slate of methods employed by MBS’s agents is unknown, though the Times reports that all bin Nayef’s means of communication were taken from him and the fact that he is both a diabetic and still hampered physically by the aftereffects of a 2009 assassination attempt was used against him in cruel fashion as the night wore on.126 According to the New Yorker, one element of the persuasion employed by MBS’s agents was making bin Nayef stand up for hours, a form of torture for the injured prince that would have, given his conditions, “caused excruciating pain.”127
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The question of why Kushner would go to such extraordinary lengths to get as close to MBS and MBZ as possible—bypassing national security protocols to engage in clandestine communications, deliberately sidelining career diplomats and even the secretary of state, offending a king-in-waiting by treating his inferior like a head of state, and using an Emirati ambassador as an adviser during a presidential campaign—goes unanswered until the Saudi blockade of Qatar in summer 2017, an event that also may explain the timing of MBS’s move against bin Nayef in June. According to the New York Times, “One American official and one adviser to a Saudi royal said Mohammed bin Nayef opposed the embargo on Qatar, a stand that probably accelerated his ouster.”128 Bin Nayef’s recalcitrance about his country taking an aggressive, even warlike posture toward a key U.S. ally may also explain, incredibly, Kushner’s support for MBS—as MBS’s summer blockade of the tiny Gulf nation leads indirectly, as will become clear in the coming months, to more than $1 billion in desperately needed new loans for Kushner Companies.129 It is a windfall that likely would have been impossible with bin Nayef on the Saudi throne.
After bin Nayef swears allegiance to MBS on video, he is sent back to his palace in Jeddah on the Red Sea, where he is immediately placed under house arrest.130 Within days, writes the New York Times, CIA officials are briefing Trump “on their concern that the ouster of Mohammed bin Nayef and the possible removal of General Huwairini [one of bin Nayef’s top security chiefs] could hamper intelligence sharing” with the United States.131 Because of his direct communications with MBS, Kushner likely has far less concern on this score than the rest of the federal government.
Since June 2017, “indications have emerged that Mohammed bin Salman plotted the ouster” of bin Nayef over a period of time, raising the possibility that—given Kushner’s intense interest in the process of succession in Saudi Arabia in early spring 2017—some part of his conversations with MBS were about the young prince’s political ambitions and perhaps even his intentions.132 The overnight shift from a bin Nayef power center in Saudi Arabia to an MBS power center “spread[s] concern among counterterrorism officials in the United States, who saw their most trusted Saudi contacts disappear” almost immediately—even as Kushner’s top Saudi contact has just become, instantaneously, the most powerful man in the kingdom.133 The shift in power in Riyadh quickly becomes a shift in power in Washington, D.C., too.
As Saudi Arabia’s succession crisis unfolds in a flurry of activity in mid-2017, Americans are unaware that the president’s son-in-law has sidelined the National Security Council with respect to certain foreign policy and national security crises in the Middle East, with the top Middle East adviser to the NSC, U.S. Army Col. Michael Bell, “complain[ing] … that he was out of the loop on the Gulf crisis and the Arab-Israeli conflict … [as] Kushner frequently micromanaged those subjects through direct interaction with regional leaders, without offering [NSC representatives] any worthwhile readout on their interactions.”134 As Kushner’s chief contacts in the Middle East by mid-2017 are MBS, MBZ’s ambassador al-Otaiba, Nader, and Netanyahu (the last of these “long a friend of the Kushners,” according to the Jerusalem Post), the effect of Kushner’s bureaucratic machinations in the first few months of the Trump presidency is to put two Red Sea conspirators and their plot’s chief beneficiary in the Middle East, Israel, atop America’s foreign policy apparatus—with both the State Department and the National Security Council deliberately marginalized.135
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Between MBS’s March 2017 trip to D.C. and Trump’s May 2017 trip to Riyadh—a period of mere weeks—an important event occurs that will have a significant bearing on the fortunes of the nation of Qatar from 2017 through 2019. In April 2017, Charles Kushner, a convicted felon and Jared Kushner’s father, meets with Qatari finance minister Ali Al Emadi to beg him to