22

“A TERRIBLE SITUATION”

After the 2016 election, a delegation from Saudi Arabia visited the United States on a reconnaissance mission, of sorts. After the visit, the Saudis produced a strikingly accurate assessment of Trump and Kushner as transactional businessmen with an anti-intellectual understanding of world affairs, according to David Fitzpatrick of the New York Times. “The inner circle is predominantly deal makers who lack familiarity with political customs and deep institutions, and they support Jared Kushner,” the delegation wrote in a slide presentation obtained by the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar and cited in the Times’s story.¹

The Saudis would soon put this intelligence to use.

During the Obama years, American diplomats had worked to keep both the Saudis and the Iranians from regional warfare, and had struck a deal with Iran to keep it from gaining nuclear weapons. The Iran deal, and the rapprochement it signaled, had infuriated the Saudis. A young Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, M.B.S., saw in the Trump administration an opportunity to reorder the American government’s priorities—and to leverage support from Kushner and Trump to elevate his own status at home.

While the Saudis were developing their assessment, the United Arab Emirates were making their own inroads in the incoming administration. An Emirati prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, known as M.B.Z., made an overture to Jared Kushner through their mutual associate, Rick Gerson of Falcon Edge Capital, who had also been a conduit for Vladimir Putin’s investment fund. “I am always here as your trusted family back channel any time you want to discreetly pass something,” Gerson wrote in text message to M.B.Z., as reported by the Times’s Fitzpatrick. In December 2016, M.B.Z. had planned to meet President Barack Obama at the White House, but abruptly cancelled the meeting, going to see Kushner secretly, instead. Intelligence agencies detected his arrival in New York.² Obama’s aides were shocked at the breach of protocol.

In the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins painted a vivid picture of this encounter. “M.B.Z. arrived at the meeting, in the Trump Tower penthouse, with an entourage of about thirty people,” Filkins wrote. “He was dressed in combat boots and jeans, and some of his men were armed. For most of the first hour, he and the Trump aides engaged in a relatively conventional discussion of Middle East policy, but the talk grew more animated as the two sides realized that they shared a common fixation on Iran. The meeting evolved into a planning session on how the Trump White House would confront the Iranian regime in the Gulf.”³ For dealing with Jared Kushner, this was an especially effective approach: the prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, viewed Iran as a particularly destructive threat; so did Jared.

“They were deeply impressed with you and already are convinced that you are their true friend and closest ally,” Gerson wrote to M.B.Z. in a text message, after the meeting with Jared. “I promise you this will be the start of a special and historic relationship.” In another text, Gerson wrote, “You have a true friend in the White House.”⁴

Around this time, M.B.Z was working on opening up another channel with the new administration, this one through Erik Prince, who had founded the now-defunct private security company Blackwater and was the brother of the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.⁵ M.B.Z. made overtures through a man named George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who acted as a middleman between high-level Emiratis and Saudis and Trump and his associates. Nader had previously served prison time for child molestation; he was later seized in 2019 at John F. Kennedy airport in possession of child pornography, arrested, and charged with the possession and with human trafficking.⁶ Nader entered a plea of not guilty to the charges.

Before Nader’s arrest, Prince reluctantly testified to members of Congress. He told them that he had flown to the Seychelles—an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, a resort destination for the ultra-rich—to meet with Emirati business contacts. Prince said that after an outdoor meeting with M.B.Z., a member of M.B.Z.’s entourage “mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town.”⁷ This was the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev, the man who called Vladimir Putin “boss.” In his report, Special Counsel Robert Mueller found Nader had prearranged the whole thing, with Prince’s knowledge. Before leaving the Seychelles, Prince sent incoming White House senior advisor Steve Bannon two texts. The texts were not preserved.⁸

 

In Washington, Tom Barrack was advising emissaries from the Saudis and the Emiratis, trying to secure a diplomatic post from the White House, which he called “Middle East Marshall Plan Commissioner,” and meeting with administration officials to lift a US prohibition on a potential Saudi nuclear power plant, from which Barrack was looking to profit, according to a House Oversight report. Barrack met with multiple administration officials about this, including Jared Kushner.⁹ But it was Kushner who the Gulf States had their eyes on.

“Thanks to you, I am in constant contact with Jared and that has been extremely helpful,” Emirati Ambassador Otaiba wrote in an email correspondence with Tom Barrack that was later reported by the New York Times.¹⁰ According to the Washington Post, “Officials from the UAE identified Kushner as particularly manipulable because of his family’s search for investors in their real estate company.”¹¹

Kushner and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman struck up a set of communications, often by the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp. They were already correspondents by the time they met face to face. This happened in Washington, in March 2017, during a snowstorm that had forced German chancellor Angela Merkel to cancel a visit to the White House. Jared took advantage of the change of plans:¹² M.B.S., then still the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was given the kind of treatment a visiting head of state would receive: lunch in the State Dining Room with the president, a media spray, a photo opportunity. These kinds of pictures had already become coin of the realm abroad: they conferred instant legitimacy on aspiring leaders, autocrats, and businessmen.

Jared and M.B.S. bonded. They were two men in their thirties who thought of themselves as tech-savvy, modern leaders for whom “disruption” was a central tenet of their style. They had both been raised in extreme wealth in a world of growing income inequality. Both had complicated and combative histories with members of their extended families. And both shared an abiding hatred for Iran. Jared became convinced M.B.S. could pressure the Palestinians to agree to a Middle East peace proposal. Their relationship was frequently referred to as a “bromance.”

Under Jared’s urging, President Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis gave Trump, accompanied by Melania, Jared, and Ivanka, a royal welcome, featuring banquets, dancing, and music, including a memorable moment where the president, the Saudi king, and the president of Egypt laid their hands on a small glowing orb of the planet Earth. There was an announcement that the Saudis would invest tens of millions of dollars in a US infrastructure fund, and would purchase a billion dollars worth of equipment from US arms contractors. Jared helped broker these deals.

He was also quietly brokering other deals, which he kept secret from the US secretary of state at the time, Rex Tillerson. The night the US delegation arrived, according to testimony released by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, there was a private dinner with then–White House advisor Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. During the dinner, the Saudis and the UAE leaders laid out their plans for a blockade of Qatar, which hosts a US air base, and which Saudi Arabia and the UAE view as an enemy. Tillerson said that he did not learn of this dinner, or these plans, until his congressional testimony, two years later. Did he have a reaction? “It makes me angry,” he said, “because I didn’t have a say. The State Department’s views were never expressed.”¹³ When the testimony was released, a White House spokesman maintained that “Jared consistently follows proper protocols,” and insisted that “the alleged dinner to supposedly discuss the blockade never happened.”

The second day of the Saudi trip, there was a very large banquet in Riyadh. Tillerson had expected to be seated with the Qatari foreign minister, but when Tillerson arrived, it turned out that the minister had been moved to a table near the kitchen, a sign of disrespect. “I began to get an inkling that something was going on involving the Qataris,” Tillerson testified, “because of the way the session had been conducted and the way the Emir had been treated in the meeting. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I just realized, I was kind of looking around the table at people trying to figure out: What is this, what is going on around here?”

After this trip, as the New Yorker’s Filkins wrote, “a series of dramatic events suggested that the attendees had quietly made a number of major decisions. Trump declared that the U.S. would move its Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something that no American President had attempted since Israel occupied the West Bank, in 1967. M.B.S. leapfrogged over [his cousin] bin Nayef to become crown prince. And the Gulf monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia, entered an open confrontation with Qatar.”¹⁴ Tillerson learned of the blockade while he was traveling in Australia, from an aide.

At the same time Jared was holding quiet, high-level meetings with Saudi Arabia, his father was discussing business with the Qataris. In April 2017, the month before the Saudi summit, Qatar’s finance minister, Ali Sharif al-Emadi, flew to New York, rented a suite at the St. Regis Hotel, and met with a series of Americans interested in obtaining financing, including Charlie and Jared’s sister, Nicole. At that point, the Qataris did not commit to investing in 666 Fifth. Charlie said he simply attended to be polite.¹⁵ But then Jared backed the blockade. Suddenly, his father’s business talks raised a thicket of questions: Was Jared supporting the action against Qatar because Qatar had denied his family funding? Was this a retaliatory move, or a signal? Because Jared had not severed ties to his family business, these questions were impossible to answer.

Kushner continued his friendship with M.B.S. In October 2017, he made a trip to the Kingdom that went unpublicized until his return. The two stayed up late into the night, talking about how they could remake the Middle East. Just before Jared had arrived, his brother, Josh Kushner, had spent three days at a Saudi conference where M.B.S. discussed investing billions in a high-tech future for Saudi Arabia. The New York Times reported that “as others sat through speeches in a gilded conference hall, several participants said, the younger Mr. Kushner frequently ducked out for more exclusive conversations with Saudi officials.”¹⁶

A spokesman for one of Josh’s companies, Thrive Capital, told the Times that Thrive was not actively fundraising when Josh made his trip. But according to Bloomberg, the real estate investment platform Cadre, of which Josh and Jared were co-founders, discussed “an investment of at least $100 million from a private fund that receives much of its capital from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”¹⁷ Jared, too, had an investment in Cadre—a company that also benefited from the new US tax law—which he did not initially disclose to the federal government. His lawyer said that was because his stake in Cadre was nested inside another company, BFPS Ventures LLC. As late as 2019, Jared still owned as much as $50 million worth of Cadre.

Weeks after Jared’s unannounced trip, M.B.S. had some two hundred Saudis, many of them blood relations, rounded up into a virtual prison at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. There were reports of extortion, torture, even a death. In the press, M.B.S. and his subordinates denied these reports, and described the moves as “anti-corruption.”

These arrests, as the Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi told the New Yorker’s Filkins, put M.B.S.’s main opponents out of commission: giving him effective control over the army, the interior ministry, and the national guard. “He can do whatever he wants now,” Khashoggi said. “All the checks and balances are gone.”¹⁸

 

By the spring of 2018, Jared Kushner appeared to be in trouble. The New Yorker had reported that Kushner took frequent visits with the Chinese. “In the months after Trump was sworn in,” Adam Entous and Evan Osnos wrote, Kushner and the Chinese ambassador to the United States “met more often than Kushner could recall.”¹⁹ On at least one occasion, they met alone, a practice that counterintelligence officials frowned upon, because it meant the Chinese could make any claim they wanted about what had been discussed. Officials told Entous and Osnos that Kushner was briefed on the dangers of foreign-influence operations within months of his arrival at the White House, and told that he was “among the top intelligence targets worldwide,” not only for China, but also the Russians, the Israelis, and others. Kushner was given a very specific warning, as well, about Wendi Murdoch. The FBI official who briefed Kushner told him that they’d picked up hints Chinese intelligence “had influence over her,” though the evidence was “inconclusive.” (A spokesperson for Wendi Murdoch told the New Yorker that “The idea that she is involved in anything covert is so absurd, it could only have come from an unnamed source.”)

Kushner brushed all of this off. He told associates that New York real estate was no “baby’s business.” On a trip to China, Kushner had a lunch at Wendi Murdoch’s Beijing home that was not mentioned in briefings or in his public schedule.

“Why do I have more of a risk of telling her state secrets than anyone else?” Kushner said. “Either I’m qualified to handle state secrets or I’m not qualified to handle state secrets. I think I understand my responsibilities.”

Officials remained alarmed. Osnos and Entous reported that in December 2017, US intelligence had concluded that “ ‘a member of the president’s family’ was being targeted by a Chinese influence operation.”²⁰ In February, the Washington Post expanded on this reporting, noting, “Officials in at least four countries”—China, Mexico, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates—“have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.”²¹

Kushner didn’t work hard to hide the fact he was circumventing normal channels. “I happened to be having a business dinner at a restaurant in town,” Tillerson said in his testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “And the owner of the restaurant, proprietor of the restaurant came around and said: ‘Oh, Mr. Secretary, you might be interested to know the Foreign Secretary of Mexico is seated at a table near the back and in case you want to go by and say hello to him.’ Very innocent on his part.”

Tillerson continued. “And so I did. I walked back. And Mr. Kushner and I don’t remember who else was at the table, and the Foreign Secretary were at the table having dinner. And I could see the color go out of the face of the Foreign Secretary of Mexico as I very—I smiled big, and I said: ‘Welcome to Washington.’ And I said: ‘I don’t want to interrupt what y’all are doing.’ I said: ‘Give me a call next time you’re coming to town.’ ”

As Tillerson said he later found out, “the Foreign Secretary was operating on the assumption that everything he was talking to Mr. Kushner about had been run through the State Department and that I was fully on board with it. And he was rather shocked . . . [when] I told him, ‘This is the first time I’m hearing of it.’ ”²²

In January 2019, NBC News reported that Jared Kushner’s application for a top-secret clearance had been rejected by career security officials because of his business entanglements, but that their supervisor, a Trump appointee, had overruled them.²³ Kushner’s was one of at least twenty-five cases in which career security experts were overruled in the Trump administration, something that had happened only once in the three years prior.

That month, Ivanka Trump gave an interview to Abby Huntsman of ABC. Ivanka had agreed to the interview to talk about Women’s Global Development and Prosperity, a Trump administration program that Ivanka said would focus resources to help women thrive around the world. “We know there’s a correlation between gender inequality and conflict, there’s tremendous amounts of research. There’s a reason today, the president signed WGDP as a national security presidential memorandum,” she said. “It is in our domestic security interests to empower women.”

When Ivanka talked about this initiative, she smiled, her eyes brightened, she talked with her hands, exuding the warmth and friendliness that has engaged interviewers for decades. But when Huntsman raised a new subject, security clearances, Ivanka’s face froze. Her hands dropped to her lap, and the warmth in her eyes drained as Huntsman said, “There were some issues early on. And there are a lot of people that question whether you were given special treatment by the President, overriding other officials—”

“Absolutely not,” Ivanka interrupted. “There were anonymous leaks, about there being issues,” she said, with a tight smile, “but the president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance. Zero.”

“What were the problems early on?” Huntsman asked.

“There weren’t any, other than a backlog that exists of close to a million clearances across government. This isn’t new, this was happening under the Obama administration, the Clinton administration.”

“So no special treatment?” Huntsman confirmed.

“No,” Ivanka said.²⁴

Ivanka was contradicted, not by an anonymous leak, but by a person inside the White House, Tricia Newbold, who had worked on security issues for eighteen years, under presidents Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. “She handles security clearance determinations for some of the most senior officials in the White House and throughout the Executive Office of the President,” the late US Representative Elijah Cummings wrote in a letter to the White House.²⁵

Newbold told Cummings’ House Oversight Committee that she had recommended against granting clearance to Jared Kushner—whom she called “Senior White House Official 1.” Newbold wrote a denial “after the background investigation revealed significant disqualifying factors, including foreign influence, outside activities (‘employment outside or businesses external to what your position at the EOP entails’), and personal conduct.” Newbold testified—on the record—that she was overruled by her supervisor, Carl Kline, who merely noted in Jared’s file that “the activities occurred prior to Federal service.”

Newbold told the committee she’d begun to keep a list of officials whose denials were overturned, a tally that grew to include twenty-five people who “had a wide range of serious disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct.” One of the people on Newbold’s list was senior White House advisor Ivanka Trump, Cummings said.

Newbold has a form of dwarfism, and after she raised her concerns, she said, Kline “repeatedly altered her office environment to cause impediments to her work, such as physically elevating personnel security files out of her reach.”²⁶ (Kline said he had moved the files but denied that it was retaliation.²⁷)

The White House said it wouldn’t comment on security clearances, but in an interview with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Jared, wearing a crisp white shirt and charcoal suit with a gray tie, laughed it off. “Over the last two years that I have been here I’ve been accused of all different types of things, and all of those things have turned out to be false,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of crazy accusations like that we colluded with Russia. I complied with all the different investigations whether it be the Senate, the House, the Special Counsel—I sat for nearly 20 hours of interviews with them. When I came to Washington I had a very successful business career, I had extensive holdings. I disclosed all my holdings to the Office of Government Ethics and what I did with that is they told me what to divest, what to keep, what rules to follow.”²⁸

 

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist and a US resident, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork he needed in order to marry his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. Inside, according to transcripts of a Turkish government audio recording described to the Washington Post, Khashoggi was told, “You’re coming back with us.” After that, according to a note in the transcript, Khashoggi was given an injection, after which a bag was placed over his head and he screamed, “I can’t breathe. I have asthma. Don’t do this.” He died soon after. Then, the Post reported, “the transcript describes a buzzing noise, perhaps from an electric saw as his body was cut into pieces.” One of the assassins, Turkish authorities said, brought a bone saw for the task.²⁹

After the killing, Trump defended the Saudis. Speaking to reporters, standing under an umbrella, he said: “The king firmly denied any knowledge of it. He didn’t really know, maybe—I don’t want to get into his mind but, it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers, who knows?” Ten days later, CIA director Gina Haspel flew to Ankara, where she was played the tapes.³⁰ The CIA had intercepts of communications attempting to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia; their intelligence analysts were all but certain the murder was not a rogue event, and concluded with a medium to high degree of confidence that it had been ordered by M.B.S. After Haspel briefed a group of senators, the US Senate voted unanimously to lay the blame on the crown prince. Trump still refused to accept this conclusion. “They have nothing definitive, and the fact is, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t,” he told reporters on the White House lawn.

On another occasion, the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey pushed Trump to comment on the CIA’s conclusion that M.B.S. ordered the killings.

“No, Josh, they didn’t conclude,” Trump said, erroneously. “They didn’t come to a conclusion, they have feelings certain ways, but they didn’t have the report.”

While the CIA was at work, Kushner and M.B.S. were calling each other “Jared” and “Mohammed” on the phone and in WhatsApp messages, the New York Times reported.³¹ Kushner became the prince’s biggest defender inside the White House. Weeks after Khashoggi was murdered in the embassy, Jared was asked by CNN’s Van Jones if he believed the Saudi version of Khashoggi’s death, which was that a fist fight had broken out in the embassy, resulting in Khashoggi’s death.

“Saudi Arabia’s been—I think, a very strong ally in terms of pushing back against Iran’s aggression,” Kushner said, citing Iranian support for a faction in Yemen and actions by Hamas and Hezbollah. “We have a lot of terrorism and in the region, the Middle East is a rough place. It’s been a rough place for a very long time and we have to be able to pursue our strategic objectives. But we also have to deal with obviously what seems to be a terrible situation.”³²

This was Jared Kushner’s grim bargain. The transactional view of a real estate developer raised as a Zionist. The Saudis, by opposing Iran, could potentially help Israel. All else could be overlooked.