Transcript of Trump Family Ruined After This Nuclear Bombshell...

I'm not concerned at all about the accuracy or the truthfulness of my reporting. But it is important to let Mr. Kushner have a moment to say that, according to him, nothing is true. So, yeah, in 2017, when Jared Kushner was named as a senior advisor to the president and joining his father-in-law's administration, Jared Kushner came into the White House underqualified, unqualified, for the post of essentially the lead person in the administration for the Middle East, and from the White House was in charge of trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The idea was that Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize to compete with and match Obama, and that the deal of all deals, the deal of the century, as it was later described, was solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so that was Jared Kushner's job, of which he had very little foreign policy—he had no foreign policy expertise or experience at all. He had very little foreign travel in his background at all.

He had no government service, and he had worked in his father's business, the Kushner Companies, which was a real estate firm. That was what he did, and that was his claim to fame. The reality was, was that he got the job because he was married to Ivanka Trump, and that made him family. And so when he comes into the White House in 2017, tasked with this, I mean, a monumental role and responsibility, he needs to find partners who are going to work with him. And what he finds is two Arab rulers, one from Saudi Arabia, MBS, as you mentioned, Mohammed bin Salman, who was the deputy crown prince at the time, and the other was Mohammed bin Zayed, effectively the ruler of the UAE, the tiny—the United Arab Emirates, the tiny little country that's next to Saudi Arabia and sits on almost as much wealth and oil as Saudi Arabia does.

So he finds these two Arab rulers who want to do what he—what he, meaning Kushner and Trump—want to do in their administration, which is to beat back Iran, undo the remnants, the last remnants of the Arab Spring, find a deal for Israel that's favorable to Israel, with a willingness to marginalize the Palestinians, and to effectively completely reshape the map and the dynamic of the Arab Middle East.

And so—but under America First, Trump's policy and sort of campaign and platform, the American government wasn't going to pay for it. And so what Kushner needed were partners who were going to help pay for this reimagining of their neighborhood. And these two Arab rulers wanted to preserve their place. In fact, MBS was trying to get bumped up from number 3 in line to number 2 in line, and he needed MBS—sorry, MBS needed MBZ to help him, and they needed Washington and the new president to support it.

And so that's the sort of setup that happens. And then—and let's not forget, actually, one other element to this, and Kushner comes into the White House in addition to being underqualified, was that his family's business, the Kushner Companies, had a massive debt due on their trophy Manhattan real estate property, 666 5th Avenue. And so Kushner comes in with his father's business, looking at a $1.2 billion loan that's due in early 2019.

And so that's the setup that we get to in the first year of the Trump administration.

And amazingly, it's a story of sexual blackmail, murder, mercenaries, and assassins, and secret bank accounts. And it's—

And what he did was, Charlie Kushner had a longtime escort. He was a—he's a, you know, married, conservative Orthodox Jew who led a secret life in New Jersey and Manhattan, a secret sexual life. And one part of it was that he had an escort that he used for more than a decade under an alias named John Hess. And when he was worried that his sister and her brother-in-law were going to give documents to the federal prosecutors, he had his brother-in-law essentially entrapped with his—with Charlie Kushner's prostitute and filmed.

They had sex. It was filmed in a hotel room. The video was taken, ultimately handed to his sister, sent to his sister through a cutout as a message to say, "Don't testify against me." And Charlie Kushner's sister went immediately to the prosecutors the next day or shortly thereafter to say, "This happened to me and my brother did it," or, "This happened to my husband and my brother did it." And that is, you know, and Kushner ultimately went to—was sentenced to—was convicted, and he pled. He's convicted and went to prison for two years, and he got out.

And—

You know, this story is built on—this book and the reporting is built on more than 50 confidential sources. One of my sources early on was saying to me, "Do you understand or know how MBZ, the ruler of the UAE, came to be the ruler of the UAE?" And I said, "I did not." He gave me a quick tutorial. "Well, he's the third son of the founder of the country. He was the first son of the third wife. He's third in place, right? He's in the third pole position. But he was always ambitious."

And the secret in the Al Nahyan family—that was the ruling family—that the crown prince, the older half-brother, who was the ruler-to-be, the ruler-awaiting, he was gay. And Mohammed did not—could not accept that and wanted to take over. And so in the early '90s, what he did was he set his brother up with a man. They had sex in a hotel in Europe, and MBZ had it filmed. And he then took the videotape—MBZ took the videotape through a cutout and had it delivered to his father under the guise that it was an outside group trying to blackmail the royal family.

The father, Zayed bin Sultan, who was the founder of the UAE, understood immediately that the video was not the work of outside, you know, blackmailers, that this was his other son, Mohammed, who was trying to demonstrate that Khalifa, the crown prince, was not qualified to be the ruler. And, you know, when I—after I was able to work through and end up with multiple sources confirming and adding details about the event, what I realized was that what a lot of this is, or the story of families and power, and it's sort of like water seeks its own level.

And it was when MBZ meets Jared Kushner for the first time in December of 2016, which is sort of how the book begins, this secret meeting in Manhattan, you have someone, MBZ, who knows—who understands where Jared comes from and who Jared is, the son of a convicted felon, someone who had blackmailed his own sister by setting up her husband with his prostitute. I mean, it's, you know, the facts.

Kushner, but it does not mean that the wire itself went to Mr. Kushner. At the same time that this was going on, Donald Trump had just fired Secretary Tillerson. Tillerson had been a key sticking point blocking Trump and Kushner—I mean, really Kushner, not Trump. Trump was president. Tillerson had been defending and trying to resolve the diplomatic crisis in the Middle East between MBZ and MBS, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, against their neighbor, Qatar.

They had declared a blockade in the summer of 2017 against Qatar. They had hoped to try to militarily invade Qatar and overthrow the ruling family there. Secretary Rex Tillerson had learned that there was a potential military incursion by the Saudis shortly after it was declared and had called MBS and said, "Absolutely not." Qatar, just to give your audience a quick background, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Qataris are all U.S.

allies. They all have U.S. troops and military bases in their country. Qatar, in particular, has a very central, a huge base with 10,000 troops on it. It was, at the time, crucial for the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the war against ISIS. And so you had two allies ganging up against a third ally, right? And Secretary Tillerson, who had been CEO of Exxon and had a long history in the region, knew the Qataris well. He put himself in between Trump and Kushner, or put himself between MBS and MBZ and the Qataris to say, "Let's find a diplomatic solution to this conflict."

And eventually, that wore on for several months. It was one of the factors in which Trump fired Tillerson. But MBZ and MBS, as the book lays out, and some of this was reported at the time, the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis wanted Tillerson fired because he was blocking them in their effort to go after the Qataris and to punish their neighbor, Qatar. And what I report in the book is that MBZ had a set of benchmarks for Kushner in their secret financial relationship.

Getting rid of Tillerson was one of them. What is unclear is whether or not this $50 million transfer that goes to Cyprus for Kushner's benefit, which Kushner denies, was, in fact, for or payment for the benchmark for having helped getting Secretary Tillerson fired. There's no question that Jared Kushner helped Tillerson get fired, and there's no question that the UAE wanted Tillerson fired, and there's no question that the effect of having Tillerson fired created panic in Qatar.

But the transfer itself was the $50 million transfer, again, through Azerbaijan—not again. I'm letting your audience know, through Azerbaijan, they had a system of laundering the money that was moving through some of these secret accounts—was around the time that Tillerson had been fired. So, you know, the question is, was Tillerson fired, and did Jared Kushner receive money because he helped...

They were—and that's part of the tell, right, is that they were designed so that everyone involved can say, "This never happened." Okay? But what the book lays out is enough details for other people to pull, other investigators, other journalists, Congress, anyone who chooses, I hope the public, to pull on and ask, "What are these transfers about? Why did, you know, this much amount of money? Why did $60 million go to the founder of Blackwater, Eric Prince, out of this foreign policy fund?"

as an example. That's one thing. The second part is, is that going back for just a moment in my describing this as sort of like a Game of Thrones, is that the secret financial arrangement and the money that my book describes two pools of money, an alpha account and a beta account, roughly $2 billion. One account's in the UAE, one account is in Israel. They have slightly, what I report, slightly different purposes, but it's not, you know, we don't have—what I have is essentially the tip of the iceberg of this story, not, you know, I don't know how big the iceberg is beneath the surface.

Okay? That's really important. Again, sort of chronology. And then there's back and forth. There's infighting in the administration. This is one of the reasons why Tillerson was fired. And the Qataris kept the government of Qatar, gas-rich nation, almost as wealthy as the other two, but even smaller, kept saying to the White House and asking, as I report in the book, "What can we do to resolve this diplomatic problem? How do we resolve this blockade? How do we find a solution?" And the answer they got back was indirect.

The answer they got back was, "The Kushner family has this building that needs to be purchased."

Then the blockade begins. Then the first of the secret money to Kushner from the UAE and Saudi Arabia begins. Then the Qataris are told, "The only way this is going to," you know, not explicitly, they were told, again, it was, and I quoted a U.S. intelligence official in the book who said the Qataris kept saying, "What can we do to resolve this?" And the answer they heard was, "The Kushner family has this building that needs to be saved."

So Tillerson's gone. What do they do? They send word back, "We're going to buy the building." It takes them several months to figure out a way to.

That real estate fund then purchased the Kushner family property, 666 5th Avenue. And so what you can see, and then at the same time that that was happening, the Trump administration, President Trump, formally changed his position on where he stood on the blockade. He had been with the Saudis and the Emiratis early on in the blockade when Kushner had first started this financial arrangement. And then the Qataris bail out the building, the Kushner family building, and now Trump says, "We have to make a peaceful solution.

You guys have to work it out." And essentially the Qataris, who felt that they were being extorted, bought themselves detente by, you know, essentially a cold war. They were sure that they weren't, you know, they had confidence now that they were not going to be, that the U.S. was not going to support any kind of military overthrow and that they would try to find a resolution to the problem. And so, you know, part of it is that what the secret details or the new details that my book have, when you plug them into what had been known publicly, what you can see is a very logical sequence of, not just logical, but understandable sequence of events that explain what had been really bizarre positions.

And, you know, Trump, there were a lot of Trump's tweets at the time about the blockade where he would say one thing and then contradict himself a little bit later, and that's because there was this civil war going on inside the U.S. government. And so, you know, the answer is, is that the book is, the sum is larger than, you know, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts, is the way I view the book. You have to, readers need to get the whole story and see how it was built, how the story played out over four years of the first administration.

And you can start to see then, "Oh, this is how, this clearly has something to do with how Trump came to decide to go to war with Iran in February." There's no question about that. And so, you know, that's, and that's why I'm glad to be talking about it.

So the first part of the question is the Dutch intelligence, the hacking of Jared's phone, and then anything you would know about the Biden administration in between these two Trump terms.

And the Dutch were able to apprehend him and sort of give this operative a choice. You can work with us or you're going to end up in the UK where you're going to be arrested and you're going to end up going to prison. The operative, who was a cyber, you know, was a computer geek, basically, agreed to work with the Dutch. One of the things he starts doing when he works with the Dutch intelligence service is he gives them access to some of the GRU's secret servers and things where they hold some of their collection.

And he gives them access specifically to a computer server in Rostov, Russia. The Dutch then get into the server, and in late 2017, and as they're going through this secret Russian server, they find elements of Jared Kushner's iPhone. So what they can see is the Russians have some sort of access or are spying on one of Jared Kushner's phones while he's serving as a senior White House, senior advisor to the president in the White House.

What do they do? What they don't do is tell the United States. Now, the Dutch service, just so we're clear, has done operations where they've been able to catch and spy on the Russians spying and, in fact, watch the Russians hacking the U.S. government in the past. So the Dutch went to the U.S. government in 2014, for instance, to tell them, "Look, we're watching the Russians as they're hacking into the U.S. State Department's email system." And so there was, they have a history of this, is the point, right?

This time, though, they are very concerned about what they're seeing. This is late 2017.

In the process of doing that, they find him accessing or monitoring this bank account in the UAE. What the book lays out and describes, what I describe in the book, as the alpha bank account. That bank account is a mystery to the Dutch. They can't figure out why hundreds of millions of dollars are moving from the country of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea into this UAE-based bank account in which Kushner has access, and then money is moving out, not to anything related to Kushner, but to other things.

We can get into that in a second. So in the summer of 2020, this is still during Trump's first administration, I have a source who calls to ask me, "What do I think about this?" And part of the reason why they were asking me is because the first transfers out of that account went to Blackwater founder Eric Prince and a Libyan wannabe dictator who is trying to overthrow, trying to unite his country by overthrowing the government in Tripoli, okay?

And the reason why the source was asking me was because at the time I was digging into and investigating Eric Prince and that wannabe dictator, okay? So there was, you know, there was some relation to what I was doing. It wasn't just like a, you know, it's a Tuesday afternoon and I've got this crazy thing, you know, can you help me with it? There was a reason. And that's, you know, I didn't report on Kushner. I wasn't a White House reporter. I'm an investigative reporter who's focused for 20 years, 25 years actually, on national security.

And that was, it had nothing to do with Russia. This was the UAE and the Saudis providing money for Kushner to work with on a secret foreign policy that the UAE is running in the Middle East. And so at that point, what became clear to me was that this account, which the book calls the alpha account, is really kind of like a rehash of Iran contra. It's sort of like Iran contra 2.0, and on steroids. You have a foreign government funding a secret policy that is run or coordinated with someone inside the White House, outside of official U.S.

policy. And so that was the, and that's sort of the, and then later, subsequently, several years later, I independently confirmed that the Dutch had hacked Kushner's phone and that this sequence of events occurred. And so, you know, I just give your audience a second to think about this or understand. I first learned about this in 2020. This book is now published in October of '26. That's how long it took me to report it out.

I traveled 150,000 miles in air miles. I did interview, I did more than 100 interviews. I went to 20 cities in 13 countries. I spent five years reporting this, stacking it up source by source with more than 50 confidential sources to be able to get to where I understood what the story was, had enough to tell it intelligibly, and to be able to stand behind it 100%.

And that's where we are. And that's sort of, you know, how we got to where we are now.

There's no reason to tell the Biden administration. There's a reason why now their official response is no comment. It's a big deal what they did. And it's a big deal that they held onto it.

The government of the UAE wanted him to help build these mercenary armies to fight in these wars in the Middle East and North Africa after Trump came in. Initially, Prince, they thought that Prince might be able to help them convince the Trump administration to support this policy just by, you know, sort of verbal support, not financial support. Later, that's what Kushner provided was the inside, was the, you know, support and giving the green light to the Emiratis and the UAE to go try to fight these wars secretly with mercenaries.

And one of the people that the UAE utilized was Eric Prince. And they gave him a foreign passport, a UAE diplomatic passport, so that Prince could travel for, around the world and keep his travel off of his U.S. passport, essentially to keep it secret. The second big transfer in that alpha account in July of 2018 was to the Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar.

Khalifa Haftar is a former CIA asset who, and U.S. citizen who had been in the Libyan army under Gaddafi. He eventually worked with the CIA to try to overthrow Gaddafi. He failed. He moved to Virginia. He lived for 20 or 30 years in Virginia. And then after Gaddafi was overthrown, he went back to Libya, took over in the eastern part of the country, which is where he's from, Benghazi. He now and still controls the eastern part of the country and has been trying since 2012 to take over the whole country and sort of rule as a dictator.

He's sort of a, he's a wannabe Libyan Saddam Hussein. And the UAE supports him because they wanted to make sure that, they need a strong man to hold the country together in their belief, to keep it from being run by Islamists. And what they accuse everyone as, their enemies as being Muslim Brotherhood. And he, Haftar, is someone who is happy to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. And so the second set of transfers, the second transfer goes to Haftar.

And then not to the, in your list, the third transfer is to a man whose name was Felipe Vidal, who received out of the alpha account $80 million. And Felipe Vidal is one of the most interesting, disturbing, significant people I've ever investigated. Felipe Vidal is a former, he was an American, not a citizen, he was an American resident. He grew up essentially as an exile as a kid in Miami. His father was anti-Castro, who had worked with the CIA and was later executed by Castro.

And Vidal grew up in Miami. He was a gang banger who went to prison for drug, running drugs and guns in high school and after high school. He eventually goes down to Central America to work with the Contras in the war during the war against the Sandinistas in the '80s and becomes an asset and a contractor for the CIA in the 1980s. When he becomes working for the CIA, he then starts working for Ali North and becomes part of a foot soldier in the Iran Contra scandal.

But among other things, he became a hitman for cartels. And he was eventually fired from the CIA or let go as a contractor. And over time, in addition to working as a hitman in Latin America, he eventually came to work for the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. And 20 years later, 30 years later from Iran Contra, became a member of, a contract member essentially, of the Israeli intelligence services assassination program.

And so you had these, so the best way to say it is that as a journalist who covers this kind of thing, that you have this question. You have this bank account that Jared Kushner is connected to that's being run through a Emirati charity, a domestic charity. So, you know, it's for domestic purposes. And yet you have money going to America's most famous mercenary, Eric Prince, a Libyan warlord, and a hitman who worked for both the CIA and Israel's Mossad, okay?

No matter, you know, how you think that that story is going to play out, that money is probably not going for real estate investment advice, right? And so that was the, one of the threads that I was pulling. And it's one of, it's one of the ways that it became clear to me that what Kushner was doing was running this secret, working on this and coordinating this secret foreign policy with some really bad dudes, right? Some bad hombres. So that's, I hope that answers that question.

So this is the ambassador to France who also did the sexual blackmail of his own brother-in-law, correct?

And that, you know, among the secrets and what people forget about the Charlie Kushner backstory is that when he pled guilty or when he was originally indicted, shortly after Governor Jim McGreevey, whose biggest donor was Charlie Kushner, resigned. He came out as gay. And part of the reason why was because Charlie Kushner had helped facilitate the secret relationship between the Israeli aide who was McGreevey's lover.

And one of the things that came in the reporting was, was that Kushner had been part of a, you know, now, I mean, I think the, and I'm in my late 40s, the down low, you know, is the, was sort of the term, right? That, and, but the community in New Jersey, the real issue and the reason why it's in there is because the, what I'm trying to demonstrate is, is that Jared grew up with a father who was a felon and kept incredible secrets that were, you know, he was an Orthodox, modern Orthodox Jew, married, right?

And yet he moves, he goes to New Jersey, I mean, he goes to New York, and he has a secret life under a secret name, John Hess, right? And so I wanted to make sure that readers understood the environment that Jared grew up in and what Jared uncovered when all of this came out, when he was, you know, a young man.

First of all, play into Kushner's advice and role as a negotiator leading into the war with Iran, but then also Trump's decision to join Israel in the war. And I, you know, I don't know the answer to that. What I'm like to say is, is that this book is the tip of the iceberg. It is not the full iceberg. And so, you know, it is up to the public to read it, decide whose version of events they think is more credible, the book's reporting or Jared Kushner's denials, and then start asking more questions.