Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has said that Jared Kushner had him fired from President Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team as a form of retribution because Christie had prosecuted Charles Kushner a decade earlier.
Appearing on the podcast The Fifth Column Thursday, Christie recounted how Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, held animosity toward him because Christie secured a guilty plea from Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, in 2005 while serving as New Jersey’s attorney general.
Charles Kushner spent more than a year in federal prison in 2006 after pleading guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission regarding campaign contributions and witness tampering.
He also orchestrated a scheme to retaliate against his brother-in-law for cooperating with federal investigators by hiring a prostitute to have sex with his brother-in-law, secretly filming it and intending to give the tape to his sister.
Christie said that even 10 years after the case, Jared Kushner was angry and successfully pushed for Trump to fire him as the head of Trump’s 2016 presidential transition team after serving in the position for roughly six months.
“I know it was Jared,” Christie explained Thursday. “Because both Donald Trump and Steve Bannon told me it was Jared.”
The Independent has asked a representative for Kushner for comment.
Although Charles Kushner served time for his crimes and was disbarred, Trump pardoned him in 2020 as he was leaving office.
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Christie said Thursday: “I think the single biggest reason Jared got into the Trump White House was to ensure that his father would be pardoned.”
Last year, Trump tapped Charles Kushner to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to France.
Christie, who was close to Trump in 2016, said that Jared Kushner had even tried to stop Trump from naming Christie his transition head.
“The day that Trump was naming me, [Jared Kushner] went into Trump’s office and said, ‘You can’t do that.’ And made the argument against me, in front of me,” Christie recounted.
One of the arguments Jared Kushner allegedly made was that Christie should have never prosecuted Charles Kushner “because it was a family dispute” and “should have been handled by the rabbis.”
Christie joked: “I was thinking to myself, I didn’t know that Title 18 of the U.S. code was under the rabbi’s jurisdiction.”
Jared Kushner allegedly called Christie “immoral” and “a bad person.”
Christie ultimately got the position leading the team in May 2016. But amid the New Jersey “Bridgegate” scandal and reportedly at Jared Kushner’s insistence, Trump fired him in November 2016.
After Christie was fired in 2016, he remained close to Trump and his allies for some time. However, he gradually grew further away from Trump until he became one of the president’s loudest Republican critics.
Charles Kushner has been at the center of controversy in his new role as U.S. ambassador to France in recent weeks. He was temporarily banned from meeting with members of the French government after failing to attend a summons to explain comments he had made about the death of a far-right activist in Lyon.
