Book Alleges Gulf Leaders Set Up Accounts for Jared Kushner; Kushner Denies the Claims

A new book by Matthew Cole alleges that two Gulf leaders set up secret bank accounts for Jared Kushner during Donald Trump's first term. Kushner has called the claims "completely insane."

The book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed's Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, was released in the United States in the week of October 28, 2026. Its publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes it as an exposé of a secret conspiracy involving Kushner, the United Arab Emirates' Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

According to The Guardian, the book alleges that payments were made into two accounts described as "slush fund" accounts, set up for Kushner by MBZ and MBS. The book also reports that Ali Al Shamsi, a UAE intelligence official, called Kushner "the most expensive employee we've ever had." It further claims that some of the activity in the accounts was partly managed by Kushner on an iPhone that had been hacked by Russian and Dutch intelligence.

An excerpt published by Vanity Fair on October 22, 2026 gives more detail on the phone allegations. It alleges that the Dutch government monitored Kushner's phone as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. That account, the excerpt says, held hundreds of millions of dollars that had come from a bank in Azerbaijan, and Kushner transferred significant sums from it to other people, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The excerpt also describes how the Netherlands Defence Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD), the Dutch military intelligence agency, allegedly recruited a Russian intelligence operative from the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, who then gave Dutch agents access to a hacking server in Rostov, Russia, where screenshots of Kushner's iPhone were found.

Kushner has rejected the account. He called the claims "completely insane," demanded that Vanity Fair retract the excerpt, and threatened legal action against Simon & Schuster. In a statement, he said: "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." He also said he had provided more than 30 hours of testimony while voluntarily cooperating with congressional and special counsel investigations.

The Guardian reports that Cole's sources in the book are mostly anonymous, and that the book does not print images of emails or other documents to support its reporting.