Seven months after he was pardoned by President Donald J. Trump, a former editor of The New York Observer was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Wednesday, accused of spying on his former wife by unlawfully accessing her computer.
The former editor, Ken Kurson, a close friend of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was charged with eavesdropping and computer trespass, both felonies. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Kurson of having used spyware to access his then-wife’s computer in 2015 as their marriage fell apart. Each crime is punishable by up to four years in prison.
A lawyer for Mr. Kurson, Marc L. Mukasey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The charges extend a saga that began in spring 2018 when the Trump White House offered Mr. Kurson a seat on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
When the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a routine background check into Mr. Kurson, the agency soon learned about allegations that he harassed several people, one of them a doctor at Mount Sinai.
In October 2020, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Kurson with cyberstalking and harassing three people, including the doctor, whom he blamed for the collapse of his marriage, which ended in divorce in 2016. At the time, Mr. Mukasey, said, “The conduct alleged is hardly worthy of a federal criminal prosecution.”
Court documents filed the following month indicated that Mr. Kurson was in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors. But in his final hours in office, Mr. Trump rendered those negotiations moot by pardoning Mr. Kurson, along with a number of the president’s other associates, including his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.
Along with his ties to Mr. Kushner, Mr. Kurson is a former speechwriter for Rudolph W. Giuliani, and during the 2016 presidential election, he faced some backlash after having advised Mr. Trump on a speech.
In February, The New York Times reported that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., 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, only to have a New York appeals court rule that the charges violated the state’s double jeopardy law.
But Mr. Manafort had already undergone a financial fraud trial in 2018 and had been convicted. Mr. Kurson has never been tried.
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