Ivanka and Jared are both senior advisers to US President Donald Trump but both had fast-paced careers before joining his administration.
Jared worked for his father’s real estate company Kushner Companies which fell into financial difficulty over the purchase of 666 Fifth, a tower block in New York City.
The family paid $1.8billion for 666 Fifth in 2007 using mostly borrowed money, but then the financial crash hit in 2008.
The global financial crisis led to a downturn in the rental market and the family risked defaulting on the loans that had financed the purchase of the building.
In early 2011, Jared called Richard Mack, who reportedly held some of the debt on 666 Fifth.
According to 2019 book ‘Kushner Inc’, he asked Mr Mack to take a significant write-down of his loan.
Mr Mack refused point blank, triggering an angry reaction from Jared.
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Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are both senior advisers to the President (Image: GETTY)
Ivanka and Jared at the G20 summit in Japan (Image: GETTY)
Author Vicky Ward claimed Jared “went beserk” and shouted “I’ve been working my a** off!” down the phone at his business associate.
Mr Mack apparently responded: “I don’t know who the hell you think you’re talking to,” and hung up.
At the time, Jared was the owner of the New York Observer, which was being edited by Elizabeth Spiers.
According to Ms Spiers, he asked to have a reporter investigate Mr Mack, based on an alleged tip about his business dealings.
Richard Mack (Image: GETTY)
She assigned a reporter called Dan Geiger to the case and Jared called him claiming that Mr Mack was a “bad fiduciary” who carelessly risked his investors’ money on suspect deals.
However, Mr Geiger looked into the case and found nothing, insisting that the tip-off claims did not add up.
Ms Ward wrote: “He sent Kushner a memo outlining exactly whom he had phoned and what the upshot was.
“A week or two later, Kushner called Geirger, and, as if he had never received the memo, told him: ‘There’s a guy called Richard Mack, and we’ve got to get this guy.’
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Elizabeth Spiers and Jared Kushner (Image: GETTY)
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“Geiger was bewildered – and uneasy. He went to Spiers, who, he said, recognised Kushner’s obsession as a ‘powder keg’.”
Jared insisted the reporter was at fault and, to humour him, Ms Spiers appointed a second reporter – and then a third, Ms Ward.
All three reporters found nothing on Mr Mack.
Eventually, Ms Spiers, the three reporters, the source and Jared met up and, upon grilling of the source, the story fell apart and even Jared agreed the story should be killed.
Sarah Ellison wrote in Vanity Fair in 2016: “The tip – which was about Mack’s business dealings – didn’t check out in the slightest. It was a joke. Totally made up.”
Ms Spiers, who left The Observer in 2012, later wrote about the episode in her blog.
It apparently became a “running joke” in the newsroom – if a reporter was ever behind in filing a story, they would joke it’s because they were working on “the big Dick Mack story”.
The Observer reporters could not find any dirt on Richard Mack (Image: GETTY)
As well as trying to dig dirt on people who crossed him, Jared allegedly tried to kill stories that were about his allies.
Ms Spiers noted he tried to get her to drop stories out of “blatant self-interest” as she desperately tried to keep the journalism at the newspaper independent.
According to Ms Ward however, Jared still went behind her back to hire a software developer to delete stories from the website he deemed “offensive”.