campaign” related to the Qatari public relations blitz of late 2017 and early 2018.120 The question becomes, therefore, why Trump appears to have done little or nothing involving al-Rumaihi until Cohen receives, per al-Rumaihi, a “$1 million payment in exchange for connecting the Qatar Investment Authority … with potential business partners in the United States”—a payment Cohen receives at a time when Trump knows his longtime attorney is or could be under federal investigation over his pre-election activities involving Stormy Daniels and Trump Tower Moscow.121 Was Trump trying to keep his longtime fixer happy by reversing roles and playing fixer for both Cohen and Qatar? Certainly, at the time Trump introduces al-Rumaihi to Haney, Haney’s consultant Cohen is under federal investigation in a case that will eventually implicate Trump, as Vice notes, in “at least eleven different felonies.”122
An even more troubling possibility, which leads Slate to publish an article in May 2018 entitled “Michael Cohen’s Meetings with Michael Flynn and a Qatari Diplomat Might Be the Key to Unlocking the Steele Dossier,” focuses on al-Rumaihi’s employment with the QIA and the fact that he is spotted at Trump Tower in December 2016, just as Russia is selling the QIA 20 percent of its state-owned oil company, Rosneft.123 According to the Steele dossier, it was in December 2016 that Carter Page—already known to have been in Moscow that month meeting with a top Rosneft executive and claiming to speak for Trump—negotiated on Trump’s behalf a small piece of the $11.57 billion Rosneft-QIA deal.124 In 2018, however, it will be revealed that the Kremlin secretly lent the QIA $6 billion of the $11.57 billion it “paid” to Russia—doing so through VTB, the very bank that Elliott Broidy has long worked for as an agent and which told Felix Sater and Michael Cohen it was willing to finance Trump Tower Moscow in the fall of 2015, during the presidential campaign (see chapter 3).125 The result of these machinations is the apparent confirmation of Steele’s raw intelligence, as Trump does indeed secretly negotiate with both of the purchasers involved in the Rosneft deal between fall 2015 and fall 2016, using as his negotiators Carter Page and Michael Cohen. Indeed, in a May 2018 interview with The Intercept, al-Rumaihi confesses that Michael Cohen was secretly negotiating American infrastructure policy with him at a series of private meetings in December 2016, with al-Rumaihi dangling $50 billion in investments before the incoming Trump administration and Cohen pushing him to “do it [invest the money] immediately, to show that Trump was already making America great again by bringing in foreign investment and creating American jobs.”126
In one meeting with al-Rumaihi, Cohen even seems to suggest the possibility of the Trump Organization receiving illegal kickbacks from any Qatari investment in the United States; Cohen, who will continue to work for the Trump Organization through January 2017, tells al-Rumaihi in December 2016, in the context of a conversation about Trump’s new administration, “We can find a steel factory that is about to shut down. You guys [the QIA] can invest. I’ll give you some names to appoint as partners. You guys put in the money, we will put in the know-how, and share the profits 50-50. We can perhaps get a federal government ‘off-take agreement’ for 10 to 15 years.” According to The Intercept, “Al-Rumaihi surmised that the biggest winners would be the silent ‘partners,’ who would put in ‘know-how,’ rather than money and walk away with half the profits.”127
As troubling as this is, a May 2018 report in The Intercept will produce even more complications, revealing that al-Rumaihi is being accused in court not only of having offered a bribe to Steve Bannon to influence Trump administration policy but also of having told Bannon that President-elect Trump’s incoming national security advisor, Michael Flynn, had in fact already accepted the Qataris’ offer of a bribe.128 While al-Rumaihi will contest the claim, he acknowledges investing in a basketball league founded by a friend of Steve Bannon, one of the top three officials on the Trump transition team and one heavily involved in Flynn and Kushner’s plans for the Middle East and Israel.129
All of the above will seem to have positioned al-Rumaihi as a potentially damning witness against Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Broidy, Page, Cohen, and Trump’s allies in Russia and the Red Sea Conspiracy governments—until al-Rumaihi’s value as a witness is tarnished by sudden allegations from Broidy, who, after months of lobbying Trump on behalf of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, alleges