chose neither to express sympathy for the Palestinians killed nor to join international calls for Israeli restraint … [Instead] [h]is administration has offered unconstrained support for settlements, with an ambassador who has fought against use of the word ‘occupation’ and refers to ‘Judea and Samaria,’ as favored by Israeli settlers, instead of traditional U.S. references to the West Bank.”221 The media outlet calls it a “Kushner fantasy” that “the Arab Gulf states [Saudi Arabia and the UAE], Egypt, and Jordan will help him overcome these major challenges” to working with the Palestinians—thus offering a list of nations almost identical to the list of those with representatives present at the founding of the Red Sea Conspiracy.222 These nations’ leaders share with Israel, however, as the Atlantic observes, “a common strategic perspective on Iran and on Islamic extremism … [so] they don’t prioritize the Palestinian issue as much as previous generations.”223
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Of the source of the intelligence Kushner reportedly gives to MBS in 2017 as part of their discussions of “peace,” multiple Saudi sources with knowledge of MBS’s boasts to his inner circle describe it as originating “from U.S. wiretaps on conversations between Arab royals in hotels in London, in major U.S. cities and even on yachts docked close to Monte Carlo … information from the daily intelligence briefing provided by the intelligence community to the White House.”224 Kushner therefore either illegally shared classified intelligence with a foreign government or the information was declassified by Trump himself to facilitate its transfer to MBS. An intelligence transmission of this sort—between Trump, his son-in-law, and a foreign leader, with the content of the intelligence arising in part from foreign nationals’ hotel stays—would mirror the sort of clandestine, Trump-executed intelligence-gathering operation described by former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in the dossier of raw intelligence he compiled in 2015 and 2016. In that document, Steele’s MI6-derived sources alleged that “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership” was “managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort,” and involved the Kremlin “receiving intel from Trump’s team on Russian oligarchs and their families in [the] US,” a topic “with which Putin and the Kremlin seemed preoccupied”—much like MBS would be, with respect to his own countrymen traveling abroad, in 2017.225 Steele’s dossier will further note that an “intelligence exchange … running between” Trump’s team and the Kremlin saw Trump’s side ably meeting “Putin’s priority requirement … for intelligence on the activities, business and otherwise, in the United States of leading Russian oligarchs and their families. Trump and his associates duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with this information.”226
Steele’s sources’ assessment of the Trump family’s willingness to pass highly personal information in their possession to foreign autocrats will be echoed by the research that journalist Craig Unger collects for his book House of Putin, House of Trump. According to Unger, Trump coordinated with Felix Sater’s Bayrock Group, the Trump Organization’s scouting outfit for potential Russian clientele, to “indirectly provid[e] Putin with a regular flow of intelligence on what the oligarchs were doing with their money in the United States.”227 According to the Washington Post, Putin’s aim was “to keep tabs on the billionaires … who had made their post–Cold War fortunes on the backs of industries once owned by the state. The oligarchs … were stashing their money in foreign real estate, including Trump properties, presumably beyond Putin’s reach. Trump, knowingly or otherwise, may have struck a side deal with the Kremlin, Unger argues: He would secretly rat out his customers to Putin, who would allow them to keep buying Trump properties. Trump got rich. Putin got eyes on where the oligarchs had hidden their wealth. Everybody won.”228
Engaged in what would appear to be a similar operation in late 2017, Trump’s son-in-law gives the Saudi crown prince valuable information on the activities of the autocratic Saudi government’s wealthiest citizens—an action that suggests either recompense for some past Saudi largesse or a conviction that something Trump wants done by Saudi Arabia could not or would not have been done had Mohammed bin Nayef, the longtime U.S. ally, been left as heir apparent. As reported by the Daily Mail, MBS “told members of his circle that the intelligence included information on who was disloyal to him.… ‘Jared took a list out of names from U.S. eavesdrops of people who were supposedly MBS’s enemies,’ said one source, characterizing how MBS spoke about the information. ‘He took a