PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, by Matthew Cole
It is hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates.
If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
In that affair, government officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to fund — against the explicit orders of Congress — a violent right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. What Cole alleges is, if anything, more consequential: that Kushner worked with the U.A.E. to shape U.S. policy across the Middle East and that, in the course of this work, he was given access to bank accounts containing roughly $2 billion.
Two caveats must be entered. Cole’s most significant sources remain anonymous: Recurring attributions in his notes include “a confidential source with direct knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.” It is equally important to acknowledge that Kushner declined to be interviewed for Cole’s book. His lawyer described Cole’s allegations as “crazy, false and defamatory” and last week threatened legal action against Vanity Fair, which published an excerpt from the book.
To Cole’s credit, he recognizes that, even after five years of digging, “much remains unknown about Kushner’s relationships and agreements with the leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, especially, the United Arab Emirates.”
What we have, then, is an incomplete and contested account of those dealings. The question that arises from the book is whether Cole has done enough to warrant a major congressional investigation into his allegations. The answer is an emphatic yes.
Its starting point is clear enough: M.B.Z. controls vast amounts of money and was determined to use a lot of it to acquire influence over the American presidency and to establish compliant regimes in Egypt (he helped finance the coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government there in 2013), Yemen, Qatar and Libya. This grand strategy included support for the rise of his ally Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization of relations between Israel and most of the Muslim powers.
The success of the U.A.E. in establishing Abu Dhabi and Dubai as international aviation hubs and tourist playgrounds depends, in his eyes, on the suppression of popular Islamism and the containment of Iran. President Barack Obama’s endorsement of the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011, and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, threatened these goals.
M.B.Z.’s first response was to use proxies to channel $3.5 million in illegal funding into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After she lost the election, he pivoted toward the incoming Trump administration. Through its American middlemen George Nader, a political consultant and convicted child sexual abuser; Elliott Broidy, a onetime top Trump fund-raiser who had served on his inauguration committee in 2017; and Thomas Barrack, a real estate investor who is now the administration’s ambassador to Turkey, the U.A.E. identified Kushner as the man who could influence the new president on their behalf.
This was a good bet. Trump made Kushner his senior adviser with a brief that included the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East. This in itself was a departure from both tradition and democratic accountability — no one elected Kushner, and he operated for much of this period without oversight, but he had access to the highest levels of secret information.
It should be accepted that Kushner had solid ideological reasons for working closely with the U.A.E. M.B.Z. could, and to a degree did, deliver much of the Arab world for a plan that cut out the Palestinians and eventually conceded Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank. The ultimate prize of recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia was brought tantalizingly close. (It was derailed by the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.) To that extent, Kushner could be said to have worked to further his father-in-law’s openly stated agenda.
The issue, however, is whether Kushner was also pursuing other, private schemes and, in order to advance them, allowing U.S. foreign policy to be dictated by a foreign power. Kushner’s family benefited enormously from the perception that he was working on behalf of M.B.Z. The U.A.E.’s regional rival Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. were blockading and threatening to invade, believed it had to counter this influence. A fund through which Qatar invests some of its sovereign wealth helped bail the Kushner family out of a disastrous $1.8 billion investment in a New York skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue.
Cole’s most explosive claims, however, relate to a 2017 operation by a Dutch military intelligence unit, which found that Russian agents had screenshots from inside Kushner’s iPhone. Investigating further, they discovered that Kushner had access to a bank account in the U.A.E., containing $750 million laundered through Azerbaijan but, according to Cole, originally deriving from the Emirati and Saudi governments. “It is unclear if Trump ever approved or even knew about the arrangement,” Cole writes.
By the spring of 2018, Cole maintains, M.B.Z. had moved roughly $1 billion into another account, held by the Israeli central bank, on Kushner’s behalf. Cole says it is also “unclear” if or how Kushner used these funds, “but according to the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s personal benefit.” For M.B.Z., Cole suggests, the return on his investment was a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iran, whose influence he feared.
These accusations are grave. The first bank account was allegedly a slush fund used to finance operations in Libya and elsewhere by Erik Prince, the former C.E.O. of Blackwater, the private military contractor (now known as Academi). If Kushner was a signatory to this account, he was helping to run a foreign government’s proxy wars. And if he used some or all of the money in the second account for his personal benefit, he was effectively an undeclared agent of a foreign power.
Cole’s work is sufficiently calm, detailed and forensic to necessitate a large-scale and urgent congressional inquiry. One assumes that, since Kushner regards all of these claims as crazed inventions, he is anxious to clear his name from some of the most grievous charges ever leveled against a senior U.S. federal official. If the country is incapable of letting its citizens know whether or not its foreign policy is for sale, the difference between a democratic republic and the secretive autocracy that tried to influence it will be much narrower than most of us would like to think.
PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East | By Matthew Cole | Atria/One Signal | 299 pp. | $30
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