ministers, the owners of three major television stations, the head of the most important military branch, and one of the wealthiest men in the world, who has been a major shareholder in Citibank, Twentieth Century Fox, Apple, Twitter, and Lyft.”194 The magazine writes that the purge “sends shockwaves of fear through the kingdom.” A former U.S. official analogizes MBS’s actions this way: “It’s the equivalent of waking up to find Warren Buffett and the heads of ABC, CBS, and NBC have been arrested. It has all the appearances of a coup d’état. Saudi Arabia is rapidly becoming another country. The kingdom has never been this unstable.”195
MBS’s November purge follows smaller purges in June—which included MBS placing his cousin and the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, Mohammed bin Nayef, under house arrest—and September, when the Saudi prince “orchestrated the arrest of well-known intellectuals and clerics.”196 That MBS’s actions are sanctioned by his father, King Salman, is underscored by the fact that the November action comes just hours after Salman has put his son in charge of an Anti-Corruption Commission.197 MBS’s new position allows him to seize the assets of—and issue blanket travel bans against—individual Saudi citizens.198
MBS’s arrest of bin Nayef in June 2017, just weeks after Trump rewarded MBS and his family with a presidential visit, had been particularly galling to the U.S. intelligence community. According to the Washington Post, “Intelligence fears about the situation in Saudi Arabia rose when Mohammed unseated his cousin and the heir apparent, Mohammed bin Nayef, a longtime U.S. ally against terrorism.”199 Calling bin Nayef “one of the preeminent counterterrorists” in the world, a thirty-plus-year CIA veteran tells the Post that bin Nayef “was the closest thing Saudi Arabia had to a genuine hero in this century”—calling gravely into question MBS’s insistence, publicly echoed by Trump, that his consolidation of power in the kingdom was born of a commitment to counterterrorism rather than autocratic avarice.200 Indeed, bin Nayef was considered such an ally to America and such a threat to al-Qaeda that in 2009 he had been injured in an al-Qaeda suicide bombing made notable in part by the bomber’s secretion of the explosives in his rectum.201
That Trump backs MBS’s several purges is borne out not only by his public tweets but also his private actions. The names of those taken by MBS in November hail in substantial part from a list derived from President Trump’s classified daily presidential briefing, meaning that they could only have been shared with the Saudis if they were first automatically declassified by Trump.202 As The Intercept notes in a March 2018 investigative report, during a period when he had top-secret clearance (a status he would later briefly lose) Kushner “was known around the White House as one of the most voracious readers of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified rundown of the latest intelligence intended only for the president and his closest advisers. Kushner … was particularly engaged by information about the Middle East.… [In the latter half of 2017] the President’s Daily Brief contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to the crown prince’s power grab.”203
According to high-level government officials familiar with Trump’s daily briefings, Kushner made use of the classified intelligence the president had received. In late October 2017, reports The Intercept, Kushner “made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard … What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown.”204 A report by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, published at the time of Kushner’s surprise visit to Saudi Arabia, notes that “the two princes [MBS and Kushner] are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.”205
Much of the information about the clandestine Kushner-MBS summit in October 2017 will come from MBS himself, who in subsequent conversations with confidants will “brag[] of receiving classified U.S. intelligence from Jared Kushner and using it as part of a purge of ‘corrupt’ princes and businessmen.”206 More broadly, MBS will spend time in 2017 and early 2018 “boasting about his close relationship with the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the intelligence which he has