Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for DuJour Magazine

It was a glorious night for Ivanka Trump, her longtime friend and business partner Moshe Lax and DuJour Magazine as Ivanka unveiled her jewelry collection at an event hosted on May 29, 2014 by DuJour's Jason Binn at Tryst, located at the luxurious Wynn Las Vegas. DuJour Magazine prides itself on being a quarterly lifestyle publication for the highly affluent, as it targets the "vibrant worlds of the wealthiest and most inspiring subjects in the world."

At the time that Ivanka and Lax, a 43-year-old New York diamond heir and entrepreneur, were riding high with their vision of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, her first major business deal connected to the Ivanka Trump name. To the best of our knowledge, Team Trump hadn't yet huddled with Felix Slater to consider the possibility of a 2016 presidential campaign that coincided with big daddy Trump's long-held wish for a Trump Tower in Moscow -- as alleged Monday by The Washington Post.

Politico updates Ivanka Trump and Moshe Lax's pedigree as lady Trump stands by her man. "vendors call him a 'career grifter.' "His father’s creditors claim he’s a fraud and a serial extortionist who shakes people down with trumped-up threats of criminal charges. With these and other allegations piling up in court records along with judgments—against him, his wife and his businesses—for millions of dollars, his lawyers are abandoning him, saying he’s a deadbeat. All the while, he’s been living in one of the most luxurious mansions in the Bronx."

One fact is for certain with the Trumps. They stand by their friends.

Lax and his wife stood at the front of the ballroom, celebrating Trump's upset win at the campaign’s victory party in New York. Moshe Lax visited Trump Tower during the transition, while Tiffany Trump attended the launch party for a new Lax venture in February. Ivanka Trump and her brother Don Jr. gave depositions in an unrelated case in the summer of 2016, making it clear that they valued the advice of Moshe Lax in other prospective business deals, writes Politico.

Ivanka Trump renewed her licensing agreement with Lax in 2011, according to court records, allowing Moshe Lax to continue using her name, even though his company defaulted on payments connected to their fine jewelry business and he violated numerous terms of their agreement.

Trump’s relationship with Lax and the mountain of legal and financial troubles—reported here for the first time based on dozens of interviews and public records—raise serious questions about the first daughter’s judgment, even as she continues to serve as a powerful White House adviser. In response to detailed questions sent to the White House and the Trump Organization, White House spokesman Josh Raffel requested more information about this article but did not provide comment.

Ivanka Trump stressed her close ties to Moshe Lax -- who introduced her to Jared Kushner -- seeing him as a kindred spirit. “Moshe was looking to take his business to a whole new level,” she recounts in “The Trump Card,” a 2010 memoir in which the entire final chapter is devoted to her partnership with Lax. “In that way, I suppose, we were a lot alike, trying to make our own way along a path set out for us by our fathers and trying to extend that path in exciting new directions, which I guess explains why we hit it off.”