The story involves a Russian double agent, the British and Dutch intelligence agencies, an American investigative journalist, Middle Eastern royal families and the son-in-law of the President of the United States.
That’s a cast of characters that could easily pack out a John Le Carré novel, or the latest movie in the Bourne franchise. But it’s also the dramatic personae for an astonishing scoop published this week in Vanity Fair, based on a book by the journalist Matthew Cole – who appears to have got hold of remarkably sensitive information from the mobile phone of Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump.
Cole alleges that the information obtained by European spy agencies shows accounts controlled by Kushner received hundreds of millions of dollars from accounts linked to the ruling royal family of the United Arab Emirates, and that these funds were in turn used to fund other individuals across the world.
Representatives for Kushner told Vanity Fair that he had followed all US laws and complied with all legal requirements, and acted in the best interests of the US at all times while serving as an envoy for Donald Trump.
The story of how the information came to light is almost as convoluted and complex as the tale of the secret account itself. Dutch intelligence officers learned that a Russian hacker working for its military intelligence agency, the GRU, was travelling to Britain, and tipped off UK authorities, so that he could be detained.
When the spy was successfully contacted, he was reportedly offered a deal – he could be prosecuted, or he could turn on his old employers and assist Western intelligence instead. Apparently, the hacker took the deal, granting British and Dutch spies access to data held on sensitive servers used by the GRU to store material it had obtained through its hacks.
One of those servers contained something very interesting indeed, according to Cole’s account: a series of screengrabs from the mobile phone screen of Kushner, which Russian operatives had managed to hack. Dutch intelligence officers managed to replicate the feat, giving them the ability – for some unspecified period of time – to see whatever Kushner saw when he used his phone.
Among the things those spies saw, according to Cole’s account, was Kushner logging in to a bank account belonging to an Emirati charity, containing hundreds of millions of dollars.
The tale Vanity Fair tells only gets more complex from there, and Cole’s book – Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East – will doubtless get knottier still.
Kushner’s team insists everything is above board, but the findings will doubtless be of interest to the Democrats if, as expected, they win the midterms, and regain the power to launch congressional investigations into the President and his allies.
If Kushner has a reasonable explanation to offer for transactions and secret relationships that will look strange to many Americans, the Democrats will likely give him ample opportunity to offer them up – probably in evidence sessions in front of Congress, accompanied by demands to hand over any and all relevant documentation and communications, too. Jared Kushner’s attempts to keep a lower profile in Trump’s second term than he did in the first might be coming to an end.
On one level, this story feels like it should have the potential to be a 21st-century Watergate. The idea of the President’s businessman son-in-law cutting multimillion-dollar deals behind the scenes with world leaders – while working as an envoy on behalf of the US government – has all of the key ingredients, after all.
But while the reporting that has gone into the story is top-notch, and the story is on one level stunning, it’s also hardly surprising. One defining trait of the Trump era is that the President and his family have been enriching themselves in plain sight, especially during his second term.
Trump makes many of his presidential announcements via Truth Social, a social network he owns. Several members of the Trump family have launched their own cryptocurrencies, or other business ventures. Kushner himself has openly received a $2bn investment in his private equity fund from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, after his first term role with the Trump White House was over.
None of these are illicit activities: every one of them has happened in full view of the American people, and the world.
Yet, the recent claims about secret bank accounts would – if proven to be true – likely violate US transparency laws and could constitute bribery and undisclosed work for a foreign agent, according to a former US prosecutor cited by Cole.
“The allegations made by this author are completely insane and never happened. We denied every one of these claims on the record, yet the author failed to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of them,” Kushner wrote on X. “None of these allegations ever surfaced, because none of these events ever happened. These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism. This is not journalism. It is a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.
Yet, the reports raises more questions about exactly who is able to buy access and influence in the White House.
So, while the new revelations around Kushner might well raise questions that Congress – and perhaps, in time, US authorities – may wish to have answered, it is unlikely to change many people’s minds about President Trump and his family.
His supporters, after all, long ago accepted the President’s family getting rich in plain sight. Many of them even admire it. And for everyone else, the generalised miasma of Team Trump’s conflicts of interest and complex business deals has been there for a long time. Even if absolutely everything is within the letter of the law, many Americans decided they’d had enough of such self-enrichment long ago.