Allison Kaplan Sommer lives in Israel and writes for Haaretz.

It’s fair to say that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the respective front-runners for the Republican and Democratic parties, would oversee very different kinds of White Houses should one of them get elected. But the two candidates do have one odd thing in common: an in-law from hell, one who would bring potentially embarrassing baggage into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue when he comes to visit.

That’s because their daughters Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton both have a felon for a father-in-law.


Ivanka Trump is married to Jared Kushner, heir to a billion-dollar New Jersey real estate empire, whose Orthodox Jewish family has been both a philanthropic pillar of the state’s Jewish community and a force in its political life. But the family’s reputation was indelibly scarred after a longstanding feud between Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, and his brother, Murray, spun out of control and landed Charles behind bars.

The two brothers, heirs to their Holocaust survivor father’s thriving businesses, spent years filing lawsuits against each other, which led to government investigations of illegal behavior surrounding campaign financing, taxes and charitable contributions. Filial anger and a desire for revenge ultimately threatened Charles to the extent that he resorted to measures more characteristic of a New Jersey mob boss than a mild-mannered businessman. Furious that his sister Esther and her husband were providing information against him, he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, videotaped their sexual encounter and had the tape delivered to Esther.

Enter Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and former presidential hopeful and current endorser in chief of Donald Trump. Christie was the prosecutor who put Ivanka’s father-in-law behind bars.

As an ambitious U.S. attorney, Christie aggressively went after Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the IRS, making false statements to the federal government and witness tampering. He served 14 months of his two-year sentence at an Alabama prison and was permitted to spend the remainder of his sentence in a New Jersey halfway house.

In 2009, not long after Charles became a free man and resumed his business activities with a far more subdued public profile, Jared and Ivanka were wed and the proud Trump and Kushner papas stood beside them at their wedding.

The families appear to get on famously. Indeed, family loyalty overtook traditional Kushner Democratic Party ties last summer when Charles jumped parties long enough to donate $100,000 to Trump’s PAC and host a Jersey Shore reception for Trump at his seaside mansion.

Left: Donald Trump, accompanied by Melania, Ivanka her husband Jared Kushner, during a campaign event in Iowa; right: Hillary Clinton, accompanied by Bill, Chelsea and her husband Marc Mezvinsky during her campaign launch on Roosevelt Island. | AP Photo.

Ivanka and Jared are also very close to their respective fathers, both personally and professionally. It seems to be a quality the ambitious overachieving young couple shares along with their extreme ambition—a strategic ability to rise above their flawed legacies while preserving unswerving family loyalty. As far as The Donald is concerned, his daughter and son-in-law’s squeaky-clean image as a tasteful New York power couple clearly more than balances out Jared’s dad’s prison record, and it is clear Trump views his son-in-law as a campaign asset, not a liability. He loves to show him off. At a town hall meeting last month, when asked about Israel, Trump responded that “my son-in-law is Jewish, and he’s fantastic.”

And in his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, Trump won big applause when he mentioned that his daughter—who converted to Judaism and whose Hebrew name is Yael—was “about to have a beautiful Jewish baby.”

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The criminal transgression of Chelsea Clinton’s father-in-law, Ed Mezvinsky, also appears to have had a lasting and devastating effect on his family. Just as the Trumps and Kushners inhabited the same lofty world of high-stakes real estate development, Chelsea Clinton's and Marc Mezvinsky’s parents—Bill and Hillary and Ed Mezvinsky and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky—were Democratic political power couples who ran in the same circles. Chelsea and Marc’s 2010 wedding should have been a great coming together for the two families who were already close; instead, it was touch-and-go as to whether Marc’s father would even be invited. His mother walked him down the aisle, and none of the wedding photos released to the press included the groom’s parents.

Ed, who had been a two-term Iowa congressman in the 1970s, relocated to Pennsylvania after marrying Marjorie and became chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. In 1992, Margolies-Mezvinsky ran for a House seat and won—only to lose it in the Republican sweep of 1994.

Senator Frank Lautenberg, Former President Bill Clinton, Bruce S. Schonbraun, and Charles Kushner. | Getty Images

But a more shocking disappointment than an unsuccessful election was in store for Margolies-Mezvinsky. During the 1990s, she discovered that her husband was neck-deep in multiple fraudulent-investment adventures, swindling investors of $10 million. Among his victims was her own mother. Margolies-Mezvinsky herself went bankrupt and had to withdraw from a political race as a result of his misdeeds.

In March 2001, Mezvinsky pleaded guilty to felony charges of bank, mail and wire fraud, and he spent five years in prison, between 2003 and 2008. He and his wife were divorced in 2007.

Extended family gatherings can’t be comfortable, and not just because of the divorce. Not only did Ed Mezvinsky use his friendship with the Clintons to give him credibility to convince his victims to invest their money with him, but when he was being prosecuted, he and his wife desperately turned to Bill and Hillary Clinton to bail him out of trouble.

POLITICO recently uncovered White House files showing that Mezvinsky had asked for clemency from his powerful friends in the last days of the Clinton presidency. In a desperate and impractical—and ultimately unsuccessful—Hail Mary play, the couple wrote to the president requesting a pardon on January 12, 2001, eight days before Clinton left office.

Unlike Kushner—who returned home from prison with his business and his family, if not his dignity, intact, and has worked his way back to a measure of respectability—Ed Mezvinsky, now 79, continues to carry his past sins with him, in the form of unpaid restitution to his victims. As recently as 2014, tabloids reported that his victims still haven’t seen their money returned and that it was unlikely it would ever happen.

Chelsea and Marc had known each other from his family’s better days and became friends at Stanford University. Their love has truly appeared to conquer all—triumphing over their awkward intertwined families, who now share a grandchild, Charlotte, with another on the way. Whether it is because his family background soured him on the political life, or whether his Wall Street job is disadvantageous to Hillary Clinton, Marc Mezvinsky (unlike Jared Kushner) has been virtually invisible in his mother-in-law’s campaign, leading The Forward to ask, “Why Is Hillary Clinton's Jewish Son-In-Law Avoiding Campaign Spotlight?"

All these shared experiences, one would think, were part of the bonding between Chelsea and Ivanka that made them friends, at least before the campaign. The Trump-Kushner and Clinton-Mezvinsky couples double-dated, and their kids play-dated. The two women must have a lot to talk about over a cup of coffee: In addition to having fathers-in-law with sullied pasts and husbands who overcame the family shame, both became pregnant; Ivanka gave birth to her third child on March 26 , and Chelsea is due with her second in the summer.

Beyond that, both Chelsea and Ivanka are well-heeled, ambitious, well-educated Manhattan working mothers nearly exactly the same age. Chelsea is 36 and vice chair of the Clinton Foundation; Ivanka is 34 and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.

Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton attend the 2014 Glamour Women Of The Year Awards. | Getty Images

But things have obviously changed. Chelsea and Ivanka have put their friendship on hold as they have crisscrossed the country campaigning in maternity wear in support of their cross-aspirational parents, whose campaign teams load up their dossiers ready to smear the other during the general election.

But only last June, just as her father was getting into the race, Ivanka tweeted a quote from Chelsea with the approving hashtag #wisewords— “Life is not about what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.” For women born in the glare of the media spotlight into highly ambitious, flawed families, managing motherhood, pregnancy and challenging in-laws and facing an-already nasty and combative presidential campaign battle—they should be words to live by over the coming months.

And what will happen when all is said and done, after the election and inauguration is behind the First Family, whichever family that may be?

While their new connection to the White House will certainly help rehabilitate the image of either Chelsea or Ivanka's ex-con father-in-laws, the optics will be problematic for their presidential relative—particularly for Clinton if Mezvinsky's debts to his victims remain unpaid.

And so, what might otherwise be camera-worthy extended family moments (joint Christmas-Hanukah celebrations with the grandkids, maybe?) could very well be kept more private than usual, if only so that an ex-con in-law doesn’t cast a shadow on the person who is trying to hold the confidence of a nation.