16 MICHAEL WOLFF SIEGE As a family insider, Kushner, in a game of court politics so vicious incredible sacrifice the couple had made by coming to Washington. Ai that, in another time, it might have yielded murder plots, had appeared to for what? “Our lives have been destroyed,’ she said melodramatically triumph over his early White House rivals. But Trump invariably soured and yet with some considerable truth. The former New York socialit on the people who worked for him, just as they soured on him, not least had been reduced to potential criminal defendants and media laughir because he nearly always came to believe that his staff was profiting at his stocks. expense. He was convinced that everyone was greedy, and that sooner or After a year of friends and advisers whispering that his daughter a later they would try to take what was more rightfully his. Increasingly, it son-in-law were at the root of the disarray in the White House, Trur seemed that Kushner, too, might be just another staff member trying to once again was thinking they should never have come. Revising histo take advantage of Donald Trump. he told various of his late-night callers that he had always thought tk Trump had recently learned that a prominent New York investment never should have come. Over his daughter's bitter protests, he declin fund, Apollo Global Management, led by the financier Leon Black, had to intercede in his son-in-law’s security clearance issues. The FBI h provided the Kushner Companies—the family real estate group that had continued to hold up Kushner’s clearance—which the president, at been managed by Kushner himself while his father, Charlie, was in federal discretion, could approve, his daughter reminded him. But Trump « prison—with $184 million in financing. nothing, letting his son-in-law dangle in the wind. This was troubling on many levels, and it left a vulnerable Kushner Kushner, with superhuman patience and resolve, waited for his opp open to more questions about