Vanity Fair recently published an excerpt from longtime investigative reporter Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East.
The excerpt alleged that during President Trump’s first term, Saudi and Emirati leaders secretly put at least $2 billion into bank accounts and gave access to Kushner. At the time, Jared Kushner was serving as senior adviser to President Trump, his father-in-law. He is now Trump’s special envoy. Kushner’s lawyers responded by demanding that Vanity Fair retract the article and threatening legal action against the book publisher, Simon & Schuster.
Jared Kushner denied the report, saying, “The allegations made by this author are completely insane, categorically false, 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.” His lawyers say no such bank accounts existed and that the allegations are unsupported by the verifiable evidence.
In an extended interview with Democracy Now!, author Matthew Cole stood by his reporting. “This book is a result of more than 50 sources. There was an enormous amount of fact-checking and legal vetting that went into this book,” says Cole. “There’s plenty of information and reporting in the book that lets us establish and understand that there was … an unholy alliance between Jared Kushner and the leader of the UAE, the leader of Saudi Arabia and, at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.”
On Friday, Congressmember Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Kushner to recuse himself from Middle East and Ukraine negotiations and to produce a “comprehensive list of bank accounts or other financial instruments” that he had access to during his time in government.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.