Tous les Toobz are all abuzz over the new book by veteran national security correspondent Matthew Cole that tees up Jared Kushner for approximately 390 congressional investigations if all goes according to the current polls next Tuesday. The book, Princes and Thieves, describes in apparently vivid detail how Kushner has turned American foreign policy into a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil sheikhs, with a whole lot left over for himself. In The New York Times, the great Fintan O’Toole provides an extended precis of the book's essential case.
If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the UAE’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as MBZ), 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.
Iran-Contra! Don't tease me, boyo.
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 UAE 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.
Kushner and his lawyers have denied the allegations and have threatened Vanity Fair with legal action over an excerpt from the book that the magazine published.
Its starting point is clear enough: MBZ 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.
...
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.
O'Toole is not overstating the case. Just from the excerpt alone, Kushner is liable to find Jamie Raskin building a lean-to in his front yard.
Over the next four years, I came to learn that, sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery. A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission.
When the Russian national arrived in England, the Dutch informed him that he had two options: he could work for them against the GRU, or the British would arrest him. Once in UK government custody, the operative would be charged with espionage. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison. The Russian chose to change his employer.
Later that year, the Russian operative gave the Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive assets. Located in Rostov, Russia, the GRU’s hacking and cyber team operated a remote server on which they stored some of their bounty. During their search through these secret files, the Dutch found something astonishing: screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone.
As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.
Kushner’s apparent betrayal of the public trust, however, went further than his failure to disclose the secret Alpha account in the UAE or the Beta account in Israel. By giving him access to roughly $2 billion, regardless of how the money was used, MBZ and MBS were paying for his influence within the U.S. government. Any efforts he made to shape U.S. policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power. U.S. law requires citizens who lobby on behalf of a foreign power to declare themselves and the country they are working on behalf of to the Justice Department.
Good God.