10/28/26: UAE Secretly Helping Houthis Against Saudis, Kushner Lawsuit Over Bribery Allegations

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0:20 Ryan Grimm has new reporting over at Dropsite. And this time it is on the UAE and the Yemen conflict. Ryan, what do you have for us?

0:28 Yeah, so this is a news story with my colleague at Dropsite, Iona Craig, that according to four sources with knowledge of the situation, the United Arab Emirates, which is a staunch ally of Israel and the United States, has been covertly assisting Ansar Allah, which is a staunch ally of Iran. They're also known as the Houthis. All this is in their war against Saudi Arabia inside Yemen. So two sources said that the assistance involved direct communication between between the UAE and Ansar Allah. All four sources said that the militias inside Yemen that have been backed by the UAE have been providing intelligence and targeting assistance to Ansar Allah. A Yemeni source familiar with this back channel

1:14 told us, quote, the UAE has passed a significant amount of intelligence to the Sana'a-based government. The line of communication between the two sides remains open. Ansar Allah has established their own channels of communication internally with military commanders who remain loyal to the UAE. The sources required anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the arrangement.

1:35 This arrangement is extraordinary because the UAE is directly aiding one of its chief regional opponents. The UAE and Ansar Allah are fierce ideological enemies with directly opposing geopolitical goals. The UAE is allied with the U.S. and Israel, while Ansar Allah, as I said, is a close ally of Iran. However, When it comes to Yemen, their interests overlap to an extent, producing the classic enemy of my enemy situation. Earlier this year, the UAE was sidelined in Yemen by Saudi Arabia, so they stand to regain a strategic foothold in Yemen in this current conflict. Some of the sources said the assistance from the UAE is limited to the conflict inside Yemen and does not include help with intelligence and targeting inside

2:18 Saudi Arabia. Ansar Allah has conducted attacks inside Saudi Arabia including strikes on their main airport recently. Ansar Allah in recent months has been remarkably effective at targeting commanders among the Saudi-backed fighters and in anticipating the movements of their forces. Two rounds of precision strikes on October 7th and October 2nd at the coalition military base west of Aden put this on display. One hit the doorway to the office of the Saudi commander, though he was not present. Another hit brand new military vehicles, that were brought to the base a few hours earlier.

2:55 Now, the U.S.

2:56 Knows this is going on. Recently, a senior American official warned the Emiratis that the U.S. had learned of the covert assistance being provided and urged that it be ended. Sources indicated the intelligence assistance, however, was ongoing. UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yusuf Al-Oteba did not respond to my requests for comment. Ansar Allah, meanwhile, denied that the alliance had come together. Mohammed al-Bukhari, a senior Ansar Allah official, denied that the UAE was assisting Ansar Allah, but insisted the Emiratis were committed to neutrality.

3:28 He told Dropsite. And we could put this up here.

3:30 The UAE has not provided any form of support to Yemen, neither against Saudi Arabia nor against its proxies within Yemen. According to our information, the UAE remains committed to to neutrality and has refused to become re-involved in the aggression against Yemen alongside Saudi Arabia, despite persistent efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to persuade it to join. Now, last month, Ansar Allah launched a blitz to the Red Sea coast, leaving them in control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a key alternate route to the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

4:05 The Saudis have unsuccessfully tried to regain the territory and since then have been increasingly bombing Sana'a and other Ansar Allah-controlled areas of Yemen, while Ansar Allah has conducted strikes on Saudi Arabia. Beginning in 2015, the Emiratis and the Saudis were allied as part of a coalition backing the Yemeni government after Ansar Allah took over Sana'a in 2014.

4:27 What is left of the Yemeni government, commonly referred to as the Internationally Recognized Government or IRG, remains largely based in a hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But early in the conflict, the UAE's aims and ambitions were at odds with the Saudis, causing division in the anti-Houthi side. In December of last year, that friction resulted in the clashes between UAE-backed forces and Saudi-backed military units in the south that led to the UAE effectively packing up and leaving Yemen. Now, earlier this month, The Guardian reported that the UAE was re-entering the Yemeni conflict on the side of Saudi Arabia by agreeing to resume some payments to some of the forces it had backed. That backing would most likely come

5:10 through supporting the so-called Giants Brigades, a predominantly Salafi militia ideologically opposed to the Houthis, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 largely Southern fighters. The Southern Giants are currently battling for control of the Khabib mountain range overlooking the Bab al-Mandeb. This potential support, however, has not been reflected on the battlefield, a Yemeni source said. Many commanders within the giant's brigades have deceived the Saudi-backed forces, the sources said, repeatedly abandoning their positions without any engagement or confrontation. A source told us that military unit commanders affiliated with the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, the STC, have refrained from fighting the Houthis,

5:52 effectively stalling battlefronts, particularly Yemeni. in the southern governance of al-Dali and Laj that are bordering the Taiz government, and they frequently withdraw from their positions unexpectedly. A UAE-based senior official categorically stated to Dropside that STC has no channels of communication with the Houthis, and they denied that STC was refusing to fight Ansar Allah in the south. Quote, the SEC has publicly and consistently maintained that the southern armed forces will not participate in military operations in the north.

6:27 This should not be confused with an unwillingness to confront the Houthis.

6:30 Quite the opposite.

6:31 Any Houthi advance towards the south will be met with resistance. It is important to distinguish between our policy of not engaging in military operations in the north and our firm commitment to defending the south against the Houthis, he added. Yet, In an indication of both how the UAE operates in Yemen and sentiment in the south towards the Saudi-backed IRG, when asked by Dropsite which of the fighting groups formerly funded and commanded by the UAE would likely be willing to provide intelligence to the Houthis for targeting IRG forces, an individual close to the STC quipped, quote, probably all of them. Ansar Allah's al-Bukhari, in his statement to Dropsite, elaborated further. He says, Saudi Arabia was the one that

7:12 forced the UAE out of the coalition waging war on Yemen in a humiliating manner, effectively shooting itself in the foot. Given this experience, it is only natural that the UAE would refuse to rejoin the Saudi-led coalition in its aggression against Yemen, despite pressure from Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel, particularly after Yemen demonstrated its remarkable ability to to defend itself and impose a principle of blockade for blockade and escalation for escalation. So even as al-Bukhari is denying the alliance, those are rather conciliatory remarks toward the UAE, which Ansar Allah has enormous enmity toward. He goes on, however, this does not mean that an alliance exists between the

7:52 UAE and Yemen out of spite toward Saudi Arabia or as a means of settling scores with it. As for reports circulating about an attempt by the UAE to contact us to form an alliance against Saudi Arabia, they are entirely baseless. Saudi Arabia does not need to beg countries around the world to defend it, nor does it need to worry about the possibility of a future Yemeni-Emirati alliance against it. All it needs to do is agree to end the war and lift the blockade on both sides.

8:18 This is the only genuine way out of this conflict, unquote. Now, al-Bukhari's reference there to, quote, the possibility of a future Yemeni-Emirati alliance, contains a thinly veiled suggestion. Saudi Arabia, he says, need not worry about such an alliance as long as they.

8:34 End the war and lift the blockade.

8:36 If they do not do so, however, he's saying, the threat of such an alliance hangs over the conflict. So we posted this story, Emily, yesterday, and there was an interesting reaction to it. On the one hand, a lot of people were saying, well, of course, this is how the UAE operates. We've assumed that this was the case.

8:57 While some kind of partisans of Ansar Allah have said, we don't believe this to be the case, because to them, it's embarrassing that they would be cooperating with an American ally, an Israeli ally. And the Emiratis have carried out probably, let's not compare atrocities, but the Emiratis have carried out some of the most disgusting and outrageous crimes against humanity inside Yemen over the past decade.

9:27 Including there was this.

9:29 Associated Press investigation into a torture dungeon that the Emiratis were operating where they were literally roasting detainees over a spit, like the most extreme forms of torture that you could possibly imagine. And so the idea of even a short-term alliance of convenience with a country that was doing that in Yemen would just be, you know, is just politically...

9:55 untenable to discuss publicly. So what you have is you have the major actor you know, publicly denying that this is going on. But what I can say is that we would not have gone to press with this investigation if we were not 100% certain that this was happening. And it raises real questions about the United States relationship with the UAE.

10:20 The U.S.

10:21 Is in an open war with Iran, has a ceasefire with the Houthis. And here is the UAE working with the same organization that Iran is working with against our allies, our other quote unquote ally, Saudi Arabia.

10:39 Yeah.

10:39 So what do you make of what this means for our relations in the region there?

10:45 Well, that's what I was going to pick up on with you is just you're reporting that the U.S. is aware of this. Can you tell us any more about how do we know with what confidence the U.S. believes this is happening? Are they fully confident this is happening? How long have they known? What can you tell us about that?

11:00 My understanding is that they know that this assistance goes back to before that blitz to the to the coast that Ansar Allah pulled off and they they're confident about it. and that they have conveyed to the Emiratis, hey, we know this is happening. This is against American interests in the region. Now, from the Emirati perspective, they don't see this as, they're not giving help inside Saudi Arabia. So they're not helping target the airports, not helping target the oil infrastructure. But what they're helping do is push Saudi forces Saudi-backed forces out of the region and giving more space then for their own forces. The idea that there's going to be some type of long-term coalition with Ansar

11:56 Allah is silly. That's headed for confrontation. But my understanding is that the hope among the Emiratis would be that they would then remain in control of a swath of southern Yemen and reach some form of detente Because, you know, there was a North and South Yemen up until about, what, 1990. And there's a Southern separatist movement that wants to go back to there being two Yemen's. And so they're hoping that they can get to that sort of a stable situation and they can focus their energy instead on the Horn of Africa, where the UAE has all sorts of interests in commodities and port infrastructure and the kind of flow of goods, money and minerals.

12:41 And do you think this makes it us more or less likely or Trump more or less likely to escalate American intervention after the midterms? I would assume less.

12:50 It's certainly another sign of the wheels coming off.

12:55 But the Trump administration seems intent on going back to war, period.

13:01 And bear in mind, aren't they building a Trump golf course in Abu Dhabi right now? And isn't MBZ also leveraged with Kushner?

13:10 Big time.

13:11 In fact, we're going to be talking to Matt Cole in a moment about the roots of that relationship. A lot of it comes back to Yemen. MBS was the minister of defense in Saudi Arabia before he became crown prince. And he, in launching this war against Yemen, raised his stature. And then in 2017, he was able to basically violently oust MBN, who was in line to be king and was crown prince at the time, made himself king. crown prince and he did so with the aggressive assistance of the uae of mbz so mbs was put into place significantly by mbz uh and now here they are um you know at you know effectively in a proxy war with each other absolutely insane There's a new book out making explosive revelations by investigative journalist Matthew Cole. It's called

14:08 Princes and Thieves, Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Zayed's secret plot to remake the Middle East. Now, you may have seen an excerpt of it making the rounds this weekend in Vanity Fair, which focused on three slush funds that Matthew Cole reported had been created by by both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, that Jared Kushner had access to and was able to distribute funds from. Now, Matthew Cole joins us now, my former colleague and the author of this new book.

14:45 Matt, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Ryan. I want to make one correction. There were two funds, not three. There was a third account. We can get into that later. But in terms of pools of money that were available for Jared Kushner, there were two. What was the third one? The third one was in the course of the negotiations, the secret relationship and negotiations going on between Kushner, Israel and the UAE. Kushner negotiated a sort of a rainy day fund for Israel. the UAE to get defense help from Israel in case there was ever an attack from Iran. And actually, it's important to note that all he did was, there's no suggestion that his involvement in that, there was anything wrong with it

15:34 at all. It was one of the reasons why it's in the book was to indicate that the mechanism that they were using was the central bank, which is the same mechanism that the US government uses when it supplies money for Weapons and defense items that it gives to Israel. And so it was in that same mechanism that what I call the beta account was set up. And so and one of the other reasons I was in there is that there is some indication now, you know, that happened in 2018, that negotiation and money and agreement between Israel, the UAE and Kushner at the time. We know now from the spring during after the war in Iran started that.

16:19 Israel provided part of the Iron Dome to the UAE and operated it for the UAE in the UAE. And so it's possible that the money that was in that account paid for that. It would make it would be very logical. Right.

16:36 And what's interesting about all of this is that while it's been met with a lot of shock, these kinds of slush funds range from the fairly mundane, normal parts of kind of business in the Gulf. to kind of more extraordinary when they become more for the personal benefit of particular officials. But the book has gotten an enormous amount of attention. You know, Chris Hayes covered it. You know, you were on Chris Hayes. People should check out that interview.

17:05 John Stewart recently, the New York Times, and you can put E3 up on the screen, New York Times recently discussed the book, calling it the revelations, you know, quite head-turning and urging Congress to, to take a closer look at what you found here to try to pull on some more of these threads. Now, before we get into some of this, of course, let's talk about the reaction from Jared Kushner. We can put up E4 here. His lawyer has threatened to launch some sort of defamation suit.

17:37 I don't know if he has done that yet, but that is a threat that's out there.

17:43 Let me take the opportunity to say that Jared Kushner and his lawyer unequivocally and deny everything that's in the book that they have. They said all of it is untrue. They've described the reporting as crazy, insane. I think the last one that I read from Mr. Kushner was that he thought that this demonstrated or suggested sinister intent. And so, you know, his we went to him before we obviously before we published the Um, they denied everything. I sent him, I think, you know, 50 or 60 questions. Um, every one of them was denied. We printed.

18:24 And we can actually link to that because his lawyer posted those questions and responses.

18:28 So we can link to that in the description. That's right. And, and so he denies everything. Um, we, uh, printed all of those denials. The book reflects those denials. After he provided those denials through a lawyer, I went back to some of my sources, my key sources, to discuss it with them and was unmoved by his denials. I stand by the story. My sources are very, very firm on the information that's in the book. And I believe that what's in the book is the truth. And in fact, I think what we're going to find over time is that this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

19:07 You know, there's the we can get into the details of there's a lot of different stories. And obviously, the bank accounts and the hacking has been explosive. But it's really part of a larger story of how Kushner ran a shadow foreign policy from the White House and found himself in sort of like a real life Game of Thrones in between three very wealthy Gulf Arab rulers at a time in which His family was facing an enormous debt, and he was trying to find a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

19:43 And so we reached out to Jared Kushner. He didn't respond to our request. We invited him onto the program. and that invitation.

19:53 Maintains.

19:54 The White House forwarded their public statements to us. So we reached out to them for comments. Stephen Chung, for instance, said this BS Vanity Fair article comes from a book that is complete fiction and was fabricated from the warped mind of failed spy thriller writer He presents no evidence or even a shred of documentation, just mysterious words from unnamed sources.

20:16 Total fake news.

20:17 Now, Vanity Fair noticeably has left its article up despite the demand for retraction. Simon & Schuster is the publisher of this book. Before we get into it, I want to talk about this particular property deal that led to the kind of uncovering by the Qataris of this slush fund. Right before we get into that, can you talk about what the fact-checking and legal review process was? For Simon & Schuster to publish, I think Jon Stewart called it a big swing. For Simon & Schuster to publish a big swing like this, they don't do it haphazardly.

20:55 What can you tell us, without.

20:57 Revealing any sources or kind of internal reporting, what can you tell us about what kind of fact-check and legal review process this went through?

21:06 Well, we went through an extensive one. We got both fact-checking and probably the most thorough legal review I've ever had in 25 years as a reporter. This doesn't come out of nowhere. I built this from five years of reporting and another seven or eight years prior to that, beginning when you and I were colleagues at The Intercept.

21:25 This is a methodical brick-by-brick, built on a foundation brick-by-brick, and it's You know, I had the book, I think, includes over 50 sources. And so, you know, we held I held myself to a very high standard, the normal standard I've held myself to my entire career. And we're very confident that what's in the book is absolutely true.

21:50 And in fact, you know, again, I keep saying this. It's it's it's not just true. It's underselling it. I mean, I was conservative in what I didn't put in that I couldn't verify or didn't have enough sourcing to to justify putting into the book.

22:04 And so let's put up E8 here, because I want to start with this extraordinary real estate transaction. This is a story that I was part of actually reporting back at the Intercept. Our headline at the time was Jared Kushner tried and failed to get a half billion dollar bailout from Qatar. And what's important about continuing to follow the money is that failure turned into success, as you ultimately found. And there was some reporting over the past several years that kind of alluded to how this unfolded.

22:39 So tell us about this building, this 666 Fifth Avenue that Kushner bought, I believe it was in 2007, and how it ended up playing a role, such a pivotal role in our foreign policy in the Gulf and also leads.

22:55 To some of what you uncovered.

22:59 Yeah.

22:59 So, you know, the 666 Fifth Avenue was the Kushner Company's trophy purchase in 2007. It was part of a plan to sort of remake and relaunder the Kushner Company's image because Jared Kushner's father, Charlie Kushner, had gone to prison for tax fraud and sexual blackmail. And it was Remaking is part of that process. Jared took over the face, took over as the face of the company. They buy this huge property, which at the time was the most expensive single building purchase in the country. And they bought it right before the market dropped in 2008 and it became a albatross. And so very quickly after they bought that building, they were looking at a massive debt of over a billion dollars. Fast forward to Trump winning office.

23:53 The debt loan, the loan on 666 was due, I believe, in 2019, early 2019. And so they were facing this and it had the potential to wipe out the family's wealth, certainly the company. I mean, they just didn't have the money. Badly underwater at that point. Very badly underwater. It wasn't worth anywhere near it. In fact, one of its owners, one of the minority owners in the building at the time said that it was worth more as dirt. The dirt underneath it was worth more than the building itself. And, um, and so he came in and that's valuable dirt, but so he, he comes into office. Um, he comes into the white house as underqualified gets the job, um, because he's the son-in-law and his family's in debt, big debt.

24:38 And so there is this pressure that's there from the beginning and the report that you pulled up, which was the effort, uh, for him to try to sell it, um, the family to try to sell it, I should say. The building just before Trump comes into office, but while he's running and after he wins, it goes awry. And that's because the Qatari official, former official who they were trying to sell it to, was nervous about how it would look if they were to put in $ 500 million.

25:10 So he says no and nixes it. And what transpires over the next several months, again, some of the reporting that you did while we were at the intercept together and is cited in the book. And I confirmed independently is that even while, um, Trump, uh, Kushner was in the white house, um, in early 2017, his father is desperately trying to get the Qataris to, to pay for the building. Now let's bring ourselves up to the late spring, early summer of, of 2017. MBZ, the leader of the UAE and MBS, the, uh, sort of king-in-waiting who's trying to move Iran up towards the throne from Saudi Arabia, decide that they want to have a blockade against Qatar.

25:55 And at that moment, as the reporting indicates and my reporting shows and other reporting has backed up, Kushner essentially greenlit the blockade without anyone else in the U.S. government knowing. Kushner and Trump on one side and Secretary Tillerson and Defense Secretary Mattis on the other about this blockade.

26:24 There's a 10,000 member, 10,000 service member base in Qatar, which is now being blockaded by our allies. So let's give people that context.

26:33 Right.

26:33 I'm sure that your readers, your viewers know. But, you know, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all have U.S. troops and presence. They're they're allies. And so this was a conflict that arises between, you know, two allies ganging up against a third. And so there's this civil war over in this fight inside the administration at the senior levels about what to do and how to respond. And one of the things that was slightly reported, but it was missed at the time, was that part of the blockade, one of the things that was going to happen in the blockade was that the Saudis were going to roll militarily over the border into Qatar, with a UAE support in the air to try to overthrow the Qatari emir, Tamim al-Thani. And so that only gets prevented because Secretary

27:26 Tillerson phones MBS, who had not yet become crown prince, and says, absolutely not, you cannot do this. And MBS backs down. From the Qatari perspective, they were aware and understood that Tillerson essentially had prevented them from being from a military incursion by the Saudis. OK, so that's sort of the start. At the same time, OK, and what the book lays out is around the same time that the blockade begins. MBZ and MBS have agreed to and started initially providing these pools of money into bank accounts for Saudi in coordination with Jared Kushner that he's going to manage. There are a lot of questions about exactly when, was it in exchange for the blockade? Was it coincidental?

28:21 That's something that we don't know. What I know is that the money began then. So then you get a sort of standoff that goes on inside the government, inside the US government. Kushner and Trump Trump is saying publicly, we're with the Saudis and we're with the Emiratis. Qataris are bad. They fund the Muslim Brotherhood. They fund terrorism.

28:46 Tillerson and Mattis are saying, hey, let's bring the temperature down. The solution is diplomatic. We don't need a war. We're all allies here. They have 10,000 troops of ours and a very important operating base for our wars in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. We need them. We have to settle this, you know, sort of privately. and gentlemanly.

29:06 And in that time, the Qatari government and royal family discovers that MBS and MBZ have started, they have this financial arrangement with Jared Kushner. And so now they have a question of what do they do with this information? And so they're mulling it and they're sifting when they're trying to figure out what to do. And as one source of mine who was quoted in the book, former US intelligence officer said to me, You know, what the Qataris were doing is they kept on saying to the Trump administration, what do we have to do to resolve this blockade? And the answer they got was never direct.

29:41 There would be another conversation that would come separately, another message that would come back from the Kushner family saying, we have this building that needs to be bailed out. We have this property that needs to be bought. And the Qataris were sort of saying, no, thanks, the building is not worth anything. We're not interested. And they would go back to the White House a few weeks or months later and say, what do we have to do to resolve this blockade? And again, the message would come back to Doha. The Kushner family has this building that needs to be saved. And so then in March of 2018, Trump fires Secretary Tillerson. And that's the moment when the royal family in Doha loses their mind. They're panicked. From

30:26 their perspective, the only person who is standing in the way of a MBS or an MBZ-led incursion into Qatar is Secretary Tillerson. And so now they have to make a decision. And what the book lays out, according to four people who were involved– or had some involvement or knowledge about the deal, they decided that they were going to secretly arrange for 666 to be purchased by essentially a front. So they have plausible deniability and sort of, because from their perspective, the Trump administration and Jared Kushner had extorted them from their view. And this was the only way they were going to preserve themselves. And so you have this extraordinary moment where, you know, officially, the company that purchased the 666 and bails them out in

31:16 the spring and into the summer of 2018 is a large Canadian real estate company of which the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund is a passive investor in one of their companies. It happens to be the company that purchased the building. And so it's hard not to look at the sequence of events and the reporting I have and not see this as some form of extortion. Now, I want to point out, Kushner denies all of this. He says there was no quid pro quo, that he had no financial interest in the building. I think what the book lays out, I think what common sense tells us, of course, is that his family was facing a potentially, you know, financially fatal debt. And at a time when he found himself negotiating between two sides of, you know, let's just call

32:06 it a Cold War and a standoff in which he was receiving or had entered into these secret financial arrangements with one half of that party. And so it's, you know, it's extraordinary, to be honest with you.

32:22 And just to buttress a little bit of that particular element of the reporting, the story I put up a moment ago from June 2017, interviewed a Qatari source who, and I'll read the last paragraph here, I wrote, we wrote, had the Qataris known where things were heading diplomatically, said a source in the region, they'd have happily ponied up the money, even knowing that it was a losing investment. Quote, it would have been much cheaper, he said. So in other words, the Qataris told us at the time, we thought this was a business pitch. We thought the Kushner companies was coming to us because we are real estate investors and they had a real estate property. We didn't realize at the time How much was at stake geopolitically?

33:08 If we had, we would have made the investment because it would have been much cheaper than getting blockaded and nearly invaded. So that's June 2017. Kushner obviously read this story, but they were sending public signals by that time that they understood what was going on. So it puts into context this 2018 deal that is finally made by the Qatari-backed real estate company.

33:32 I want to offer just a little bit of nuance. The book does not lay out, my reporting does not say that the blockade was permitted or that Kushner's support of the blockade was because of the building not being sold previously to the Qatari rejection of it, nor that it was because he had entered into the secret agreement with bank accounts with MBS and MBZ at the time.

33:57 I only note that that the bank accounts and the first money that starts to flow into these pools start around, I mean, within weeks of the announcement of the blockade.

34:10 And so talk a little bit about then these slush funds that you identify. How did, you know, how do we learn about these?

34:23 Well, my first indication and tip came from a source who, was reporting and had questions about a Dutch government hack into Jared Kushner's phone in or the discovery of a hack of Jared Kushner's phone in late 2017. And I first was told about it in mid 2020. And at that point, source was was inquiring whether or not I could help fill in some gaps or understanding about what it could mean. And What it stemmed from was the Dutch had run an operation against the Russians. Eventually, they ended up inside a Russian server controlled by the GRU.

35:10 They see that Jared Kushner's phone's been hacked by the Russians. They ultimately decide that they're also going to hack Jared's phone and look inside, see if they can recreate it. They're successful. They don't control the phone. They can see his phone.

35:24 And there's a Russian GRU agent who gets flipped who's involved in this.

35:27 What happened there? Yeah, there was a GRU operative who was traveling to the UK. The Dutch ran an operation to stop them and give them an opportunity to work for them or to end up in a UK prison. He agreed to cooperate. He provided them access to a server in Rostov, Russia. evidence that Kushner's phone was being monitored by the Russian service. And so they then decide, they make a decision that they're going to try to recreate, figure out how the Russians got in. They do. They eventually decide that they're going to maintain their ability to look inside the phone. In the course of that, they see Kushner's access to one of the bank accounts. In the book, I describe this as a alpha account that's

36:27 held in the UAE. I want to stop here for one second and just say that initially, as I report in the book, initially this story seemed, was initially hard to believe. Over a long period of time, I was able to independently corroborate and verify from sources in other parts of the world who actually initially didn't know anything about the hack. They only knew about the bank accounts and the financial arrangements. And so there was independent verification on my end that had me going again from what to, whoa, maybe there's something here. And the reason why it took five years is because it took a long time to pull all the threads and stack up enough sourcing and information to be very confident and details, verifiable details on

37:24 my end. And so they see this bank account. The Dutch are very perplexed. You have hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into what I'll call the alpha account into a bank, the first Abu Dhabi bank in a branch in Dubai. And that money is coming in from Azerbaijan, which is very strange as far as the Dutch are concerned.

37:48 And I want to just point out at this moment, the Dutch service focuses almost exclusively on on the GRU and the Russians, right? They're a NATO ally. That's their big enemy. That's where they pay attention. At the same time, you had the Trump-Russia hysteria in the U.S. And so NATO was very concerned about Trump's policies, period, and view towards NATO. He was very aggressive and not particularly friendly when he came into office. And so one of the questions that was arising for the Dutch was, you know, is this Russian money going to Jared Kushner or what, what is this about? Um, and so, and part of it was because money was coming in from Azerbaijan. So what I was able to uncover about that account was

38:37 Azerbaijan was just a laundering point. And this first alpha pool was a pool of money that was effectively, um, paid for by MBS in Saudi Arabia, but managed in the UAE by MBZ. And the account that, uh, Kushner had access to. The Alpha account was actually a bank account held and owned by a Emirati charity called Watani al-Emirat.

39:05 That charity served as a front for secret UAE military and intelligence covert operations. And so now the money is sitting in this account. And what the Dutch see and what I separately confirmed later is that Money from that account goes out to people like Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to the Libyan renegade general, Khalifa Haftar. And so Alpha looks like, and visually, if you will, but also in the reporting, like a foreign policy fund, sort of like Iran-Contra, where Kushner is working with the Emiratis and the Saudis on their plan to effect change in the Middle East and North Africa, to remake the Middle East, overthrow the government in Tripoli, for instance, in Libya, potentially,

39:58 you know, bring in mercenaries to solve and fight the war in Yemen against the Houthis, right? These are examples of things that are going on and things that they were trying to do. Now, let's pause here. Then there's a separate account, the beta account. The beta account was funded by MBZ for Jared. The words I use in the in the book based on my sourcing is for his personal benefit. Now, what the book does not have, what I am not reporting is whether Kushner took money for his personal benefit from that account. And if so, how much? What I know is that the– and what the book lays out is that the money was put in– held in the Central Bank of Israel at Netanyahu's suggestion, serving essentially as a custodian for this secret account for Kushner.

40:52 And it's open for interpretation as to what was done with that money. The book lays out a mechanism in which money was moving out of that account to other accounts. But that's where I lost its trail. And so combined– Sorry, go ahead.

41:07 One of the criticisms from Kushner and others has been, that's just not how the Central Bank of Israel operates.

41:13 What's the response to that? I'm really glad you asked. The claims that it's not true, it doesn't work that way, is an entire and I think intentional mischaracterization of what I reported. What's in the book and what book lays out is it makes it very clear that the central, the account, beta account was held in the central bank specifically and for the intent of hiding its true purpose, which was it was a UAE government-funded money that goes into the Israeli Central Bank, which only serves for a government purpose. It does not hold personal accounts. The book does not describe the beta account as a personal account in Jared's name. It had a whole mechanism that was set up that Netanyahu was involved with in helping to

42:01 move the money out. And so it's about putting the pool of money in a place that was deniable. And it's about how the money flows out, some of the details I have, some of which I don't, and where it ends up in. So the notion that it can't be is just false.

42:23 Second criticism is that you haven't personally seen the financial ledgers, the documents yourself.

42:30 Well, I don't know where that comes from. I'm not going to say what I have seen or what I've not seen. Oh, sorry.

42:36 Kushner's criticism was you have not published, to be more precise.

42:41 Financial ledgers. And that's absolutely right. One of the costs of being an investigative reporter, and you know this well, Ryan, is that we rely on anonymous sources. It's the bread and butter of American investigative journalism since Watergate. And in this particular case, and I think readers should get the book and read the book. And it'll be abundantly clear that this is a story that has sexual blackmail, murder, assassins, and mercenaries. This is real stuff. And the sources who are willing to talk and share what they know, share what they have or may not have, put their lives on the line. And so one of the things that I had to, one of the calculations that I had to make, and I think every journalist in this situation

43:23 has to make, is how much to reveal based on what you have without jeopardizing the safety and the identity of the people who are sharing the information. So where it may not feel like there's enough there to feel like someone has seen something or I've seen something, that's a calculation that I've had to make, but I absolutely stand behind everything that's in this book. I'm not concerned at all about his truthfulness. In fact, my biggest concern was that I didn't publish enough of the truth that there is more that I wasn't able to get to in time.

44:01 Well, I think one thing people need to understand is that this is the beginning and not the end of any investigation. As the New York Times says, this is something that lawmakers ought to look closer into, and I expect that they will. The book is called Princes and Thieves. The subhead, Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Zayed's secret plot to remake the Middle East. Everyone should read it for themselves.

44:26 Matthew Cole, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Ryan, thank you so much for having me on.

44:32 Yep, you got it.

44:34 Ryan, you think I can get you to root for the Brewers?

44:36 Yeah, why not? That's exciting, right?

44:38 Yeah, you like to see a small market thrive.

44:41 Absolutely.

44:42 In this economy.

44:44 Jeremy's from there, so that's close enough.

44:48 Do it for Jeremy.

44:50 Both of my colleagues.

44:52 Big, big show today. And this is going to get out late to people. We had a total tech meltdown in the studio today, which is why you're seeing all kinds of different things happening. But we just appreciate your patience. We appreciate you so much for subscribing. Sagar obviously was floating the fish opportunity that is very much on the table for people who get a premium subscription over at BreakingPoints.com.

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45:26 Week or so.

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46:07 It's not to love there.

46:09 All right. Well, thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in. Thank you for your patience. Crystal and Sagar will be back tomorrow with more breaking points.