Kushner Phone Hack Reveals How Middle East Dictators Bought Him Off

Jared Kushner oversaw foreign slush funds filled and managed by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Vanity Fair reported Thursday.

In the forthcoming book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole made a shocking revelation about Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s potentially illegal dealings with foreign dictators.

During the first Trump administration, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service discovered a way to hack into Kushner’s iPhone. Officials learned that he was secretly moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a bank account at First Dubai Bank.

Crucially, Kushner did not own the account, but was merely a signatory for the account managed and owned by the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a government-funded charity run by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi, a close friend of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, referred to as MBZ.

Starting in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the account to be used as a foreign policy slush fund. The charity was used to fund the UAE government’s covert intelligence operations overseas, as well as its secret weapons-purchasing programs, one confidential source told Cole.

First Dubai Bank is run by Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, MBZ’s brother. (Tahnoon also oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm Affinity Partners.) The money was sent by a bank in Azerbaijan, where banks have a well-established but unadvertised practice of exchanging Saudi riyals or Emirati dirhams for an equal amount of American dollars.

Four senior Trump administration officials—including two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—told Cole they were not aware that the president had authorized Kushner to access a foreign government bank account.

Kushner’s lawyer denied that his client had any knowledge of the charity or the bank account, and claimed that Trump’s son-in-law did not make any arrangements with foreign leaders that the president did not agree to.

But that wasn’t the only account Kushner managed. By the spring of 2018, MBZ had also put roughly $1 billion for Kushner into a second account at Israel’s Central Bank—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging. Unlike the political slush fund, Kushner’s activity in this account indicated that it was for his personal use. The money was difficult to access, and so Kushner would channel requests to Netanyahu for the funds to be released through then-Ambassador David M. Friedman, and then move the money through an account in Cyprus. The former diplomat denied any involvement in the scheme, and claimed that “there are no accounts, and never were.”

Additionally, the UAE secretly put money into yet another account at Israel’s Central Bank as a “rainy-day defense fund” in case of an attack from Iran.

It should go without saying, but Kushner did not disclose his access to these accounts to the IRS—potentially violating federal law. At the time, Kushner was a government employee who worked in the White House, meaning he was required to submit both public and confidential financial forms and disclose any bank account on which he had access as a signatory or beneficiary. Kushner also failed to disclose himself as an agent of a foreign government, having been paid nearly $2 billion in total by foreign leaders. If he offered anything in return for the money, even just conversations with his father-in-law, then he would have violated U.S. bribery laws and the foreign agent statute.

This is far from the first time that Kushner has been accused of blatant self-dealing in his service to Trump. He used used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit his business partners, invested in a firm that saw massive gains from Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East.

Attorney General Todd Blanche is open to blocking states from certifying the November midterm elections.

Blanche made the comments during a Thursday press gaggle in Virginia.

“Is there any scenario in which DOJ would weigh in on that certification process or try to block states from certifying?” a reporter asked.

“Is there any scenario? Yes,” Blanche said. “Of course there’s scenarios that we could all come up with hypothetically, some doomsday scenario for example, right? I don’t think it’s proper to make any kind of conclusory statements about what’s gonna happen in the future.... It is not DOJ’s intention to—and it’s never our intention—to improperly interfere with our elections.”

“But to say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I’m not gonna say that,” he continued.

The federal government is not supposed to play a role in state certification of elections. The soundbite quickly raised alarm to Blanche’s left.

“THIS IS CODE RED !!” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office. “Trump’s politicized DOJ is now saying out loud that they may interfere in the election in a desperate, unprecedented, and completely unAmerican and anti-democratic attempt to keep Trump and MAGA in power.”

“He answered the question of whether Donald Trump’s DOJ may interfere in the midterm elections with a ‘Yes,’” said Campaign for New York Health’s Melanie D’Arrigo.

It is incredibly abnormal for a sitting attorney general to float the possibility of interfering with an election, especially one who believes the Justice Department is not independent from the president (in this case, a president who has spent six years trying to manufacture a baseless voter fraud scandal). Yet Blanche, Trump’s formal personal attorney, did it with ease.

Mail-in ballots are being rejected at a growing rate in rural areas thanks to U.S. Postal Service cuts. 

ProPublica reports that in the primaries this year in Oregon, North Carolina, Washington, California, and Ohio, a staggering amount of ballots arrived too late to be counted due to delays in mail delivery. Three days after primary elections in Stevens County, Washington, election workers checked the mail for late ballots. They found over 500 envelopes when they were only expecting a few dozen. 

The same thing happened in all of eastern Washington’s 11 rural counties. Over 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to just 600 late ballots in 2022’s midterm elections. The nonprofit news outlet traces the issues to a number of changes at the USPS. 

First, over the past three years, the postal service moved to process first-class mail at regional hubs instead of smaller plants closer to local post offices. Then, just after the presidential election two years ago, the USPS cut in half its pickups from post offices at least 50 miles away from those hubs.

That increased delivery time by at least one day. Postmarks, which are critical for legally verifying if a ballot can be counted, were also pushed back as those stamps aren’t added until mail reaches a regional processing center. In rural counties in the five states, late ballots have a grace period as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, but rejections still shot up compared to 2022 according to ProPublica’s findings. 

The postal service’s policy changes were pushed by Trump administration officials, and likely unintentionally hurt the Republican Party.  

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, told ProPublica, noting that his state has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

USPS officials claim that delays are much less likely for November’s general election because of “extraordinary measures.” The postal service sent a memo to every post office in the country earlier this fall instructing them to separate ballots from other mail for the 10 days preceding Election Day on November 3. The memo said that the post offices should deliver the ballots on the day they arrive. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said the chair of the Postal Service board of governors Amber McReynolds in a press conference last week, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

If they are wrong, though, many races could be affected. A few thousand or even hundred ballots could swing many contests in rural areas, leaving voters across the political spectrum disenfranchised. Trump’s attempts to undermine the entire process aren’t helping, either. 

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded answers Thursday from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the company suspended the No Kings Coalition’s official Instagram account during the group’s nationwide day of action.

In a letter shared exclusively with The New Republic, Van Hollen asked why the coalition’s Instagram was mysteriously shut down for more than an hour during a major day of early voting activations over the weekend. The administrators did not regain access for hours, restricting their ability to communicate with supporters.

Van Hollen asked the MAGA-friendly technocrat whether Meta had communicated internally about the No Kings Coalition, and to explain why it took so long to restore the administrators’ access to the account. So far, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, and Jeff Merkley have joined Van Hollen’s probe.

Van Hollen also demanded an explanation for Meta’s vacillating excuses for the incident. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone initially claimed Sunday that the account was shut down due to high frequencies of posting, sharing, and commenting. The next day, however, he claimed it had to do with the account’s “reading” behavior.

“Not only are Meta’s shifting explanations alarming, the substance of the claims paint the picture that one of the largest social media companies in the world is somehow incapable of handling technical concerns about an account without shutting it down for hours,” Van Hollen’s letter stated.

The Maryland Democrat also questioned why the account was not included in Meta’s cross-check program, which allows the company to designate civic entities to ensure human review before a decision is made that could severely jeopardize participation in significant political events.

“This is not the first time that Meta has experienced shutdowns or lapses around political speech leading up to the 2026 elections,” the letter stated, referring to a so-called “glitch” that disrupted Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown’s campaign ads on Facebook and restrictions placed on Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Instagram ahead of his country’s elections. On Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board called the incidents part of a series of “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts,” and that it was unclear why the error was not caught by the company’s mistake-prevention systems.

“How will you guarantee that accounts sharing critical election and civic information are not incorrectly shutdown in the future? What steps will Meta take between now and election day to ensure that accounts sharing this information are not taken offline without notice?” the letter asked.

With the midterm elections fast-approaching, Van Hollen asked that Zuckerberg provide lawmakers with responses by October 29.

The incident raises serious concerns about Meta’s impartial handling of voting information and political speech—particularly in light of the company’s close financial relationship with the Trump administration. The company awarded nearly $25 million straight into Donald Trump’s pocket, $10 million to a Trump-aligned dark money group, $5 million to the president’s White House ballroom, and $1 million to his inaugural fund. In return, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts.

A judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to end its investigations into noncitizen voting in nine states. 

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled Wednesday that DHS’s data  contains multiple inaccuracies and could be used to target U.S. citizens, The Washington Post reports. She barred the department from using the records in “elections-related field operations and field interviews” but delayed the order, allowing the Trump administration until 5 p.m. Friday to appeal. 

DHS agents have recently been spotted going door to door to look for noncitizen voters. Under the order, DHS would be barred from using the program to continue these operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. 

According to the Post, the department built target lists from commercial voter files, official state voter rolls, and other lists comprising 48.2 million voters that Martínez-Olguín, appointed by President Biden, said came from “questionable provenance.”

Because of pressure from administration officials, DHS employees were only given up to 12 minutes to clear someone from the list, Martínez-Olguín said. She ruled that this had a high likelihood of error because the government doesn’t keep a true master list of people living in the U.S. that includes their citizenship status. 

Groups including the California Nurses Association sued the government, claiming that the White House was violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating people who try to increase voter turnout or help with voting. Martínez-Olguín ruled that these groups had valid claims. 

“The fear is objectively reasonable, and compounded by [DHS’s] use of data that is widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens, leaves citizens afraid that their name will be wrongly included in the hundreds of thousands identified for investigation,” Martínez-Olguín wrote. 

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice admitted that its list of noncitizens who illegally voted in California may not be accurate, and officials in the state as well as Los Angeles County attested the same in court. That hasn’t stopped the federal government from arresting people based on that faulty information, though.