Kushner, who has voluntarily agreed to talk to the Senate Intelligence Committee, has lately given investigators another subject to explore. According to The New York Times, he apparently encouraged Trump to make the disastrous decision to fire James Comey—and then, when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein surprised the White House by installing Mueller as special counsel, Kushner is said to have urged Trump to fight the appointment.

Investigators will try to determine whether Kushner’s actions were attempts to obstruct the Russia investigations. But even short of any possible criminality, Kushner’s choices are fascinating insights into his character, especially because they contradict what had been the prevailing conventional wisdom about him.

“If somebody’s in the way of what you want or what you need, you destroy them.”

In his public appearances, the impeccably dressed, bedimpled Kushner comes across as resolutely calm. And the media has extended that image to Kushner’s worldview: he’s been portrayed as a moderating influence on his tempestuous father-in-law, to the fury of Steve Bannon, his bitter rival for White House influence, who has reportedly scorned Kushner as a “globalist” and a “Democrat.”

Kushner’s true policy beliefs remain vague. What’s more important, though, is what the Comey episode reveals about his thought process. “This whole notion that Jared is a moderating influence on Trump is wrong,” a former Kushner associate says. “That’s probably what happened with Comey—he didn’t mitigate Trump’s terrible instinct. He’d be egging Trump on. Jared could not possibly read a guy like Comey as anything but a supreme poseur. If Comey was telling Trump, ‘Sir, I’m not comfortable with you asking for my loyalty, but I’ll give you my honesty’—that’s Jared’s least favorite kind of person. His reaction to that would be, ‘Get him out of here. This is not a guy we can do business with.’ ”

Elizabeth Spiers was the editor-in-chief of the Kushner-owned New York Observer for 18 months. “Part of the reason Trump and Jared missed the blowback they were going to get from firing Comey was they are very single-minded about stuff like this: if somebody’s in the way of what you want or what you need, you destroy them,” she says. “They’re both reactionary. Jared’s not as extreme as Trump. But he’s not thinking several moves ahead, either. And when bad things happen, it’s never his fault—he’s being victimized by somebody. That’s the way he perceives what happened to his father."

In 2005, Charles Kushner, a wealthy New Jersey real-estate developer, went to prison. A feud with his brother over a business deal escalated into a bizarre revenge scheme in which Charles hired a prostitute and arranged to videotape her having sex in a motel room with his brother-in-law. After his father’s conviction, on charges of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering (and at the hands of U.S. Attorney Chris Christie and Kushner relatives who cooperated with the government), then-24-year-old Jared stepped in to run the family real-estate empire. “That experience is totally formative, in terms of Jared not trusting anyone and not trusting the media and not trusting friends and barely trusting family,” the former Kushner associate says.

Part of his strategy to redeem the family name was buying the Fifth Avenue skyscraper that may now have him in the F.B.I.’s crosshairs. Another legacy of the scandal seems to have been Kushner’s advice to Trump to fire Comey and lash back at the special counsel. “Jared sees Comey as an incipient Chris Christie, who brought down Charlie,” the former Kushner colleague says. “He never, ever, ever thought his dad did anything even a little bit wrong, and one lesson he took from it was that you have to make sure you hit them harder the next time.”

It will all keep the F.B.I. and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees plenty busy. “It’s an investigation, so there are several strings being pulled at the same time, and you don’t know which ones are going to end up being significant,” a Senate source says, sounding both amazed by and a bit weary of the ongoing Trump drama. “There's so much raw material, every day leads to different shit.”