Ken Kurson, Who Was Pardoned by Trump, Faces Charges in New York

Last October, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Kurson with cyberstalking and harassing three people, including the doctor, whom he blamed for the collapse of his marriage. At the time, Mr. Mukasey said that “the conduct alleged is hardly worthy of a federal criminal prosecution.”

But Mr. Kurson’s accusers said that his behavior — which included targeting the doctor with negative Yelp reviews, threatening emails and insinuations in calls to her office that she was having an affair, according to the federal complaint — had been “diabolical.”

A footnote in the federal complaint mentioned that in addition to the behavior for which he was being charged, Mr. Kurson had engaged in a pattern of harassment that included “installing software on one individual’s computer to monitor that individual’s keystrokes and website usage without his/her knowledge or authorization.”

In addition to his ties to Mr. Kushner, Mr. Kurson is a former speechwriter for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump. He also faced criticism during the 2016 presidential election for advising Mr. Trump on a speech.

Court documents filed in November 2020 indicated that Mr. Kurson was in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors. But in his final hours in office, Mr. Trump rendered those talks moot by pardoning Mr. Kurson, along with a number of the president’s other associates, including his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Vance, a Democrat, had opened separate investigations into the conduct that led to the federal charges against Mr. Kurson and Mr. Bannon, raising the prospect of state charges, from which Mr. Trump’s pardon did not protect them. (The investigation into Mr. Bannon is ongoing.)

Mr. Vance’s office charged Paul J. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, with mortgage fraud and other felonies in 2019. A New York appeals court later ruled that the charges violated the state’s double jeopardy law.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/nyregion/ken-kurson-charged-trump-kushner.html