Sordid Arabia and Jared
May 6, 2021
This is the under-reported story behind the death of Khashoggi, with important implications:
In 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was lured into an embassy in Turkey then assassinated. He was Editor in Chief of Al-Arab News Channel and a columnist for The Washington Post who had fled his homeland in 2017 and been highly critical of Saudi rulers -- the ailing King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). He championed human rights and opposed the Saudi bloodbath in Yemen.
His death was grisly and cruel. He entered the consulate and 15 Saudi agents awaited him with a bone saw. They killed him, then dismembered him — an act of desecration strictly forbidden in Islam — in order to deny him a dignified burial. His remains disappeared and the deed was taped, according to Turkish police. British and American intelligence agencies later said seven of the 15 killers were MBS’s personal bodyguards and that the Royal Prince “very likely” ordered the killing. That’s when some commentators began referring to him as MBS, saying the acronym stood for “Mister Bone Saw”.
The American reaction was muted in the United States because the Saudis were playing footsie President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who described MBS as a “friend”. And this was not just royal name-dropping. In fact, very few know the behind-the-scenes story of how these two “Princes” became so entwined in business and diplomacy that they were able to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East, bolster their respective family fortunes, and nearly make the world more dangerous by nuclearizing Mister Bone Saw.
This Tale of Two Princes has been mostly consigned to real estate trade journals, business sections, and tedious Congressional hearings. But missing is the fact that their Grand Game, if successful, would have abrogated the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which is the cornerstone of post-war peace and security.
MBS and Kushner tried to get a bomb for Saudi Arabia by representing it as a desirable countervail to Iran. Israel, the only nuclear power in the region, bought into the idea due to Kushner’s coziness with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was a family friend and needed a friendly Arab friend in the region. In return, MBS publicly stated in 2018 that both “the Palestinians and Israelis have the right to have their own land”.
This redrew the Cold War Map of the Middle East — with Saudi Arabia and Iran as counterbalancing nation-states -- which is not a bad thing, but it all came about because Jared overpaid for a Manhattan skyscraper in 2007.
In 2007, Jared was only 26 years of age and had become CEO of Kushner Companies after his father, Charles Kushner, was jailed for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. He wanted to crack the big time and so he put up his family’s New Jersey assets to buy a prestigious Manhattan 48-storey skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion. His timing was awful. The stock market crashed, real estate values tanked, and he spent years trying to sell or improve its profits and refinancing properties to keep it all afloat.
In 2009, the Kushner and Trump families “merged” when Jared married Ivanka Trump, then he eventually joined the Trump presidential campaign in 2016 and became a senior White House advisor. Nepotism and concerns about conflicts of interest dogged him, appropriately, and he was barred from Top Security clearance until May 2018 when his father-in-law finally intervened.
According to an extensive timeline of news reports and an analysis prepared by high-level national security law publication JustSecurity here, Jared’s father, Charles Kushner had served his sentence and in early 2017 convinced Anbang Insurance Group, with links to the Chinese government, to buy the troubled skyscraper. The deal fell through, due to concern by Beijing about appearances given Jared’s involvement in the White House. Next, Kushner approached the Qatar Investment Authority in April 2017. It also declined.
The next month, President Trump broke with tradition and made his first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia. During that stay, Kushner and security advisor Steve Bannon met for a private dinner with Saudi and United Arab Emirate leaders who wanted to impose a blockade on Qatar. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was unaware of the meeting because he had fiercely opposed the blockade. It made no sense because, among other reasons, Qatar was home to the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East.
But suddenly, on June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt severed diplomatic relations, and cut trade and travel links, with Qatar. The White House supported this despite State Department objections internally. Qatari officials later said to NBC News that they believed the White House's position on the blockade was retaliation “driven by Kushner who was sour about the failed deal” and was also due to Saudi Arabia’s and UAE’s rivalry with Qatar.
Five months later in November 2017, Kushner Companies received a loan — $184-million loan from a Qatar-supported company for a Chicago property — following meetings with the lender in the White House held with Kushner.
As the blockade continued, two more transactions occurred: On January 4, 2018, a Canadian company named Brookfield Asset Management (a Qatar sovereign fund was a large shareholder) announced a subsidiary was buying Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC, the bankrupt nuclear services company for $4.6 billion. The acquisition was surprising because Brookfield was involved in real estate and renewable energy projects, not nuclear. But the Reuters story explained why: “Westinghouse has joined a consortium bidding to provide nuclear power in Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest new markets in the world.”
Two days later, Brookfield announced its $1.28 billion purchase of Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue, “owned by the family of Donald Trump’s son-in-law,” in The New York Times. Not surprisingly, the blockade by the Saudi-led coalition eased, and finally ended just before Trump left office on January 4, 2021.
“This sequence of events, especially the stunning reversal in U.S. policy towards Qatar, raises serious questions about what role Jared Kushner — and the financial interests of his family — may have played in influencing U.S. foreign policy regarding the blockade,” wrote a group of Democrats in Congress who launched an investigation on December 9, 2020, into the whole business.
In 2019, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing into the administration’s planned $80-billion mega-deal for reactors linked to the Westinghouse deal. The Committee said "multiple whistleblowers" informed it that Trump administration appointees -- led by fired national security advisor Michael Flynn, Trump friend Tom Barrack, and former Energy Secretary Rick Perry -- pursued selling nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia over the objections of top national security officials. Worse, they claimed, the plan was to transfer nuclear technology to the Saudis without any Congressional review.
Implications were that Qatar was strong-armed into bailing out the Kushner family, then the White House facilitated a nuclear deal with a medieval country that chops up journalists, ignores human rights, and blows up children in Yemen. But the Qataris denied that they knew what Brookfield was doing until the deals were completed.
The New York Times wrote in February 2019: “By ramming through the sale of as much as $80 billion in nuclear power plants, the Trump administration would provide sensitive know-how and materials to a government whose de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has suggested that he may eventually want a nuclear weapon as a hedge against Iran and has shown little concern for what the rest of the world thinks.”
The nuke deal never happened, but the ethics and other violations that took place in Trump’s White House should still be pursued, but the ex-President exempted his staff (and son-in-law) from culpability for any ethical wrongdoing with a stroke of the pen on his way out the exit and likely blocks that possibility. But Jared’s reputation in the Middle East vaulted and he has been raising $100 million for the family business in Israel. And Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has begun to set up a hedge fund on behalf of sovereign funds in the Gulf States.
Meanwhile, Biden imposed sanctions against Saudis for Khasshogi’s murder but excluded MBS. However, the Crown Prince is not welcome anytime soon in the U.S., and his phone calls won’t be returned, but this too will pass. The consensus is that Sordid Arabia remains central to America’s objectives to keep Iran at bay, support Israel, and as a proxy to fight radicalism in its Kingdom and the region. As for the rest involved in this tale, Brookfield is stuck with too much New York real estate and is considering the sale of Westinghouse, but the Kushners are billionaires.
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