Jared Kushner oversaw foreign slush funds filled and managed by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Vanity Fair reported Thursday.
In the forthcoming book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole made a shocking revelation about Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s potentially illegal dealings with foreign dictators.
During the first Trump administration, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service discovered a way to hack into Kushner’s iPhone. Officials learned that he was secretly moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a bank account at First Dubai Bank.
Crucially, Kushner did not own the account, but was merely a signatory for the account managed and owned by the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a government-funded charity run by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi, a close friend of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, referred to as MBZ.
Starting in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the account to be used as a foreign policy slush fund. The charity was used to fund the UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs, one confidential source told Cole.
First Dubai Bank is run by Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, MBZ’s brother. (Tahnoon also oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm Affinity Partners.) The money was sent by a bank in Azerbaijan, where banks have a well-established but unadvertised practice of exchanging Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams for an equal amount of American dollars.
Four senior Trump administration officials—including two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—told Cole they were not aware that the president had authorized Kushner to access a foreign government bank account.
Kushner’s lawyer denied that his client had any knowledge of the charity or the bank account, and claimed that Trump’s son-in-law did not make any arrangements with foreign leaders that the president did not agree to.
But that wasn’t the only account Kushner managed. By the spring of 2018, MBZ had also put roughly $1 billion for Kushner into a second account at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging. Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.”
Additionally, the UAE secretly put money into yet another account at Israel’s Central Bank as a “rainy-day defense fund” in case of an attack from Iran.
It should go without saying, but Kushner did not disclose his access to these accounts to the IRS—potentially violating federal law. At the time, Kushner was a government employee who worked in the White House, meaning he was required to submit both public and confidential financial forms and disclose any bank account on which he had access as a signatory or beneficiary. Kushner also failed to disclose himself as an agent of a foreign government, having been paid nearly $2 billion in total by foreign leaders. If he offered anything in return for the money, even just conversations with his father-in-law, then he would have violated U.S. bribery laws and the foreign agent statute.
This is far from the first time that Kushner has been accused of blatant self-dealing in his service to Trump. He used used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit his business partners, invested in a firm that saw massive gains from Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East.