told her in the past that he could “make people disappear.”68
* * *
In March 2018, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “wins” his “reelection” effort in Egypt, with Foreign Policy calling the balloting a “farcical election in which every credible challenger was arrested or intimidated out of the race.”69
March also sees a visit by MBS to Washington, where he is “feted” by President Trump even as a close Trump ally—David Pecker of AMI, a future Mueller cooperating witness who had spent the 2016 presidential campaign “catching” and “killing” stories that could harm Trump politically—publishes nationwide a large, glossy, ad-free propaganda magazine whose sole purpose is to “sell America on a fellow Trump ally, Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”70 The propaganda, which ignores MBS’s domestic purges in Riyadh and his sponsorship of war crimes in Yemen, lauds his wealth and his Vision 2030 plan for the future of the kingdom he stands to inherit. At one point it includes a picture of a grinning Donald Trump beside Kacy Grine, a French financial adviser who “acts as an intermediary between … [MBS] and Western businesses.”71 Pecker’s publication promotes a “new Saudi-led United Arabic Market” that will “build economic relations with Israel.”72
MBS and the Saudi government will disclaim any knowledge of how the propaganda vehicle came to be, and the White House and the Trump Organization will refuse to comment on the question.73 The New York Times will note, however, that in July 2017 Pecker and Grine went to the White House to visit Trump and Kushner, during which meeting the AMI chairman received “an unofficial seal of approval from the White House … [as he was] considering expanding his media and events businesses into Saudi Arabia.”74 According to the Times, “Word soon traveled back to Saudi Arabia about the dinner: It signaled Mr. Pecker’s powerful status in Washington. Two months later, Pecker was in Saudi Arabia, meeting with Mr. Grine and the crown prince about business opportunities there.”75 When MBS comes to America in March 2018, Pecker and Grine attend multiple events with him, even as his $13.99-per-unit panegyric to MBS is on newsstands across the country “talk[ing] up the relationship between Mr. Trump and the Saudis” and noting, as summarized by the Times, that “Mr. Trump ‘endorsed the crown prince’s high profile anticorruption’ crackdown.”76 During his visit to D.C., MBS acquires a $400 million stake in the Hollywood talent agency run by Ari Emanuel, the man who introduced Pecker to Grine.77
From Trump’s inauguration onward, it is Jared Kushner—not, as during the campaign, Michael Cohen—who acts as Trump’s “main conduit” to Pecker, broadly discussing, according to the Daily Beast, “international relations” with the publisher of the National Enquirer, as well as “relations with the Saudi regime” specifically.78 By the time Pecker publishes his pro-MBS propaganda in 2018, he has not only been discussing U.S.-Saudi relations with Kushner for months but also, over the years he has known Kushner, at various points been “thinking about forging a business relationship” with Trump’s son-in-law, according to the Daily Beast.79
Following the publication of his glossy MBS propaganda, Pecker becomes concerned that he may be acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia. Trump’s longtime friend is worried on this score not only because of the magazine he’s just published but because AMI has had, per the Wall Street Journal, “plenty of contacts with Saudi Arabia in recent years, including seeking financial backing from Saudi investors to fund acquisitions”—an apparent reference to Pecker asking Saudi Arabia to assist the National Enquirer in paying for news stories.80
Pecker will ultimately ask the Department of Justice whether AMI—an entity with significant responsibility for Trump’s election as president, given the stories it purchased and buried for him pre-election—should register as an agent of the Saudi government.81 A further reason for Pecker making the query to the DOJ, though it’s unknown if this information was transmitted to the DOJ at the time, is that, as the Associated Press will later report, “the Saudi Embassy in Washington got a sneak peek” of the pro-MBS magazine AMI produced in a print run of 200,000 copies, “quietly sharing [a digital copy] with Saudi officials … almost three weeks before it was published, despite both parties’ insistence that they didn’t coordinate on the magazine.”82 AMI even “reached out to Saudi officials in the U.S. before publication to seek help with the [magazine’s] content.”83 Image metadata acquired by the Associated Press from two different individuals reveals that shortly after February 19, 2018, AMI sent a pdf of the magazine