March 10, 2023

by Thom Hartmann

The Hartmann Report

Lauren “Bam Bam” Boebert announced at CPAC:

“We are going to investigate Hunter Biden because he has used his father’s positions in government for shady business dealings with Ukraine and China. We no longer need a resident in the White House. We need a president who puts America first and not his business dealings with corrupt foreign countries.”

You’d think such a statement by a Trump supporter would be met with shocked silence, but the crowd went wild with applause. And there is, of course, some legitimacy to the sentiment.

After President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General, Republicans freaked out and passed an anti-nepotism law against presidents hiring family members. 

When Donald Trump put Jared Kushner into the White House (even after he failed a security clearance), his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled, essentially, that Trump could ignore the law.

Saudi Arabia was then run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), the grandson of the nation’s founder, King Abdulaziz; MBN’s father, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, had run the country before him.

Like his father and grandfather, MBN was tight with US intelligence agencies and committed to a stable long-term relationship with the United States and Europe. He also kept oil prices stable to help the United States in Europe.

Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), then pushing his 60s, was arguably the most pro-US figure in Saudi leadership.

Back in the 1980s he’d studied at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, then at the FBI in Quantico, followed by participating in a 1990s “anti-terrorism” program at Scotland Yard.

After 9/11, he took on Al-Qaeda and they tried to assassinate him.

When Trump came into office in 2017, MBN’s cousin, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was merely one of many young Saudi princes (he was 32) jockeying for position and power in the kingdom (MBN was then 58).

At the time Trump appointed Kushner (then 36) in 2017, US intelligence and the State Department were concerned that if MBS were to overthrow MBN the consequences could be unpredictable for the United States.  

Kushner, with his new security clearance in hand, would have had access to that information.

Things were then getting wild in the kingdom.

MBS wanted to overthrow MBN, and, according to some extraordinary reporting from Vicki Ward (whose Substack newsletter is worth subscribing to), Jared saw an opportunity to go around US interests and help MBS overthrow and imprison his cousin so MBS could seize control of the Kingdom and its more than $700 billion in cash:

“Four well-placed sources,” she reports, “say that the primary reason Kushner has now received $2 billion is that he helped MBS depose MBN, knowing that this went directly against what U.S. intelligence wanted or thought was good for national security.”

Suddenly, the news was full of stories about members of the Saudi royal family who were being held by security forces in fancy hotels, some being tortured and a few even “vanished.”

Immediately after Kushner met in secret with Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), America’s ally and the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), was arrested and thrown into prison where he remains to this day. 

As a result, Jared’s buddy MBS now runs the kingdom and controls its money.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post noted a few weeks after MBS began arresting his royal political foes, apparently using information from inside US intelligence agencies:

“It was probably no accident that last month, Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, made a personal visit to Riyadh. The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.”

Did Jared sell out American interests for $2 billion? And is his father-in-law, Donald Trump, now following up on the deal with the money being laundered through the LIV golf tournaments?

— It was with MBS that President Trump negotiated a 2.2 million-barrels-a-day production cut in 2020, when the pandemic had crashed demand for oil: that cut raised the price of oil and bailed out Trump’s Texas oilman supporters. 

— It was MBS who reportedly said he had Jared “in his pocket.”

— It was MBS who reportedly had Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi murdered and dismembered by an assassination squad when visiting a Saudi embassy to get a visa to marry his fiancé.

— And, the New York Times notes, it was Jared who was there for MBS when he needed a friend on the inside: “As the killing set off a firestorm around the world and American intelligence agencies concluded that it was ordered by Prince Mohammed [MBS], Mr. Kushner became the prince’s most important defender inside the White House…”

— It’s MBS who The Wall Street Journal reports is now moving his country “closer” to Russia and China to “punish” President Joe Biden for defeating Trump.

— It’s also MBS who’s given Donald Trump tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — to host the LIV golf tournaments at his shabby properties (the tournament has a reported $2 billion budget).

Have we all been witnessing a young con-man and his grifter father-in-law walk away with billions after selling out the United States? With virtually no questions from the mainstream media or Congress?

The son of a professional con-artist (Charles Kushner, who was pardoned by Trump) and a minor slumlord, Jared is said to have gotten advice from a PR professional when his father went to prison. Ben Walsh noted for Huffington Post that Jared’s dad tells the story that his PR friend advised Jared:

“Step one: Buy a New York newspaper. Don’t be too particular…. Any newspaper will do. Step two: Buy a big Manhattan building. Any building will do. Step three: Marry the daughter of a rich New York family. Anyone will do.”

Jared, the story goes, then purchased the New York Observer newspaper, overpaid for the 666 Fifth Avenue office building just down the street from Trump Tower, and, now impressively credentialed as a Serious Guy, hooked up with Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

From there it was a straight shot to the White House and then cashing in with $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, authorized by MBS, who had to override his investment advisors to hand the cash to Jared.

Which is a crime far more massive and serious than anything Hunter Biden has ever been accused of.

Our Constitution contains two emoluments clauses, both forbidding officials from taking gifts from foreign governments. The most well-known one (in Article II) forbids presidents from taking what could be bribes; the second, from Article I of the Constitution, forbids such behavior by anybody working in the federal government without the explicit permission of Congress:

“[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) notes:

“The purpose of the Foreign Emoluments Clause is to prevent corruption and limit foreign influence on federal officers. The Clause grew out of the Framers’ experience with the European custom of gift-giving to foreign diplomats, which the Articles of Confederation prohibited. Following that precedent, the Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits federal officers from accepting foreign emoluments without congressional consent.”

When Trump was running for president, he reportedly told Fox News viewers in February 2016:

“Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.”

But when the Saudis started shoveling money his way, suddenly his tune changed.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

In January of 2021, as he was leaving office, Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities. 

Information literally worth billions of dollars.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company — against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump or through the golf tournament front.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward noted:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to 2021, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

History will hopefully tell us if Jared Kushner and Donald Trump sold out their country and damaged prospects for peace in the world by helping MBS rise to power and then pushing Saudi Arabia toward Russia, just to get their hands on a few billion dollars. 

But that history is being written today, and if there was ever a scandal more worthy of an FBI and congressional investigation than Hunter Biden, this is it.

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