in saving his floundering real estate company. Nevertheless, Kushner will tell federal law enforcement that when Gerson returns from the Seychelles and gives him a detailed multipage plan for U.S.-Russian reconciliation that he has negotiated with Dmitriev, Kushner had at that point “not heard of Dmitriev” at all.182
The Gerson-Dmitriev plan presented to Kushner on January 18, just two days before Trump’s inauguration, calls for a five-point détente between the United States and Russia: (1) the two countries will jointly fight terrorism in the Middle East; (2) the two countries will jointly battle the spread of weapons of mass destruction; (3) the two countries will jointly develop “win-win” economic and investment initiatives, likely a euphemism for immediate sanctions relief for Russia; (4) the two countries will “maintain[] an honest, open, and continual dialogue regarding issues of disagreement,” likely a euphemism for the establishment and maintenance of a permanent White House–Kremlin back channel of the sort Kushner had been searching for since Election Day; and (5) the two countries will “ensur[e] proper communication and trust from ‘key people’ from each country”—a likely reference to the creation of a back channel that cannot be overseen or interfered with by the U.S. intelligence community, a problem discussed by Kushner and Kislyak face-to-face in late November 2016.183
A Gerson spokesman will say in May 2018 that Gerson was in the Seychelles at the same time as Prince, Nader, Dmitriev, and MBZ—and meeting with at least the latter three of these people, just as they were all meeting with one another—as part of a “vacation” he was taking unrelated to Prince or Prince’s meetings on the island, which Gerson’s spokesman will say Gerson “knew nothing about.”184 Two U.S. officials briefed about the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s subsequent investigative interest in Gerson will tell NBC News through an intermediary, however, that members of the select committee have by mid-2018 “inferred that Gerson was there [the Seychelles] because of his connection to Kushner” and that “UAE officials [in the Seychelles] considered Gerson to be ‘Kushner’s guy.’”185 Gerson’s spokesman, while denying that Gerson is under federal investigation, will decline to say whether Gerson has ever been “personally contacted by Mueller.”186
Joel Zamel will, like his longtime acquaintance George Nader, repeatedly make contact with members of Trump’s transition team. According to the Daily Beast, in January 2017 “Zamel … led conversations with Trump transition officials about his company helping [to] assist other Middle Eastern players, such as Saudi Arabia, with regime change in Iran.”187 These Zamel-led conversations occur just before Prince leaves for the Seychelles, and involve not only Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and George Nader but also a Saudi general dispatched from Riyadh by MBS.188 The general, Ahmed al-Assiri, is the chief of Saudi intelligence—and will be accused, in twenty-one months, of helping to orchestrate the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.189 The topic the five men discuss is the very topic Trump had been talking about regularly on campaign stops in the fall of 2015, when Mike Flynn began acting as his chief foreign policy adviser: countering America’s adversaries in the Middle East.190 According to the Daily Beast, Flynn’s meetings with Saudi intelligence in January 2017 are “attended and brokered” by Nader.191 Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin will tell the Daily Beast in October 2018 that meetings like the transition-period Flynn-Bannon-Nader-Zamel-Assiri meeting would be considered “very unusual” in the intelligence community. “It’s concerning to me as a former intelligence official,” McLaughlin will say, “because of the fact that it smacks of covert action planning, which is the most sensitive thing the U.S. government does and is so uniquely the province of the sitting president.”192
Flynn meets with al-Assiri more than a year after the Saudi intelligence chief, working in conjunction with MBS’s “right-hand man” Saud al-Qahtani, has developed a military unit within CSMARC whose job is to “engage[] in the kidnapping—sometimes overseas—and detention and harsh interrogation of Saudis whom the monarchy perceives as a threat. The interrogations [lead] to repeated physical harm to the detainees,” according to the Wall Street Journal.193 In 2018 a CIA assessment will conclude that, since 2015, CSMARC’s military arm has been used by MBS “to target his opponents domestically and abroad, sometimes violently.”194 The New York Times reports that “numerous Washington lobbying and public affairs firms … assist [CSMARC]” in “promoting a positive story about the [Saudi-]Yemen war in Washington,” suggesting that the center’s public-facing civilian activities are not wholly outside Beltway political discourse.195
While it is unknown whether al-Assiri and Flynn discuss CSMARC