Dutch intelligence reportedly monitored Jared Kushner's phone and a Dubai bank account

Monitoring with a defected Russian hacker's help

The Dutch military intelligence service MIVD reportedly watched the phone of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and a former adviser, from 2018 onward. It did so with help from a defected Russian hacker who had worked for the GRU military intelligence service. The account comes from a forthcoming book by US investigative journalist Matthew Cole, an excerpt of which Vanity Fair has published. Cole relies on sources he describes as reliable, and he writes that the Dutch saw Kushner log into a bank account in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that held hundreds of millions of dollars. The MIVD told NOS it would make no statements about its methods, its level of knowledge or its sources, and how long the monitoring lasted is not known.

The 750 million dollar account

Cole writes that the account held about 750 million dollars from the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, intended to advance political and diplomatic goals in the Middle East. NOS reports that the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan, and that the Dutch initially assumed it was linked to the Azerbaijani government. NRC gives a different version, in which the money passed through a charity and was meant for secret foreign operations of the Emirates. Cole also says Kushner and Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirati president, partly managed the account. According to Cole's source close to the UAE-Kushner deal, Kushner promised MBZ he would advance Emirati interests with Trump if they joined a fund, while Kushner wanted normalization of relations with Israel so that trade and investment could grow.

Motive and possible legal exposure

Cole writes that the two royal families wanted to force a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would let them improve ties with Israel without losing face. He says Kushner agreed to raise the Saudi plans with his father-in-law, Trump. De Morgen notes that if this happened, Kushner may have broken US bribery law. NRC reports that Cole writes Kushner left the account out of the financial disclosures he was required to file as a White House employee, which would contravene US law. Kushner led the US diplomatic team in the Middle East during Trump's first term, helping broker the 2020 Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and, among others, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Timeline of the reported operation

NOS reports that the MIVD learned in 2017 that a GRU employee specialising in stolen bank data was travelling to the United Kingdom. De Morgen dates the monitoring of Kushner's screen to 2017, while NOS and NRC put the start of the access in 2018. The Abraham Accords followed in 2020. The chart below sets out these dates as the sources give them.

Kushner's denial and current role

Kushner rejects the allegations. NRC reports that he called the story completely made up in a statement to The Daily Beast and said Cole had provided no proof. His lawyer denies that Kushner knew about the charity or the bank account. In a post on X, Kushner wrote that the piece is not journalism but fiction presented as fact. Kushner currently works as an informal negotiator on Trump's effort to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff, and NRC reports that he also sits on the executive board of Trump's Board of Peace for Gaza.