Ironically, it’s Hillary Clinton who might bail Trump out here. When Bill Clinton named the first lady to lead a health-care task force in 1993, the appointment was challenged in court as a violation of the act. But the court concluded that the White House and Executive Office of the President didn’t fall under the statutory definition. Will that work for Kushner? Opinions diverge, even between Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who have emerged as the most consistent voices assailing Trump’s ethical practices.

“We’re not talking about Kushner running a side task force here,” Eisen, who was Obama’s chief ethics lawyer, told Politico in November. “We’re talking about a regular staff job. This falls right in the bull’s eye of the statute. I think it’s illegal.” But Richard Painter, who held the same position for George W. Bush, told ABC News that same month that while a Kushner job “clearly violates the intent of the law,” there are also “arguments that could be used to try and wiggle around it if you were making an appointment in the White House.”

The likely ascent to a job at the president’s right hand represents the latest piece of good luck and good timing for Kushner, a spree that began with his birth as the scion of a prominent New York area real-estate family—a parallel between Kushner and Donald Trump that has not been overlook. Kushner was also lucky in marriage, with his union with Ivanka Trump bringing him into another prominent New York real-estate empire.

The attempt to circumvent nepotism statutes points to another characteristic of Kushner’s career: He’s been willing and able to have rules bent on his behalf. In a 2006 book on how colleges court wealthy donors, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Daniel Golden reported that Jared Kushner was likely admitted to Harvard on the basis of a lavish gift that his father Charles made to the Ivy League college. Golden recapped his reporting in a recent ProPublica piece:

“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

During the course of the campaign, Kushner gradually came to be seen as a more and more powerful figure. He helped shape Trump’s Middle East policy and his March 2016 speech to AIPAC, an outing that was seen as surprisingly sober and prepared for a candidate mostly characterized by chaos and disorder. He was said to have a role in the June firing of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who, according to some reports, had sought to plant negative stories about Kushner. But although Kushner is an observant orthodox Jew, he emerged as a major backer of Steve Bannon, the emissary of the “alt-right” who became Trump’s final campaign chairman and is headed to the White House as its top strategist.