First posted on Instagram
An excerpt published Thursday by Vanity Fair from investigative journalist Matthew Cole's forthcoming book "Princes and Thieves" alleges that the Netherlands' Military Intelligence and Security Service hacked Jared Kushner's iPhone in late 2017 and watched him log into a bank account in the United Arab Emirates holding roughly $750 million from Gulf rulers.
According to Cole, the account was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank in the name of the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, a UAE government-linked charity, and the money was routed through an Azerbaijani bank. Kushner was allegedly an authorized signatory with authority to manage the funds, which were intended to finance unofficial diplomatic and Middle East operations. Cole writes that the account was overseen by Tahnoon bin Zayed, the brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed who served as the bank's chairman. Cole further alleges that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and bin Zayed conceived the account as an off-the-books foreign-policy fund, that another roughly $1 billion was moved to Israel for Kushner's "personal benefit," and that the two Gulf royals placed about $2 billion in total into two accounts associated with Kushner.
The Dutch access, in Cole's account, came after the MIVD detained a Russian GRU hacker in the Netherlands in late 2017 and gave him a choice between cooperating or extradition to the United Kingdom. The hacker flipped, and the Dutch gained access to files on a GRU server in Rostov where screenshots from Kushner's iPhone were found; by early 2018 the Dutch had found their own way into the phone and could see his screen. Cole says his first tip on the story came in the spring of 2020, when a source told him Kushner appeared to have moved significant sums from the account to people including "a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man," and that a second source confirmed the UAE-account transfers six months later. According to Cole, the arrangement grew out of a bigger offer in which the two royals had discussed putting more than $10 billion into a slush fund to advance the new administration's foreign policy goals; that idea fizzled.
The excerpt also touches on a February 2026 whistleblower complaint over an intercepted 2025 conversation involving Kushner, which the Wall Street Journal reported on; senior administration officials called the claims about him demonstrably false. A former Mueller prosecutor told Cole that if Kushner promised the royals anything in return for the money — even just a word with his father-in-law — he may have violated federal bribery law and the Foreign Agents Registration Act; Kushner's lawyer said he broke no laws while in the White House and that every arrangement he made with foreign leaders was agreed to by Trump.
Kushner has denied everything. "@VanityFair posted an excerpt from a book containing outrageous and categorically false allegations. The allegations made by this author are completely insane and never happened," he wrote on X on October 22, 2026. "No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided to support these extraordinary accusations." He continued: "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." He called the excerpt "a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy," and his lawyer told the author that "there are no accounts and never were."
The claims are separate from the previously documented $2 billion that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund put into Kushner's private equity firm, Affinity Partners, after he left the White House in 2021 — an investment the fund's own screening panel objected to over Affinity's inexperience and fees. The Senate Finance Committee found in September 2024 that Affinity had collected as much as $157 million in fees from foreign clients, $87 million of it from the Saudi government, while returning nothing to investors as of July 2024. Affinity has told regulators that 99 percent of the money it manages comes from abroad, mainly from the sovereign funds of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.