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16 MICHAEL WOLFF

As a family insider, Kushner, in a game of court politics so vicious that, in another time, it might have yielded murder plots, had appeared to triumph over his early White House rivals. But Trump invariably soured on the people who worked for him, just as they soured on him, not least because he nearly always came to believe that his staff was profiting at his expense. He was convinced that everyone was greedy, and that sooner or later they would try to take what was more rightfully his. Increasingly, it seemed that Kushner, too, might be just another staff member trying to take advantage of Donald Trump.

Trump had recently learned that a prominent New York investment fund, Apollo Global Management, led by the financier Leon Black, had provided the Kushner Companies—the family real estate group that had been managed by Kushner himself while his father, Charlie, was in federal prison—with $184 million in financing.

This was troubling on many levels, and it left a vulnerable Kushner open to more questions about the conflicts between his business and his position in the White House. During the transition, Kushner had offered Apollo's cofounder Marc Rowan, the job of director of the Office of Management and Budget. Rowan initially accepted the job, declining it only after Apollo chairman Leon Black objected to what would have to be disclosed about Rowan's and the firm's investments.

But the president-elect's concerns were elsewhere: he was more keenly and furiously focused on the fact that, in the constant search for financings that occur in mid-tier real estate companies like Trump's, Apollo had never extended itself for the Trump Organization. Now, it seemed baldly apparent, Apollo was backing the Kushners solely because of the family's connection to the administration. The constant accounting in Trump's head of who was profiting from whom, and his sense of what he was therefore owed for creating the circumstances by which everyone could profit, was one of the things that reliably kept him up at night.

"You think I don't know what's going on?" Trump sneered at his daughter, one of the few people he usually went out of his way to try to mollify. "You think I don't know what's going on?"

The Kushners had gained. He had not.

The president's daughter pleaded her husband's case. She spoke of the

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incredible sacrifice the couple had made by coming to Washington. And for what? "Our lives have been destroyed," she said melodramatically and yet with some considerable truth. The former New York socialite had been reduced to potential criminal defendants and media laughingstocks.

After a year of friends and advisers whispering that his daughter and son-in-law were at the root of the disarray in the White House, Trump once again was thinking they should never have come. Revising history, he told various of his late-night callers that he had always thought they never should have come. Over his daughter's bitter protests, he declined to intercede in his son-in-law's security clearance issues. The FBI had continued to hold up Kushner's clearance—which the president, at his discretion, could approve, his daughter reminded him. But Trump did nothing, letting his son-in-law dangle in the wind.

Kushner, with superhuman patience and resolve, waited for his opportunity. The trick among Trump whisperers was how to focus Trump's attention, since Trump could never be counted on to participate in anything like a normal conversation with reasonable back-and-forth. Sports and women were reliable subjects; both would immediately engage him. Disloyalty also got Trump's attention. So did conspiracies. And money—always money.

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Kushner's own lawyer was Abbe Lowell, a well-known showboat of D.C. criminal bar who prided himself on, and managed his clients' expectations and attention with, an up-to-the-minute menu of rumors and insights about what gambit or strategy prosecutors were about to dish out. The true edge provided by a high-profile litigator was perhaps not courtroom skill but backroom intelligence.

Lowell, adding to the reports Dowd had received, told Kushner that prosecutors were about to substantially deepen the president's—and the Trump family's—jeopardy. Dowd had continued to try to mollify the president, but Kushner, with intel supplied by Lowell, went to his father-in-law with reports about this new front in the legal war against him. Sure enough, on March 15 the news broke that the special counsel had issued a subpoena

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