with Trump to convince the GOP candidate to begin the process of replacing his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. As longtime Trump friend, adviser, and ally Roger Stone explains, “[Thomas Barrack] is the only person I know who the president speaks to as a peer. Barrack is to Trump as [Florida banker] Bebe Rebozo was to Nixon, which is the best friend.”24 But Barrack is also more than this to the extended Trump family: he is Jared Kushner’s lender, holding $70 million of the debt owed by Kushner on the worst real estate investment of his career, 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.25 Barrack’s late-2000s investment in Kushner helped save Ivanka’s husband from bankruptcy, a circumstance that could have materially affected Trump’s daughter as well.26 The billionaire speaks Arabic, worked for Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer—yet another Trump-circle confidant with Nixon ties, joining Roger Stone, Dimitri Simes, Ed Cox, CNI patron and Kushner acquaintance Henry Kissinger, and others—and made his fortune by networking with powerful Saudis and Emiratis, including an executive at the Saudi government-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco, the Emirati oil minister, a son of the Saudi kingdom’s then ruler, and a host of other “Persian Gulf royals,” to whom he became, according to the Times, a “concierge” who not only “look[ed] after their children on visits to the West” but also “vacation[ed] with them at his home in the south of France.”27 Barrack had even opened up a halal restaurant on the Sardinian coast specifically to cater to “Gulf royals who came by in their yachts.”28
Barrack’s skill at flattery, according to an account in the Times, has been directed most vigorously over the years at three targets: Donald Trump and the Saudi and Emirati royal families. During the presidential campaign, Barrack will tell the Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, that if he works in conjunction with Barrack, they “can turn [Trump] to prudence. He needs a few really smart Arab minds to whom he can confer.” Barrack adds that the Emirati ambassador is “at the top of that list.”29 Indeed, as Barrack predicts, the Emirates’ agent, al-Otaiba, will become one of the Trump campaign’s most important advisers—though also, like Dimitri Simes, one that the campaign never acknowledges, for reasons that will become clear over time (see chapters 4 and 6).
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After announcing his candidacy for president of the United States on May 4, 2015, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican, begins forming a foreign policy team with a surprising number of experts on the nation of Israel—many of whom will move directly to the campaign of Donald Trump in the weeks before Carson officially suspends his flailing campaign in early March 2016.30 One of the Israel experts who joins Carson’s campaign as a foreign policy adviser is George Birnbaum, a longtime GOP operative who “has worked extensively as a campaign consultant for Israeli politicians and has developed a network of contacts with current and former Israeli security officials.”31 Another member of Carson’s team with substantial Israeli security contacts—though not an adviser to Carson exclusively, as he is also advising Donald Trump at the time—is Michael Flynn. Flynn will tell the Washington Post in August 2016 that Carson is one of the Republican presidential candidates who “would ask me about national security, what’s happening in the world, my thoughts on particular issues.” Flynn confirms to the Post that he met directly with Carson, and that “if I saw something I thought was important I would share it with [Carson and several other GOP candidates].”32
Prior to joining the Carson campaign as an adviser, Flynn had been approached by an Israeli business intelligence company, Psy-Group, whose owner, Joel Zamel, sought to recruit him.33 As the Daily Beast writes, “Zamel apparently wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynn to be a member of the firm’s advisory board; Zamel spoke with him about it on multiple occasions about the time Flynn was forming his ill-fated Flynn Intel Group,” a period between fall 2014 and summer 2015 that ended just weeks before Trump summoned Flynn to Trump Tower in August 2015 for the pair’s first meeting.34 Trump will later claim, falsely, that he did not know Flynn in 2015, though it was Trump who had his team call Flynn in 2015, and Trump who permitted his first meeting with Flynn to run for ninety minutes instead of the scheduled thirty minutes.35
The Daily Beast confirms that Flynn is extremely fond of Zamel in 2014 and 2015, having taken “a real shining” to him.36