IN AUGUST 2022, Jared Kushner published Breaking History, a memoir detailing his achievements as a senior adviser during Trump’s first term.

Its self-aggrandising content, generously littered with admiring quotes testifying to his ‘genius’, and his ‘amazing’ skill in negotiating the Abraham Accords was shot down by a fusillade of savage reviews with critics variously describing it as a ‘cringeworthy’ effort of ‘college admissions essay’ standard.

“Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one,” New York Times critic Dwight Garner concluded.

Four years later, a very different book about Kushner’s first term has hit the shelves, amid a flurry of legal writs and threats from Kushner’s lawyers, who have tried to block its publication. It deals with much of the same turf covered by Kushner’s tome – but reaches altogether different conclusions.

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In a nutshell, “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohammed Bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East” claims that a $2 billion slush fund was set up to run “off the books” operations by Kushner. In allegations that mirror the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration, the book claims that Trump’s most powerful foreign policy adviser was running a shadow foreign policy in cahoots with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, who was then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to author Matthew Cole, an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter who has worked for NBC, ABC and The Intercept, Netanyahu helped to facilitate and conceal the money trail, $1 billion of which Cole claims was deposited into Israel’s central bank under the guise of an official government account. He claims a separate account in a UAE bank, which contained around $750 million, was also for Kushner’s use.

It’s claimed the trail started when Dutch intelligence officials, who first alerted the US Department of State to Russian hackers in 2014, ‘flipped’ a GRU (Russian Intelligence) operative who hacked into a GRU server that contained photos of Kushner’s iPhone. This marked the start of a trail that Cole claims led to the discovery of two bank accounts set up for Kushner’s ‘off the books’ operations.

The Netherlands Defence Intelligence and Security Service has refused to confirm or deny Cole’s reporting. But Kushner and his lawyers have vehemently denied the allegations in a 13-page letter to Simon & Schuster. They also sent a letter to Vanity Fair publishers, Condé Nast, demanding an immediate retraction of the excerpt it published.

Kushner has posted a separate denial on X, calling the allegations ‘outrageous and categorically false’ and ‘completely insane.’ In a separate statement, he points out that Cole has offered no verifiable evidence, such as bank statements or evidence of transactions, to support his claims.

.@VanityFair posted an excerpt from a book........

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