I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, December 24.

If there are two people well positioned to explain President Trump's pardon last night of Jared Kushner's father.

They are Chris Christie and Andrea Bernstein. Andrea, who will join us in a minute,

is author of the book American oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps, and the marriage of money and power.

Chris Christie, before he was governor of New Jersey, if you don't know this or don't remember it,

was the U.S. attorney for the state who prosecuted Charles Kushner, a lawyer and real estate developer,

and Jared's father.

In a PBS interview last year, Christie explained a little of why he prosecuted Kushner

and why Kushner was not just any criminal in Christy's eyes, but was special.

I just think that it was so obvious he had to be prosecuted that, I mean, if a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and videotapes it and then sends the videotaped to his sister to attempt

to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?

I mean, it's one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S.

attorney. And I was U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, Margaret, so we had some

loathsome and disgusting crime going on there. But I just laid out the facts, and any

objective person who looks at the facts knows, confronted with those facts, I had a moral and

an ethical obligation to bring that prosecution.

Chris Christie pulling no punches last year on PBS.

With us now on Charles Kushner and some of the other 50 or so pardons the president

has given out this week, including how they relate to the president's own potential

legal problems, are Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Merritt's co-hosts of the WNYC podcast, Trump, Inc., about the

intersection of the president's business interests and the national interest.

They have a new episode about the possibility that Trump will be charged with various crimes

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