Jared Kushner’s Middle Eastern Spoils System

Dutch intelligence hacked Kushner’s phone and found bribes

Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday in Vanity Fair, Matthew Cole dropped a bombshell of a story, an excerpt from his forthcoming book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East.

The gist of it is as follows:

In 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) flipped a Russian operative and gained access to a trove of hacked material, including screenshots from the phone of President Trump’s close relative Jared Kushner.
In 2018, the MIVD reverse-engineered this hack and began surveilling Kushner themselves.
They discovered Kushner had a bank account in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in which he had received hundreds of millions of dollars.
The funders of this account were “UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia.”

“Early in the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS offered to pay for a slush fund dedicated to helping the new administration with foreign policy goals. The idea was to help pay for Trump’s promised wall between Mexico and the US, for example, in an effort to secure a second term in the White House. …the broader foreign policy slush fund idea fizzled. Instead, MBZ and MBS initially, and then MBZ alone, put at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner.”

“Bank account Alpha was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest in the UAE, and was overseen by MBZ’s brother, Tahnoon bin Zayed, who served as the bank’s chairman. Beginning in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the Alpha account. Alpha would be used as a foreign policy fund. This money would be overseen and partially managed by Kushner and MBZ …”

One of Cole’s sources explained that “A slush fund—a shared pool of money for off-the-books diplomatic objectives—was a common form of Gulf Arab government corruption.”

It is frankly difficult to summarize any more of this without simply quoting it at length. I encourage you to read Cole’s reporting.

This was in the first Trump term. We often talk about how much worse the second term has been, and it has been worse. But that is not because they were just innocent men in the first term—their position was simply weaker, then. They were complete outsiders to the practice of politics and had to rely on personnel that did not share their objectives or methods. They began hollowing out that institutional resistance and building relationships that would give them a freer hand. That began right away, in 2017, with things like Kushner’s Dubai slush fund. It is a cliché to note that the abuses of empire frequently end up coming home. What we see in the Trump family instead is decades of cozying up to Gulf “monarchies” and dictatorships coming home. Every “common form of Gulf Arab corruption” is on display in both terms of the Trump administration, and then some.

Elon Musk grabs for more American mindspace

A day after the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk personally made the call to throttle Starlink access in Ukraine, Semafor reports that he is investing $1 billion in Skydance. Rohan Goswami writes:

“Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price. …

“Musk and David Ellison’s father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, have long been close, and it is in part the elder Ellison’s money — and connections — that made Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. possible. Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of the equity financing for Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros.

“Larry Ellison invested $1 billion in Musk’s 2022 deal to take X, formerly Twitter, private. He also invested in Tesla in 2018, and served on the company’s board of directors for years.”

Swallowing Warner Bros. Discovery was going to be a very difficult task, and the debt taken on to finance the deal led to a downgrading of their credit. Not to worry—the richest man in the world, who is already cozy with the other billionaires involved in all of this, will swoop in to help right the ship.

We will certainly have to take some lessons about media consolidation from this Trump term.

The importance of breaking the power of the billionaires has never been more urgent. You cannot criminally charge Musk for investing in Skydance. But he has committed many, many crimes. Quite frankly, he should be target number one for congressional investigations and a 2029 DOJ prosecution. He is the perfect confluence of guilt, importance, and unpopularity. Successfully holding him accountable would send a powerful message to many, many others. It is imperative that we do so at the first moment we are able.

This just is our politics now

Yesterday on Liberal Currents Live, we discussed the utterly shameful Vivek Ramaswamy campaign ad at great length. Contributing editor Alan Elrod in particular was of the mind that brazenness would carry the day among Republicans, and mere hours later Trump vindicated that prediction. As Caroline Wilburn reports for HuffPost:

“President Donald Trump griped about pushback that Ohio gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy is facing from his own party for an extremely personal attack ad against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

“‘The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good!’ Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday. ‘Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would. It’s called “hitting pay dirt.”’”

Nothing to add here, really, we’re all used to it at this point, the slide into ever greater depths. It simply bears repeating that Amy Acton’s stepfather raped her from the time she was nine years old to the time she was 12, and then Acton’s birth mother abandoned her children to flee with her rapist husband. She has not spoken with Acton in decades and therefore would have nothing to base a character assessment on even if she wasn’t a pedophile protector and child abuser.

But what can one expect from Trump’s GOP? I will just echo Elrod’s call for us to do our best not to lose our capacity for shock.

This just is the GOP now

Democrats should really feature these creeps their extensive ties to this administration.
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) 2026-10-22T21:13:54.837Z

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