An investigation by the American magazine Vanity Fair raises questions about major financial movements linking Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser, with officials from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
According to the magazine, part of the story came to light after the Dutch intelligence service obtained screenshots from Kushner’s phone. During surveillance, agents noticed that he was accessing a bank account in the United Arab Emirates into which hundreds of millions of dollars had been deposited through a bank in Azerbaijan.
Vanity Fair writes that in 2017, leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia discussed with Kushner the creation of a fund for foreign-policy objectives. Initially, the possibility of financing worth more than $10 billion was discussed, but the plan was shelved. Later, at least $2 billion was deposited into two accounts linked to Kushner.
One of them, called “Alpha” in the investigation, was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank. Around $750 million was transferred into the account from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with the intention that the money would be used for foreign-policy matters, according to the magazine.
Kushner did not own the “Alpha” account, but he was authorized to conduct transactions through it. The account was owned by a government-funded Emirati charity.
Sources cited in the article claim that the foundation also served as a cover for transferring money that supported the United Arab Emirates’ covert military and intelligence operations abroad. According to them, the organization’s charitable status meant that its international transactions faced fewer checks.
The investigation also raises questions about the authorization Kushner had to conduct these transactions. Four former senior Trump administration officials cited by the magazine said they knew of no presidential authorization that gave him access to a foreign government’s bank account.
Kushner’s lawyer disputed the conclusions that could be drawn from the investigation. He said his client had not entered into agreements or arrangements with foreign leaders or officials without the approval of the president of the United States, and that every action had been taken in the interests of the United States.
Article by Vanity Fair:
In late spring 2020, someone I considered trustworthy called me to tell me a story: The Dutch government had hacked Jared Kushner’s phone and was monitoring him as he accessed a bank account in Dubai. According to the source, what stood out was that hundreds of millions of dollars had entered the account from a bank in Azerbaijan. More importantly, Kushner appeared to have sent large sums of money from that account to other people, including a warlord, a mercenary and a former hitman.
I told the source that the story seemed absurd to me. Nevertheless…
Six months later, I was speaking with someone else about the government of the United Arab Emirates and its use of mercenaries in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. I casually asked whether the person had heard about Kushner and the transfers from an account in the United Arab Emirates. The person fell silent for a few moments and then replied: “Yes.”
Over the next four years, I learned that in late 2017 the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service, known as MIVD, had made a shocking discovery. An operative of Russia’s Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, or GRU, a dark-web hacker experienced in stolen banking data, was traveling to the United Kingdom on a spying mission.
The Dutch asked the British government for permission to arrest him upon arrival, and the British agreed. When the Russian citizen arrived in England, the Dutch offered him two choices: cooperate with them against the GRU or be arrested by the British. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison. The Russian decided to switch sides.
Later that year, the Russian agent gave Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive assets. In Rostov, Russia, a group of GRU hackers and cyber specialists operated a remote server where some of the stolen data was stored. As they searched the secret files, the Dutch found something extraordinary: screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone.
In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to understand how the Russians had penetrated the phone. Kushner had the newest model at the time, the iPhone X, released in November 2017. The device included Face ID, the security system Apple had heavily promoted at its launch.
As they searched for a way to bypass the phone’s protection, the Dutch realized that the Russians might not have breached the main entry point but had found an unprotected opening.
Their assumption proved correct. In early 2018, the MIVD discovered a vulnerability in the iPhone that allowed access to the device. But the method used to exploit it was not perfect. Some malicious programs can use a victim’s phone as a microphone and camera, turn it on or off, and receive or add files. The Dutch method did not provide that level of control. Instead, whenever Kushner used the phone, the agents could see his screen.
Almost immediately after gaining access to the phone, the intelligence service began recording every screen image during Kushner’s use of the device and saving them on its internal servers.
The monitoring revealed that Kushner used the phone to access a bank account in the United Arab Emirates. By the time the Dutch spies were able to observe the device’s activity, hundreds of millions of dollars had arrived in the account from a bank in Azerbaijan.
At first, it was believed that the account was linked to the government of Azerbaijan. For the MIVD hackers, it became an intelligence puzzle that had to be solved. Almost everything they investigated appeared to be connected to Russian plots.
A little more than a year after Trump began his first presidency, the MIVD, like the FBI agents and federal prosecutors in Washington working on Robert Mueller’s investigation, had uncovered only part of the story.
Kushner, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed, or MBZ, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, came together at a crucial time.
MBS sought to become crown prince. MBZ wanted to overturn Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, while Kushner hoped that the two would help him pressure the Palestinians into an agreement acceptable to Israel.
Although known to be wealthy, Kushner was not entirely financially independent from his parents. The family company, Kushner Companies, had to repay a $1 billion loan for its best-known building, the office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
At the beginning of the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS offered to finance a special fund that would help the new administration achieve its foreign-policy objectives. One possibility was financing the wall Trump had promised to build along the border between Mexico and the United States, with the aim of securing a second presidential term.
In their initial conversations with Kushner, the two Arab leaders considered investing more than $10 billion in the initiative.
Within a few months, as MBZ pressured the Trump administration to support MBS’s effort to become crown prince and later king of Saudi Arabia, the plan for a broader foreign-policy fund was abandoned.
Instead, MBZ and MBS first together and later MBZ alone placed at least $2 billion in at least two bank accounts linked to Kushner.
It is not known exactly how the two Arab leaders organized their joint contributions of $2 billion. In practice, however, they shared the cost. To understand the arrangement, one must look at the location of the accounts and the people who controlled them.
The “Alpha” bank account was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest banking institution in the United Arab Emirates. It was overseen by Tahnoon bin Zayed, MBZ’s brother and the bank’s board chairman.
Since 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis sent around $750 million to the Alpha account. It was intended as a foreign-policy fund. Some of the oversight and management of the money was to be carried out by Kushner and MBZ, who, in their effort to reach a comprehensive agreement that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, believed the region’s map had to be changed.
“Jared was looking for shortcuts in his diplomacy,” said a source familiar with the agreement between the Emirates and Kushner.
This person had spoken with senior Emirati and Israeli officials about the secret financial arrangement between Kushner, the Emirates and, at least initially, Saudi Arabia.
“Jared promised MBZ that he would advance their agenda with Trump if they contributed to a fund. He wanted the normalization of relations with Israel so that business could flourish,” the source said.
According to the same person, the secret fund, meaning a pool of money jointly collected for diplomatic purposes outside official channels, was a common form of corruption in the governments of the Arab Gulf states.
“The Emirates and the Saudis do this once a year. One or two billion dollars is nothing to them, and if it gets them what they want, then it is money well spent,” he said.
The Alpha account resembled a source of financing for an Emirati government program. Through it, MBZ could cover, for example, officials’ salaries or the funding of public schools. But the way the money entered the account and the intermediaries used indicated that the purpose was to keep the arrangement secret.
In essence, it was a secret and questionable scheme, partly administered by a senior adviser to the president of the United States.
The Dutch monitoring the Alpha account noticed that the funds arrived in U.S. dollars, sent from a bank in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has a special role in money laundering. The country’s central bank holds considerable reserves in U.S. dollars, while the banking system does not apply the highest standards of transparency.
As a result, Azerbaijani banks have developed established but unofficial practices of serving as transit points for large transfers. In these cases, a foreign currency is exchanged for an equivalent amount in U.S. dollars.
Some banks in Azerbaijan accept, in exchange for a commission of around 6–7 percent of the transaction, transfers from clients who want to move hundreds of millions of dollars into Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams.
The Saudi or Emirati client sends the funds to the Azerbaijani bank. The bank then uses another internal account to transfer the corresponding amount in U.S. dollars to the country requested by the client.
For auditors, uncovering this shadow trade is difficult. A superficial observation, such as the one the Dutch conducted by monitoring Kushner’s iPhone, showed only an account that appeared to be linked to the Azerbaijani government and that had sent hundreds of millions of dollars to an account in Dubai.
But the Alpha account had another feature, one the Dutch could neither see nor understand. It helped reveal the money’s true purpose.
Kushner did not own the account at First Abu Dhabi Bank. He was authorized to conduct transactions through an account belonging to and administered by an Emirati charitable foundation.
When MBZ and MBS began contributing to the Alpha account in 2017, the Watani Al Emarat foundation, a government-funded Emirati charity, was headed by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi.
Al Falasi was a technocrat, a member of the Federal National Council and a friend of one of MBZ’s closest advisers.
The Watani foundation, according to sources cited in the investigation, had another role: It was used as a cover for sending money to support the Emirates’ covert military and intelligence operations abroad.
A confidential source with direct knowledge of the foundation’s weapons-proliferation program said that Al Falasi had helped facilitate the Emirates’ secret weapons-purchasing programs.
According to the source, the Emiratis believed that the foundation’s charitable status would mean its international transfers would face less scrutiny. This made the organization a useful cover for financing MBZ’s and his brother’s covert wars.
MBZ and Tahnoon designated Kushner as an authorized person on the Watani foundation’s Alpha account. This gave him access and, at least in theory, the ability to conduct transactions, even though the account was not officially in his name. His role in the account can be understood by comparing it with that of the CIA director.
If Kushner had headed a government institution responsible for administering covert programs abroad, such an account would have been part of his duties, provided that the activity was approved by the president and reported to Congress. But he was not the CIA director. That position requires Senate approval, and operations are subject to congressional oversight.
Instead, Kushner answered only to his father-in-law, Donald Trump. Four senior Trump administration officials — two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff and a former CIA director — said they knew of no presidential authorization allowing Kushner to use a foreign government’s bank account.
Kushner’s lawyer, however, said that his client had not entered into agreements or arrangements with foreign leaders or officials without the consent of the president of the United States, and that every action had been taken in the best interests of the United States.
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