July 2017 to December 2017
In the first year of Trump’s presidency, MBS and MBZ not only erect direct conduits to Trump but see him execute both their grandest and most minute policy demands—from personnel changes to policy initiatives, from passing them classified intelligence to continuing to seek ways to bring to fruition MBZ’s “grand bargain” for the Middle East. Hundreds of millions of dollars in suspicious transnational transactions, coupled with a spate of suspicious meetings involving Kremlin agents, Israeli spies, Saudi torturers, Emirati mercenaries, and two “princes” (Kushner and MBS) help confirm that U.S. foreign policy is for sale and the federal government less transparent than ever—an impression only solidified when a Trump adviser plots to develop two secret international “armies” under Trump’s control.
On July 18, 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller, just two months into his appointment, establishes probable cause before a federal court that a personal attorney of the president of the United States is an unregistered foreign agent.1 While the special counsel’s successful application for a search warrant doesn’t state which foreign nation he believes Michael Cohen to be a foreign agent of, one likely candidate is Russia, for in January 2017, Cohen had acted as a courier for a Russia-Ukraine “peace deal” that “had the backing of Russians close to the Kremlin.”2 A Mother Jones investigation will reveal that in fact the deal Cohen brought to the White House was not only backed by Kremlin-linked oligarchs but had been approved by the Kremlin itself—even initiated by it, inasmuch as it was “senior aides to Putin [who] encouraged him [the deal’s author] to push the plan” by trying to get it to Trump.3
The so-called peace deal is an agreement to have the new American president drop the sanctions levied in response to Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine in early 2014. By the time Cohen acts as a courier for the deal and is asked to pass it along to the White House, however, it has grown to encompass all outstanding U.S. sanctions on Russia—including those imposed on the Russian Federation in December 2016 to punish the Kremlin’s pro-Trump interference in the 2016 presidential election.4
In explaining the process by which a Kremlin-approved treaty was “given to a Trump associate for delivery to the administration,” McClatchy reveals that the deal’s first draft, involving only Crimea-related sanctions on Russia, was written in February 2016, the month Trump became the prohibitive favorite in the Republican primaries. Three men authored the plan: Andrii Artemenko, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament; Alexander Rovt, a Ukrainian American billionaire who made his fortune in the fertilizer business in the former Soviet Union; and former Republican congressman Curt Weldon, who the Atlantic will report has “ties to the Trump campaign … as well as to powerful figures in Russia and Ukraine,” including Viktor Vekselberg—a Russian oligarch who both attended Trump’s inauguration and allegedly funded, through a company called Columbus Nova, the effort by Artemenko, Rovt, and Weldon to get the Kremlin-approved sanctions deal to Trump via Cohen.5
Weldon had previously been investigated by the FBI for political corruption relating to his ties to the “Russian-managed Itera International Energy Corporation, one of the world’s largest oil and gas firms.”6 The allegation that Weldon had illegally acted on behalf of a Russian oil and gas company did not lead to criminal charges but “tarnished” Weldon’s reputation, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.7
Like Weldon, Rovt has business ties to a Soviet-born oligarch—in his case Dmytro Firtash, to whom Rovt “sold most of his foreign fertilizer assets in 2007.” Firtash was “a chief financier of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party [in Ukraine] before Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 and fled to Moscow. That party paid millions of dollars to yet another key figure in the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, who was a top Yanukovych adviser before he became Trump’s campaign chairman.”8 Firtash is often accused, notes the Daily Beast, of being a “Moscow [Kremlin] front” because his work in the Russian gas industry eventually resulted in him being in business with the Russian government; indeed, his “thick business ties with the Kremlin” include “a 50-50 partnership with Russia’s state-backed Gazprom to sell gas in Ukraine.”9
Just as Artemenko and Weldon present as credible cutouts for Vekselberg, Rovt presents as a credible front man for Firtash. According to Bloomberg, “Through much of 2017, as the nascent Trump administration navigated controversies of its own making, Vekselberg was giving Russian officials and fellow businessmen vague yet certain assurances about his influence in the White House, according to six people who interacted with him at the time. He’d attended Trump’s swearing-in ceremony in Washington as a guest of [his American cousin and Columbus Nova founder Andrew] Intrater, who’d donated $250,000 to the inaugural committee, and come back with a newfound sense of clout, they said.”10 After being interviewed by Robert Mueller in March 2018, both Vekselberg and another noted “aluminum baron,” Oleg Deripaska, will be subjected to new sanctions, which by the end of 2018 have cost Vekselberg (in total) over $2 billion of his $16.4 billion fortune.11 The oligarch’s financial impetus to want sanctions removed is therefore profound as he helps coordinate the transmission of the Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon deal to Cohen and, thereafter, the White House.
In late December 2018, it will be revealed that Len Blavatnik, “a longtime business associate of Russian oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg,” had in 2015 suddenly amended his political donation habits, which for years had been bipartisan. As soon as Trump announces his candidacy, Blavatnik begins giving almost exclusively to Republicans, including “$3.5 million to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s PAC from 2015 to 2017” and a “hefty sum” to staunch Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).12 Trump will also enjoy Blavatnik’s largesse directly, with the Soviet-born billionaire donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.13
The story of how, as the Atlantic will put it, “a foreign national sought to influence the president through one of his closest advisers” begins during the presidential transition period, when Cohen and Vekselberg meet on January 9 to “discuss[] U.S.-Russia relations.”14 Just days later, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Columbus Nova, Intrater’s New York City investment management firm—one of whose biggest clients is the Vekselberg-owned company Renova Group—begins paying Cohen a consulting retainer (monthly payments of $83,333) that will total over $500,000 in seven months.15 Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater is not only the founder of Columbus Nova, but also its president.16
Cohen is thereafter introduced to Artemenko by Felix Sater, who had spent 2015 and 2016 secretly working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal with the Kremlin, Andrey Rozov, Cohen, and Trump. Trump’s Russian real estate “fixer” is therefore, over the period from September 2015 to February 2017, assisting Trump with both a multibillion-dollar property transaction and with a clandestine agreement on U.S. foreign policy—with both deals involving Trump and the Kremlin as consequential principals.17 Any connection between the two deals, such as each using Sater as a Trump- and Kremlin-connected intermediary, raises the prospect of a quid pro quo and therefore a federal charge of bribery; bribery is an impeachable offense under the U.S. Constitution.
The Kremlin-backed Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon-Vekselberg sanctions agreement Cohen ultimately ferries to the White House—with national security advisor Mike Flynn as its initial intended recipient—is fairly simple in its contours, and operates as a Putin-supported alternative to the Red Sea Conspiracy; the latter is a plan that likewise would lead to the ending of all U.S. sanctions on Russia, but potentially at a much higher long-term cost to the Kremlin via the loss of its alliance with Iran. By comparison, as summarized by McClatchy, the Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon-Vekselberg simply says that Trump will “lift[] sanctions on Moscow if the Kremlin withdraw[s] Russian forces from Eastern Ukraine,” though it would also “permit[] Russia to keep Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.”18 As deals go, it is squarely, even exclusively, to the benefit of the Kremlin, as under international law Putin’s armed forces are illegally in Eastern Ukraine; the deal is thus more properly seen as thin diplomatic cover for the unilateral ending of all U.S. sanctions on Russia, without any of the illusory (or merely transitory) benefits to the United States of the plan supported by MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, and the “gang of six” (Flynn, Barrack, Gates, Prince, Nader, and Broidy).
Mueller’s July 2017 search warrant for Cohen’s emails—and the Southern District of New York’s April 2018 warrants for Cohen’s home and office, as well as a hotel room used by the president’s attorney—therefore present a clear danger to President Trump, as Cohen’s communications can establish not only his and Sater’s secret real estate dealings on Trump’s behalf in 2015 and 2016 but also the fact that he and his friend Sater were lobbying Trump on U.S. foreign policy both before and after his inauguration.19
In February 2019, the House Judiciary Committee will say it has evidence that Trump asked acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker whether the Department of Justice could reinstall the recused Geoff Berman—a former law partner of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani—as overseer of the Southern District of New York’s probe into Cohen.20 This new evidence will cause the Judiciary Committee to open an investigation into whether Whitaker committed perjury before Congress, as he had told the Judiciary Committee in sworn testimony that “at no time has the White House asked, nor have I promised, any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel’s investigation or any other investigation.”21 According to the New York Times, after Whitaker told Trump that Berman could not “unrecuse” himself following his recusal from the Cohen case, “the president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker … and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.”22 The Times will also report that Whitaker had “privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to ‘jump on a grenade’ for the president.”23
CNN will report on additional problematic interactions between Trump and the DOJ over the various ongoing Cohen investigations. In one incident detailed by CNN, Trump “vented to his acting attorney general [Whitaker]” about the Cohen investigation, “angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President’s actions in crimes his former lawyer … pleaded guilty to.”24 Per CNN, the president was “frustrated … that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad … [and] lashed out” at the acting attorney general.25 In another incident, just a week later, Trump “again voiced his anger at Whitaker after prosecutors in Manhattan officially implicated the President in a hush-money scheme to buy the silence of women around the 2016 campaign … Trump pressed Whitaker on why more wasn’t being done to control prosecutors in New York.”26 The cable news network will conclude that “the episodes offer a glimpse into the unsettling dynamic of a sitting president talking to his attorney general about investigations he’s potentially implicated in”—a status that applies to all of the various federal investigations into Michael Cohen’s business and political activities, from the probe of Cohen’s pre-election hush money payments to Stormy Daniels to any pending federal probe of his involvement with the Artemenko-Rovt-Weldon-Vekselberg “peace deal” in early 2017.27 Trump’s conversations with Whitaker are seen as particularly troubling, as Whitaker had become acting attorney general only when Trump fired the recused Jeff Sessions—after months of public complaints that Sessions was not protecting him from federal investigations—and upon Whitaker’s elevation to acting attorney general, he was told by a senior DOJ ethics official that, like Sessions, he should recuse himself out of an “abundance of caution.”28 Yet Whitaker refused to do so.29
Whitaker, previously a Sessions deputy, was said prior to his promotion to have “a close relationship with Mr. Trump, and had been described,” writes the New York Times, “as the White House’s eyes and ears inside the Justice Department.”30 The Times adds that “Whitaker had also sharply criticized the Russia investigation while he was a legal analyst on CNN … [and] worked on the [2014 Iowa state treasurer campaign] of Sam Clovis, who is a witness in the Mueller investigation” as well as having been national co-chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.31 In December 2018, Whitaker will be observed by media getting aboard Marine One with Jared Kushner in D.C., the sort of impromptu meeting between an attorney general and an interested party to a federal criminal investigation that Trump had long railed about when the parties in question were attorney general Loretta Lynch and former president Bill Clinton—though of course the former president was not as closely linked to the investigation of his wife’s email practices as Kushner is, by December 2018, to the Russia investigation.32 While at the DOJ as Sessions’s deputy, Whitaker, according to Vox, “in his conversations with the president, presented himself as a vigorous supporter of Trump’s position and ‘committed to extract as much as he could from the Justice Department on the president’s behalf.’”33 At one point the future acting attorney general went so far as to “let it be known [in the White House] that he was on a team, and it was the president’s team.”34 Vox will add that “during this period, Whitaker frequently spoke by phone with both Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly.… On many of those calls, nobody else was on the phone except for the president and Whitaker … As one senior law enforcement official told [Vox], ‘Nobody else knew what was said on those calls except what Whitaker decided to tell others, and if he did, whether he was telling the truth. Who ever heard of a president barely speaking to his attorney general but on the phone constantly with a staff-level person?”35 When he is asked by the media how well he knows Whitaker upon elevating him to acting attorney general, Trump will say, “I don’t know Whitaker.”36
Other attempts by Trump to interfere with federal investigations of Michael Cohen include the following: evidence that Trump directed Cohen to lie publicly and to Congress about the details of his ongoing negotiations for a Trump Tower Moscow during the general election (information BuzzFeed News will report it gained from “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents”); evidence that Cohen was in “regular contact” with Trump’s legal team while writing and editing his false statement to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow deal, including evidence his statement was reviewed and edited by at least one Trump attorney, Jay Sekulow; evidence that “lawyers who claimed to be associates of Rudy Giuliani” contacted Cohen two weeks after his home, office, and hotel room were raided in 2018 to “convince Cohen to remain loyal to Trump” by staying in a “joint defense agreement” with the president; evidence that in April 2018, “an attorney who said he was speaking with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani reassured Michael Cohen … that Cohen could ‘sleep well tonight’ because he had ‘friends in high places’”; evidence that the president was aware, at a minimum after the fact, that one of his top House allies, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), had threatened Cohen with exposure of an extramarital affair the night before his public congressional testimony (“I was happy to do it for you,” Gaetz told Trump during a subsequent telephone call); and evidence that Trump may have directly (face-to-face) or indirectly (through his attorneys) floated the possibility of a pardon for Cohen prior to him signing a cooperation deal with federal prosecutors, including evidence that Giuliani “left open the possibility [of a pardon]” in his conversations with Cohen’s legal team.37
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani will falsely claim Trump never signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow with Andrey Rozov in the fall of 2015 just days before CNN anchor Chris Cuomo produces the signed document live on-air.38 When his deceit is caught out, Giuliani responds by arguing that Trump signing a multibillion-dollar deal to build a tower in Moscow with financing from a Kremlin-owned bank during the 2016 election—at a time he was telling American voters he had no association of any kind with the Russians—is “meaningless.”39 In October 2018, ProPublica will reveal that Giuliani “has often traveled to Russia or other former Soviet states as guests of powerful players there. And since Trump was elected, [Giuliani] appears to have stepped up the frequency of those trips.”40 Giuliani’s odd overseas meeting partners include an Armenian businessman whose construction firm once helped reconstruct the Kremlin and a Russian cybersecurity expert currently on the U.S. sanctions list with whom Giuliani appeared on a conference panel; the company that “claims credit for organizing the trips,” TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, includes among its board members a former Russian government minister.41 In December 2018, Giuliani—still working for Trump—travels to Bahrain, one of the nations involved in the Red Sea Conspiracy, to make an in-person pitch for a “lucrative security consulting contract with the [Bahraini] government.”42
According to the Jerusalem Post, a Chabad house in Long Island—Chabad being an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement—was a key location both in the Cohen-Sater axis that led to Trump’s secret negotiation of a Kremlin-connected Moscow real estate deal during the presidential campaign and in pro-Kremlin Ukrainians’ efforts to gain access to Trump through Cohen. Per the Israeli media outlet, which is working in part from a BBC report, “Individuals who attended the Chabad of Port Washington allegedly facilitated contact between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and U.S. President Donald Trump by connecting loyalists of Poroshenko with Michael Cohen.”43 A politician who has called Putin his chief political “opponent,” Poroshenko allegedly “sought an audience with Trump and directed confidantes to orchestrate it … using the Chabad house as a channel to reach Cohen and, through him, the president.44 While not itself illegal, this outreach will by 2019 become what the Jerusalem Post calls a “fulcrum” in federal investigations into Trump’s foreign contacts because, according to a BBC report, “Cohen was paid $400,000 to connect Poroshenko’s aides with the White House, where the Ukrainian leader succeeded in meeting with Trump in June. Cohen did not register as a foreign agent representing Ukrainian or Russian interests, as is mandated by U.S. law.”45 The Post mentions “Russian interests” because of the popular belief that the Trump-Poroshenko meeting led to an easing of Ukrainian investigations of Paul Manafort’s pro-Kremlin work in Ukraine, the revelation of which could have been embarrassing or even directly damaging to Trump; the possibility of his eventual extradition to Ukraine could also have persuaded Manafort to cooperate with the special counsel’s office more fully than he previously had. Yet “shortly after the June [Poroshenko] meeting with Trump,” writes the Post, “Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency dropped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort … [a] top target in the Mueller probe.”46 The Post adds that the Long Island Chabad whose members allegedly facilitated the Trump-Poroshenko meeting was also accused by Politico in April 2017 of “connecting Trump and Putin’s oligarchs”—specifically Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who Politico reported “used the Chabad network as their base” to act as Putin’s “envoys” to Trump.47 Not only was Leviev longtime friends with the late Tamir Sapir, a development partner and investor for the Trump SoHo project, but also, per the Post, close enough to Trump himself that the two men had met in 2008—two years after Trump SoHo opened—to “discuss Moscow real estate opportunities”; this meeting suggests that the Putin envoy and “confidante” (also Chabad’s “top donor”) had, on Putin’s behalf, been priming Trump for future Moscow investments in the twenty-four months before the New York businessman began seriously considering a run for president in 2012. Notably, ABC News has called Michael Cohen “the man behind Donald Trump’s possible 2012 presidential campaign.”48
Trump’s tweets in support of Saudi Arabia in June 2017 echo his tweets praising the kingdom the month before, during his visit to Riyadh. In great contrast to his angry pre-visit tweets castigating NATO and America’s European allies, his tweets while in Saudi Arabia reflect his enthusiasm for both the visit and his hosts: “Great to be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Looking forward to the afternoon and evening ahead,” he tweets on May 20, and then, shortly after he leaves Saudi Arabia, “Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East were great. Trying hard for PEACE. Doing well.”; according to 2019 testimony by former secretary of state Rex Tillerson before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the first of these two tweets was sent the same day that Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon secretly met with MBS and MBZ in Riyadh, at which clandestine gathering Bannon and Kushner were told of the Saudi and Emirati plan to blockade Qatar.49 Whereas American presidents have traditionally referred to “peace” in the Middle East in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump appears to be referring instead to the chief subject of his discussions with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and the leaders of other Muslim countries in Riyadh: “[America’s] differences with Iran … and how to crack down on Islamic militancy.” Significantly, Trump treats “Islamic militancy” no differently whether it is a direct action by the Iranians or actions taken by an alleged Iranian proxy with perhaps only distant or unconfirmed links to Tehran.50 That Trump is not looking for “peace” with Iran through diplomacy—in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s approach, typified by the Iran nuclear deal—is underscored by the fact that the key event Trump attends in Riyadh is a “regional summit focusing on combatting extremism” to which no Iranian officials are invited; as late as June 2019 Trump will still be saying, of possible diplomacy with Iran, “I personally feel that it is too soon to even think about making a deal.”51
According to Bob Woodward’s Fear, in April 2017 Trump tells one of his attorneys, John Dowd, that Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is a “fucking killer” who is “worried about this [Mueller] investigation” because he anticipates needing to ask Trump for a “favor” in the future.52 Just a few weeks earlier, Trump had invited the autocrat to visit the White House—something his predecessor, Barack Obama, had steadfastly refused to do—and called him a “fantastic guy.”53 Trump also “pledged close cooperation” with the Egyptian leader and stated in a press conference, “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job.”54 By 2018, el-Sisi will be celebrating his “reelection” in a vote in which he “earns” 97 percent of the vote; Trump will immediately call el-Sisi to offer his “sincere congratulations” for the statistically improbable win.55
According to an April 2018 article in the Washington Post, el-Sisi’s reelection is internationally deemed a “sham,” and Trump’s highly vocal approval of it is widely seen as “another signal of the Trump administration’s stated goal to improve relations with Egypt” after el-Sisi’s deposing of its democratically elected government. Trump’s congratulatory message “comes shortly after Trump faced widespread pushback for congratulating another foreign leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who similarly won a race that was broadly criticized as neither free nor fair.”56
In his first White House meeting with el-Sisi, Trump confirms that he considers his administration to be in a “strategic partnership” with the Egyptian strongman’s, a reversal of U.S. policy toward el-Sisi and an acknowledgment of Trump’s ongoing coordination with a Red Sea conspirator.57 Tellingly, Trump says during his joint appearance with el-Sisi that the autocrat is “someone that’s been very close to me from the first time I met him … [we] met during the campaign, at that point there were two of us … it was a very long—it was supposed to be just a quick, brief meeting, and we were with each other for a long period of time. We agree on so many things … I just want to say to you, Mr. President, that you have a great friend and ally … in me.”58
In fact, Trump is not telling the truth when he says that he met el-Sisi alone in September 2016.59 At least three men besides Trump and el-Sisi were present at the meeting—two of whom, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, will subsequently be indicted for, and convicted of, a federal felony by the special counsel’s office. The fifth participant in Trump’s meeting with el-Sisi, Jeff Sessions, will also be investigated by federal law enforcement for lying about his contacts with foreign nationals, in Sessions’s case under oath and before Congress.60
Two of the (at least) five men present when Trump meets el-Sisi, Flynn and Papadopoulos, had also worked on the Carson campaign in late 2015, a time when that campaign was using an Israeli business intelligence firm, Inspiration, for its voter targeting operation.61 Flynn, by late 2015, had taken “a real shining” to—and been recruited by—Joel Zamel, head of two other Israeli business intelligence firms, Wikistrat and Psy-Group.62 Given that Zamel would, in August 2016, make a proposal at Trump Tower alongside George Nader, one of the architects, with el-Sisi, of the Red Sea Conspiracy, there is some reason to suspect an association between either Flynn’s or Papadopoulos’s ties to individuals in Israel and the warm reception Trump receives from el-Sisi and vice versa. Indeed, a man Papadopoulos meets in Tel Aviv in June 2017, Arabic-fluent Israeli businessman Charles Tawil—whom Papadopoulos will accuse of working for the Israeli government—will tell media, in response to Papadopoulos’s allegation, that the young energy consultant first came to his attention following his arrangement of the mid-presidential campaign meeting between Trump and el-Sisi in September 2016.63
When Papadopoulos meets Tawil for the first time in Israel in June 2017, just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Tawil gives the former Trump national security adviser $10,000 in cash for unspecified reasons.64 Tawil denies Papadopoulos’s claims that he was or is an Israeli spy, but acknowledges that in June 2017 he did indeed give a large sum of money to Papadopoulos; he contends, however, that Papadopoulos was “desperate” to be in a partnership with him at the time.65 In the same November 2018 interview with the Times of Israel in which Tawil denies Papadopoulos’s allegations that he is a spy for the Israeli government, Tawil admits that he is on friendly terms with a top agent of the Emirati government, minister of tolerance Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan.66
Papadopoulos’s meeting with Tawil in 2017 is not, of course, his first meeting with Israeli nationals during his period of service for Donald Trump or afterward. In early April 2016, just a month after his hire by Sam Clovis, Papadopoulos was sent by the campaign to speak to research associates at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.67 During the same trip, Papadopoulos spoke to unnamed Israeli diplomats to “discuss Trump’s foreign-policy priorities” and was on a panel at the Hadera Energy Conference in Tel Aviv with Eli Groner, a top aide in Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.68 Indeed, Papadopoulos will have so many contacts with Israeli nationals during the 2016 presidential campaign, during the presidential transition, and after Trump’s 2017 inauguration that in August 2017 the special counsel’s office seeks and receives from the Department of Justice the authority to investigate Papadopoulos as a possible Israeli agent.69 According to Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, the special counsel’s office went so far as to, in its conversations with Papadopoulos, “threaten[] to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”70 Papadopoulos’s significant Israeli ties, like Flynn’s, suggest the probability that one or both men communicated pre-election not just to agents of Red Sea conspirators like el-Sisi but to individuals associated with the Israeli government such as Groner that the Trump campaign was on board with what the Emiratis and Saudis considered a “grand bargain”; both men were well positioned, too, to report back to the Trump campaign that the Israelis were similarly inclined to participate in the proposed geopolitical arrangement. Apropos of many Trump campaign aides and associates having close Israeli ties, just days after Trump meets with el-Sisi alongside Papadopoulos and Flynn, the GOP candidate has another consequential meeting with a key figure in the Red Sea Conspiracy, this one at Trump Tower—where he meets with Kushner, Bannon, Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer, and Benjamin Netanyahu himself.71
By the time of his September 25, 2016, meeting with Trump, Trump’s son-in-law, and Bannon, Netanyahu has had a “long friendship” with Kushner’s father, convicted felon Charles Kushner, sometimes staying at the Kushners’ home when visiting the United States.72 As for the Israeli ambassador, Dermer had first met Trump at Trump Tower alongside Netanyahu in the early aughts, and first met Kushner in March 2016, thereafter “working closely” with him and remaining “in close touch” with him “throughout the campaign and the transition”—meaning that from March onward, Kushner was being regularly advised behind the scenes by an Israeli (Dermer), an Emirati (al-Otaiba), and a Soviet-born “friend” of Vladimir Putin (Simes), with none of these men ever being acknowledged by the Trump campaign as key advisers.73 Notably, the New Yorker reports that the Israeli and Emirati ambassadors were in communication pre-election about the shared interests of their two nations with respect to the Trump campaign and, later, the Trump administration; indeed, the magazine reveals that, “toward the end of Obama’s second term”—a period of time that includes both the hatching of the Red Sea Conspiracy in late 2015 and Papadopoulos’s secretive efforts in May 2016 to schedule mid-campaign trips to Greece and Israel by Trump—“U.S. intelligence agencies learned of phone calls between senior U.A.E. and Israeli officials, including calls between a senior Emirati leader and Netanyahu. Then U.S. intelligence agencies picked up on a secret meeting between senior U.A.E. and Israeli leaders in Cyprus. U.S. officials suspect that Netanyahu attended the meeting, which centered on countering Obama’s Iran deal.”74 As for Steve Bannon, who is Papadopoulos’s interlocutor with Trump in setting up the el-Sisi meeting—and who attends the September 25 Trump-Netanyahu meeting—he becomes so close to Ron Dermer during the presidential campaign and presidential transition that he will on several occasions, according to the New Yorker, call Dermer “my wingman.”75
By September 2016, Netanyahu has developed, per the New Yorker, a “grand strategy for transforming the direction of Middle Eastern politics” that he believes only a President Trump can help him execute.76 The plan: “form a coalition with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to combat Iran” while sidelining, perhaps permanently, the debate over the Palestinian territories.77 At Trump Tower on September 25, Netanyahu “press[es] his strategic agenda,” something he does not do when he meets with Clinton the same week, pitching her instead on a plan that focuses on “improving the lives of the Palestinians” in exchange for Arab states “taking steps toward” recognizing Israel—this being a trade-off far more solicitous of the Palestinians than anything Netanyahu’s “grand strategy” in fact envisions.78
Netanyahu and Dermer’s “well articulated” strategy for “an alliance between Israel and the Gulf states,” discussed in detail with Trump, Kushner, and Bannon at Trump Tower months before Election Day, “blow[s] away” Bannon, who will later recount that it “dovetailed exactly with our [the Trump campaign’s] thinking.” Another Trump campaign adviser will tell the New Yorker that “the germ of the idea” of a grand Israeli-Arab alliance “started in that room … on September 25, 2016, in Trump’s penthouse.”79 Because the exact timing of the secret meeting in Cyprus Netanyahu holds with Emirati leadership toward the end of President Obama’s second term is unknown, it is unclear whether Netanyahu meets with Trump having recently spoken with Abu Dhabi—perhaps even MBZ—about countering Iran, or whether it is Netanyahu’s meeting at Trump Tower that provides Netanyahu with sufficient intelligence on Trump’s intentions that the Israeli prime minister is then able to discuss with the Emiratis the candidate’s amenability to a “grand bargain.”
On June 21, 2017, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman becomes the heir apparent to the throne of his father’s kingdom, having just deposed his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef.80 The same month, an Israeli business intelligence company that “specializes in cyber espionage tools,” NSO Group, enters into a $55 million agreement with the Saudi government to give the Saudis Pegasus 3—proprietary software that will allow MBS and his father to “hack their citizens’ cell phones, and to listen to calls as well as conversations that take place near the phones.”81 While the NSO deal with Riyadh draws significant public attention, a November 2018 Times of Israel report will disclose that throughout 2017 “Israeli cyber spying companies [meet] several times with Saudi figures at European locations to talk about the sale of various [intelligence] technologies”—suggesting a new era of Israeli-Saudi coordination has begun, one that in short order will have substantial repercussions across the globe.82 That MBS intends to use such technology to destroy domestic opposition to his regime is evidenced by the fact that “in one [NSO-Saudi] meeting, Israeli representatives refused a Saudi request to identify the user behind an anti-regime Twitter account as a way of showing the ability of their technology”—though NSO officials did agree to “demonstrate[] how [Pegasus 3] could take control of a brand-new iPhone [if] it was provided the phone’s number.”83
While the identities of the NSO and Saudi negotiators are unknown, the Times of Israel will note that one of the people involved in helping the Saudis acquire Pegasus 3 was “an Israeli businessman dealing in defense-related technologies who operates through Cyprus … and [who] flew NSO founder Shalev Hulio to a location in the Gulf for three days of meetings in June 2017.”84 According to the New York Times, two lawsuits brought against NSO in August 2018 will accuse the company of “actively participating in illegal spying,” in one case involving spying conducted by the UAE.85 This is a particularly explosive charge given that, as the Times of Israel notes, “to sell Pegasus to the UAE [or Saudi Arabia] the company would have had to receive the express permission of the [Israeli] Defense Ministry, as such software is considered a weapon.”86 If the lawsuits against NSO are successful, they may therefore establish that the Israeli government (as well as the “Israeli businessman dealing in defense-related technologies who operates through Cyprus”) is assisting the UAE—and likely Saudi Arabia—in conducting illegal international spycraft.
The same month NSO sells Pegasus 3 to the Saudis, another—or perhaps the same—UAE-connected “Israeli businessman dealing in defense-related technologies who operates through Cyprus,” Charles Tawil, meets with George Papadopoulos.87 According to Papadopoulos, on June 8, 2017, Tawil, who identifies himself as a “pro-Trump citizen,” introduces him to Shai Arbel, co-founder of Israeli cyberintelligence company Terrogence, at the Crowne Plaza Tel Aviv City Center Hotel.88 As reported by the New Yorker, Psy-Group, Joel Zamel’s Israeli business intelligence outfit (see chapters 3 and 4), “emerged more directly from Terrogence” than did other spin-offs of the Israeli business intelligence pioneer, though the company’s first-in-its-field status means that not only Psy-Group but NSO is an heir to its inheritance. Per the New Yorker, “In 2008, [Terrogence co-founder Gadi] Aviran hired an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer named Royi Burstien to be the vice-president of business development.… Burstien urged Aviran to consider using [online] avatars in more aggressive ways, and on behalf of a wider range of commercial clients. Aviran was wary. After less than a year at Terrogence, Burstien returned to Israel’s military intelligence, and joined an élite unit that specialized in PsyOps, or psychological operations.… [in 2014], Burstien founded Psy-Group.”89
Though Burstien is Psy-Group’s founder, Joel Zamel is its owner, via a Cyprus-based company called IOCO Limited.90 Zamel bases his company in Cyprus to make it easier for Arab states—which often eschew being seen doing business with an Israeli company—to become his clients.91 Psy-Group’s early work in 2016, which involves “mak[ing] money by investigating jihadi networks,” according to the New Yorker, is modeled on the business plan of Terrogence.92
Also present at the June 2017 Terrogence-Papadopoulos meeting are several unnamed “founders of an Arabic language digital marketing company” and, according to Papadopoulos, multiple “ex-Israeli intelligence people,” raising the possibility that Papadopoulos is, as he will later say he suspects, meeting with representatives of foreign governments who are incognito. Another possibility is that he is meeting with representatives from Israeli business intelligence firms—and perhaps their clients—other than Terrogence.93 Papadopoulos will later say that the purpose of his meeting with Tawil, Terrogence co-founder Arbel, several Arab businessmen, and former Israeli intelligence officers with unclear affiliations was for the mysterious Israeli veterans to “pitch[] a social media manipulation operation … [that was] basically what they [the FBI] were accusing the Russians of doing regarding social media” during the 2016 presidential election.”94
Papadopoulos is, at the time, so startled by the similarities between the Israeli and Russian interference operations presented to him (a similarity that in retrospect underscores the similarity between the work Zamel did for the Trump campaign and the crimes the Kremlin committed to aid the Trump campaign) that he begins to fear he will be “framed” for a crime if he agrees to go into business with the Israelis.95 Tawil, in a subsequent interview with the Times of Israel, will say that the meeting involved a “social media marketing company aiming to do business in the Arab world.”96 He does not explain how or why the Israeli veterans’ proposed social media manipulation campaign came to be nearly identical, in Papadopoulos’s accounting of events, to the Russian election interference operation organized by the Internet Research Agency. Nor does Tawil explain why he ultimately—according to Papadopoulos—asks for the $10,000 he gave Papadopoulos in Tel Aviv back, sending the former Trump staffer “an email [on September 9, 2018] threatening to sue him and saying Papadopoulos should act like they never met.”97 Papadopoulos will later say that Mueller and federal investigators put “tremendous scrutiny on my ties to Israel, to the point where I had apparently a formal charge of acting as an agent of Israel … by the time I had my first interview with the FBI, they led me to believe that they knew about certain meetings I was having, who I knew in the Israeli government domestically and abroad.”98
Papadopoulos does not return the $10,000 as Tawil requests; instead, he will relinquish it to federal law enforcement as part of his plea in his federal criminal case, even as he maintains that he does not understand why it was given to him—or explain why he agreed to take it—in the first instance.99 One of the founders of the “Arabic language digital marketing company” Papadopoulos had met with in June 2017, when later contacted by the Times of Israel, will claim to not recall having ever attended a meeting of the sort Papadopoulos describes.100 Tawil will later provide the Times of Israel with a cell phone text as evidence that—despite Papadopoulos’s claims that Tawil “terrified” him at the meeting and gave him $10,000 only to “frame” him—the two men were still in cordial digital contact at least as late as July 7, 2017, a month after their meeting in Tel Aviv.101 In the text Tawil discloses to the media, Papadopoulos confirms that he wants to be involved in unspecified “deals” with Tawil that would see the onetime Trump national security adviser working “with” Tawil for a monthly retainer.102
Whatever “deals” Tawil and Papadopoulos are working on in the summer of 2017, they clearly attract attention at the very highest levels of the Israeli government. After Papadopoulos’s meeting with Terrogence’s co-founder, “ex-Israeli intelligence people,” Tawil, and an “Arab language digital marketing company” on June 8—as well as the exchange of $10,000 for no purpose either Papadopoulos or Tawil is willing to admit—“someone in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office invite[s] Papadopoulos to come to Thessaloniki, Greece, where Benjamin Netanyahu [is] arriving for an energy and security summit with the Greek and Cypriot presidents.”103 An entry from Tawil’s calendar for the week of the Terrogence-Papadopoulos meeting and the Netanyahu visit to Thessaloniki reads “Crisis with George.” “Something happened in Athens,” Tawil tells the Times.104
In retrospect, it is unclear why an Israeli business intelligence firm like Terrogence would be interested in an obscure energy consultant like George Papadopoulos, let alone for the Israeli government to invite Papadopoulos to an event that its prime minister was attending—unless the Israelis believed or had been given reason to believe that Papadopoulos was still representing Trump’s interests long after he had officially left Trump’s employ. In fairness, Trump aides continuing to work with Trump “post-employment” is an identifiable pattern with the New York City businessman; Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Rick Gates, and others in Trump’s inner circle all continue to advise and assist Trump long after they have been (variously) fired, forced to resign, or in some other way separated from Trump’s public-facing activities. Just so, $10,000 does not change hands in a Tel Aviv hotel room without purpose or explanation, nor does an Israeli businessman dealing in defense-related technologies tell someone to act like they have never met before unless some sort of “crisis”—as Tawil terms it—has indeed occurred. While it cannot be said that Papadopoulos, Tawil, or any of those involved in the June 2017 Tel Aviv meeting have fully relayed to U.S. or Israeli media what occurred there, two conclusions seem reasonable: as of mid-2017, the Israelis believed Papadopoulos still had ties to Trump’s political team, and Papadopoulos at one point agreed to establish a new connection in Israel but thereafter pulled back.
As to what sort of interactions with the Israelis Papadopoulos embraces in Tel Aviv but thereafter seeks to divest from, an event that occurs eighteen days after the Papadopoulos-Terrogence meeting offers a possible clue. On that day, Papadopoulos emails Tawil to set up a meeting between Tawil, himself, and the directors of the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP)—the employers of Papadopoulos’s Kremlin-agent contact, Joseph Mifsud. LCILP is, per its website, an entity that provides “specialized training, technical assistance, and advice to government ministries [and] embassies.”105 That Papadopoulos seeks to connect his former employers at the anodyne-seeming LCILP with someone he will later say he suspects is an Israeli intelligence agent suggests that he believes—perhaps even believed when he took a job with the LCILP in February 2016—that both his unexpected hire by the Trump campaign in March 2016 and the sudden appearance of Joseph Mifsud in his professional milieu that same month were causally related to LCILP being a front for international spycraft. Indeed, the rapid succession of events that begins with Papadopoulos’s hire by the LCILP and ends with him meeting Mifsud—two events that bookend Papadopoulos suddenly getting hired by a political campaign he has wanted to work for since mid-2015—imply that the LCILP is not what it would at first appear: merely a subsidiary of “EN Education,” a “global education consultancy.”106
Papadopoulos’s email to Tawil in late June 2017 does nothing to quell such concerns. The unemployed former Trump national security adviser tells Tawil that meeting with Mifsud’s bosses will open up “avenues of tremendous opportunity” that will be partly based on his and Tawil’s “various contacts in Saudi [Arabia] and Washington” and the fact that “the Trump administration has signed a $350 billion arms agreement with Saudi [Arabia].”107 That Papadopoulos insists to Tawil that “we can be involved” in the aftermath of the Trump-Saudi arms deal—the largest arms deal in U.S. history—underscores the sort of connection Papadopoulos believes he still has to the Trump administration in the summer of 2017, as well as the connection he perceives the LCILP to maintain with the government of either Saudi Arabia, Russia, Israel, the United States, or some combination of these four.108
Papadopoulos’s linkage of Trump and Kushner’s arms deal with Israeli intelligence is rather more straightforward. Just a few days after Trump and Kushner leave Riyadh and MBS deposes his cousin bin Nayef, MBS invests $20 billion in Blackstone, one of Kushner Companies’ largest creditors; the investment firm has loaned Kushner and his family $400 million over a four-year period from 2013 to 2017.109 Almost immediately after MBS invests billions in Blackstone, it is revealed that Blackstone is in “advanced talks” to buy 40 percent of NSO Group—the maker of the Pegasus 3 cyberhacking technology—for $400 million, the exact amount the Kushners owe Blackstone.110
All of Papadopoulos’s interactions in Tel Aviv—cryptic in their totality, but evidently involving the Saudis and Israeli intelligence technology—occur in the days leading up to MBS’s investment in Blackstone and Blackstone’s investment in NSO. A fact that may or may not be related to this is that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is in Israel for reasons he says have to do with his interest in “cybersecurity” at the same time Papadopoulos and Tawil are interacting in Tel Aviv on that very subject and Papadopoulos is receiving a request to join Netanyahu at a conference in Greece.111 Giuliani had previously been named an “unofficial adviser on cybersecurity” to President-elect Trump during the transition period, in which role he met face-to-face with Netanyahu in Israel in January 2017 and “delivered a personal message from Trump to the prime minister”; according to the Times of Israel, Giuliani and Netanyahu “have been friends for 25 years.”112
That Israeli businessman Joel Zamel’s digital marketing and intelligence-gathering business is based in Cyprus, and that Zamel has done extensive work with the Emiratis on anti-Iran social media campaigns; that Israeli businessman Charles Tawil’s business is also based in Cyprus, and that Tawil has also had extensive contact with the Emiratis and is, like Zamel, focused on new social media campaigns in the Middle East; and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sometime in the months prior to Trump’s January 2017 inauguration been in secret talks in Cyprus with the Emiratis over plans to counter Iran all suggest another possibility behind Netanyahu’s strange invitation of Papadopoulos to a meeting involving the presidents of Greece and Cyprus: that the Israelis, Emiratis, Trump administration, or all three are trying to use Trump’s onetime Israel expert as a go-between in a post-election plot to target Iran with a digital psy-ops campaign. Certainly, the shifting stories (or silence) from all those involved in Papadopoulos’s mid-2017 meetings in Israel and Greece—Papadopoulos, Tawil, Arbel, the Arab businessmen and former Israeli intelligence officers who meet with Papadopoulos in a Tel Aviv hotel room, and even Netanyahu himself—suggest geopolitical intrigue well beyond what Papadopoulos has thus far revealed to federal law enforcement.
Just days after his email to Tawil about the “tremendous opportunity” offered to him and Tawil by the Trump-Saudi arms deal, Papadopoulos is arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport, in part due to suspicions that he has been acting, in both Israel and Greece, as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government.113 According to a summary of June 2018 remarks to the press by Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, “Special Counsel Robert Mueller last summer [summer 2017] threatened to charge George … with acting as an unregistered agent of Israel.”114 Per Mangiante, whatever the special counsel’s office thought of Papadopoulos’s meetings in Israel and Greece in June and July of 2017—and of what he said in each meeting and to whom—it believed, strikingly, that following its review of the evidence and relevant counterintelligence data, it had sufficient basis to charge Papadopoulos as an Israeli agent based exclusively on his actions “while he was serving as an energy consultant before he joined the Trump campaign [in March 2016].”115
Subsequent media reports on Papadopoulos’s connections to Israel will reveal a new piece of information that explains much of the special counsel’s and Papadopoulos’s own actions: as of the day in mid-2017 that Papadopoulos was asked by the Israeli prime minister’s office to come immediately to Thessaloniki, Greece, Papadopoulos had, for at least two years, been in semi-regular contact with Eli Groner, “a top aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”; this suggests that Papadopoulos’s appearance “alongside” Groner at the Hadera Energy Conference in Tel Aviv in April 2016—while he was a Trump adviser and, moreover, on a Trump campaign-approved trip—may not have been mere coincidence.116
That Papadopoulos, one of the most active members of the Trump campaign’s twelve-man national security advisory committee, had direct access to the Israeli prime minister’s office for the entirety of his employment by Trump—March 2016 to January 2017, though he had first approached the campaign about a job in mid-2015, when he first met Netanyahu’s aide Groner, itself a troubling concurrence—casts a new light on the efforts of at least one Israeli business intelligence firm, Psy-Group, to try to assist Trump’s team through a social media manipulation campaign in the final three months of the 2016 presidential election. That Psy-Group was introduced to the Trump campaign by George Birnbaum, a man who, like Groner, was a Netanyahu aide; that Papadopoulos’s June 2017 meeting in Tel Aviv was with former Israeli soldiers “pitching a social media manipulation operation”; and that unofficial Trump cybersecurity adviser Giuliani was in Israel that month working on cybersecurity issues suggests that Papadopoulos may not have been entirely aloof from efforts to link the Israeli government and Trump in 2015, 2016, and 2017—especially as two of Joel Zamel’s Trump campaign contacts during the period he was pitching Rick Gates in spring 2016 remain “unnamed” and Papadopoulos’s 2017 Israeli contact Charles Tawil has said, for his part, “I support Trump … I like the fact that Trump is president. I wanted him to be president.”117
Papadopoulos will tell the Times of Israel in 2018 that the work Tawil wanted him to do was “not … legitimate,” but that he cannot say more because the details are “incredibly sensitive.”118 He will be more forthcoming with Rolling Stone, however, calling Tawil an agent for Mossad and saying that the money Tawil offered him was not for consulting work but to “keep [his] engagements”—the implication being that either the Israeli man believed Papadopoulos had been working for the Israelis and needed to continue doing so, or, alternatively or in addition, that Tawil (and possibly Terrogence) wanted Papadopoulos to maintain what they perceived to be his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump’s national security team.119
If indeed Tawil works for Mossad, as Papadopoulos speculates, it would also be the case that the Israeli government’s understanding of Papadopoulos’s ongoing links to the Trump administration is based not on guesswork but intelligence. Tellingly, Papadopoulos’s wife Simona has insisted to ABC News that Papadopoulos was merely the “first domino” to fall in the special counsel’s and related federal investigations, implying that the information Papadopoulos gave to Mueller will eventually lead to further federal indictments or probes.120 “This is much more complicated than Watergate,” Papadopoulos himself will tell Rolling Stone. “We are talking about foreign governments, intelligence, various countries, decoys, hacking, honey pots … and, of course, one of the most-watched presidential campaigns of history. I am … in the middle of it.”121 Of the LCILP, whose directors Papadopoulos wanted to introduce to a man he says is a Mossad agent, Papadopoulos now says it is a “hotbed with potential spies and all this craziness.”122 This “hotbed with potential spies” is also where Papadopoulos met his wife, Simona, who began working for the LCILP in September 2016, as Papadopoulos was working for the Trump campaign; according to Mangiante, Mueller’s team “suspected she may have been a Russian spy” tasked with seducing Papadopoulos.123
Tawil now says that the relationship he sought with Papadopoulos was merely a “consulting business … for the petroleum industry,” and that Israeli “independent [political] strategist” David Ha’ivri—onetime head of the Samaria Regional Council, the pseudo-government of contested Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank—was the man who first introduced him to Papadopoulos. Ha’ivri, like Tawil, says that Tawil and Papadopoulos were engaged in “a business deal involving an oil and gas project,” though it is not clear, then, why Tawil urged Papadopoulos to travel from Greece to Tel Aviv to meet with the co-founder of an Israeli cyberintelligence company and the owners of an Arabic-language digital marketing company, or why Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office asked Papadopoulos to come to Greece.124 Ha’ivri will tell the Daily Caller that Tawil is also “a part-time consultant for companies that operate in … [the] Middle East,” but he will offer no more about the Israeli man’s activities or interests in the region.125
When the Times of Israel tracks Tawil down in November 2018 to ask him about his contacts with Papadopoulos, they will find him “in the glittering Gulf city-state of Dubai, where he had come for a conference hosted by the United Arab Emirates’ Minister of Tolerance Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, with whom Tawil said he is friendly.”126 As of September 2018, Sheikh Nahayan was involved not in the oil and gas industry but in global telecommunications—as he is “chairman of Warid Telecom International, a regional telecom group based out of Dubai … [and] also chairman of Abu Dhabi Group, Union National Bank and United Bank Limited.”127 During the 2016 presidential election, Sheikh Nahayan was the UAE’s minister of culture and knowledge development.128 In the Emiratis’ governmental structure, the minister of tolerance and the minister of culture and knowledge are two of just thirty-three cabinet-level positions immediately beneath the president of the UAE—a position held by MBZ’s brother, Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahayan.129 Sheikh Nahayan’s professional background is unrelated to either of his most recent positions in the Emirati government, however; while serving as chancellor of Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi from 1988 to 2013, he concurrently acted as the UAE’s minister of higher education and scientific research.130 Tawil admits to being a sometime adviser to world leaders, though he is willing to specify to the Times of Israel only the presidents of certain African nations.131 He does not indicate whether he has ever advised leaders in the country he evidently spends a good deal of time in: the United Arab Emirates.
In the fall of 2017, Elliott Broidy, now the deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee thanks to Trump, emails George Nader, still an adviser to MBZ, a “detailed report” on a private meeting he has just had with the president.132 Broidy’s report is sent to an encrypted email address used by Nader and is, according to the New York Times, sent in response to a request by MBZ that Broidy lobby Trump for the creation of a new “counterterrorism task force” focused on the Middle East.133 The Times reports that by fall 2017 Nader has been trying for months to turn Broidy into an “instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”134 In sum, writes the Times, “hundreds of pages of correspondence between the two men reveal an active effort to cultivate President Trump on behalf of the two oil-rich Arab monarchies.”135 In charting Nader and Broidy’s three primary ambitions—convincing Trump to fire secretary of state Rex Tillerson, ensuring Trump backs Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Iran and Qatar, and orchestrating a private meeting between Trump and MBZ—the Times notes that the first two of these ambitions were achieved by the Broidy-Nader partnership. As for the third, it is unknown whether Trump has met secretly with MBZ, though the possibility remains MBZ did so when he attended a Trump Tower meeting in secrecy in December 2016.136
Across a number of emails, Nader offers Broidy more than $1 billion in contracts for his private security company, Circinus, in exchange for Broidy’s help wooing Trump on behalf of MBZ.137 Because Nader is offering this money to the Republican National Committee’s deputy finance chair, there is a risk from the start that some of the money offered by the Emiratis will end up in Republican Party coffers, either directly or through money laundering—for instance, by Broidy, who is a GOP mega-donor, legally donating to the Republican Party money that he himself has received from MBZ to influence the party’s leader. Broidy is already accused by federal prosecutors in court filings of receiving laundered money in a separate case involving 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a Malaysian state-owned fund.138 In April 2019, shortly after Robert Mueller reports the findings of his Russia investigation to William Barr, Trump’s new attorney general—by then facing persistent accusations of “acting like Trump’s lawyer” and “trying to protect” Trump—will seek and receive an ethics waiver from the DOJ to oversee the 1MDB case; Barr’s former law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, currently represents Goldman Sachs in the 1MDB investigation.139
During the 2016 election cycle, Broidy was responsible for raising $108 million for a joint RNC-Trump campaign fund. The August 2016 offer to Trump Jr. by Broidy’s partner, Nader—that Nader would do anything he could do, on behalf of MBZ and MBS, to assist the Trump campaign—could therefore have been a promise delivered upon, pre- or post-election, through Broidy’s fundraising efforts for the RNC, making the 1MDB investigation a potentially dangerous one not just for Broidy but for Trump and members of his 2016 presidential campaign.140
In his emails to Broidy, Nader assures the GOP rainmaker and donor that he is playing a “Pivotal Indispensable Magic Role” in helping both Saudi Arabia and the UAE.141 That the special counsel’s office will subsequently grant Nader immunity from criminal prosecution—and have him testify multiple times before a federal grand jury—underscores that elements of the secretive efforts Nader made in conjunction with Broidy and MBZ may have amounted to criminal acts, possibly of a sort Broidy has repeatedly been accused of throughout his political career: bribery, a charge not investigated by the special counsel but possibly being considered by other federal jurisdictions that have received evidence from his office.142 According to the New York Times, one of the focuses of Mueller’s probe—though this subject does not appear in his report, suggesting any case related to it was referred elsewhere or considered a counterintelligence matter—is whether Nader “funnel[ed] Emirati money to Mr. Trump’s political efforts,” though it is unclear when Mueller believes any such illegal donations may have been made.143 What is clear is that Trump’s foreign policy aligns with the requests made by MBZ through his agents and intermediaries, and that Nader and Broidy for some reason feel compelled to use code names in their emails, referring to Donald Trump as “Chairman” and to MBZ as “Friend.”144
In one of the Nader-Broidy emails, first reported on by the New York Times in March 2018, Broidy, who by fall 2017 has “hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the United Arab Emirates,” tells Nader that he “repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump to meet privately with Prince Mohammed [bin Zayed], preferably in an informal setting outside the White House.” Broidy also explains to Nader and MBZ that he strongly urged Trump to get behind MBZ’s policy agenda in the Middle East.145 At his fall 2017 private meeting with Trump, moreover, Broidy tells the president to fire Rex Tillerson, which Trump will do (via tweet) in March 2018.146 Months after the firing, Trump tweets, on December 7, 2018, that Tillerson, the man who had so critiqued the MBS-Kushner relationship—also the former president of Exxon, one of the largest energy companies in the world—“didn’t have the mental capacity needed” to be secretary of state.147 “He was dumb as a rock … [and] lazy as hell,” Trump will add, suggesting further that he had wanted to get rid of Tillerson from the moment he hired him and “couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.”148 The tweet has the effect of erasing Saudi or Emirati involvement in Tillerson’s ouster, as well as the involvement of the by then disgraced former RNC deputy finance chair, Broidy.
Trump takes Broidy’s advice with respect not only to Tillerson but also to his administration’s continued support for Emirati schemes and adventures abroad. As the New York Times will note in March 2018, “Trump has closely allied himself with the Emiratis, endorsing their strong support for the new heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia [Mohammed bin Salman], as well as their confrontational approaches toward Iran and their neighbor Qatar. In the case of Qatar, which is the host to a major United States military base, Mr. Trump’s endorsement of an Emirati- and Saudi-led blockade against that country has put him openly at odds with … years of American policy.”149
When Broidy is confronted with his emails to Nader by the Times, his only response, through a spokesman, is to accuse, without evidence, the nation of Qatar—an enemy of his allies in the UAE—of a “hack … sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr. Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism.”150 Neither Broidy nor his spokesman explains which email between him and Nader, in whole or in part, contains content sensitive enough that its revelation could be construed as state-sponsored punishment.151 In addition to Qatar, Broidy also blames “numerous Washington consultants and former intelligence operatives” for the hack.152
By August 2017, just sixty days into his tenure as heir presumptive to the throne of Saudi Arabia, MBS is already thinking with great particularity about which of his enemies he needs to harness and which he needs to torture or kill. According to American intelligence intercepts, he issues instructions to his top associates to lure a noted critic of his regime, Jamal Khashoggi—a Virginia resident with three American-citizen children—to a third country so that he can be kidnapped there and taken back to Saudi Arabia.153 Under U.S. law (specifically, a 2015 directive to the National Security Act), the receipt of this intercept immediately obligates the Trump administration to warn Khashoggi that he is in danger, as the directive “requires the United States to give ‘non-U.S. persons’ notice of ‘impending threats of intentional killing, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping.’”154 Khashoggi is given no warning about traveling abroad, however, let alone about the danger of entering Saudi consulates abroad. Quartz will note, upon disclosure of these intelligence intercepts, that “the U.S. knew that Khashoggi was a target,” while the Washington Post will add that “intelligence about Saudi Arabia’s earlier plans to detain Khashoggi have raised questions about whether the Trump administration should have warned the journalist that he might be in danger.”155 (The Post references “earlier plans” because, as will be revealed in 2018, the Trump administration also acquired advance knowledge of MBS’s murderous alternative to his extraordinary rendition plot: according to Quartz, “An unnamed National Security Agency official told the … [Observer] that US intelligence had learned that Riyadh ‘had something unpleasant in store for Khashoggi,’ at least a day before Khashoggi went to the embassy in Istanbul,” where he was murdered, in early October 2018. “The ‘threat warning was communicated to the White House through official intelligence channels’ … [but] the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has refused to comment on why Khashoggi was not warned.”)156
In another August 2017 intercept, American intelligence agents hear MBS tell associates—though it is not clear, per the Wall Street Journal, if this is a direct quote or a summary of intelligence collected—that if top MBS aide Saud al-Qahtani and others cannot successfully lure Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia, “we could possibly lure him outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements.”157
That some of MBS’s ire toward Khashoggi stems from his belief that Saudi journalists should be organs of the royal family is almost certain. The New York Times reports that “prominent Saudi editors and journalists who have accompanied [MBS] on foreign trips have been given up to $100,000 in cash.”158 According to the Times, Saudi journalists living in-country who criticize MBS can see their websites permanently blocked within twenty-four hours, and other “journalists deemed too critical have been quietly silenced through phone calls informing them that they are barred from publishing, and sometimes from traveling abroad.”159 Interestingly, while Khashoggi has already received such a communication from the royal palace, it is because of his criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, not MBS’s, that he is banned from journalism in Saudi Arabia (see chapter 6).
August 2017 also sees Jared Kushner travel to the Middle East to “build on talks with a budding Sunni Arab coalition of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan”—all of the original Red Sea conspirators, except for Bahrain.160 Kushner and his small entourage of Trump loyalists, including former Trump Organization executive vice president and chief legal officer Jason Greenblatt, will come away from their meetings in the Middle East “hopeful that the new generation of Arab leaders is a potential ‘game-changer.’”161 In reporting on Kushner’s multinational tour, the Washington Post notes “Trump’s unusually close relations with both Israel and the Gulf Arabs.”162 The Post notes, too, that Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf nations are looking for a partner in the Palestinian Authority. It is in this context that the newspaper mentions “Mohammed Dahlan, a Gazan Palestinian now living in the UAE,” as a “key intermediary” between the new Israeli-Arab alliance and the Palestinians, adding that “the plan is to provide economic and social support [to Gazans], through Egypt and with Israel’s blessing, that can weaken the hard-liners’ control” in Gaza.163 The Post concludes its coverage of Kushner’s trip by reporting that “beyond the machinations in Gaza is a larger vision for restarting a Palestinian peace process drawing on the alliance of moderate Sunni leaders. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi already have extensive, friendly relations with Israel. Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince and military leader of the UAE, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed don’t have formal ambassadorial contacts with Israel. But they share a common enemy in Iran.”164
In September 2017, U.S. intelligence receives more intercepts confirming MBS’s intentions with respect to Khashoggi, by now a Washington Post journalist. According to the New York Times, an intercepted MBS conversation from September includes MBS telling a top aide, Turki Aldakhil, that he will use “a bullet” on Khashoggi if the journalist does not, according to the Times report, “return to the kingdom and end his criticism of the Saudi government.”165 The Times cites The Intercept as “detailed evidence … [that] the crown prince considered killing Mr. Khashoggi long before a team of Saudi operatives strangled him inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and dismembered his body using a bone saw” in October 2018 (see chapter 9). The Times reminds its readers that MBS is “a close ally of the Trump White House—especially Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.”166
The September 2017 recording is just one audio file from “years of the crown prince’s voice and text communications that the NSA [National Security Agency] routinely intercepted and stored,” according to the Times, which notes that a late 2018 review by the NSA “and other American spy agencies,” which are by then “circulat[ing] intelligence reports [on MBS] to other spy agencies, the White House, and close foreign allies,” will result in the CIA “concluding that Prince Mohammed had ordered” Khashoggi’s murder.167
Indeed, MBS’s communications from September 2017, taken in full, reveal that by ninety days into his reign as de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the crown prince and other top Saudi officials were growing “increasingly alarmed about Mr. Khashoggi’s criticisms of the Saudi government.”168 American intelligence analysts have concluded that, by that September, MBS “had every intention of killing the journalist if he did not return to Saudi Arabia.”169 One tape analyst’s review finds MBS opining to Saud al-Qahtani that “Khashoggi had grown too influential … and [his] articles and Twitter posts were tarnishing the crown prince’s image as a forward-thinking reformer”; when al-Qahtani warns the crown prince to avoid “any move” against Khashoggi because it would be “risky” and could cause “an international uproar,” MBS replies, as summarized by the Times, that “Saudi Arabia should not care about international reaction to how it handles its own citizens” and that he “did not like half-measures—he never liked them and did not believe in them.”170 Al-Qahtani, who will in late fall 2018 be implicated in Khashoggi’s murder, calls Khashoggi in September 2017 to praise his writings about MBS as part of an attempt to lure Khashoggi into a false sense of security—even as he knows MBS’s designs on the journalist involve, at a minimum, his arrest and detention.171
By fall 2017, Khashoggi is living in the United States, with no plans to return to Saudi Arabia.172 He has left Saudi Arabia still a nominal supporter of MBS’s vision of the kingdom, but the events of October and November 2017 will cause him to realize it is “time to speak” against the new regime in Riyadh.173 As Khashoggi will later tell Vanity Fair, “The people MBS arrested [in October and November 2017] were not radicals. The majority were reformers for women’s rights and open society. He arrested them to spread fear.”174 Vanity Fair will also speak to an adviser to a Saudi businessman who agrees with Khashoggi’s fall 2017 assessment, telling the magazine that by late 2017 Saudi Arabia had become “a bit of a police state.”175
In early October 2017, as MBS is tightening his grip on Saudi Arabia and just weeks before a surprise visit to Riyadh by Jared Kushner, King Salman, MBS’s father, becomes the first ruling monarch in the history of the kingdom to visit Moscow. At the airport in Moscow, bin Salman deplanes via a golden escalator similar to the one Donald Trump descended before announcing his presidential run in June 2015—with the difference that the former’s escalator breaks as he is using it, forcing the Saudi king to descend the stairway to an eagerly awaiting Kremlin delegation the old-fashioned way.176
King Salman’s visit to Russia is hailed as a “turning point in Middle East politics” (the Guardian), a “signal[] [of] a new era of cooperation with Russia” by the Saudi government (the Guardian), a “new qualitative level” for Russian-Saudi relations (Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov), “an historical moment” (Lavrov), and a “landmark event” (Putin).177 While he is in Moscow, MBS’s father signs billions of dollars’ worth of energy, military, and technological agreements with Putin and announces that in the view of the royal family Russia is now a “friendly country,” making clear that one of the things he wants in return is an end to the Syrian conflict that unifies rather than divides that war-torn Arab nation. As part of his own commitment on this score he declines, for the first time, to call for the removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power, previously a sticking point in Russian-Saudi diplomatic engagements.178 According to the Guardian, the visit and its accompanying international business transactions signal that while Saudi Arabia has “traditionally seen the United States as its chief—if not exclusive—foreign policy partner … changes inside the Saudi regime … have left the kingdom looking to diversify into a wider set of alliances.”179
Given that, per the Guardian, King Salman’s Moscow visit “has been in the works for months, if not years,” and that, as the Independent notes, the trip “comes at the end of several years of [Saudi-Russian] courtship,” by far the most interesting member of the Saudi delegation to Moscow is a Maltese professor by the name of Joseph Mifsud.180 Mifsud is just days away from being outed by special counsel Robert Mueller as the Kremlin agent who acted as Trump adviser and self-described Kremlin “intermediary” George Papadopoulos’s contact with Putin’s government during the 2016 presidential campaign.181 Mifsud’s role as a Kremlin-Trump campaign conduit had extended from March 2016 until at least September 2016, meaning that he arrives in Riyadh only a year after his contacts with Trump national security adviser Papadopoulos—at least the publicly known ones—have ended.182 As all of Mifsud’s 2016 contacts with Papadopoulos occurred after both the Saudi-led conspiracy to aid Trump’s campaign and the Saudi-Russian détente had begun, the possibility remains that Mifsud was working for the Saudis as well as the Kremlin when he made contact with the Trump campaign through Papadopoulos.183 BuzzFeed News will observe, however, that Mifsud joins King Salman in Moscow as a guest of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), a “partner” organization of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS)—the Kremlin think tank that drew up the Russian plan to interfere with the 2016 election in the United States.184 Mifsud’s contact at the RIAC, Ivan Timofeev, with whom he put Papadopoulos in contact in spring 2016, is a “sanctions expert,” according to Reuters, and, like the RIAC as a whole, is “close to the Russian Foreign Ministry.”185 Even at the time Mifsud was representing himself as a Kremlin agent to Papadopoulos in spring 2016, he may well have also been in contact with powerful royals in Riyadh, as BuzzFeed News notes that “Mifsud had spoken at … events, in both Saudi Arabia and Russia, organized by RIAC and the King Faisal Center.” BuzzFeed News also notes that during his October 2017 trip to Moscow with the Saudi delegation, Mifsud again met with Timofeev.186 Asked by the digital media outlet whether he and Mifsud discussed Papadopoulos in Moscow during King Salman’s visit, Timofeev will decline to say.187
While MBS does not go to Moscow with his father in October 2017, the Independent will reveal that, in fact, much of the business of the trip was about him. According to the British media outlet, “King Salman is believed to be in Moscow to shore up international support for his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, next in line to the throne.”188 In seeking “Russia’s backing for his son,” in the words of one RIAC foreign relations expert, the king apparently meets with success—as within a matter of days MBS will purge scores of his domestic enemies using illicit kidnappings and detentions, behavior that could have, had King Salman not paved the way for it in both the United States and Russia, threatened MBS’s future rule. The cost Putin demands for supporting MBS appears to be pecuniary: while Saudi Arabia had already pledged $10 billion to Russia from its sovereign wealth fund in 2015—the year the Red Sea Conspiracy was established—by late 2017 only 10 percent of that amount had reached a Russian government “hamstrung by Western sanctions.” As the Independent notes, during the Saudis’ Moscow visit the Russians “made it clear that they hope the Saudi delegation will deliver on investment from the kingdom’s sovereign wealth funds.”189 As an Al Jazeera editorial published after King Salman’s visit to Moscow opines, “The Russia-Saudi rapprochement of recent months arguably became possible precisely because Russian President Vladimir Putin and MBS speak the same language. Both prefer to use hard power to resolve issues domestically and internationally and both see the world in black and white … The Yemen war, the Qatar blockade and, finally, Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in recent Lebanese developments [the kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister], all seem to have been borrowed out of Putin’s playbook.”190 The editorial’s title asks a prescient question: “Will Mohammed bin Salman be Arabia’s Vladimir Putin?”191
In 2018, the Middle East Eye will quote a Saudi source who calls Putin “a role model [for MBS]. MBS once asked in a gathering, ‘How does Putin manage to kidnap his opposition figures and assassinate them in London, and it does not have consequences?’”192
Another reason that MBS does not travel to Moscow with his father may be that he has significant plans of his own to attend to at home. In early November, MBS purges his domestic enemies—via arrest and incarceration—with the seeming assistance of a list of Saudi dissidents provided to him by Jared Kushner, now his confidant; Kushner has access, through the President’s Daily Brief, to the results of U.S. and international surveillance of prominent Saudis, and is thereby able to provide MBS with a level of insight into the machinations of his enemies that the Saudi crown prince might not otherwise have.193 The purge ensnares, as itemized by the New Yorker, “eleven senior [Saudi] princes, several current or former ministers, the owners of three major television stations, the head of the most important military branch, and one of the wealthiest men in the world, who has been a major shareholder in Citibank, Twentieth Century Fox, Apple, Twitter, and Lyft.”194 The magazine writes that the purge “sends shockwaves of fear through the kingdom.” A former U.S. official analogizes MBS’s actions this way: “It’s the equivalent of waking up to find Warren Buffett and the heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC have been arrested. It has all the appearances of a coup d’état. Saudi Arabia is rapidly becoming another country. The kingdom has never been this unstable.”195
MBS’s November purge follows smaller purges in June—which included MBS placing his cousin and the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, Mohammed bin Nayef, under house arrest—and September, when the Saudi prince “orchestrated the arrest of well-known intellectuals and clerics.”196 That MBS’s actions are sanctioned by his father, King Salman, is underscored by the fact that the November action comes just hours after Salman has put his son in charge of an Anti-Corruption Commission.197 MBS’s new position allows him to seize the assets of—and issue blanket travel bans against—individual Saudi citizens.198
MBS’s arrest of bin Nayef in June 2017, just weeks after Trump rewarded MBS and his family with a presidential visit, had been particularly galling to the U.S. intelligence community. According to the Washington Post, “Intelligence fears about the situation in Saudi Arabia rose when Mohammed unseated his cousin and the heir apparent, Mohammed bin Nayef, a longtime U.S. ally against terrorism.”199 Calling bin Nayef “one of the preeminent counterterrorists” in the world, a thirty-plus-year CIA veteran tells the Post that bin Nayef “was the closest thing Saudi Arabia had to a genuine hero in this century”—calling gravely into question MBS’s insistence, publicly echoed by Trump, that his consolidation of power in the kingdom was born of a commitment to counterterrorism rather than autocratic avarice.200 Indeed, bin Nayef was considered such an ally to America and such a threat to al-Qaeda that in 2009 he had been injured in an al-Qaeda suicide bombing made notable in part by the bomber’s secretion of the explosives in his rectum.201
That Trump backs MBS’s several purges is borne out not only by his public tweets but also his private actions. The names of those taken by MBS in November hail in substantial part from a list derived from President Trump’s classified daily presidential briefing, meaning that they could only have been shared with the Saudis if they were first automatically declassified by Trump.202 As The Intercept notes in a March 2018 investigative report, during a period when he had top-secret clearance (a status he would later briefly lose) Kushner “was known around the White House as one of the most voracious readers of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified rundown of the latest intelligence intended only for the president and his closest advisers. Kushner … was particularly engaged by information about the Middle East.… [In the latter half of 2017] the President’s Daily Brief contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to the crown prince’s power grab.”203
According to high-level government officials familiar with Trump’s daily briefings, Kushner made use of the classified intelligence the president had received. In late October 2017, reports The Intercept, Kushner “made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard … What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown.”204 A report by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, published at the time of Kushner’s surprise visit to Saudi Arabia, notes that “the two princes [MBS and Kushner] are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.”205
Much of the information about the clandestine Kushner-MBS summit in October 2017 will come from MBS himself, who in subsequent conversations with confidants will “brag[] of receiving classified U.S. intelligence from Jared Kushner and using it as part of a purge of ‘corrupt’ princes and businessmen.”206 More broadly, MBS will spend time in 2017 and early 2018 “boasting about his close relationship with the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the intelligence which he has told his circle Kushner passed to him.”207
According to the New York Times, the domestic purge MBS orders in November 2017 results in at least one death and a number of detainees being tortured—including a Harvard-educated American doctor, Walid Fitaihi, who was “blindfolded, slapped and stripped to his underwear before being bound to a chair and shocked with electricity … [an] episode of torture that lasted about an hour.”208 A friend of Fitaihi’s will tell the Times that the doctor’s Saudi torturers “whipped his back so severely that he could not sleep on it for days.”209 A spokesman for MBS’s government will say, in response to accusations it tortured the American, that “the kingdom prohibits torture.”210 As of spring 2019, Fitaihi was still imprisoned in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton without any charges having been announced or trial held, and with no public evidence that the Trump administration is seeking to free him.211
Another MBS detainee, according to the Washington Post, is a “longtime U.S. ally in the country, billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talel … [who] had publicly attacked Trump as a ‘disgrace’ to America during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump followed the crackdown with a public tweet in support of Mohammed’s moves.”212 Alwaleed is of course not the only Trump critic MBS targets; as he purges the kingdom in the fall of 2017, he has set in motion a sequence of events that will eventually lead to the gruesome assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 (see chapter 9). The New York Times will report in 2019 that MBS’s agents also tortured women’s rights advocates during the crown prince’s late 2017 domestic purge, with the torturers’ favorite method of inflicting pain being electrocution.213
It is not only the identities of MBS’s detainees and torture or murder victims that worry the American intelligence community. It is also that Kushner’s “secretive” trip to Riyadh, which preceded MBS’s purge by mere days, catches “some intelligence officials … off guard,” and that the general consensus is that this was intentional on Kushner’s part, with “most people in the White House … kept out of the loop about the trip and its purpose.”214 After Kushner returns to the United States, “intelligence officials [a]re troubled”—again—“by a lack of information [from Kushner] about the topics [he] discussed” with MBS, with Kushner saying only, euphemistically, that “he and the prince met alone to ‘brainstorm’ strategies” relating to a “Middle East peace plan.” The White House will intimate that other foreign nationals were involved in these meetings with Kushner and MBS as well, but will not say who.215
That the “Middle East peace plan” Kushner, MBS, and perhaps some others allegedly discuss in Riyadh in October 2017 is not the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan Kushner has already been tasked with working on by his father-in-law is seemingly confirmed by the fact that, just weeks after Kushner leaves Riyadh, Trump formally recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by announcing he will move the U.S. embassy there. It is a controversial decision that, unsurprisingly, leads to a months-long suspension of diplomatic contact between the Trump administration and the Palestinians on the subject of a Middle East peace deal.216 Indeed, Kushner evinces no hurry in his peace planning either in October 2017 or at any other time; well over a year after Trump’s December 2017 change in U.S. policy on Jerusalem, Kushner will tell an international conference that he refuses to release any Israeli-Palestinian peace plan until after Israel’s April 2019 elections, a vote in which Netanyahu ultimately secures reelection (see Epilogue).217 Kushner instead spends the period from December 2017 to early 2019 in a fashion decidedly not conducive to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks: “pushing to remove the refugee status of millions of Palestinians as part of an apparent effort to shutter the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).218 According to the Atlantic, Trump, with Kushner’s support, spends 2018 seeking to “cut financial assistance for … [UNRWA] out of pique that the Palestinians have not given him the requisite ‘appreciation or respect,’ as if humanitarian aid, even when it serves U.S. national interests, should be awarded in return for flattery.”219 “It is no surprise, therefore,” the magazine adds, “that the Palestinians stopped talking to the administration.”220
Whether the 2018 freeze in U.S.-Palestinian relations is intentional on Trump and Kushner’s part is worth discussion. Certainly, as the Atlantic notes, when “dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed in clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces [in early 2018], the Trump administration chose neither to express sympathy for the Palestinians killed nor to join international calls for Israeli restraint … [Instead] [h]is administration has offered unconstrained support for settlements, with an ambassador who has fought against use of the word ‘occupation’ and refers to ‘Judea and Samaria,’ as favored by Israeli settlers, instead of traditional U.S. references to the West Bank.”221 The media outlet calls it a “Kushner fantasy” that “the Arab Gulf states [Saudi Arabia and the UAE], Egypt, and Jordan will help him overcome these major challenges” to working with the Palestinians—thus offering a list of nations almost identical to the list of those with representatives present at the founding of the Red Sea Conspiracy.222 These nations’ leaders share with Israel, however, as the Atlantic observes, “a common strategic perspective on Iran and on Islamic extremism … [so] they don’t prioritize the Palestinian issue as much as previous generations.”223
Of the source of the intelligence Kushner reportedly gives to MBS in 2017 as part of their discussions of “peace,” multiple Saudi sources with knowledge of MBS’s boasts to his inner circle describe it as originating “from U.S. wiretaps on conversations between Arab royals in hotels in London, in major U.S. cities and even on yachts docked close to Monte Carlo … information from the daily intelligence briefing provided by the intelligence community to the White House.”224 Kushner therefore either illegally shared classified intelligence with a foreign government or the information was declassified by Trump himself to facilitate its transfer to MBS. An intelligence transmission of this sort—between Trump, his son-in-law, and a foreign leader, with the content of the intelligence arising in part from foreign nationals’ hotel stays—would mirror the sort of clandestine, Trump-executed intelligence-gathering operation described by former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in the dossier of raw intelligence he compiled in 2015 and 2016. In that document, Steele’s MI6-derived sources alleged that “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership” was “managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort,” and involved the Kremlin “receiving intel from Trump’s team on Russian oligarchs and their families in [the] US,” a topic “with which Putin and the Kremlin seemed preoccupied”—much like MBS would be, with respect to his own countrymen traveling abroad, in 2017.225 Steele’s dossier will further note that an “intelligence exchange … running between” Trump’s team and the Kremlin saw Trump’s side ably meeting “Putin’s priority requirement … for intelligence on the activities, business and otherwise, in the United States of leading Russian oligarchs and their families. Trump and his associates duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with this information.”226
Steele’s sources’ assessment of the Trump family’s willingness to pass highly personal information in their possession to foreign autocrats will be echoed by the research that journalist Craig Unger collects for his book House of Putin, House of Trump. According to Unger, Trump coordinated with Felix Sater’s Bayrock Group, the Trump Organization’s scouting outfit for potential Russian clientele, to “indirectly provid[e] Putin with a regular flow of intelligence on what the oligarchs were doing with their money in the United States.”227 According to the Washington Post, Putin’s aim was “to keep tabs on the billionaires … who had made their post–Cold War fortunes on the backs of industries once owned by the state. The oligarchs … were stashing their money in foreign real estate, including Trump properties, presumably beyond Putin’s reach. Trump, knowingly or otherwise, may have struck a side deal with the Kremlin, Unger argues: He would secretly rat out his customers to Putin, who would allow them to keep buying Trump properties. Trump got rich. Putin got eyes on where the oligarchs had hidden their wealth. Everybody won.”228
Engaged in what would appear to be a similar operation in late 2017, Trump’s son-in-law gives the Saudi crown prince valuable information on the activities of the autocratic Saudi government’s wealthiest citizens—an action that suggests either recompense for some past Saudi largesse or a conviction that something Trump wants done by Saudi Arabia could not or would not have been done had Mohammed bin Nayef, the longtime U.S. ally, been left as heir apparent. As reported by the Daily Mail, MBS “told members of his circle that the intelligence included information on who was disloyal to him.… ‘Jared took a list out of names from U.S. eavesdrops of people who were supposedly MBS’s enemies,’ said one source, characterizing how MBS spoke about the information. ‘He took a list out of these people who had been trashing MBS in phone calls, and said ‘these are the ones who are your enemies.’ MBS was actually bragging about it in Saudi Arabia when it happened, that he and Jared sat up until 4AM discussing things, and Jared brought him this list.”229 A second Saudi source told the Mail that Kushner and MBS “sat for several hours together. They literally laid out the future map of the entire region, that’s why they stayed up to the early hours of the morning from the afternoon before.”230
Another disturbing aspect of Kushner’s October 2017 trip to Riyadh is the subsequent revelation that during the same week Kushner was in the Saudi capital working on reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East, another member of the Kushner clan was there as well—working on a business deal. According to the New York Times, Jared’s brother, Josh, flew out of Riyadh less than twenty-four hours before Jared flew in; Josh had been attending an investor conference at which MBS “promised to spend billions of dollars on a high-tech future for Saudi Arabia.” The younger Kushner had “frequently ducked out for more exclusive conversations with Saudi officials,” however.231 The appearance left by the synchronicity between the Kushner brothers’ travel itineraries—that “top aides” to MBS were discussing sizable investments in one Kushner enterprise just hours before receiving classified intelligence from another Kushner to help the crown prince take control of Saudi Arabia—is troubling.232 What is even more concerning, however, is that, as the Times reports, through the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign Jared Kushner had a financial “interest in his brother’s funds” and “ties [to] his brother’s company.”233 According to the newspaper, before the election Jared Kushner was “closely involved” in Josh Kushner’s firm, Thrive Capital, “having sat on the board and investment committees of Thrive” through the beginning of the Trump administration, and having “received at least $8.2 million in capital gains from various Thrive funds while working in the White House”—meaning that, despite stepping down from Thrive’s board in January 2017, Jared Kushner stood to gain financially from any deals his brother did with MBS in the days immediately preceding or following his secret trip to meet with the Saudi crown prince.234
Within twelve months of Josh Kushner’s meetings with top aides to MBS in Riyadh, Thrive will have raised $1 billion in new funds. It is unclear how much of this came from MBS and his promised “billions” of new investments in American firms.235 A Thrive spokesman “declined to disclose whether Saudis had invested in any Thrive funds,” answering queries from the Times instead with a cryptic remark about Thrive having “received no money since the presidential election from any Saudi who had not previously invested in its funds”—inadvertently raising an additional worry for ethics watchdogs in Washington, namely that MBS had been giving money to the younger Kushner during the presidential campaign even as his emissary George Nader was offering money to another member of the Trump family, Don Jr.236 Asked by the Times whether Thrive had in fact continued receiving investments from Saudis who had already invested in Thrive pre-election, Thrive’s spokesman “declined to answer.”237
Josh Kushner’s access to top MBS aides like Yasir Al-Rumayyan in Riyadh in October 2017 raises eyebrows in the tech community as well. According to the Times, “The Riyadh conference drew Wall Street titans, and some attendees questioned how a relatively small player [Josh Kushner] enjoyed high-level access to Saudi officials.”238 Al-Rumayyan, for instance, is managing director of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, and his son Faisal began socializing with Josh Kushner in New York after Jared’s brother returned there from Riyadh.239
That Trump and Kushner agreed to give classified information to MBS to help him solidify his hold on power in Riyadh is seemingly confirmed when, following the crown prince’s November 2017 purge, Trump “tell[s] friends that he and Jared had engineered a Saudi coup.”240 “We’ve put our man on top!” Trump crows.241 While Kushner’s involvement in the intelligence transfer is unsurprising, given that he was at the time a “voracious” reader of the President’s Daily Brief, the PDB is in fact “intended only for the president and his closest advisers”; although Kushner is a top adviser to President Trump, it is unclear how much of the classified intelligence included in the PDB is relevant to his official role in the White House.242 According to a former White House official and a former U.S. intelligence professional familiar with Kushner’s habits, Trump’s son-in-law is “particularly engaged by information about the Middle East,” though whether this interest is born of his role as an adviser to his father-in-law or a personal investment in events in Saudi Arabia is unclear.243 One indication that Kushner’s interest in PDB intelligence on Saudi Arabia is tied to his personal relationship with MBS comes from U.S. intelligence sources—including “a former White House official and two government officials with knowledge of” the PDB—who confirm for The Intercept that between June and October 2017, the PDB “contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to” MBS deposing bin Nayef.244 Therefore, when MBS’s late fall purge occurs and “the Saudi figures named in the President’s Daily Brief [a]re among those rounded up,” it suggests that both Trump and Kushner—the former through an intelligence declassification not clearly in the interests of the United States, and the latter through a transmission of intelligence of equally dubious utility to long-term American interests—have focused their respective attentions on putting a Saudi royal they call “our man” on the throne of his kingdom, MBS’s qualifications or readiness for that position notwithstanding.245
On November 15, 2017, Salvator Mundi, a “long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII of France more than 500 years ago” (and considered a “male counterpart” to da Vinci’s world-famous Mona Lisa) sells at auction for $450.3 million, “shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction.”246 The painting, one of only twenty “great works” ever painted by da Vinci, is termed by Christie’s, the auction house that sells it, “a painting of the most iconic figure in the world by the most important artist of all time.”247
The seller of the painting is Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who has previously bought real estate from Donald Trump under suspicious circumstances, and in the ten days before the 2016 election parked his plane near Trump’s (twice) under likewise suspicious circumstances (see chapters 1 and 3); the buyer, through an intermediary, is MBS, on whose yacht Serene the da Vinci will later be found.248
Immediately after the purchase, however, one of history’s most expensive pieces of art—and an arguable pretext for the transfer of nearly half a billion dollars from a Russian associate of Trump’s to a Saudi associate of Trump’s—is, to all appearances, “lost” by its buyer, with an intended Louvre Abu Dhabi unveiling unceremoniously canceled.249 Adding to the intrigue is rampant speculation that the painting is, in fact, “far from being a Leonardo,” having been painted, rather, “largely … by his third-rate imitator, Bernardino Luini”—an allegation that could imply that the sale and purchase of the work are pretextual. If true, this would mean that MBS, through an intermediary, has effectively gifted a Russian oligarch the largest sum ever to change hands at an art auction; such an MBS-Rybolovlev transfer would be suspicious because MBS had previously offered to fund, on Trump’s behalf, a pre-election digital disinformation campaign run by Rybolovlev’s business associate, Joel Zamel—a commitment that would naturally cause investigators to search for any unexplained transfer of funds between MBS and either Zamel or anyone (like Rybolovlev) in Zamel’s professional milieu.250 According to Al-Araby, “The painting was taken to an unknown location after it was purchased by the crown prince. Art collector and conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini [restorer of Salvator Mundi], who resorted to contacting Louvre Abu Dhabi to ask for the whereabouts of the painting, received no response.”251
In covering the disappearance of Salvator Mundi, Vanity Fair will note that not only did MBS’s intermediary in the purchase, Saudi Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, wildly overpay for the painting, but the seller, Rybolovlev, was shortly thereafter questioned by authorities in Monaco on claims of “corruption and influence peddling.”252 By November 2018, Rybolovlev will be formally charged in Monaco with “trading in passive influence and violation of the secrecy of an investigation”—an accusation involving, of all things, Rybolovlev’s original purchase of Salvator Mundi for $127 million (an overpayment estimated at $47 million) from Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier.253 Rybolovlev’s overpayment of Trump for Trump’s Florida mansion had been nearly $54 million (see chapter 1).
Writing for Narativ, former CBC journalist Zev Shalev will publish an investigative report in January 2019 revealing that federal investigators in the United States are “investigating both the buyer and the seller of the Da Vinci masterpiece as part of the Trump-Russia investigation,” as Rybolovlev is said by German media outlet Der Spiegel and “Western intelligence officials” to be managing money for Russian deputy premier Yuri Trutnev “in a fiduciary capacity,” putting Rybolovlev in a position to be a front man for large-scale Kremlin financial transactions.254 According to Shalev, given that MBS and MBZ appear to have jointly promised the Trumps money in August 2016 to support Donald Trump’s campaign, MBS’s transfer of almost half a billion dollars to a Kremlin agent for a painting that might be worth almost nothing is one way to deliver on that promise—and, as with so many of Trump’s interactions with Russia, a good way to do so in “plain sight.”255
Alternatively, given that Psy-Group’s Joel Zamel has worked for Rybolovlev in the past, and was at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016 looking for someone to pay him to do secret work on behalf of Trump’s campaign—and was, moreover, asking the Saudis and Emiratis, through George Nader, to be his patrons—there is reason to wonder whether some portion of the money Rybolovlev received from MBS may have passed through the oligarch to Zamel or Psy-Group.256 A key component of the Psy-Group/Cambridge Analytica deal Zamel signed in mid-December 2016 was a “mutual non-disclosure agreement” that, among other things, prohibited either party from revealing any past or current clients of the other—an unusual rider that seemed to anticipate either future animosity, future litigation, or future investigation by law enforcement.257
Within a week of Mueller sending investigators to interview Zamel and members of Psy-Group in 2018, Zamel will “shutter[] the entire operation,” Zev Shalev notes.258 Moreover, per Bloomberg, “Psy-Group’s decision to shut down appears to have come the same week that Nader testified before the grand jury working with Mueller, according to the timing of that testimony previously reported in the New York Times.”259 Originally, George Nader’s $2 million post-election payment to Zamel had been pegged to a new Zamel venture, WhiteKnight, and work Zamel theoretically might have done for Nader or Nader’s patrons after the election, but a Bloomberg review will find that WhiteKnight did not have a website, had published “little public information” about itself or its products, and in fact was, according to a “person familiar with Psy-Group’s operations,” simply a “rebranding [of] the firm [Psy-Group] under a different name.”260 According to Bloomberg’s source, switching Psy-Group’s name to WhiteKnight post-election was already being discussed internally at the firm in 2016, though for what reason is unclear.261 These machinations only underscore the byzantine processes used by those in Trump’s orbit to transfer money to Zamel—a tendency that raises the stakes of (and the attention paid to) the MBS-Rybolovlev transaction.
The most important revelation about the disappearance of Salvator Mundi will come in 2018, when it is revealed that MBS did not overpay for the painting by $350 million—Christie’s had estimated it might sell for $100 million—merely due to bad luck. Rather, he was bidding against an unusually insistent anonymous party whose aggressive bids raised the painting’s price to historic heights. That bidder is revealed, in March 2018, to be MBS’s friend, political ally, and geopolitical co-conspirator, MBZ.262
A prominent critic of MBS’s November 2017 purge in the American media is Jamal Khashoggi.263 Khashoggi’s criticism is well founded, given that, as the New Yorker notes, King Salman and his son have, in a very short time, “created a whole new [Saudi] royal family … bypass[ing] hundreds (at least) of other princes” who were in line for the Saudi throne.264 Moreover, with MBS telling confidants that he received significant pre-purge intelligence from Kushner—and even bragging to his Red Sea co-conspirator, MBZ, that Kushner was now “in his pocket” (an allegation he now denies)—the Saudi crown prince has begun, as The Intercept notes, “send[ing] a powerful message to [his] allies and enemies that his actions were backed by the U.S. government,” an observation whose veracity Trump’s celebration of MBS’s ascension appears to confirm.265 Just so, within forty-eight hours of MBS rounding up his enemies—and at least one American—for prolonged detention, torture, and in at least one case death, Trump tweets to his tens of millions of followers that he has “great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing. Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years.”266 Trump’s words echo the Saudi government’s propaganda regarding the purge’s necessity.267 Even so, the odd phrasing of Trump’s tweet, in which the word “some” does surprisingly heavy lifting, implies that the president and his primary Middle East adviser, Kushner, are aware that many of those MBS is “treating harshly” have not, in fact, been taking advantage of the Saudi government, but are being rounded up for some other reason—for instance, their opposition to MBS.
In December 2017, it is revealed that MBS has had a man named Ali al-Qahtani tortured to death in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh. When al-Qahtani’s corpse is found, his neck is “twisted unnaturally as though it had been broken,” and his body exhibits not only bruises but “burn marks that appear[] to be from electric shocks.”268 The Times reports that al-Qahtani, a respected Saudi major general, “was not wealthy himself, so his value as a major anti-corruption target is questionable. But he was a top aide to … a son of the late King Abdullah … and the interrogators may have been pressing the general for information about his boss. The members of King Abdullah’s family are seen as rivals of Crown Prince Mohammed and his father, King Salman.”269 When another son of the late king “complain[s] about General Qahtani’s treatment to a circle of friends … [he] too [is] arrested and locked in the Ritz.”270 Several other MBS detainees are owners and board members of MBC, the Arab world’s largest private media company, which MBS had been unsuccessfully trying to buy; during their detention, the businessmen agree to change the valuation and structure of their company to allow for their own imminent ouster.271 They also, under “order … from a senior Saudi official close to Crown Prince Mohammed,” cancel six popular and highly lucrative Turkish drama series—a priority for MBS, reports the Times, because “the Saudi government is at odds with Turkey over its ties to Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and its allies are boycotting.”272
At least seventeen other MBS detainees are tortured with sufficient vigor that they require hospitalization, and even those of the hundreds of individuals held by MBS who are released begin “living in fear and uncertainty” thereafter, according to the New York Times.273 Some are issued ankle bracelets to track their movements and to “transmit their conversations” to MBS’s agents—mandatory surveillance jewelry that they are told they will be wearing indefinitely.274 “No one can talk about what happened in the Ritz,” an associate of a former detainee tells the Times. “In the end, they all have to live in Saudi Arabia.”275
Within a matter of days of the purge, Trump begins the process of aiding MBS in securing the one thing the crown prince seems to desire above all else: nuclear weapons. According to a November 2017 investigative report by ProPublica, “The Trump administration is holding talks on providing nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia—a move that critics say could upend decades of U.S. policy and lead to an arms race in the Middle East.… [C]urrent and former American officials suspect the country’s leaders … want to keep up with the enrichment capabilities of their rival, Iran.”276 Most troublingly, the Saudis, who in the past “wouldn’t commit to certain safeguards against eventually using the technology for weapons,” continue to maintain that position—but now, reports ProPublica, Trump “might not insist on the same precautions.”277 While experts agree that the Saudis have a rational basis to want nonmilitary nuclear power, with “growing domestic energy demand” and crude oil being “an expensive and inefficient way to generate electricity,” they agree also that nuclear power in the hands of the Saudis is necessarily also “nuclear contingency capability”—the ability to ramp up a nuclear arms program when or if Saudi Arabia’s enemy Iran seems close to building a deliverable nuclear bomb.278
The two chief proponents of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia have long been Thomas Barrack and Michael Flynn. On December 1, ninety-six hours after the ProPublica report is published, Flynn pleads guilty to a federal felony for lying to federal investigators and agrees to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller.279 Days later, Mueller’s investigators interview Barrack, asking primarily questions about Paul Manafort and Rick Gates—an investigative decision that would seem to presage Mueller farming out certain other matters involving Barrack and the presidential transition to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.280 A second source, however, will tell the Associated Press that Barrack was in fact asked questions on a somewhat broader range of topics, including “financial matters about the campaign, the transition, and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.”281
Within twenty-four hours of Flynn pleading guilty, Trump publicly declares that he is “not concerned about what Flynn might tell the Special Counsel.”282 In fact, just ten days earlier, on November 22, Trump’s personal counsel had called Flynn’s counsel to tell him that he needed to know if anything Flynn told the FBI “implicates the president.” If so, Trump’s attorney John Dowd had said, it would be a “national security issue” that required the president to act to “protect[] all our interests.”283
On December 2, 2017, Trump meets with Elliott Broidy. Broidy informs Trump that his “royal business partners,” MBS and MBZ, are “most favorably impressed” by Trump’s “leadership.”284 In the days after the meeting, Broidy and George Nader will receive “intelligence contracts good for up to $600 million to be paid over five years by the UAE … [with] several other deals, like the creation of an all-Muslim fighting force in the Middle East … set to bring their Gulf business initiatives to $1 billion.”285 It is unknown whether the “all-Muslim fighting force” Broidy and Nader are working on is connected to MESA (see chapter 9), though plans for the latter entity—a so-called Arab NATO—suggest a similar description of its affiliated fighting forces.
In private, Nader and Broidy joke about the stupidity of Jared Kushner, with Nader at one point writing Broidy (who he refers to as “my Brother”), “You have to hear in private my Brother what [the] Principals [MBS and MBZ] think of [the] ‘Clown prince’s’ [Kushner’s] efforts and his [Middle East peace] plan! Nobody would even waste [a] cup of coffee on him if it wasn’t for who he is married to.”286 Though Broidy may call MBS and MBZ his “business partners” in speaking to the president, that he and Nader privately refer to them as “principals”—a legal term for the person an “agent” works on behalf of—suggests an acknowledgment by Broidy that he, like Nader, is a foreign agent. The exchange between Broidy and Nader is also consistent with reporting indicating that MBS had told MBZ he had Kushner “in his pocket” and that Emirati officials had discussed, according to the Washington Post, how to “manipulate” Kushner.”287 Vanity Fair will even run a headline, in March 2018, contending that MBZ and MBS are currently “feud[ing] over who has more control of Jared Kushner.”288
In December 2017 or January 2018, MBS’s brother Prince Khalid bin Salman invites Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi to his office in the Saudi embassy in Washington, and has with Khashoggi what a friend of the journalist will later refer to (quoting Khashoggi) as a “nice chat.”289 NBC News will note in October 2018, after MBS has had Khashoggi brutally murdered, that “both Prince Khalid and Saud bin Abdullah Al Qahtani, a senior royal court adviser who was fired … for his role in Khashoggi’s killing, had been contacting Khashoggi for at least a year to try to persuade him to return.… They said the Saudi officials had told Khashoggi … he would be welcomed back warmly to Saudi Arabia and could essentially write his own ticket upon his return. Over the summer [of 2018], Al Qahtani even offered Khashoggi a high-level job in the royal court or in a Saudi think tank.”290
A major investigative report by The Intercept in December 2017 reveals that Erik Prince has secretly been lobbying the Trump administration—along with Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North—to create “a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies … as a means of countering ‘deep state’ enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.”291 The covert intelligence unit would be “direct-action” and “off the books,” reporting exclusively to Trump himself, sharing none of its intelligence with any existing U.S. intelligence agencies.292 By December 2017, plans for Prince’s new intelligence agency are advanced enough that Prince has begun raising money to fund the agency’s operations in advance of an order by Trump creating the outfit.293 Prince’s “army of spies” would, according to The Intercept, operate around the world with “no official cover” in various countries, including Iran.294 A complementary military mercenary unit—likewise reporting to Trump exclusively—would, under Prince’s plan, act as a “new global rendition unit … to capture terrorist suspects around the world … [and mount] a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran.”295
Despite the fact that Prince’s audacious plan would see Trump operating both a secret army and a secret spy agency in allied European countries—units accountable to no one but Trump himself—The Intercept finds that the Prince-North proposal has been “pitched at the White House,” including to Vice President Pence.296 Because the plan calls for secretary of state Mike Pompeo to oversee the operations of the two units on Trump’s behalf, the fact that “Pompeo has embraced the plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract” suggests that Trump has been apprised of the plan as well—as he is the only person above Pompeo in the proposed units’ chain of command, and therefore the only official Pompeo would need to successfully lobby to get the plan approved.297
In seeking the plan’s approval, Prince and North are assisted by John R. Maguire, a Trump transition official now working for intelligence contractor Amyntor Group.298 Maguire is also a consultant for Prince’s Frontier Services Group, though he is most well-known in intelligence circles for having “helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”299 More recently, Maguire has been propagating the conspiracy theory, in intelligence circles, that “National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven [sic] Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.”300 Maguire has also, according to The Intercept, been spreading the false and anti-Semitic rumor that McMaster is “us[ing] a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance [of the Trumps and Bannon] to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.”301 Perhaps most troubling, Maguire is also known for taking potential donors to the Prince-North plan to the “Tinfoil Room”—a suite at the Trump Hotel in Washington set up to send and receive “secure communications.” In the Tinfoil Room, The Intercept reports, Maguire tries to convince donors that a cabal of “deep state” plotters is planning a coup of the Trump administration, a treasonous attack that Maguire tells prospective donors throughout 2017 will be executed by the end of 2018.302
According to Maguire, his job—and Prince’s and North’s—is to “protect[] the president” by various means, including sending clandestine “intelligence reports” to Mike Pompeo.303 Both Prince and Maguire, writes The Intercept, have also been involved in the planning of unauthorized “snatch operation[s]”—in which private citizens illegally kidnap a foreign national suspected of crimes for extraordinary rendition to the United States. Some of those Prince and Maguire recruit for such operations have previously been involved in a “post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives.”304 According to an associate of Prince’s, the men Prince and Maguire are dealing with are “very dark individuals” who are already operating in “Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, [and] all across North Africa.”305 It is unclear if this is the same outfit capable of conducting “kinetics” that Prince and Nader discuss with Saudi intelligence chief (and suspect in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi) Ahmed al-Assiri when the men meet with him in 2017.
Prince has denied all of the preceding allegations—which, according to a “longtime Prince associate” spoken to by The Intercept, is “his exact modus operandi,” as he “consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.”306 The associate says that Prince has an international network of “deniable assets” (that is, covert operators) that “has never gone away.” “The NOC [“no official cover” operator] network is already there,” the associate tells the digital media outlet. “It already exists [and has] for the better part of 15 years now.”307
The Intercept notes that Prince “revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle the Islamic State.”308 The proposed assassinations would go well beyond ISIS fighters, however: “Prince said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture ‘the funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East’”—in other words, anyone MBS or MBZ happens to identify as an enemy of their new anti-Iran alliance.309 Just Security, a media outlet run by national security experts, calls Prince’s proposals “alarming” and “dangerous” and a possible prelude to a “private, domestic counterintelligence squad” whose opaque domestic intelligence-gathering functions would make it an outfit the likes of which America has never seen before.310
MBS did not overpay for the painting by $350 million—Christie’s had estimated it might sell for $100 million—merely due to bad luck. Rather, he was bidding against an unusually insistent anonymous party whose aggressive bids raised the painting’s price to historic heights.
Oddly, the figure $350 million will recur in the Trump-Russia saga, with former Trump adviser Carter Page—who testifies before Congress that he had no income whatsoever in 2016 or 2017—suddenly coming into exactly $350 million in 2018, according to RD Heritage Group, a U.S. investment company “with oil and gas interests in the Middle East.”311 In 2018, the group will announce that it has received a “$350 million capital commitment by Global Energy Capital … an investment management and advisory firm focused on the energy sector primarily in emerging markets. Global Energy Capital was founded by Carter Page … a foreign policy advisor to Presidential candidate Donald Trump.”312
The roughly $350 million profit involved in the sale of Salvator Mundi ended up in the pockets of Kremlin agent and onetime Trump business client Dmitry Rybolovlev. According to the Steele dossier, it was Carter Page who negotiated a percentage of the December 2016 sale of a portion of the Kremlin’s oil company (Rosneft) being transmitted, possibly through Page himself, to Donald Trump.313 In the case of RD Heritage—the recipient of $350 million from Page—the company’s “main partner in the Middle East is Hadi Al Alawi of the Al Hayat Group, a Bahraini investment company,” though Heritage also does business with the state-owned oil companies of Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.314 Most notable, however, as investigative reporter Scott Stedman discovers in September 2018, is a remark on the company website about an ongoing relationship with the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA)—one of the entities that purchased a substantial stake in Rosneft in December 2016.315
While it is not clear what these connections signify, when Stedman brings them to RD Heritage’s attention in August 2018, the company immediately scrubs its website of any mention of Carter Page.316