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ColumnStars and Swipes
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, explosive new allegations and the questions over money
Marion McKeone looks at Jared Kushner’s extraordinary rise under his father-in-law’s presidency and how explosive new allegations have raised questions about his influence and business interests.
IN AUGUST 2022, Jared Kushner published Breaking History, a memoir detailing his achievements as a senior adviser during Trump’s first term.
Its self-aggrandising content, generously littered with admiring quotes testifying to his ‘genius’, and his ‘amazing’ skill in negotiating the Abraham Accords was shot down by a fusillade of savage reviews with critics variously describing it as a ‘cringeworthy’ effort of ‘college admissions essay’ standard.
“Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one,” New York Times critic Dwight Garner concluded.
Four years later, a very different book about Kushner’s first term has hit the shelves, amid a flurry of legal writs and threats from Kushner’s lawyers, who have tried to block its publication. It deals with much of the same turf covered by Kushner’s tome – but reaches altogether different conclusions.
In a nutshell, “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohammed Bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East” claims that a $2 billion slush fund was set up to run “off the books” operations by Kushner. In allegations that mirror the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration, the book claims that Trump’s most powerful foreign policy adviser was running a shadow foreign policy in cahoots with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, who was then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to author Matthew Cole, an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter who has worked for NBC, ABC and The Intercept, Netanyahu helped to facilitate and conceal the money trail, $1 billion of which Cole claims was deposited into Israel’s central bank under the guise of an official government account. He claims a separate account in a UAE bank, which contained around $750 million, was also for Kushner’s use.
The Dutch question
It’s claimed the trail started when Dutch intelligence officials, who first alerted the US Department of State to Russian hackers in 2014, ‘flipped’ a GRU (Russian Intelligence) operative who hacked into a GRU server that contained photos of Kushner’s iPhone. This marked the start of a trail that Cole claims led to the discovery of two bank accounts set up for Kushner’s ‘off the books’ operations.
The Netherlands Defence Intelligence and Security Service has refused to confirm or deny Cole’s reporting. But Kushner and his lawyers have vehemently denied the allegations in a 13-page letter to Simon & Schuster. They also sent a letter to Vanity Fair publishers, Condé Nast, demanding an immediate retraction of the excerpt it published.
Kushner has posted a separate denial on X, calling the allegations ‘outrageous and categorically false’ and ‘completely insane.’ In a separate statement, he points out that Cole has offered no verifiable evidence, such as bank statements or evidence of transactions, to support his claims.
.@VanityFair posted an excerpt from a book containing outrageous and categorically false allegations. The allegations made by this author are completely insane and never happened. We denied every one of these claims on the record, yet the author failed to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of them. No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided to support these extraordinary accusations. During the period in question, I was one of the most scrutinized people in the world, subjected to intense media coverage, multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel investigation. I voluntarily cooperated with these investigations, providing over 30 hours of testimony. None of these allegations ever surfaced, because none of these events ever happened. These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism. This is not journalism. It is a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.
— Jared Kushner (@jaredkushner) October 22, 2026
Not only has Simon & Schuster decided to publish and be damned in the face of a lawsuit that would bring the resources and power of the Trump administration down on its head; the publishing giant pushed its publication date forward to meet the surge of public interest that followed the Vanity Fair excerpt.
The allegations have triggered a furore in the United States and beyond, but Cole is no stranger to controversy. His previous books include an in-depth exposé of the CIA’s rendition programme. More explosive was Code Over Country, a damning indictment of leadership cover-ups of brutality and egregious battlefield misconduct by the ultra-elite Navy Seal Team Six. While Cole’s earlier books triggered fierce pushback from the Pentagon and the CIA, none of his core claims have been debunked or disproven.
Accountability
If the reports are accurate, it would raise serious questions about criminal violations of multiple federal laws. Cole’s book, together with a lengthy investigative report in the New Yorker magazine last month, claiming Kushner’s private equity firm has received more than $5 billion in investments since Trump’s return to the Oval Office, has Democrats champing at the bit.
Senior Democrats have pledged a wide-ranging investigation into whether Kushner’s Middle Eastern business interests and his role as a special envoy have violated any laws, If, as is widely expected, Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives next week, Cole’s book and the New Yorker report will provide a roadmap of sorts for investigations by the House Judiciary, Intelligence and Oversight Committees, which can force Kushner to testify and provide records related to his business dealings. If Democrats also take control of the Senate, Kushner will likely experience the Congressional equivalent of a simultaneous endoscopy and colonoscopy.
It’s difficult to think of anyone who better exemplifies the art of failing upwards than Trump’s son-in-law – or anyone who is more oblivious to the role played by others in negotiating and facilitating his enrichment.
Kushner’s father, Charlie, a convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump, and the current US Ambassador to France, invested millions of dollars in his eldest son; a below average student who has parlayed mediocrity into a position of unprecedented power in shaping US foreign policy, which has in turn leveraged billions of dollars’ worth of investment into his private equity firm.
The Kushner family made its fortune through its ownership of multiple low-rent apartment buildings in New Jersey. Despite his poor grades, Kushner was admitted to Harvard shortly after a $2.5 million pledge by his father, who subsequently bought The New York Observer for his 25-year-old son. For $10 million, the once-witty chronicler of New York’s cultural, political and social elites provided Kushner with an entrée to Manhattan society that would never have been afforded to the scion of a New Jersey slum landlord and felon.
Kushner showed little aptitude as a newspaper owner. Sales plummeted and editors quit but he managed to ingratiate himself with powerful figures like Rupert Murdoch and married the daughter of one of Manhattan’s most controversial property developers. Amongst New York’s social elite, Kushner and Ivanka were regarded as strictly second tier; but that was before Trump became President.
During Trump’s first term, Kushner and his wife Ivanka earned $620 million while working as White House senior advisers. He’s been accused of using his stature as Trump’s closest adviser to lay the foundations for a lucrative payoff, befriending the Saudi and Abu Dhabi Crown Princes and delivering Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish list – tacit approval for Israel’s brutal annexation of the West Bank, the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, slashing US aid to Palestinians and locking them out of talks about their future.
Underestimating Kushner
White House senior staffers and Republican Congressional leaders – who had dismissed Kushner as a vapid but relatively benign presence – grew alarmed when he started meddling in foreign policy. Since then, it’s been hard to keep track of the constellation of Middle Eastern Princes and Sheikhs that have intersected with Kushner in his quest for ever greater wealth.
In 2007, Kushner paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue – more than twice what the dilapidated office building was worth. In 2018, when imminent foreclosure threatened to scuttle the family business, the Qataris helped with a $1.2 billion bailout that was widely construed by some in government as an inducement to Kushner to withdraw support for an economic chokehold imposed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
When Kushner exited the White House in early 2021, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman became one of the first investors in Kushner’s newly launched Affinity Partners, providing a $2 billion investment in his private equity start up. After Trump’s 2024 victory, the Qataris and the UAE Investment Authority ponied up at least another $3 billion.
A lengthy New Yorker report by Dexter Filkins last month cast a spotlight on the Venn Diagram that represents the overlap between Kushner’s private investment business and his role as an unvetted envoy who has been dispatched by Trump, alongside his former golf buddy Steve Witkoff, to broker peace deals between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Russians and the Ukrainians and the US, Israel and Iran. Neither Kushner nor Witkoff have been subjected to any vetting procedure, and their appointments have evaded the Senate confirmation process.
During his first term, Kushner’s application for top secret security clearance in January 2017, was denied largely because intelligence intercepts revealed that senior Chinese, Israeli and UAE intelligence believed Kushner was ripe for manipulation.
There was also concern about his family’s close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been a close friend of the Kushner family for decades, even sleeping in Kushner’s childhood bed during non-official visits to the US in the 1990s, while Kushner was temporarily relegated to the basement.
Regardless, Trump insisted that he be provided with ‘interim clearance’ but in 2018 White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a former four star general and a stickler for protocol, ordered that Kushner’s clearance be downgraded. Trump overruled Kelly, who was so concerned by the potential consequences of Kushner having access to America’s most sensitive intelligence, he wrote a memo noting his concerns and that he had been ordered to bypass the standard protocols by Trump.
The second time around, no such guardrails were even contemplated.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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