treatment at the hands of Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies in the Gulf.
February 2019 sees the nation of Qatar trying to clean up the historical record with respect to Jared Kushner’s blockade-enabled shakedown of the Qatar Investment Authority in 2017 and 2018. Reuters reports that the Qatari government now claims it “unwittingly helped bail out a New York skyscraper owned by the family of Jared Kushner,” as it was unaware that Brookfield Asset Management’s subsidiary Brookfield Property Partners, a company in which it heavily invests, “struck a deal last year [2018] that rescued the Kushner Companies’ 666 Fifth Avenue tower in Manhattan from financial straits.”358 Doha’s claim—that it didn’t know what Brookfield was doing because it owned nearly a tenth of Brookfield rather than being its exclusive owner—doesn’t track with common governance practices in the international financial sector, however; the Qataris would have been unlikely to miss a transfer of more than a billion dollars from a fund with an $87 billion value, especially as the recipient was a desperately underwater property owner sitting on a virtually worthless property.359 Moreover, the Qataris’ hire of a former Trump campaign staffer, Stuart Jolly—during the same month as their announcement regarding the Brookfield-Kushner deal—underscores that they understand very well the association between favorable economic treatment from the Trump campaign and proximity to those Trump cares about.360 In 2016, Jolly oversaw Trump’s field campaign in thirty states, and said, upon transitioning from campaign work to involvement with lobbying-adjacent super PACs, “I think I can be effective [helping Trump] from the outside.”361
According to White House officials, during these nonsecure calls to friends and world leaders Trump may well be discussing classified information. Despite “repeated warnings” from his aides that “Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on [his iPhone] calls,” Trump refuses to cease putting American intelligence and policy at risk—a reckless practice that seems in direct opposition to the supposed paranoia that causes him to hide his schedule and phone habits from top aides in the first instance.
In February 2019, Time publishes a report revealing that Trump’s disregard for the advice of his intelligence advisers goes far beyond anything Americans had supposed. Speaking for the first time about Trump’s conduct during two years’ worth of closed-door intelligence briefings, intelligence officials reveal to Time that Trump has adopted a position of “willful ignorance” toward intelligence assessments that do not align with his personal preferences, forcing officials into “futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.”362 Even more troubling, Trump—whose positions on geopolitics often seem to be drawn directly from the mouths of foreign adversaries like Vladimir Putin or Mohammed bin Salman—is, according to his briefers, prone to “angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds.” Intelligence officers have even been “warned,” though it is not clear by whom, that they must “avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.”363
To the extent these admonitions are acknowledged and acceded to, they permit Trump to receive foreign policy talking points directly from world leaders such as Putin and MBS and then accurately say that he has received no intelligence assessments from his own briefers to contradict them. It can therefore be presumed that, at least on certain hot-button issues, America’s foreign policy is the product not of independent assessments by the American intelligence community but the whims and self-interest of America’s staunchest strategic competitors and even its enemies. Trump’s recalcitrance on intelligence matters has “existed since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, intelligence officials say,” and may explain why, during one 85-day period of assessment between 2018 and 2019, Trump skipped his President’s Daily Brief—the most significant regular intelligence briefing any president receives—on 68 of the 85 days.364 While NBC observes that presidents often do not receive a face-to-face PDB every day, it also reports that Trump “does not regularly read” the written intelligence briefings sent to him daily whether or not he receives a live PDB.365 In this respect he is entirely unlike his predecessors, per NBC.366
In February 2019, when Trump’s intelligence chiefs offer him a report on Russia’s continued efforts at interfering with American elections—a report that both Trump and Putin disagree with—and when they offer, too, a positive assessment of Iran’s compliance with the nuclear treaty it signed with President Obama (an assessment disagreed with by both Trump and his allies