Last weekend, Nicole Kushner Meyer stood on stage before a room of Chinese investors at the Ritz Carlton in Beijing and explained that her family’s new 79-story apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, “means a lot to me and my family.” Family is, indeed, sacrosanct to the Kushners. The clan was reared in Livingston, about a half an hour’s drive from the site of the project at hand. In his previous life as a real-estate scion, Meyer’s brother, Jared Kushner, the senior adviser and son-in-law to president Donald Trump, often spent weekends with his own burgeoning family, including fellow White House employee and First Daughter Ivanka Trump, near his parents’ weekend estate. And, as is well known, Kushner regularly visited his father on weekends when he was serving a 14-month sentence in a federal prison in Alabama on 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations—a formative experience that seems to have forged a bond and ambition within the young man.

But family wasn’t the only thing apparently on Meyer’s mind as she presented her pitch to investors. She was seeking $150 million in financing, partly through a program that gives foreigners who invest at least half a million dollars in American development projects a pathway toward permanent residency and eventual citizenship—a perfectly legal measure that Trump had extended a few days earlier when he signed the most recent budget bill. Meyer made a similar entreaty the next day at the Four Seasons in Shanghai, despite the flurry of ethics concerns that started to engulf the trip as reporters from The New York Times and a number of other news outlets telegraphed back that she had mentioned the elephant in the room: that her brother had left her family’s real-estate company to join the White House. (Kushner stepped away from Kushner Companies in January and divested many of his real-estate holdings, keeping others in a family-held trust in order to comply with government ethics standards, and his lawyer has said he would recuse himself from related policy issues.)

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This reality was presumably known to everyone in the room, but Meyer’s conflation couldn’t help but come across as a suggestion of potential influence peddling, real or otherwise. By the end of the weekend, Meyer issued an apology through Kushner Companies' spokeswoman Risa Heller. “Ms. Meyer wanted to make clear that her brother had stepped away from the company in January and has nothing to do with this project,” the statement read. “Kushner Companies apologizes if that mention of her brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors.” On Thursday, the Kushner family said it had pulled out of events at which representatives were supposed to appear in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, as The Washington Post reported had been advertised. “No one from Kushner Companies will be in China this weekend,” Heller said in a statement.

Donald Trump managed to win the highest office in the land despite various conflicts of interest and failure to release his tax returns, among other ethical quandaries. He did not divest of his myriad business holdings; he patronizes his own golf clubs and resorts most weekends; and despite a provision in the lease that stated no government official could benefit from it, he remains on the lease of the Trump Hotel in D.C.—a government-owned property that makes him technically both landlord and tenant. (His lawyers structured a series of trusts as a workaround.) Ivanka Trump has also been fairly successful at evading such ethical minefields. She came under fire when her clothing line, which she stepped down from in order to serve in her father’s administration, received trademark approval in China while the Chinese president was meeting with her and her family at Mar-a-Lago. She was also subject to scrutiny for taking a role in the White House, too. Somehow, the Trumps have managed to shake all of this off. The Kushners, however, seem to be realizing it might not be as easy for them.