The August Trump Tower meeting with Gulf emissaries

 The August Trump Tower meeting with Gulf emissaries

By Josh Marshall

Let me share some thoughts on the significance of that blockbuster Times article from the weekend on that 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don, Jr. and emissaries from Gulf monarchs offering to help candidate Trump’s campaign.

Since early this year we’ve heard a steady stream of reports about backchannel discussions and deals between key Trump advisors like Jared Kushner and leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. This part of the investigation broke into the open early this year after FBI agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller met George Nader at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. on January 17th, 2018. Nader had arrived from abroad on his way to Mar-a-Lago for a celebration of the anniversary of Trump’s first year in office. He had become a close advisor to the White House, Trump, and Jared Kushner. Agents had warrants to seize his electronic devices. They questioned him for two hours. The upshot of the encounter was that Nader more or less immediately became a cooperating witness with the Mueller probe.

It soon emerged that it had been Nader, acting on behalf of the UAE, who had arranged that January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles which brought together Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev. As had long been suspected, it was an effort to build a backchannel to Russia. Nader had also made at least two visits to Moscow during the 2016 campaign as the emissary of the leader of the UAE.

Somehow Nader seemed to bring together elements of the Russia probe with a seemingly distinct effort to ally the Trump administration with the conservative Gulf monarchies trying to build a regional coalition against Iran. Nader’s efforts also put into a new light Trump’s and particularly Jared Kushner’s support for the Saudi-UAE blockade of Qatar starting mid-2017, even against the opposition of the Departments of State and Defense. Money appeared to be flowing from these conservative Gulf monarchies to the Trump family, with great effect. Elliott Broidy was also in the mix, a close collaborator and business partner of Nader’s, who separately had used Michael Cohen to secure a hush money agreement with a former Playboy model he’d impregnated. Somehow these covert efforts to ally Trump with UAE/Saudi seemed to overlap with efforts to build a backchannel with Russia. But how and when did it start?

The ties between Nader and the Trump campaign clearly had some backstory before the election. But what it was remained unclear. That’s the importance of this article. This August 2016 meeting seems to have been the key moment in bringing Nader into the Trump fold, with specific assistance on offer from his paymasters in the Gulf.

On August 3rd, days after the end of the Democratic convention, Donald Trump Jr. met with Nader, Prince and an Israeli social media psy-ops campaign expert at Trump Tower. Nader was there as the representative of the de facto leaders of UAE and Saudi Arabia. They wanted to help Trump become President and they wanted to assist with money. Trump Jr. was apparently happy to accept their help — something that clearly violates U.S. law.

This is an article you definitely want to read. Here are my key takeaways.

What’s notable to me about this article is how many things it suggests without quite saying. Joel Zamel had previously worked on behalf of the government of the UAE as well as Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who Paul Manafort owed millions to. He’d also worked for Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for $95 million in 2008. It appears that the offer was for Zamel to run a social media campaign that sounds very similar to the one Russia was then conducting on Trump’s behalf and that the effort would be paid for by the UAE. Nader was also pushing a plan to create a vast mercenary army to destabilize Iran. Prince has been pushing similar plans for some time.

The article, for instance, notes that Nader later paid $2 million to Zamel. Nader works for the UAE. Presumably, that’s where the money was from? Why would he pay that? Presumably, because Zamel & Co. did the social media psy-ops work they proposed. After the campaign, they also hired another Zamel firm to analyze the importance of social media efforts to Trump’s victory. Why would they do that? Presumably to demonstrate the effectiveness of Zamel’s efforts. Yet in the Times piece, these “presumablies” aren’t stated — presumably because the Times reporters were not able to confirm that Zamel’s firms had done the work, something his lawyer (a close associate of Rudy Giuliani) denies.

This is, to put it mildly, a complex set of facts to unravel. Here are some further observations.

1: This is now the second instance where emissaries of a foreign power(s) offered their support to President Trump’s campaign and got a welcome reception.

2: Clearly the UAE/Saudis collaborated at some level with Russians, trying to build channels into the Trump world. On its face at least this is perplexing because the UAE/Saudis are primarily focused on building an anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East and making the U.S. a robust part of that coalition. Russia is on the other side of that fight, the major regional backer of the Syrian government which is closely tied to Iran. This requires more explanation. But I think there are various ways that they would see themselves having overlapping interests.

3: George Nader is at the center of all of this. He appears to have been the key player in the Gulf side of this and significantly involved in the Russia part. Our best evidence is that he has been fully cooperating with the Mueller probe for more than four months. So they likely have all the information from Nader, if not in every case the proof of Nader’s claims. This investigation is likely much further along than we know.

Take all of this together and you have a very far-flung counter-intelligence probe involving multiple foreign powers and vast sums of cash. The scope of all this seems to go far, far beyond what we know.