the Guardian offers a report establishing that $2 million—the exact amount Nader pays Zamel immediately after the 2016 election—was Cambridge Analytica’s total fee for the complex, large-scale, last-minute general-election campaign it had been hired to conduct in Nigeria in 2015.362 During its campaign in Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica represented to its client that its intelligence-gathering partners for the project actually worked for Israeli intelligence; some of the firm’s own staff, speaking months later to the Guardian, said they were surprised to learn that Israelis working on the project, whether governmental or nongovernmental, were in possession of a large trove of hacked materials from Nigerian servers.363
Tellingly, the period in which Gates first fields proposals from Psy-Group is the same period during which Cambridge Analytica is pitching some—though perhaps, in retrospect, not all—of its services to the Trump campaign.364 The possibility that the Emiratis used George Nader to pay for the illicit components of the media package Cambridge Analytica provided to the Trump campaign—and that this arrangement was sealed at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016, with representatives of Trump, Psy-Group, and the UAE all present—is never addressed in the Mueller Report, which notes that it has omitted counterintelligence information in favor of providing it directly to the counterintelligence division of the FBI.365
Nader and Zamel have since 2016 provided contradictory accounts regarding the $2 million post-election payment the former made to the latter, suggesting that one of the two—or both—is not telling the truth about their relationship.366 Just so, while the New York Times reports that Trump Jr. in August 2016 “responded approvingly” to Psy-Group’s proposal, Trump’s son, through his current attorney, has claimed that he “was not interested.” Here again, one of two sources is evidently not telling the truth.367
Significant to unpacking both of these mysteries—that of Nader’s payment to Zamel and that of Don Jr.’s disposition toward Zamel’s proposal—might be the following: that Psy-Group’s attorney (up until the firm’s dissolution and his own departure for a new job) was Marc Mukasey, a longtime law partner of future Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and also, more important, the longtime attorney for Donald Trump Sr., Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump.368 In a similar vein, the presence of the UAE-dwelling, UAE-advising Erik Prince at the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting, coupled with the May 2018 revelation by the Wall Street Journal that Zamel not only had been “making contacts” in the UAE since 2014 but had begun working for MBZ via his company Wikistrat, significantly increases the odds of Trump-UAE-Zamel coordination.369 Tellingly, Zamel’s work with MBZ began around the same time Trump first made his presidential ambitions public in 2014.
Campaign donations to the Trump campaign by the UAE would be illegal under 52 U.S.C. § 30121, as would any efforts by the Israeli government to direct toward the Trump campaign clandestine Israeli intelligence services that might have assisted Trump in securing victory against Hillary Clinton.370 The Times of Israel reports that Psy-Group does much foreign intelligence work that is “known to the Israeli government … specifically the Ministry of Strategic Affairs,” even though the work is not paid for by the government.371 The Times reports, moreover, that Rick Gates “first heard about Psy-Group from … George Birnbaum”—Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime chief of staff.372 Birnbaum did much more than passively direct Trump’s deputy campaign manager to Zamel and Psy-Group, however, as he “introduce[s]” Gates to Psy-Group at a meeting at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington in March 2016 that Birnbaum himself attends.373 Birnbaum will later say that he believed Psy-Group was a good fit for the Trump campaign, which he calls “interested” in Psy-Group’s offerings, because the Israeli business intelligence outfit had “the technology to achieve what they [the Trump campaign] were looking for.”374 Whether Birnbaum would have dared insert himself into an American presidential election, particularly through the intermediary of an Israeli company whose work was known to be followed by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, without first consulting with the Israeli leader for whom he had worked for so long, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Netanyahu is a longtime Trump ally who is personal friends with Jared Kushner and his family. According to the New Yorker, Netanyahu has had “a long friendship with Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner. In recent years, the Kushners, Orthodox Jews who made their fortune in the real-estate business and hold conservative views on Israel, have donated large sums of money to Israeli causes