When Corruption is a Family Affair

Posted: 13th July 2026

This is the second of a series of essays I am writing this summer about corruption, which can be defined as the abuse of power for private gain. With the right bad actors in power, corruption can evolve from something occasional within any kind of organization and political party into a lubricant of “the system” and a rationale for government action.

Here’s my first essay in the series, on how the Supreme Court now serves as a partner in authoritarian corruption in America.

The Supreme Court, Partner in Authoritarian Corruption

RUTH BEN-GHIAT

JUN 30

Read full story

Now we turn to corruption as a family affair, starting with the role of President Donald Trump’s sons-in-law. A 2024 Lucid essay addressed the place of sons-in-law in authoritarian states in Italy, Chile, Turkey, Hungary, and Trump’s America. The present essay updates this last case study.

Authoritarians and their Sons-In-Law from Mussolini to Trump: Partners in Corruption

RUTH BEN-GHIAT

JANUARY 3, 2024

Read full story

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who has no formal role in his administration, recently sat in on an official meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Old news, you might say. Where isn’t Jared Kushner these days? Iran, Ukraine, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Israel, Russia…never losing an opportunity to fish for ways to enrich himself and his autocratic friends and patrons, while tasked with conducting sensitive military or trade negotiations.

This time, though, it wasn’t Kushner. It was a different son-in-law: Michael Boulos, who is married to Tiffany Trump and is the son of businessman Masad Boulos, who came to Texas from Lebanon as a teenager and is now Trump’s Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs and Senior Advisor for Africa at the State Department.

Sec. Marco Rubio, who is normally a smooth talker, seemed momentarily at a loss when reporters asked why Boulos junior was at that meeting. He provided a lame answer: Boulos was in Abu Dhabi to see his brother, and then he and his good friend Rubio decided to “catch up.” A meeting with a foreign head of state is as good a time as any!

The Special Place of Sons-In-Law in Authoritarian Corruption

Sons-in-law, by virtue of their special position within the autocrat’s family, may occupy key positions in the inner sanctum, becoming central to corruption operations that benefit the whole family network.

The ultimate insider-outsiders, sons-in-law are convenient tools for autocrats who often designate their actual sons as candidates to succeed them (which has happened among autocrats one of every three years since 1994, a phenomenon known as hereditary succession).

Freed of this burden, sons-in-law have a different role, and they are often placed in economic policy and management positions that have potential to enrich the family. Such jobs also carry lots of exposure, giving the autocrat ammunition to throw the son-in-law under the bus if a scapegoat is needed or disloyalty is suspected.

Sons-in-law inevitably come to know things about the leader that could be valuable to his opponents. Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano kept a diary, which his wife Edda smuggled out of Italy with the help of fashion designer Emilio Pucci after Il Duce had Ciano executed for voting to remove him from power. Allied prosecutors used the diary as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Pierre Janssen, Mobutu Sese Seko’s son-in-law, made sure the tyrant was dead before publishing a tell-all book about his father-in-law’s colossal corruption and profligate spending.

Kushner: An Exemplary Son-in-Law

Kushner kept notes, too. Yet the memoir he released in 2022 to celebrate his achievements in foreign and domestic policy during the first administration keeps Trump’s secrets and depicts his father-in-law exactly as he likes to be seen (brash dealmaker, family-oriented patriarch). It is a 400-plus page loyalty gesture.

How could Kushner not excel at the dark arts of corruption, given his trio of mentors? Besides Trump, there is his own father, Charles (who was convicted of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering, then pardoned by Trump and installed as Ambassador to France) and close Kushner family friend Benjamin Netanyahu, who is charged in Israel of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery (his corruption trial has involved 98 hearings over 18 months) and is also the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.

During his father-in-law’s first administration, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, earned up to $640 million while serving as “senior advisors.” Kushner made that experience a launching pad for a far more ambitious venture: starting Affinity Partners, a private-equity fund backed by $2 billion in Saudi sovereign wealth funds, sovereign wealth funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, money from Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, and an unidentified foreign investor.

So yes, Kushner is conducting critical foreign negotiations while being funded by known and unknown foreign investors. He is there, nominally, to represent the United States, but his real job is to represent the interests of Jared Kushner, the Trump clan, and his financial backers.

This is why return on investment was probably never the point of Affinity, and it’s no surprise that a September 2024 letter to Affinity by Senate Committee on Finance Chair Sen. Ron Wyden states that the fund has generated no real income for its backers. Those investors likely wanted something else: the chance to influence the foreign, commercial and other policies of a superpower.

Kushner shows us how policymaking looks when corruption is at the center.

Serving as a wartime envoy and negotiator for the U.S. government is a side job: the real work overseas is raising billions for your fund. So what if mistakes occur due to your inexperience (Iran) or because your real focus was elsewhere, like on the master plan you had recently unveiled at Davos for luxury resorts you will build in Gaza? Making a killing from all the killing is how you roll.

If the press reveals that you relied heavily on a Kremlin document for the terms and concepts of your peace plan for Ukraine, you won’t be fired. Quite the contrary. Your collaborator on that peace plan, Kirill Dmitriev, is not only Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, but heads a main sovereign wealth fund of Russia, which is a kleptocracy. Dmitriev understands your focus is raising money. Let’s reduce our time at the negotiating table and help your father-in-law to keep Putin happy!

Kushner, Dmitriev, and Steve Witkoff, December 2025, Moscow. Kristina Kormilitsnya/AFP, via Getty Images.

As we see, Boulos has much to learn from Kushner. Boulos already has one Trump family badge of honor: being a person of interest to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for reportedly receiving $100,000 for using his proximity to Trump to help a Saudi businessman, Abdulelah Allam, recover assets seized by the Saudi government in a corruption crackdown. He gets extra points for involving a family member, his cousin, James Frangi, as middleman.

As ranking Committee member Rep. Robert Garcia stated, the Boulos transaction “raises serious concerns that corrupt foreign money is being used to buy access to the President and influence American policy.”

When corruption becomes institutionalized, such actions are the norm. Among autocrats, policymaking and diplomacy are understood as opportunities for dealmaking and shakedowns that benefit private family interests. One reason Trump falls sleeps in presidential meetings is that governance is profoundly boring to him. It is the dealmaking, moneymaking, and constant ego boosts that are exciting. Kushner understands this, plays to it, and benefits from it. Trump uses him, but he uses Trump too.