Observers were shocked Thursday after a new book excerpt detailed how foreign spies spent months peering into the phone of President Donald Trump's son-in-law.
In an excerpt published by Vanity Fair from his upcoming book "Princes and Thieves," investigative reporter Matthew Cole lays out how Dutch military intelligence flipped a Russian GRU hacker in 2017 and used him to reach a Russian server holding screenshots from Jared Kushner's iPhone. By early 2018, according to Cole, the Dutch had cracked the device themselves and could watch Kushner's screen in real time.
What they saw, Cole reports, was Kushner logging into a UAE bank account stocked with hundreds of millions of dollars routed through a bank in Azerbaijan. Cole's reporting alleges that the Saudi and Emirati royals ultimately put at least $2 billion into accounts tied to Kushner, including roughly $750 million at First Abu Dhabi Bank, where Kushner was allegedly a signatory on an account owned by an Emirati charity, and about $1 billion in Israel's Central Bank.
A former Mueller prosecutor told Cole that Kushner may have run afoul of federal bribery and foreign agents laws if he promised anything in return. Kushner's lawyer denied any wrongdoing and insisted "there are no accounts and never were."
Reaction online was swift.
"Every word of this is f------ insane," investigative journalist Scott Stedman fumed on X. "Kushner cannot be in charge of negotiations."
Stedman followed up by arguing that, if the reporting holds, Cole "may have uncovered the biggest case of foreign bribery (MBZ and MBS of Kushner) in U.S. history."
Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim marveled at the backstory. "Aside from the shocking substance of this story, what's amazing is how it was unearthed by Cole," he wrote.
Former Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman summed up the chain of events, noting that Dutch cyberspies reverse-engineered a Russian hack to gain "unprecedented access to his world." He called it a "bananas story."
National security journalist Zach Dorfman hailed it as "astounding reporting," while reporter Erin Banco kept it short. "This is wild," she posted.
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