emerged about Kushner in recent weeks: secret meetings with Chinese and Russian bankers amid mounting financial pressure over a family investment he oversaw at 666 Fifth Ave., a money-losing Manhattan office tower; his residential real-estate holdings have been accused of shady dealings; and the businesses he promised to divest upon becoming an adviser to the President largely remain under his control.
It has been reported widely that he advocated strongly for the controversial firing of FBI director James Comey, whose investigators were probing Mr. Kushner's links to Russia.
That leaves aside the mini-scandal arising from a presentation his sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, gave in China earlier this month that intimated her brother could help expedite the process of obtaining investor visas to the U.S. in exchange for putting money into a Kushner investment in New Jersey. The family company later apologized.
If it seems like an unusual amount of news for one person to generate over the space of a few weeks, it's worth bearing in mind that the Kushner clan is no stranger to controversy.
Mr. Kushner's father, Charles, the son of Holocaust survivors, took over his own father's burgeoning commercial real-estate business and built it into an empire.
A long-time Democrat, Charles Kushner also managed to run afoul of the law, serving a jail term for illegal campaign donations, tax evasion and witness tampering – the latter charge stemmed from a nasty internecine family dispute and the fact that he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was providing evidence for the prosecution.
The elder Kushner later arranged to have a videotape of the encounter sent to his sister .
The federal prosecutor in the case, Chris Christie, went on to become New Jersey Governor, and eventually a close adviser to Mr. Trump; last December, he was dumped as head of the presidential transition committee, apparently at Jared Kushner's urging.
The Kushner family's vast wealth – according to Forbes magazine it exceeds $1.8-billion (U.S.) – has opened several doors for Jared, including acceptance to one of the world's most prestigious universities.
According to The Price of Admission, a 2006 book by Harvard alumnus Daniel Golden, the younger Kushner's admission to the famous Ivy League university was less a function of his academic achievement than his father's bank account.
Writing last November for ProPublica, the investigative website that employs him as a senior editor, Mr. Golden cheekily thanked Mr. Kushner for reviving interest in his book, which exposed the "grubby secret" that American plutocrats routinely buy admission to elite colleges for their offspring.
The criminal prosecution against Charles Kushner helped fill in the picture.
"While looking into Kushner's taxes, though, federal authorities had subpoenaed records of his charitable giving. I learned that in 1998, when Jared was attending The Frisch School and starting to look at colleges, his father had pledged $2.5-million to Harvard, to be paid in annual instalments of $250,000," Mr. Golden wrote. "Charles Kushner also visited Neil Rudenstine, then-Harvard president, and discussed funding a scholarship program for low- and middle-income students."
After his time at Harvard, Jared Kushner moved on to an MBA and law degree at New York University, his father's alma mater and an institution that happens to lease office space from the Kushner Companies.
In February, ProPublica published a scoop concerning his pledge to divest himself from a raft of family owned assets: it hasn't happened.
This past week, correspondent Alec MacGillis published the results of an investigation into Mr. Kushner's residential properties.
It uncovered decrepit rental units, humiliation of late payers, multiple lawsuits against former tenants even years after they had moved out – behaviour that has prompted accusations he is essentially a slumlord.
Mr. Kushner has also shown little hesitation to use the power of the pen to achieve his ends.
When he was owner and publisher of the New York Observer (he ceded ownership of the paper to his brother-in-law after the Nov. 9 election), the paper went after Trump foes such as New York Attorney-General Eric Schneiderman, who has led an investigation into Trump University (the President settled a class-action fraud lawsuit brought by former students for $25-million two days before his inauguration).
When Mr. Kushner suggested an investigation of Richard Mack, a fellow real-estate developer, and it yielded less than hard-hitting results, he demanded it be assigned to another reporter, according to former editor Elizabeth Spiers .
When the second reporter found nothing, he asked that another journalist outside the newsroom look into it.
When Ms. Spiers resigned a few months later, Mr. Kushner is said to have brought the story up with her successor.
In the White House, Mr. Kushner has become an influential – some might say central – player.
Among other things, he appears to be Canada's main interlocutor in the White House.
When Mr. Trump began making noises about cancelling the North American free-trade agreement, someone from Mr. Kushner's team reached out to Canadian officials with the suggestion it would be worth their time to call the President to persuade him otherwise.
Such is Mr. Kushner's importance to Mr. Trump that when the latter met with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Mr. Kushner was asked to stay in the room after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster were shown out.
It has also recently emerged that Mr. Kushner argued for the dismissal of the FBI's Mr. Comey, whose firing on May 9 caused a considerable political ruckus.
It's around that time the first reports surfaced that Mr. Kushner was a person of interest in the probe involving the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.
One of the Trump White House's defining characteristics is the vicious infighting among factions led by Mr. Kushner, chief of staff Reince Priebus and strategist Steve Bannon.
Indeed, it was an unidentified Bannon associate who was quoted last April in an Axios Media newsletter saying of Mr. Kushner: "I see some bad press in his future." It was a response to rumours of Mr. Bannon's fall into disfavour and impending departure. Similar talk has intermittently hounded Mr. Priebus, an establishment Republican. Both are still there.
Now a man sometimes described as "the princeling" is having his turn on the hot seat.