As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.
For the MIVD hackers, the bank account became an intelligence mystery to unravel. Nearly everything they worked on had a tinge of Russian conspiracy. A little over a year into Trump’s first presidency, the MIVD, like FBI agents and federal prosecutors in Washington working on the Robert Mueller investigation, had only part of the story.
Kushner, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia, converged at an auspicious moment. MBS wanted to be crown prince. MBZ wanted to blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and Kushner wanted both to help him force the Palestinians into a deal that Israel would accept. Despite the perception of his wealth, Kushner was not entirely financially independent of his parents, and the family business, Kushner Companies, faced a billion-dollar loan coming due on their trophy property, the Manhattan office building at 666 Fifth Avenue.
Early in the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS offered to pay for a slush fund dedicated to helping the new administration with foreign policy goals. The idea was to help pay for Trump’s promised wall between Mexico and the US, for example, in an effort to secure a second term in the White House. The two Arab royals initially discussed with Kushner putting more than $10 billion into the effort. Within months, though, as MBZ pushed the Trump administration to help back MBS’s effort to become his country’s crown prince—and future king—the broader foreign policy slush fund idea fizzled. Instead, MBZ and MBS initially, and then MBZ alone, put at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner. It is unclear how the royals organized their $2 billion in combined payments, but they effectively split the cost. For the purposes of explanation, it is best to understand where and how each bank account was controlled.