would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”63 According to a major digital media outlet in Israel, Walla News, Inspiration is “managed by a former senior [IDF] intelligence official” from the Israeli government.64 Located in a “mysterious building in central Israel” with “no sign or information on it,” Inspiration is, per Walla, a company whose “website does not reveal anything about its founders or employees,” but whose activities in 2016 and even before then are quite clear: Inspiration’s “main activity in recent years has been working for the election of Donald Trump as president.”65 One Inspiration employee said that “the person who connected her to Trump [in 2016] was Ben Carson,” adding that “Carson knew the company after working with a research body that worked for us.”66 That the “research body” referenced here may be either NSO (to which Flynn was linked in 2016) or Joel Zamel’s Wikistrat or Psy-Group business intelligence firms (the latter of which Zamel sought to recruit Flynn to in 2014 or 2015) is underscored by the presence of not just Flynn but also George Birnbaum as an adviser to Carson’s campaign. Birnbaum will, not long after Carson’s campaign folds in March 2016, introduce Zamel to Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager.67
Another former Inspiration employee tells Walla that Inspiration began “work[ing] for Trump’s election … about three months before the 2016 election,” placing the beginning of its involvement in the same month—August 2016—that Donald Trump Jr. responds approvingly to an offer of assistance from Zamel’s firm after a meeting in Trump Tower, thereby providing more evidence that the Israeli “research body” Inspiration worked with to ensure Trump’s election was Zamel’s (see chapter 4).68 Indeed, Inspiration will concede that it worked in August 2016 “in cooperation with another Israeli company in order to understand which voters are more likely or less likely to vote on election day … [and] trying to predict the behavior of the voters in … the swing states … [O]n the basis of this assessment, various [types of] content intended for different types of voters were prepared in a focused manner.”69 This description of Inspiration’s research partner matches the sort of work done by Psy-Group, as well as a company closely linked to Psy-Group, Cambridge Analytica, which was Trump’s data firm for the entirety of the 2016 general election season. While Inspiration will state publicly that its partner was not Israeli business intelligence firm Black Cube, it will not issue a similar statement with respect to either Psy-Group, Wikistrat, or NSO.70 Inspiration’s concurrent claim that it did not work with Cambridge Analytica is consistent with other evidence that when, prior to its dissolution in 2018, Cambridge Analytica worked with Israeli firms, as it has acknowledged doing, it did so through subcontractors rather than directly.71 Even so, that Inspiration denies working with Cambridge Analytica in response to a question about working with Israeli business intelligence firms—which Cambridge Analytica is not—is curious.
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In his June 16, 2015, speech at Trump Tower announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, Donald Trump declares, “I love the Saudis. Many are in this building.”72 He repeats his long-standing complaint, however, that the Saudis enjoy the benefit of military assistance from America without properly paying for the aid they receive. “If the right person asked them, they’d pay a fortune,” Trump tells the assembled crowd, noting that the Saudis “have got nothing but money.”73 He does not explain in his speech how or why he is the “right person” to deal with the Saudi government regarding its domestic investments.
During his speech, Trump also makes a telling and unusual comment about the political situation inside Saudi Arabia that goes largely unnoticed at the time. Discussing the need for a new American leader who will deal differently with our traditional geopolitical competitors, Trump says of Saudi Arabia that it “is in big, big trouble. Now, thanks to fracking and other things, the oil is all over the place.”74 The comment—which implies that oil is now more plentiful in the United States and elsewhere due to advanced extraction techniques, and that Saudi Arabia’s economy will therefore have to quickly evolve to accommodate this new reality—is one of the more informed observations Trump makes in his announcement address.75 It is unclear what Trump would like to do as president to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s new vulnerability on energy issues, however. He avers that a new president can make decisions that force the Saudis to pay