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PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, by Matthew Cole
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Nonfiction
PRINCES
AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the
Middle East, by Matthew Cole
A Damning
Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit
The new
book by the reporter Matthew Cole connects $2 billion in slush funds from Gulf
state leaders to Trump’s son-in-law in an effort to influence U.S. policy.
By Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole is the author of “We Don’t Know
Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” and the advising editor of The
New York Review of Books.
Oct. 26,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/books/review/princes-and-thieves-matthew-cole.html
It is
hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so
many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of
ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and
important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner
during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew
Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the
collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates.
If Cole’s
claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the
U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes
what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted
outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during
the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
In that
affair, government officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds
to fund — against the explicit orders of Congress — a violent right-wing
insurgency in Nicaragua. What Cole alleges is, if anything, more consequential:
that Kushner worked with the U.A.E. to shape U.S. policy across the Middle East
and that, in the course of this work, he was given access to bank accounts
containing roughly $2 billion.
Two
caveats must be entered. Cole’s most significant sources remain anonymous:
Recurring attributions in his notes include “a confidential source with direct
knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.” It is
equally important to acknowledge that Kushner declined to be interviewed for
Cole’s book. His lawyer described Cole’s allegations as “crazy, false and
defamatory” and last week threatened legal action against Vanity Fair, which
published an excerpt from the book.
To Cole’s
credit, he recognizes that, even after five years of digging, “much remains
unknown about Kushner’s relationships and agreements with the leaders of
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, especially, the United Arab Emirates.”
What we
have, then, is an incomplete and contested account of those dealings. The
question that arises from the book is whether Cole has done enough to warrant a
major congressional investigation into his allegations. The answer is an
emphatic yes.
Its
starting point is clear enough: M.B.Z. controls vast amounts of money and was
determined to use a lot of it to acquire influence over the American presidency
and to establish compliant regimes in Egypt (he helped finance the coup against
the elected Muslim Brotherhood government there in 2013), Yemen, Qatar and
Libya. This grand strategy included support for the rise of his ally Mohammed
bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization
of relations between Israel and most of the Muslim powers.
The
success of the U.A.E. in establishing Abu Dhabi and Dubai as international
aviation hubs and tourist playgrounds depends, in his eyes, on the suppression
of popular Islamism and the containment of Iran. President Barack Obama’s
endorsement of the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011, and his nuclear deal
with Iran in 2015, threatened these goals.
M.B.Z.’s
first response was to use proxies to channel $3.5 million in illegal funding
into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After she lost the election,
he pivoted toward the incoming Trump administration. Through its American
middlemen George Nader, a political consultant and convicted child sexual
abuser; Elliott Broidy, a onetime top Trump fund-raiser who had served on his
inauguration committee in 2017; and Thomas Barrack, a real estate investor who
is now the administration’s ambassador to Turkey, the U.A.E. identified Kushner
as the man who could influence the new president on their behalf.
This was
a good bet. Trump made Kushner his senior adviser with a brief that included
the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East. This in itself was a
departure from both tradition and democratic accountability — no one elected
Kushner, and he operated for much of this period without oversight, but he had
access to the highest levels of secret information.
It should
be accepted that Kushner had solid ideological reasons for working closely with
the U.A.E. M.B.Z. could, and to a degree did, deliver much of the Arab world
for a plan that cut out the Palestinians and eventually conceded Israeli
annexation of much of the West Bank. The ultimate prize of recognition of
Israel by Saudi Arabia was brought tantalizingly close. (It was derailed by the
Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.) To that extent, Kushner could be said to
have worked to further his father-in-law’s openly stated agenda.
The
issue, however, is whether Kushner was also pursuing other, private schemes
and, in order to advance them, allowing U.S. foreign policy to be dictated by a
foreign power. Kushner’s family benefited enormously from the perception that
he was working on behalf of M.B.Z. The U.A.E.’s regional rival Qatar, which
Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. were blockading and threatening to invade, believed
it had to counter this influence. A fund through which Qatar invests some of
its sovereign wealth helped bail the Kushner family out of a disastrous $1.8
billion investment in a New York skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue.
Cole’s
most explosive claims, however, relate to a 2017 operation by a Dutch military
intelligence unit, which found that Russian agents had screenshots from inside
Kushner’s iPhone. Investigating further, they discovered that Kushner had
access to a bank account in the U.A.E., containing $750 million laundered
through Azerbaijan but, according to Cole, originally deriving from the Emirati
and Saudi governments. “It is unclear if Trump ever approved or even knew about
the arrangement,” Cole writes.
By the
spring of 2018, Cole maintains, M.B.Z. had moved roughly $1 billion into
another account, held by the Israeli central bank, on Kushner’s behalf. Cole
says it is also “unclear” if or how Kushner used these funds, “but according to
the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s
personal benefit.” For M.B.Z., Cole suggests, the return on his investment was
a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, culminating in the
invasion of Iran, whose influence he feared.
These
accusations are grave. The first bank account was allegedly a slush fund used
to finance operations in Libya and elsewhere by Erik Prince, the former C.E.O.
of Blackwater, the private military contractor (now known as Academi). If
Kushner was a signatory to this account, he was helping to run a foreign
government’s proxy wars. And if he used some or all of the money in the second
account for his personal benefit, he was effectively an undeclared agent of a
foreign power.
Cole’s
work is sufficiently calm, detailed and forensic to necessitate a large-scale
and urgent congressional inquiry. One assumes that, since Kushner regards all
of these claims as crazed inventions, he is anxious to clear his name from some
of the most grievous charges ever leveled against a senior U.S. federal
official. If the country is incapable of letting its citizens know whether or
not its foreign policy is for sale, the difference between a democratic
republic and the secretive autocracy that tried to influence it will be much
narrower than most of us would like to think.
PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East | By Matthew Cole | Atria/One Signal | 299 pp.
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