Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Friday, October 23, 2026

Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel's disastrous war with Iran, the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and a raging conflict between Yemen's Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition. Yet Jared Kushner is more than one of the many ghouls who have clambered over a track record of failure right back into Trump's second-term White House, where he's still a top envoy. He also got owned by the Dutch, according to an excerpt from Matthew Cole's new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed's Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, published in Vanity Fair.

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According to Cole, Dutch intelligence services captured and flipped a Russian hacker operating for the GRU (Russia's foreign military intelligence agency) in late 2017. By the end of the year, the operative had given them access to a GRU server containing screenshots of Kushner's iPhone X, and the Dutch spies were able to reverse-engineer the original method the GRU used to penetrate the phone's then-state-of-the-art security. This gave them access to a continual image feed (albeit without audio) of the phone's screen. In early 2018, Dutch intelligence personnel began monitoring Kushner's phone and identified him logging into a Dubai-based bank account that had received around $750 million. This is the Alpha account. According to Cole, the Alpha account belonged to the United Arab Emirates-based (and government-funded) Watani Al Emarat Foundation, and was held at the First Abu Dhabi Bank. That bank is, in turn, chaired by the brother of UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ).

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... Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel's disastrous war with Iran, ...

An excellent, albeit succulent, summary of Pres Trump being manipulated by Pres Netanyahu to do what Pres Netanyahu wants Pres Trump to do.


#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-10-23 12:34 AM | Reply

... He also got owned by the Dutch ...

imo, the people in Pres Trump's orbit are amateurs on the diplomatic global stage.

Also, imo, the Dutch don't look to own anyone. The Dutch are, and have been for centuries, traders on the world stage.

If the Trump folk think that the Dutch have owned them, well, to me that just looks like a major admission of incompetence by that Trump team.

But, would that admission really be a surprise?



#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-10-23 12:41 AM | Reply

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