and charities, including tens of thousands of dollars to a yeshiva in the Beit El settlement, in the West Bank. When Netanyahu visited the Kushners at their home in New Jersey, he sometimes stayed overnight and slept in Jared’s bedroom, while Jared was relegated to the basement.”375 Meanwhile, Netanyahu has known Trump for so long that Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, recalls “accompanying Netanyahu to Trump Tower, in New York, in the early aughts for a meeting with Donald Trump.”376 As for Psy-Group itself, the Wall Street Journal notes that several individuals closely linked to the company are “veteran Israeli intelligence officials.”377
Of equal significance to the question of Zamel’s and Nader’s connection to the Trump campaign is the matter of the two consultants’ employers. Not only do Zamel and Nader share an employer in MBZ, with Nader acting as an “adviser” and Zamel, according to the New York Times, as a “consultant,” but Zamel, like Nader, has also worked closely with individuals closely linked to the Russian government. Per the Times, Zamel has previously worked for “oligarchs linked to Mr. Putin, including Oleg V. Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who hired the firm for online campaigns against their business rivals.”378 The Zamel-Deripaska link is particularly intriguing given the Mueller Report’s finding that Paul Manafort was secretly sending polling data and strategy updates to Deripaska through Konstantin Kilimnik during the presidential campaign, and given additional claims by Nastya Rybka that the oligarch was involved in Russian election interference. As for Rybolovlev, besides being involved in a mysterious business transaction with Trump in 2008 that netted Trump tens of millions of dollars more than the value of the property he was selling, he has also faced allegations, based on flight data, that he twice secretly met Trump on airport tarmacs in the last days of the 2016 general election.379 That MBS, with the assistance of MBZ, publicly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to Rybolovlev in 2017 through a bizarre international art auction is also a source of significant concern (see chapter 8). As for Nader, the New York Times notes that the Lebanese American businessman “visited Moscow at least twice during the presidential campaign as a confidential emissary from [MBZ]” even as he was, in the United States, meeting “often” with Kushner, Flynn, and Bannon “in the hectic final weeks of the [2016] campaign.”380 In view of the foregoing, it is not difficult to imagine both Nader and Zamel having a strong grasp of the Kremlin’s interests, intentions, and efforts with respect to the 2016 presidential election at the time they met with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower in August 2016.
That Zamel has previously worked for both a man known to be a business associate of Donald Trump and another man accused of being involved in Russia’s 2016 election interference raises another troubling—if remote—possibility that may be addressed in any ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s election victory. In its undercover exposé of Cambridge Analytica and the exploits of its CEO, Alexander Nix, England’s Channel 4 captures Nix revealing that a favored Cambridge Analytica tactic, executed through one of its “vehicles” rather than itself, is to send an operative to a politician and “offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded. These sorts of tactics are very effective—instantly having video evidence of corruption.… We’ll have a wealthy developer come in—somebody posing as a wealthy developer—they will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign, in exchange for land, for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras.”381 Nix also discusses using “very beautiful Ukrainian girls” to catch a politician in an indelicate position on camera.382 Apropos of Nix’s reference to Ukraine, and in the process of providing a specific example of how Cambridge Analytica can and does work with outside outfits, Nix’s deputy Mark Turnbull tells Channel 4’s undercover reporters, “We’ve just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in a, um … Eastern European country … where they did a really—no one even knew they were there. They were just ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out, and produced really, really good material. So we have experience in doing this.”383 In light of Trump’s acknowledgment that his Moscow hotel room in late 2013 was audio and video bugged, and representations by Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who is a mutual business associate of both Trump and Aras