US presidential envoy and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has dismissed claims in a new book that he controlled billions of dollars in secret overseas bank accounts, describing the allegations as "completely insane" and "outrageous fabrications." The accusations are made in the book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East by investigative journalist Matthew Cole. Among the book’s claims is that Kushner was a signatory to secret bank accounts in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which Cole says were set up by Arab leaders as a slush fund to influence US foreign policy. An extract from the book published in US magazine Vanity Fair further claims that “significant amounts of money” were sent by Kushner to individuals including “a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man.” Kushner blasted the “outrageous and categorically false allegations” in an X post on Thursday, dismissing the claims as “a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.” “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,” Kushner wrote. “No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided to support these extraordinary accusations.” Intelligence ops? Cole reported that the accounts had come to light after screenshots from Kushner’s phone were found on a server belonging to GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. The screenshots were discovered by Dutch intelligence, which went on to hack Kushner’s phone in 2018, Cole claimed. “As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account,” Cole wrote. “By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.” Cole said the money trail led back to UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, who went on to become Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. The two Arab leaders had geopolitical plans for the Middle East and sought to sway the Trump administration to further their aims, Cole alleges. "Any efforts he [Kushner] made to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power," Cole wrote, going on to claim that Kushner “may have violated federal bribery laws, as well as the foreign agent statute.” "The allegations made by this author are completely insane and never happened..." Kushner retorted in his rebuttal on X. "These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism."
