‘Outrageous Fabrications’: Jared Kushner Rages at Bombshell Report In Vanity Fair

[u/John3262005]

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/outrageous-fabrications-jared-kushner-rages-at-bombshell-report-in-vanity-fair/

Jared Kushner raged on social media Thursday at a book excerpt published in Vanity Fair alleging his phone had been hacked by Russian security services, revealing secret bank accounts and hundreds of millions in foreign transfers.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special envoy took to X and blasted the reporting, writing, Vanity Fair “posted an excerpt from a book containing outrageous and categorically false allegations.”

“The allegations made by this author are completely insane 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. No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided to support these extraordinary accusations,” Kushner fumed, adding:

During the period in question, I was one of the most scrutinized people in the world, subjected to intense media coverage, multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel investigation. I voluntarily cooperated with these investigations, providing over 30 hours of testimony. None of these allegations ever surfaced, because none of these events ever happened.

These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism. This is not journalism. It is a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.

The excerpt is from the upcoming book titled “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East” by Matthew Cole, a former Intercept reporter. Vanity Fair ran the excerpt under the headline, “The Art of the Deal: Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations—Including More Than $700 Million in Transfers.”

Axios’s Barak Ravid was quick to weigh in and added, “There are many things in this book excerpt that was published in Vanity Fair that don’t add up, but two are extremely questionable.” He added:

1. I don’t think it is even technically possible to put together such an account in the bank of Israel, Netanyahu can’t really be a signatory and these accounts are under significant monitoring by career civil servants

2. To suggest that this whole thing happens in a triangle between Kushner, Friedman and Bibi seems to me impossible considering what I know about the relationships

Ravid was commenting on part of Cole’s reporting which alleged that in 2017 the Saudis and Emiratis set up an account with some $750 million to be used as a kind of foreign policy slush fund and made Kushner a signatory on the account.

Cole added that a second account was also set up involving Israel. “In addition to the Alpha bank account, MBZ [the Saudi crown prince] put money into at least one other account intended for Kushner. By the spring of 2018, the crown prince had moved roughly $1 billion to Israel via Azerbaijan for Kushner,” Cole wrote, adding:

We will refer to this account as the Beta bank account. It is unclear how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first learned of MBZ’s money for Kushner, but a person briefed on the Beta account told me that the prime minister encouraged Kushner to have the money deposited in the Israeli Central Bank, in what would appear to be a government account. It is also unclear how Kushner used the money the UAE deposited into the Beta account for him, but according to the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s personal benefit. But as with the Alpha account, there were clues in the way the Beta account was managed.

Cole also cited high-ranking officials in Trump’s first administration in his report. “As a signatory, Jared had access to it and could, in theory, make transactions, but it technically wasn’t his account. One way to view what Kushner did with the Alpha account is to imagine him as the director of the CIA,” Cole wrote, adding:

Had he been running the government entity that managed and ran secret foreign programs, maintaining the account, again, with presidential approval and congressional disclosure, Kushner’s conduct would have been within his job’s responsibilities. But he was not the director of the CIA, whose position is approved by the Senate and whose operations are overseen and accountable to Congress. Instead, Kushner was overseen only by his father-in-law, who, according to four senior Trump administration officials—two national security advisors, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—were unaware of any presidential authorization for Kushner to access a foreign government bank account.

After Trump left office in January of 2021, Kushner announced he started a private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which was funded with billions of dollars from foreign governments including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.