Seven months after being pardoned by President Donald J. Trump, a onetime editor of The New York Observer faces new charges of unlawfully spying on his former wife by secretly gaining access to her computer.
The editor, Ken Kurson, a close friend of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was charged in state criminal court in Manhattan on Wednesday with eavesdropping and computer trespass, both felonies. Prosecutors accuse Mr. Kurson of using spyware to breach his wife’s computer in 2015 as the couple’s marriage fell apart. Each crime is punishable by up to four years in prison.
“We will not accept presidential pardons as get-out-of-jail-free cards for the well-connected in New York,” the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in a statement announcing the charges.
A lawyer for Mr. Kurson, Marc L. Mukasey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Kurson used the spyware to monitor his wife’s computer keystrokes from The Observer’s offices in Midtown Manhattan, which allowed him to get the passwords to her Gmail and Facebook accounts, according to prosecutors. He used the illicit access to spy on her from September 2015 to March 2016, prosecutors said. The couple divorced in January 2016.
The charges, which were included in a criminal complaint, are the latest twist in a case that first began in spring 2018 when the Trump administration nominated Mr. Kurson for a seat on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
After the F. B.I. began a routine background check into Mr. Kurson, investigators soon learned of allegations that he had harassed several people, one of them a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital.
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.”
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.
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.
The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Vance, a Democrat, had opened separate investigations into the conduct that led to the unrelated charges against Mr. Kurson and Mr. Bannon. Mr. Vance’s office had previously charged Paul J. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, with mortgage fraud and other felonies. A New York appeals court later ruled that the charges violated the state’s double jeopardy law.
But Mr. Manafort had already been tried and convicted on federal fraud charges in 2018. Mr. Kurson has never been tried.
It was unclear whether Mr. Kurson’s former wife is cooperating with the district attorney’s office. In a written explanation about why the president had pardoned Mr. Kurson, the Trump administration said she had written a letter to federal prosecutors asking them to drop their case.
In July, Mr. Vance charged Mr. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, as well as its longtime chief financial officer, with participating in a sweeping, yearslong scheme to evade taxes on certain benefits.
The investigation into Mr. Kurson was led by the district attorney’s bureau of cybercrime and identity theft, which has been a priority for Mr. Vance.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
