Chris Christie is the former governor of New Jersey and author of Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, from which this article is adapted. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books. All rights reserved.

On the morning of May 6, 2016, in the heat of the presidential campaign, I headed into the city to see Donald Trump. A couple weeks earlier, he had asked me to lead his government transition team, and I was ready to button down the announcement details and dive into this important responsibility. No one had to tell me how huge a job it was. But I was all in.

By this point in the presidential campaign, I’d become a semi-permanent fixture on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. The Secret Service agents didn’t bother me anymore. I didn’t have to check in with Donald’s executive assistant, Rhona Graff, or anyone else. On this particular morning, I walked past the receptionist —“Hello.” I nodded good morning to everyone, and I breezed into the main office.


“Hi, Chris. What’s up today?” Donald said without looking up as I dropped into one of the chairs in front of his desk.

“I’m doing the transition stuff,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” he said with a sigh, finally glancing up at me and scrunching his face a little. “I hate that stuff. It’s bad karma, Chris. You know that.”

I just smiled. “I know, Donald,” I assured him. “But you gotta do it.”

“I know, I know,” he admitted. “Let’s get Corey in here, and let’s finish this up.”

He called to Rhona, who summoned the campaign manager. Half a minute later, Corey Lewandowski walked in. Corey and I had talked about my chairing the transition, and we were on the same page. He handed me a draft of a news release announcing my appointment.

“Is this OK with you, Governor?” Corey asked as he sat in the chair next to mine.

I gave the release a quick glance. “Looks fine to me,” I said. Then Corey handed the paper to Donald, who picked up a black Sharpie, made a couple of minor edits and handed the sheet back to me. “I’m really happy you are doing this for me,” he said. “And I think it’s going to be good for you, too.”

“Yeah,” I answered cheerfully. “I think it will be good for both of us.”

The meeting was over. Our business was finished. Or so I thought. Actually, the meeting had hardly begun.

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Just as Corey and I prepared to stand, I heard a soft voice coming from just inside the open office door.

“Good morning, everyone,” the voice said.

As Corey and I both turned around, there stood Jared Kushner, Donald’s 35-year-old son-in-law and close campaign adviser. Jared and I had spoken once or twice at Trump Tower. We didn’t really know each other well by then, despite both of us being close to Donald and both of us working on the campaign. But given the role I had played more than a decade earlier as the prosecutor of his father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, of course there was an added something between us.

“Governor, how are you?” Jared said.

“Good, Jared,” I responded.

The two of us shook hands. He sat in a third chair in front of the desk. Looking at Donald, he asked, as if no one had told him: “So what are we doing here?”

“Great news,” Donald said. “The governor has agreed to run the transition, and we’re so lucky to have him. He’s so smart. He’s so good. This is going to be great for us, and then I don’t have to worry about any of that. Chris will handle everything.”

Jared’s face remained stubbornly blank. But he filled in the picture soon enough. “I don’t think we need to rush on this,” he said. “I don’t think we have to do this now. Let’s take our time on this one.”

That’s when Corey jumped in. “Actually, Jared,” he said, “we’re already late on this. The law requires us to designate someone. Right now, we’ve had Michael Glassner. Michael shouldn’t be in a role like that. We need to get somebody with the governor’s experience.”

Jared clearly wasn’t sold.

“I think we’re rushing on this,” he said. “Donald, I’d like you to hold back and give us some time to talk about it. There are a lot of things to discuss about this.”

I’d been around politics long enough to grasp what was happening. Jared was trying — and not so subtly — to derail my appointment as transition chairman. The issue wasn’t the rushing. The issue was the guy. Donald didn’t sound as convinced as Jared did.

“Jared,” he said, “why would we have to wait on this? It’s going to be a great announcement for him and a great announcement for us.”

Jared let a beat pass before he spoke up. But when he started talking, he sounded like a person who’d been holding poison inside himself for a very long time. “You really want to know why?” Jared asked.

“Yeah,” Trump said.

“Because I don’t trust him to have this, and you know why I don’t trust him to have it.”



***

Corey and I hadn’t said much since Jared arrived. But I looked at him, and he looked at me. Then Corey looked at Donald. “Do you want me to step out?” Corey asked.

“No,” Trump shot back. “You stay right there.”

And Jared began to detail his ancient grievances against me. “He tried to destroy my father,” Jared said.

“There was a dispute inside the family,” Jared reminded Donald, severely underplaying the sordid details of the felony indictment of Charles Kushner and subsequent guilty plea and imprisonment. In Jared’s version, his uncle’s lawyer brought the matter to me, and I collected damaging evidence from members of the family who already hated his father. He implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn’t state one fact to back that up. Just a lot of feelings — very raw feelings that had been simmering for nearly a dozen years. Those feelings were now, finally, coming to a boil in front of the man who had brought all this heat on the Kushner family — me.

“My father made those people rich, and they did nothing,” Jared said. “They just benefited from my father’s hard work. And those are the people who turned him in.”

As Jared spoke, he never raised his voice. But some strong emotions are not dependent on volume. Jared delivered his in a soft quiver. As he continued, his voice began to crack.

“It wasn’t fair,” he said.

He said I had worked with a bookkeeper who’d stolen private information. He said that once I got involved in the case, I said false things about his father and, after the guilty plea, I made his father stay in prison longer than he was supposed to. He had it down to the exact number of additional days. Jared said I did all of that because I was vindictive and ambitious and untrustworthy.

“This was a family matter,” Jared said, “a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis” — not by a hard-charging federal prosecutor.

Jared glanced at me, then fixed his gaze on his father-in-law, Donald. “How can he be trusted to handle the transition?”

As Jared plowed through this litany, I didn’t dignify his decade-old rantings with a response of any kind. I just didn’t speak. Not to correct his version of the record. Not to add crucial details. I didn’t say a word. I looked right at him. I kept thinking to myself, What is this? — and shooting perplexed looks at Corey and across the desk at Donald. How long are we going to let this go on?

Finally, Donald spoke up.

“Jared, if you were in Chris’ position, you would have done exactly the same thing. It was a big case against a famous person who had done something wrong, and he did what he had to do. You’re a lawyer. You would have done exactly what Chris did if you would have had that job.”

Trump stopped there for a moment, letting his words sink in. Then he said one more thing that I didn’t expect to hear: “And your other problem was you didn’t know me at the time. Maybe if you would have known me, maybe I could have helped.”

“Jared, if you were in Chris’s position, you would have done exactly the same thing,” Trump said.



Then he said one more thing that I didn’t expect to hear: “And your other problem was you didn’t know me at the time. Maybe if you would have known me, maybe I could have helped.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what Donald meant by that. But as I sat there and soaked it all in, the thoughts in my head had more to do with Donald than with Jared.

OK, we’re going to find out right now. Is Trump going to defend me and do the right thing? Or is he going to side with Jared and his ancient grudge?

I knew this was a crucial test for what this new phase of our relationship was going to be.

“Here’s an idea,” Trump said. “We should be able to resolve this. How ’bout if the four of us go out to dinner?”

That came out of nowhere for me. But it was classic Trump. Hammer it out over dinner. And who exactly would be there?

Donald laid it out. “Me and Chris, you and your dad. What if we all go out to dinner and just try to resolve this?”

I have to say I breathed a small sigh of relief when Jared refused to bite on Donald’s deal. I could hardly imagine a tenser gathering. “I don’t think there’s any way that my father is ready to have dinner with the governor,” Jared said.

Donald leaned back in his large leather chair. “Chris,” he said to me, “do you have anything to say here?”

“Just this,” I answered. “This is your decision, Donald. Whatever you want to do. I didn’t ask for this job. You guys approached me.”

Then, I turned to Jared, feeling like I should probably say something to him. The whole thing was just too surreal.

“You and I are both burdened with things that are difficult for the other person to understand,” I said to him. “You’re burdened with a love for your father that I can’t possibly understand, because he’s not my father. And I’m burdened with facts about your father that even you don’t know, that I can never tell you, because if I did, I would break the law.” Then I turned away from Jared and looked back at Donald.

“I’ve made my decision,” Donald said. “Jared, I know you’re not happy about it, but Chris is the chairman of the transition. Corey, put out the press release.”

Jared looked at Donald. “Fine,” he said. “I understand.” Donald looked back at him. Then Jared turned toward me.

“Good to see you, Governor,” he said before getting up and walking out of the room.



***

I hit the Midtown sidewalk by 11 a.m. At 5:41 p.m., a story popped up on the website of the New York Times. The piece was obviously a leak from Jared, attempting to undercut Donald’s big decision and me. “Trump Asks Son-in-Law, Jared Kushner, to Plan for Transition Team,” the headline read.

Really? Jared is planning the transition? Where the hell did that come from? Hadn’t Donald just decreed precisely the opposite, handing that assignment to me?

“Donald J. Trump has asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to begin quietly working to put together a blueprint for a transition team should he win the White House in November,” the Times reported. The story also went on about the “close relationship” between Trump and his son-in-law. It was as if our meeting that very morning had never even occurred.

Jared’s little game didn’t scuttle the official announcement, though. That Monday morning, just as planned, the campaign put out the news release exactly as Donald had edited it.

I did get an odd call the next day, one of many I would receive in the coming months. It was Jared, asking if I could stop in to see him. I didn’t know exactly what he wanted to add to our showdown with Donald. But I didn’t see any purpose in ducking him. I was perfectly satisfied with how I had handled our encounter. I liked where Donald had come down. The official announcement had discredited the leaked story in the Times.

Jared couldn’t have been more pleasant when I stopped into his office. “You and I should put all this behind us, Governor,” he said as soon as I sat down. “It’s all in the past as far as I am concerned. We have to do what is best for the campaign. We have to work together here. The most important thing is that Donald Trump is elected president.”

Now all he had to do was prove his intentions through his actions.

Things didn’t quite turn out that way.