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Jamal Khashoggi—a Saudi citizen and U.S. resident, a journalist and high-stakes player in Persian Gulf politics, and an irritant to the thirty-two-year-old Crown Prince and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman—entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the afternoon of October 2, 2018, shortly after 1:00. He was met by an assassination squad sent by the mercurial Crown Prince, Jared Kushner’s closest international ally in his effort to be a dominant foreign policy voice in his father-in-law’s administration. After Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment, Khashoggi appeared to have been dissolved in a vat of acid or his body parts flown out of Turkey in a diplomatic pouch.
Unbeknownst to the none-too-smooth Saudi assassination team, Turkish security services were recording most of Khashoggi’s last moments. In the hours and days afterward, while the Saudis insisted that Khashoggi had walked out of the embassy unharmed, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—aligned with Saudi Arabia’s enemies Qatar and Iran—authorized a drip-by-drip leak of the dark details of Khashoggi’s disappearance and murder.
President Trump brushed off the first sketchy report of Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible death. When more details started to emerge, he said he didn’t trust the Turks. Finally he prodded Jared to “call your friend”—the Crown Prince.
“Mohammed,” Jared reported back, “is looking into it. He doesn’t know anything more about it than we do.”
On October 4, the Washington Post ran a blank space where Khashoggi’s column “should appear.” The Post laid the suspicion of Khashoggi’s murder on the Saudi ruler’s doorstep. The next day the Turks confirmed that Khashoggi had entered but never left the Saudi embassy.
As so often happened in Trumpworld, an important, and rare, victory—the Kavanaugh confirmation vote—was now almost instantly subsumed by this new ugly reality, Trump and his family’s close personal relationship with an apparent murderer.
Saudi Arabia, with its complex and difficult royal family, alliances with terrorist organizations, cruelties of law and culture, vast amount of oil, and key position in the Middle East, had always required the greatest diplomatic finesse and legerdemain on the part of U.S. presidents. Absent those skills, the Trump administration, four weeks before a challenging election, found itself owning, and publicly defending, a blatant act of torture and political revenge, with more gory details emerging every day.
In a dramatic example of Bannon’s feared exogenous events, here was an open window—which no one could seem to close—into Trump and his family’s strange dealings in the dubious corners of the world.
It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for other passengers) trips on his yacht. He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games. Like Trump, he was often described as a petulant child. Uncontrollable, he was determined to flatten any opposition to his rule within the vast royal family, and to use a level of brutality in service to this goal even greater than the kingdom’s usual brand of savagery. MBS, the U.S. foreign policy and intelligence community understood, was, even for the Saudis, a piece of work—Tony Montana in the movie Scarface.
What was harder to understand was Jared Kushner’s exceptional embrace of the man. Not only had they become genuinely chummy, but Kushner spent time, effort, and significant political currency promoting the Crown Prince. The Saudis’ already vast PR operation in the United States included Kushner as one of its important sponsors.
On October 5 and 6, with the president barnstorming the country in his now almost daily series of MAGA events in friendly stadiums, Kushner was left to get his friend MBS, as well as himself, out of the Khashoggi mess. In frequent contact with the Crown Prince, Kushner effectively became a crisis manager for him. To that end, he also become the White House’s most prolific leaker of Saudi conspiracy theories and disinformation.
From White House sources came the Turkish plot: blaming MBS for Khashoggi’s “disappearance” was part of Erdoğan’s plan to reestablish the Ottoman caliphate and take control of Mecca from the Saudis. From White House sources came the UAE plot: the plane carrying the assassination squad departed from Riyadh but landed in Dubai on its way to Istanbul. MBS was once the protégé of Mohammed bin Zayed—MBZ—the ruler of the UAE, but recently their relationship had been souring, in part because of MBZ’s disapproval of MBS’s cocaine use. MBZ, it was said, might well have had a number of assassins join the team in Dubai so he could lay the blame for the killing on MBS.
Kushner, in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter, argued the crux of the Saudi case: “This guy [Khashoggi] was the link between certain factions in the royal family and Osama. We know that. A journalist? Come on. This was a terrorist masquerading as a journalist.”
For Jim Mattis, the ever more deeply disgusted secretary of defense, the Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world, from Putin to Kim Jong-un to their entanglement with the never-ending soap opera in the Persian Gulf states, in particular the high-stakes interplay among MBS, MBZ, and the Qatari strongman Hamad bin Jassim—HBJ. Trump’s own instincts were weird and confusing, but sometimes even more alarming, and frustrating, were Kushner’s incessant meddling and unclear agenda. Mattis had become increasingly convinced that Kushner’s continual forays were screwball, or criminal, or both. And the FBI might seem to have its own concerns: Kushner had failed to pass normal security clearances and had only received a top secret security status due to the almost unheard-of intervention by the president himself (a fact baldly denied by Kushner and his wife).
The Kushner family’s financial problems, and their link to the Gulf region, were a source of incredulous discussion in foreign policy circles. It seemed well beyond mere artlessness that someone so overtly conflicted—the president’s son-in-law was trying to raise private money from the same people who were involved in complex negotiations and relationships with the U.S. government—could, without universal objection, have a leadership role in those same matters. “The sign of the beast” became a kind of shrugging byword and acknowledgment that Kushner’s actions or recommendations might have something to do with his family’s efforts to refinance their troubled holding, 666 Fifth Avenue.
The Fifth Avenue office and retail building had been purchased in 2007—on the eve of the world’s financial collapse—by Jared Kushner, the deal under way while his father was in prison. The acquisition was part of the Kushner family’s grand plan to relocate their holdings and the emphasis of their business from low-profile New Jersey to the spotlight of New York City. The Kushners paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth, double the square-foot price record for a building in Manhattan. From the start, the property, needing extensive renovation, had trouble attracting premium tenants. What’s more, after several restructurings, a balloon payment of $1.4 billion, cross-collateralized by many of the family’s other assets, was due on the mortgage in 2019.
Since before the election, the family had, without much success, tried to secure a refinancing deal. Keeping 666 afloat could be the difference between the family’s multibillionaire status and significantly more ignomious circumstances. Adding particular urgency to the situation, the majority of Jared’s personal wealth was tied up in his family’s business.
Jared’s relationship with Steve Bannon, never good after they entered the White House, hit an early flash point when Kushner learned that Bannon was keeping a metaphorical countdown clock for when 666 Fifth would go bust and take the family with it. Certainly Kushner’s White House job had made the refinancing efforts vastly more challenging: any lender to the family would invite ethics scrutiny and press attention. Willing lenders, if there were any, had the family in a squeeze and could force a distress deal—unless, of course, there were potential other benefits of being in business with the Kushners that a lender might pay a premium for.
As Jared became one of the most significant voices in U.S. foreign policy, the Kushner family tried to obtain financing from the Qataris, Saudis, Chinese, Russians, Turks, and in the UAE, all nations where private monies were invariably aligned with state interests. In each instance, foreign investors concluded that the potential upside of dealing with the Kushners was sorely compromised by the downside of the exposure. But the family pushed on, struggling to find a willing partner in the limited pool of billion-dollar-class high-risk real estate investors.
In August 2018, the Kushner family appeared to save itself by making a deal to bail out 666 Fifth with a Toronto-based investment firm called Brookfield Asset Management. With nearly $300 billion in assets under management, Brookfield fronted for sovereign wealth funds around the world—Qatar was one of its significant investors—that might want high levels of anonymity. In many deals, the anodyne “Brookfield” was better positioned than, for instance, the more overt Qatar Investment Authority. And in this unvirtuous circle of Brookfield, its sovereign wealth funds, and the Kushner family, it was not only Middle East money potentially looking for sway in the Trump White House, but Brookfield looking for White House influence on its behalf in the Middle East.
In the White House, after the announcement of the Brookfield deal, John Kelly lost it. His relationship with Jared and Ivanka, ever a seesaw of him and them trying to oust the other, had reached its lowest point, with Kelly accusing Kushner of having sold his father-in-law’s government.
By mid-October, almost two weeks into the Khashoggi nightmare, every part of it had gotten much worse and much more public. Both the Saudis and the White House seemed wholly unable to adjust to the facts of the case. The Saudis denied the obvious, with mostly harebrained counter-narratives, while the White House rationalized the obvious with half-baked logic.
Strangely, the president’s advisers let Trump thread the verbal needle. When speaking or tweeting about the assassination, Trump seemed to be having a public argument with himself, in some sense agonizing out loud about the clash between realpolitik behavior and moral values. For five straight days he offered a variety of opinions and rationales.
“It’s being looked at very, very strongly, and we would be very upset and angry if that were the case [that the Saudis ordered the murder],” he said on October 14. “As of this moment, they deny it. And deny it vehemently. Could it be them? Yes,” he admitted, seemingly reluctantly, even churlishly.
On October 15: “I just spoke with the king of Saudi Arabia, who denies any knowledge of what took place with regard to, as he said, his Saudi Arabian citizen.… I don’t want to get into his mind—but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows?… And it sounded like he, and also the Crown Prince, had no knowledge.”
In fact, the king of Saudi Arabia was mostly non compos mentis—to the knowledge of many in the foreign policy establishment—so it was highly unlikely that this conversation had actually occurred.
On October 16, Trump continued to struggle to find a way out of the subject or a consistent line to adhere to. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh, and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.”
And later that day: “For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter). Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!”
And still again on that day: “Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate. He was with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the call, and told me that he has already started, and will rapidly expand, a full and complete investigation.”
There was more on October 17: “We’ll get down to the bottom of it. I hope that the [Saudi] king and the Crown Prince didn’t know about it. That’s the big factor in my eyes … I’m not giving cover at all. They are an ally. We have other good allies in the Middle East.”
That same day the White House announced that the Saudis had just transferred $100 million to the United States as part of an unpaid sum they had agreed to spend on U.S. weapons more than a year before.
And finally, asked on October 18 whether he thought Khashoggi was dead, Trump said: “It certainly looks that way to me. We’re waiting for some investigations … and I think we’ll be making a statement, a very strong statement. It’ll have to be very severe. I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff. But we’ll see what happens.”
That week, to one of his after-dinner callers, he put it somewhat differently: “Of course he killed him—he probably had good reason. Who gives a fuck?”
Meanwhile, less publicly, Kushner was trying to manage MBS. The effort was not going well, with MBS seemingly incapable of appreciating, on virtually any level, that the world beyond the Saudi kingdom and the Gulf states might demand a different standard of behavior than what was acceptable in the world of a despotic feudal prince.
Kushner suggested to the Crown Prince that he should order the arrest and quick execution of fifteen plotters involved in Khashoggi’s assassination. He was considering that, said MBS. Kushner urged MBS to cancel “Davos in the Desert,” Saudi Arabia’s elaborately staged investment conference, which was scheduled to begin on October 23. Embarrassingly, many blue-chip American CEOs had agreed to attend, in part at Kushner’s prodding. But MBS, adamant about the importance of not showing worry or contrition, unequivocally refused. He pointed out to Kushner that in Saudi Arabia the press coverage was very positive—nobody cared about Khashoggi!
Publicly and privately, the efforts by the White House to manage the fallout from Khashoggi’s assassination merely dug the hole deeper and wider. After several days of pressure from a number of advisers, Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, finally canceled his plan to attend the Saudi Davos. Trump continued to offer almost daily comments about the assassination, none of them satisfying, until the day the conference began.
By then, the midterm elections were less than three weeks away.
Jared Kushner came into the White House believing that he could initiate and represent a new generation of cool, Kissingeresque precision in foreign policy—with Kissinger himself encouraging Kushner to believe this.
A few months before the Khashoggi murder, however, Kissinger had attended a luncheon hosted by a small group of influential New York lawyers. Kissinger brought Rupert Murdoch along. Both men had aided the rise of Jared Kushner and, quite despite their better instincts, both had urged an open mind regarding the Trump administration. Kissinger’s attitude for most of Trump’s first year or so had been that, beyond the nasty rhetoric, and the fact that nothing particularly positive had happened, nothing particularly negative had occurred in this White House’s management of the U.S. global role either, so give Trump and his people a chance. But now, at the lunch—and with Murdoch, arms crossed, nodding his approval—a disgusted Kissinger ripped Trump and Kushner in the most fundamental and visceral way. “The entire foreign policy is based on a single unstable individual’s reaction to perceptions of slights or flattery. If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend; if they say something unkind, if they don’t kiss the ring, they are our enemy.”
After the Khashoggi murder, Kissinger, with renewed contempt, told friends that Kushner, in forging a friendship with MBS, had missed the main point about the Saudis. The Trump White House had tied itself to MBS, who had tied himself to his country’s economic renaissance. But Saudi Arabia, confronting declining oil prices and ever more demanding royal mouths to feed, was basically broke: its future, or the royal family’s future, was tied to the Aramco deal, which was increasingly less likely to happen.
“The ‘M’ in MBS is for Madoff,” said one U.S. financier brought in to consult on the Aramco deal. MBS’s power, not to mention his future, was predicated on his ability to sell something very much like a pyramid scheme, to which Kushner had become a party and a sponsor.
Since Trump’s election, Kushner had been developing an elaborate, rose-colored scenario featuring support for Aramco and ever-increasing Saudi-U.S. economic links, a scenario that was coupled with the promise that the Saudis would use their influence with the Palestinians to forge a peace agreement with Israel. This, in turn, would be Kushner’s crowning achievement—and this great success would, Kushner believed, help keep his father-in-law in office and also propel Kushner’s own political destiny.
Encouraged by Kushner, MBS went on a wide-ranging investment and business outreach tour of the United States. Along the way, David Pecker, Trump’s publishing friend, was promised Saudi money for his company AMI; so was Trump’s Apprentice agent Ari Emanuel, for his company WME; so was Trump and Kushner’s favorite businessman, Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, the private equity group, who got $20 billion from the Saudis for a new investment fund.
Rather than seeing himself as compromised by his family’s search for funds in the Middle East and the deals negotiated by various friends and allies, Kushner viewed himself as uniquely positioned to arbitrate the conflicts. He had taken to referring to Oslo, a play about the efforts of Norwegian diplomats in 1993 to bring Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together. He saw himself as the one person with the sagacity and temperament to effect a resolution among all the players in the region.
During the summer of 2018, Kushner prepared what he thought might be the ultimate initiative, his personal Oslo move. His idea was to build a platform for pan–Middle East economic development; through joint-venture lending programs, the platform would lead to political discussion and a conceptual framework for lasting peace. The sheer size of what he envisioned would create a structure of cooperation and codependence. As he described it, the shared platform would be like nothing the region had ever seen before. In pursuing this notion, Kushner was operating outside of diplomatic channels. He was also charging ahead without much involvement from the White House itself, although he promised his father-in-law that his initiative was going to be something “very big.”
As the idea evolved, Kushner suggested that the World Bank would stand behind the project, with massive investments from each of the richest states in the region. And the project would be run by someone Kushner had already selected, an investment banker named Michael Klein.
Klein, in fact, was dubious about the project, privately telling people he thought that one of Kushner’s motivations, in addition to his pressing desire to announce the initiative in the run-up to the midterm elections, was to sell himself as the administration’s indispensable man. Kushner, Klein said, was mounting a PR campaign intended to counter any bad publicity in the event that he found himself facing an indictment: Kushner wanted to appear essential to achieving peace in the Middle East.
This was perhaps not the only aspect of the scheme that failed to acknowledge reality. Indeed, Klein was quite a peculiar choice, one that reflected Kushner’s apparent inability to appreciate even a flashing neon sign signaling the appearance of conflict. A former banker with Citibank, Klein was a Zelig-like networker with a vast office overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown Manhattan, a pasha-style space occupied only by himself and a handful of assistants. He was one of those people, observed a banker who had participated in a deal with Klein, who seemed to have identified the ten richest people in the world and then made every effort to have a personal relationship with at least one of them. The Saudis were his current key client. He provided investment advice to MBS and was a strategic advocate for the plan to publicly float Aramco for $2 trillion, in what would be the world’s biggest public offering. In June 2017, Klein was in Riyadh with the presidential party during Trump’s first foreign foray.
Kushner’s initiative and Klein’s involvement in it highlighted how central MBS was to Kushner’s plans and his view of the world. Together, Kushner and MBS’s personal banker would make peace in the Middle East. But Kushner’s ambitious plan collapsed at the end of summer 2018, not long after the collapse of the Saudi’s Aramco public offering.
Davos in the Desert opened on October 23, three weeks after Khashoggi’s murder, with Kushner yet urging U.S. executives to attend the Saudi event. At the same time, Trump dispatched his CIA director Gina Haspel to Turkey. Her brief was to review the evidence held by the Turks about the Khashoggi murder, including the recordings of his assassination.
Haspel confirmed the obvious: just as all U.S intelligence agencies had concluded, Khashoggi died in the manner described by the Turks. What’s more, it appeared incontrovertible that the murder had happened with the knowledge of—and, with overwhelming likelihood, at the direction of—the Crown Prince himself.
Trump, sick of the Khashoggi mess, was privately blaming Kushner for it. “I told him to make peace,” said Trump to a caller. “Instead he makes friends with a murderer. What can I do?”
Publicly, Trump openly debated the conclusions reached by his intelligence agencies about MBS’s culpability: “[I]t could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
Once again Trump had needlessly moved the goal posts. It was not just that he had spectacularly mishandled the diplomatic challenge of managing a toxic ally, but that—just as he had done repeatedly with Russia—he had undermined the U.S. intelligence community. In some real sense, he was making this disaster their fault. Not only was he blaming them for inconvenient news, he was doubting the truth of the news they brought.
As a political issue on the eve of the midterms, Trump’s public waffling and weakness when discussing an international scandal involving a gory murder would surely not be a plus. But as a practical issue, his handling of the incident might be even more damaging to his future. Many believed that most senior members of the defense, diplomatic, and intelligence communities had now reached the point that they doubted the president’s competence or mental stability. What’s more, few could be confident that in this instance his logic-defying approach and painful efforts to deny the obvious were not a reflection of side deals or other interests connected to the Trump and Kushner families.
Jim Mattis, for one, had rationalized his place in the Trump government by arguing that, since the president himself could not be trusted or believed, it was vitally necessary for someone with credibility and a steady hand to hold the fort. Now he was telling friends he hoped and assumed that the Democrats would win the House in November—which, in turn, would allow him to at last leave his post.