Last month, in an effort to push back on the growing consensus that his eldest son may be an idiot, Charlie Kushner sat down with CNN to claim that the decision to buy 666 Fifth Avenue, a Midtown tower that has become an albatross around Kushner Cos.’s neck, was not Jared’s but his. “I pushed Jared to do the deal,” Charlie insisted, despite the fact that Jared had been the de facto C.E.O. at the time the deal was being negotiated. His father, in fact, was busy making wallets at a prison camp in Alabama, where he was serving time for, among other things, setting up his brother-in-law with a prostitute, taping the encounter, and sending it to his sister in retaliation for turning state’s evidence. But we digress. Regardless of whose idea it was to buy 666 Fifth—what was then the most expensive building in New York City history, on the eve of the financial crisis—, the deal was a disaster. The building’s biggest tenants fled during the recession. The Kushners had to refinance, selling a 49.5 percent stake in the building to Vornado Realty Trust in exchange for a portion of the debt. Still, the mortgage ballooned. The entire $1.2 billion balance is due in 2019, and the property is bleeding money.

The result has been a slow-motion, failed fire sale, with the Kushners trying to find someone, anyone, to bail them out. In 2017, it looked like Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese holding company with ties to the Chinese government, might bite, but they backed out when the heat on Jared—suddenly a West Wing adviser—got too hot. Charlie even sat down with Qatar’s finance minister, Ali Sharif Al Emadi, in 2017, but the talks allegedly went nowhere.

Why did those talks go nowhere? As Charlie Kushner told CNN, Kushner Cos. takes pains to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest. Indeed, the firm’s lawyer “reminds dealmakers weekly of the company’s self-imposed ban on financing from foreign governments.” Kushner the Elder even went so far to admit it was “stupid” of him to meet with Al Emadi in 2017, saying he accepted the invite purely “out of respect” for the Qataris to tell them there was no way “we could do business.”

Getting a bail out from a company with “extensive ties” to Qatar, though? Apparently that’s a-O.K.!