to the New York Times, in June 2016 Thomas Barrack and Ambassador al-Otaiba hatch a plot to “arrange a secret meeting between Paul Manafort”—who has just officially become Trump’s campaign manager, after doing the job unofficially for two months—and MBS.188 It is the perfect time for an introduction, the men reason, as Trump has just recently clinched the Republican nomination for president. Barrack, having gotten his friend Manafort his job with Trump, is now positioning Manafort as Trump’s intermediary to the Saudis; indeed, the Times notes that in an email to al-Otaiba, Barrack presents “a Manafort meeting as a prelude to an [MBS] meeting with Mr. Trump.”189 Barrack writes to al-Otaiba on June 21, “I would like to align in Donald’s mind the connection between the UAE and Saudi Arabia which we have already started with Jared.”190 Barrack feels urgency in connecting MBS and Trump because MBS has already secretly reached out to Trump for a meeting through Blackstone, a private equity company with whom Barrack’s own private equity firm competes—raising the possibility that Blackstone, not Barrack, will get credit for establishing a pre-general-election relationship between the Republicans’ designated presidential candidate and the Saudi crown prince.191
Blackstone is a particularly troubling MBS-Kushner interlocutor because the firm loans Kushner Companies $400 million between 2013 and mid-2017, when it receives a $20 billion investment from MBS just days after Trump (now president) and Jared Kushner negotiate what they say is a $350 billion arms deal with the Saudis.192 The MBS-Blackstone deal implies that MBS is shoring up one of Kushner’s most critical financial pipelines as a reward for steering the United States and the Saudi kingdom toward what Trump calls the biggest military equipment order in the two nations’ diplomatic history.193 The MBS-Kushner-Blackstone connection is made even more problematic by the presence of Blackstone’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Stephen Schwarzman—who is also the head of Trump’s business advisory council—in Riyadh with Kushner and the president.194 As Bloomberg will later report, “The Saudi promise to invest in Blackstone’s fund drove the firm’s stock up more than 8 percent.”195
In speaking to al-Otaiba about his friend Manafort, Barrack says Trump’s campaign manager is “totally programmed” on the present and future need for Trump to appreciate “the closeness and alignment of the UAE,” and he calls Manafort a “friend of [MBZ] and the UAE.”196 Though Barrack arranges a secret MBS-Manafort meeting for June 24, at a location designed to “avoid the news media,” Manafort cancels at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. Nevertheless, Manafort offers MBS two deliverables over the next three weeks: first, a private campaign “clarification” that “modulate[s]” Trump’s “Muslim ban” proposal (likely a promise that the kingdom will not be affected by the policy), and second, and more important, the removal of a platform plank at the Republican National Convention that would have, as Barrack put it to the Emiratis, “embarrass[ed]” Saudi Arabia by un-redacting certain pages of the federal government’s 9/11 report that pertain to the Saudis.197 Manafort’s ability to compel significant Republican platform changes to please foreign nationals on short notice underscores his involvement—much touted by his former employee Kilimnik overseas—in the even more controversial RNC platform change regarding the provision of lethal weaponry to anti-Kremlin Ukrainian rebels.
With Barrack having supplied the Emiratis with direct access to the Trump campaign through Kushner beginning in spring 2016, and with Manafort having delivered to the Saudis at least two pro-Saudi policy shifts in early summer, the question remained: What would the Trump campaign receive in return? Barrack communicates to al-Otaiba post-election his sense of anticipation for “the things that we will have to do together … together being the operative word,” and al-Otaiba replies, “Let’s do them together,” to which Barrack immediately assents. But what value did the Saudis and Emiratis offer the Trump campaign before it achieved victory on Election Day, if not payment for Psy-Group’s intelligence-gathering and disinformation services?198 A similar question must be asked with respect to what the Israelis expected would happen after Trump’s election as president.
Regarding the Israelis, one possible answer comes a few weeks after Trump calls Jerusalem “the eternal capital of the Jewish people” in a March 2016 speech to AIPAC—the same month his campaign begins seeking aid from Israeli company Psy-Group. That May, Trump discusses moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem with billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish mega-donor with a long history of donating to the GOP and such substantial connections to Benjamin Netanyahu that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert