The Trump White House was always bound to be a low-wattage operation, considering the professional grifters the campaign attracted. Candidate Trump, after all, never actually planned on winning the election. Still, the incoming administration had a chance to avoid making complete and total fools of itself in the months before the inauguration, by (begrudgingly) hiring Chris Christie to run federally-mandated preparations to take over the government. While hardly anyone’s idea of a political savant, the former governor of New Jersey was at the very least a semi-competent manager who had served as both a federal prosecutor and in an executive role. Christie, by all accounts, spent much of 2016 trying to find quality Republican establishment appointees to serve in the administration, so that Trump’s government might have a chance at functioning. But shortly after winning the election, the ex-Miss Universe owner decided to unceremoniously fire the guy, throw his team’s work in the trash, and handle things “more or less by himself,” a turn of events that led to the bumbling shit-show that is our current executive branch. And apparently, we have Jared Kushner’s unique view of the law to thank for that.

In a memoir slated for release at the end of the month, the ex–New Jersey governor accuses the First Son-in-Law of carrying out a political “hit job” on him as revenge for prosecuting his father, Charles Kushner, a decade prior. For those not up to speed on the criminal history of the president’s in-laws, in 2005, Kushner the Elder pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, following an investigation by then–U.S. Attorney Chris Christie. The witness-tampering charge was a result of Chuck’s decision to retaliate against his sister’s husband, William Schulder, who was cooperating with the feds, by hiring a sex worker to seduce him, filming the encounter, and sending the tape to his sister. Jared, unsurprisingly, had bad feelings about his father going to prison for 14 months, though his anger didn’t lie with his (extremely guilty) dad but rather prosecutors, who a man now working in the upper echelons of the U.S. government believed had overstepped their bounds. During an April 2016 meeting, the Boy Prince of New Jersey reportedly pleaded with his father-in-law not to name Christie transition chairman, implying, per Christie, that “I had acted unethically and inappropriately,” and making the bold claim that when it came to the sex tape and the blackmailing, such things were “family matter[s], matter[s] to be handled by the family or the rabbis.”

Trump ended up hiring Christie anyway, but Jared, who seemingly believes criminal acts should be settled at a diner on the New Jersey Turnpike, never relented. Shortly after the election, he got his wish: Christie was given the heave-ho and told by then–senior adviser Steve Bannon that “one person only was responsible for the . . . execution . . . Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred decades ago,” an account echoed in Michael Lewis’s book about the administration. “The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon apparently told Christie.

While the former governor of New Jersey has his own history of political revenge, corruption, and score-settling, Jared Kushner has gone on the record with his belief that his father did nothing wrong in committing a host of federal crimes. In 2009, he explained to New York magazine that his father was actually the true victim in all this: “His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office, and they took it to the government,” Jared insisted, not mentioning that the things on the pieces of paper showed evidence his father had committed a cornucopia of crimes. “Siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing. He gave them interests in the business for nothing. All he did was put the tape together and send it. Was it the right thing to do? At the end of the day, it was a function of saying, ‘You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.’”

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