Picture an intelligence analyst in The Hague, coffee going cold beside the keyboard, capturing one screenshot after another as the man married to the President’s daughter logs into a bank account in Dubai holding hundreds of millions of dollars sent from a bank in Azerbaijan. According to Matthew Cole’s excerpt from his forthcoming book Princes and Thieves, published by Vanity Fair on October 22, 2026, Dutch intelligence allegedly captured screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone that revealed his access to foreign bank accounts, claims Kushner’s counsel denies. Every voter who cares about who our leaders answer to should read what follows.
The Man Handed the Middle East
Jared Kushner married Ivanka Trump in 2009. In 2017, Donald Trump named him Senior Advisor to the President. Before that, Kushner ran his family’s real estate company. He had no government experience. Then he received the Middle East portfolio, one of the hardest jobs in American foreign policy, with no Senate confirmation and no hearing, and the man at the top of his chain of command was his wife’s father, the President himself.
In 2018, intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer raised concerns about giving Kushner a top secret clearance, and as The New York Times reported in 2019, the President overruled them and ordered his chief of staff, John Kelly, to grant it, an order Kelly documented in writing. Trump denied playing any role, and Kushner’s lawyer said the clearance went through the regular process with no pressure from anyone. That same year, The Washington Post reported that officials in at least four countries privately talked about ways to manipulate Kushner by exploiting his tangled business deals and his thin foreign policy experience.
Give an untested man the keys to the Middle East with nobody watching, and foreign rulers will line up to test him.
Kushner left the White House in January 2021. He returned to Middle East diplomacy during Trump’s second term as an informal envoy, helped broker the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire, and now carries the President’s title of envoy of peace, a role the White House calls unofficial volunteer work.
How the Money Moved, According to the Investigation
Here is the story Cole’s reporting tells. In late 2017, Dutch military intelligence learned that a Russian GRU hacker was heading to England, and the British agreed to help catch him. The Dutch gave him a choice between working for them and going to a British prison. He chose to switch sides. He then gave the Dutch access to a GRU server in Rostov, Russia, where they found screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone X.
By early 2018 the Dutch had their own way in, one that let them see his screen as he used it, and they watched him log into the UAE account. The money had arrived from Azerbaijan, where some banks charge a fee of 6 to 7 percent to swap Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams for an equal amount of American dollars, a quiet trick that leaves auditors unable to see where the cash started. The original tip to Cole claimed Kushner moved large sums from that account to several people, including a warlord, a mercenary, a one time hit man, and others.
According to the Vanity Fair excerpt, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, first talked with Kushner about a slush fund of more than $10 billion. That plan fizzled. The two royals then put at least $2 billion into accounts for Kushner. This alleged money stands apart from the $2 billion that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund openly invested in Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, in 2021, after he left office.
The account Cole calls Alpha sat at First Abu Dhabi Bank, chaired by MBZ’s brother, Tahnoon bin Zayed, and it took in roughly $750 million. An Emirati charity called the Watani Al Emarat Foundation owned the account, and a source says the charity secretly paid for the UAE’s weapons purchases and hidden wars overseas. Kushner held signing power on it.
The account called Beta held about $1 billion at Israel’s Central Bank. The excerpt says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged that deposit and required Kushner to tell him before moving any money, with messages passed through Ambassador David Friedman. Much of that money reportedly flowed out through Cyprus. A third account paid Israel to defend the UAE against a major Iranian attack. All of this unfolded as Kushner Companies faced a billion dollar loan coming due on 666 Fifth Avenue.
Four senior Trump administration officials told Cole they knew of no presidential approval for Kushner to touch a foreign government’s account. In response to Vanity Fair’s reporting, Kushner’s lawyer says the accounts never existed and that Kushner obeyed every law, while Friedman calls the claims about him 100 percent false.
Paperwork Sinks People
Every trial lawyer learns early that federal cases usually turn on paperwork. The law requires any American with a financial interest in or signing authority over foreign accounts worth more than $10,000 combined at any point in the year to report them to the Treasury Department. Ownership makes no difference.
Federal rules define signing authority as the power to move the money by giving instructions to the bank, and that power alone creates the duty. A willful failure to report exposes a person to a civil penalty of up to $165,353 or half the account balance on the date of the violation, whichever is larger, assessed account by account and year by year. If the Alpha account held its full $750 million on a filing deadline, half of it comes to $375 million, a number big enough to swallow most American fortunes whole. The government has six years to assess that civil penalty.
White House staff also file yearly public financial disclosure forms, and knowingly and willfully leaving required information off them exposes a filer to civil fines and criminal prosecution. Those forms target the filer’s own financial interests and outside positions. A signing role on a charity’s account sits in a gray zone under those rules. An account held for Kushner’s personal benefit, as the Vanity Fair excerpt describes the Beta account, falls squarely inside them. A false answer on a security clearance form is its own federal crime.
Bribery and the Foreign Agent Problem
Federal law requires anyone who acts inside the United States at the direction of a foreign government, doing political work for it or pressing its interests with American officials, to register with the Justice Department within 10 days. Willfully skipping that step carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
A separate federal law goes further and makes it a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, for a government official to act as that kind of foreign agent at all, so no registration form would have saved a senior White House advisor taking direction from Abu Dhabi. The only exception covers special government employees whose agency head certifies the work serves the national interest.
Bribery works this way. The Supreme Court says a meeting or a phone call, standing alone, does not count as an official act worth a bribe. An agreement to act is enough, and pressuring or advising another official, knowing that advice will drive an official decision, counts too. Think about a senior advisor who promises two Gulf royals he will lean on the President about Iran policy and Saudi succession in exchange for $2 billion, and you have a picture that fits the bribery theory prosecutors use, the one where pressure on another official seals the deal. A former prosecutor from the Mueller investigation told Cole that if Kushner promised MBZ and MBS anything for that money, even a conversation with his wife’s father, he would have exposed himself to charges under the bribery and foreign agent laws.
Today’s Justice Department has stepped back from foreign agent prosecutions. In February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi limited criminal foreign agent charges to conduct resembling traditional espionage and disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. A September 2025 executive order partly revived enforcement, and the Bondi memo had not been rescinded when that order arrived.
Proof Decides It
Proof decides everything in court. The core evidence comes from foreign intelligence screenshots and unnamed sources, which an American judge would test piece by piece, and the five year clock on most federal crimes has already run on much of the conduct from 2017 and 2018.
A few rules stretch that clock. In foreign agent cases, it starts on the last day a person acted as an agent. Prosecutors who formally ask a foreign government for evidence are able to pause it for up to three years, and filings from Kushner’s final year in office sit at or near the five year line today, with the civil window for the foreign account penalty running six years.
What You Do Now
Congress holds subpoena power over witnesses and over records kept in the United States, including the records that dollar transfers leave behind at American correspondent banks. Committee chairs who control those subpoenas have every tool they need to put Kushner and Friedman under oath. Republican majorities run both chambers today, so nothing happens until democrats take back majority control in Congress. The Justice Department and the Treasury hold stronger tools still, including subpoenas to foreign banks that keep correspondent accounts here. Make them use it.
Call your representative and both of your senators today and demand hearings with witnesses under oath. The number is (202) 224-3121.
Next, pass this piece to someone you love who still thinks foreign money has no say in Washington, because the people who took that money are counting on your silence.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
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Most Popular Note
Jared mixes bribery with a generic dose of grifting and corruption! Only a family member of the autocracy/kleptocracy can get away with it all!
Even a hint of pervasive corruption, influence peddling, and personal enrichment requires — demands — investigation. Which we know this regime’s DoJ won’t do. So, as Mitch says, the task rests with the new Congress in January. Subpoena power, and testimony under oath. Period. A great start. But only a start. To find out where these threads leads.