media outlet Der Spiegel and “Western intelligence officials” to be managing money for Russian deputy premier Yuri Trutnev “in a fiduciary capacity,” putting Rybolovlev in a position to be a front man for large-scale Kremlin financial transactions.254 According to Shalev, given that MBS and MBZ appear to have jointly promised the Trumps money in August 2016 to support Donald Trump’s campaign, MBS’s transfer of almost half a billion dollars to a Kremlin agent for a painting that might be worth almost nothing is one way to deliver on that promise—and, as with so many of Trump’s interactions with Russia, a good way to do so in “plain sight.”255
Alternatively, given that Psy-Group’s Joel Zamel has worked for Rybolovlev in the past, and was at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016 looking for someone to pay him to do secret work on behalf of Trump’s campaign—and was, moreover, asking the Saudis and Emiratis, through George Nader, to be his patrons—there is reason to wonder whether some portion of the money Rybolovlev received from MBS may have passed through the oligarch to Zamel or Psy-Group.256 A key component of the Psy-Group/Cambridge Analytica deal Zamel signed in mid-December 2016 was a “mutual non-disclosure agreement” that, among other things, prohibited either party from revealing any past or current clients of the other—an unusual rider that seemed to anticipate either future animosity, future litigation, or future investigation by law enforcement.257
Within a week of Mueller sending investigators to interview Zamel and members of Psy-Group in 2018, Zamel will “shutter[] the entire operation,” Zev Shalev notes.258 Moreover, per Bloomberg, “Psy-Group’s decision to shut down appears to have come the same week that Nader testified before the grand jury working with Mueller, according to the timing of that testimony previously reported in the New York Times.”259 Originally, George Nader’s $2 million post-election payment to Zamel had been pegged to a new Zamel venture, WhiteKnight, and work Zamel theoretically might have done for Nader or Nader’s patrons after the election, but a Bloomberg review will find that WhiteKnight did not have a website, had published “little public information” about itself or its products, and in fact was, according to a “person familiar with Psy-Group’s operations,” simply a “rebranding [of] the firm [Psy-Group] under a different name.”260 According to Bloomberg’s source, switching Psy-Group’s name to WhiteKnight post-election was already being discussed internally at the firm in 2016, though for what reason is unclear.261 These machinations only underscore the byzantine processes used by those in Trump’s orbit to transfer money to Zamel—a tendency that raises the stakes of (and the attention paid to) the MBS-Rybolovlev transaction.
The most important revelation about the disappearance of Salvator Mundi will come in 2018, when it is revealed that MBS did not overpay for the painting by $350 million—Christie’s had estimated it might sell for $100 million—merely due to bad luck. Rather, he was bidding against an unusually insistent anonymous party whose aggressive bids raised the painting’s price to historic heights. That bidder is revealed, in March 2018, to be MBS’s friend, political ally, and geopolitical co-conspirator, MBZ.262
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A prominent critic of MBS’s November 2017 purge in the American media is Jamal Khashoggi.263 Khashoggi’s criticism is well founded, given that, as the New Yorker notes, King Salman and his son have, in a very short time, “created a whole new [Saudi] royal family … bypass[ing] hundreds (at least) of other princes” who were in line for the Saudi throne.264 Moreover, with MBS telling confidants that he received significant pre-purge intelligence from Kushner—and even bragging to his Red Sea co-conspirator, MBZ, that Kushner was now “in his pocket” (an allegation he now denies)—the Saudi crown prince has begun, as The Intercept notes, “send[ing] a powerful message to [his] allies and enemies that his actions were backed by the U.S. government,” an observation whose veracity Trump’s celebration of MBS’s ascension appears to confirm.265 Just so, within forty-eight hours of MBS rounding up his enemies—and at least one American—for prolonged detention, torture, and in at least one case death, Trump tweets to his tens of millions of followers that he has “great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing. Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years.”266 Trump’s words echo the Saudi government’s propaganda regarding the purge’s necessity.267 Even so, the odd phrasing of Trump’s tweet, in which the word “some” does surprisingly heavy lifting, implies that the president