As you will see, in the middle of my live video chat with Matthew Cole, the author of the absolutely riveting and densely reported tome Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, he got a call from his editor at Simon & Schuster. In its first week, the book is number three on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list and number two on the combined print and e-book list.
He deserves this success.
As I say (immodestly) at the start of our conversation, this book reads like a sequel to my own 2019 book, Kushner, Inc., in that it’s a deep dive into how Jared Kushner appeared to run foreign policy in the first Trump administration for his own benefit, which included rescuing the Kushner family’s problematic $1.4 billion loan on a New York building, 666 Fifth Avenue, that was due in early 2019 (an allegation he has emphatically denied). Kushner has also emphatically denied all the claims in Cole’s book, saying: “The allegations made by this author are completely insane and never happened.” His attorneys called them “false and defamatory” and said they intend to pursue legal action.
The biggest news bombs in Cole’s book are the claims that, via Dutch intelligence, which gained access to Kushner’s iPhone in 2018, it appeared as though during the first Trump administration Kushner was a signatory on two slush fund accounts totaling $2 billion funded by Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), the ruler of the UAE, and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Cole claims that the princes hoped the money would facilitate US involvement in shaping the Middle East according to their vision, which coincided with the vision of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu—and also of Jared Kushner, who has known Netanyahu since childhood. It most emphatically did not coincide with that of the Palestinians.
The book further claims that the vehicle through which much of this “shaping” was supposed to happen was the mercenary Erik Prince—and the stories about Prince’s misadventures in Libya and elsewhere are wild. (Cole explains in our interview that he has not heard from Prince since the book’s publication but that the two have history. When Cole was a reporter at The Intercept, Prince sued him—and lost.)
To the lay reader, a lot of the allegations may indeed seem far-fetched. Why on earth would two Gulf potentates bet billions through a back-door channel that might not work—indeed, one that, given this week’s resounding verdict on Trump’s foreign policy at the polls and J.D. Vance’s tweet denouncing the war with Iran, already looks likely to be reversed?
But, as I have learned, this is how business gets done in the region. Cole explains drily: “It’s called patronage in the Middle East... under US law, it’s called bribery.” As I reported in Kushner, Inc., the Middle East autocrats saw in the Trump family a mirror image of themselves. Which created an opportunity.
The key question, of course, is, if Cole’s claims are true, did President Trump know about or sanction any of it? And what about the CIA? If they didn’t know about it, why not? If Dutch intelligence could hack Kushner’s phone, surely so, too, could our own. And if they did know, what happened?
And is Congress going to follow up with investigations into the allegations when the Democrats take over the House and Senate in January?
You’d think, well… obviously.
But what troubles me is a passage at the end of the book in which Cole explains that he put a very long list of questions to Kushner in May of this year and in July an attorney for Affinity, the fund in which the Saudis and Emiratis have also invested billions, talked with an attorney for Simon & Schuster, Cole’s publisher, rebutting Cole’s claims and then issued a legal “hold”. Around the same time, Kushner requested—and got—a private meeting with Hakeem Jeffries.
If Kushner is indeed right and Cole’s claims are as crazy as he says, he should welcome a congressional investigation. And Jeffries should not hesitate to bring it. Otherwise, what would be the point of Cole’s diligent and difficult reporting? Or, indeed, the point of living in the United States of America as opposed to the United Arab Emirates?
We shall see.
Thank you Robert Jobson, Richard Bertoldo, Liz Alexander, Kerry Shaw, Carolynn Saracino, and many others for tuning into my live video with Matthew Cole! Join me for my next live video in the app.
