economic development,” a role that would put him at the center of hundreds of billions of dollars in Middle East commerce.447 He is unable to secure the posting he wants, however.448 Later events suggest that Barrack’s long-standing ties to Qatar may have put him at odds with both Kushner’s private ambitions as a businessman and his public ambitions as an amateur diplomat. By the time of Trump’s May 2017 visit to Riyadh, Kushner has become close to MBS—and MBS is just weeks away from initiating an air, land, and sea blockade on Qatar. Moreover, in November 2017 MBS arrests and detains for three months Barrack’s former Saudi investing partner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. According to The Intercept, bin Talal may have been on a list of MBS’s enemies that MBS claims was given to him by Kushner in October 2017 (see chapter 8).449
Given bin Talal’s long-standing business relationship with Barrack, one of Trump’s closest friends, a call bin Talal makes just days prior to his arrest and detention in November 2017—after the first wave of MBS-ordered arrests and detentions in October 2017—will in 2018 draw significant media attention. Shortly before MBS’s agents place him under arrest, bin Talal calls Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, to “praise MBS” and his “vision” and to invite Khashoggi “to come back to the Kingdom and be part of [that vision].”450 Khashoggi “resist[s] [the] pressure from Riyadh” and does not return to Saudi Arabia.451
After Trump names Barrack the chairman of his inaugural committee instead of special Middle East envoy, Bloomberg quotes two sources who say they heard Barrack unhappily compare his transition role to that of a “wedding planner.”452
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.
Like several of his campaign aides, Ben Carson will end up on Trump’s transition team in November 2016.453 Trump thereafter successfully nominates him to be secretary of housing and urban development.
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—whose foreign policy views, according to the New York Times, were in 2015 undergirded by a devout belief that America “needed to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight [against terrorism]”—spent that year and the next receiving money from entities connected to three foreign countries: Israel (via a cyberweapons firm specializing in cell phone hacking), Turkey (via work for GreenZone Systems Inc., a firm run by an Iranian American businessman simultaneously working as an agent of the Turkish government), and Russia (via contracts with or appearances for Kaspersky Lab—“a Russian research firm that works to uncover Western government spyware, and whose founder has long been suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence services”—Volga Dnepr Airlines, and RT, the “Kremlin-financed news network”).454 For his efforts, Flynn earns in 2016, while acting as Trump’s top national security advisor, between $1.37 million and $1.47 million.455 Another company for which Flynn does consulting work, Brainwave Science, had previously seen one of its board members—and its principal investor—get “convicted [in the 1990s] of trying to sell stolen biotech material to the Russian KGB espionage agency.”456 The company’s chief scientist warned Flynn against working with Brainwave, in part due to the company being “the target of a federal investigation … [about which he] declined to provide further details” to the New York Times, but Flynn ignored him.457 “I’m a capitalist at heart,” Flynn tells the Times in October 2016.458
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.
The Daily Beast, writing of Zamel’s other business intelligence company, Wikistrat, notes that “the vast majority of Wikistrat’s clients [are] foreign governments … [and] the company work [is] not just limited to analysis. It also engage[s] in intelligence collection.”459 Zamel, who considers himself “the Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world,” per the Daily Beast, “exploits ‘in country … informants’ as sources.”460 Indeed, the digital media outlet confirms that prior to its closure 74 percent of Wikistrat’s revenue came from partnerships with governments, not private individuals, and that while Zamel unsuccessfully sought to recruit Flynn to his operations,