Jared Kushner Reveals Rare Details About Ties With Saudi Crown Prince
New memoir offers look at how the two men forged a friendly political alliance that deepened into a post-White House business partnership
In the early months of the Trump administration, Jared Kushner made an urgent call to Mohammed bin Salman, who was then serving as Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, with an appeal for help to ensure that the president’s first overseas trip to the kingdom would be a success.
“Everyone here is telling me that I’m a fool for trusting you,” Mr. Kushner said he told Prince Mohammed. “They are saying the trip is a terrible idea. If I get to Saudi Arabia, and it’s just a bunch of sand and camels, I’m a dead man.”
Prince Mohammed laughed and assured Mr. Kushner that the trip would reap huge benefits for Mr. Trump, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Prince Mohammed and the Saudi rulers treated Mr. Trump to a lavish welcome in May 2017, complete with a sword dance, a $350 billion arms deal and the country’s highest civilian medal for strengthening ties between the two countries.
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The call, detailed in Mr. Kushner’s forthcoming memoir, offers a rare glimpse into the unusual relationship between the two men that evolved from a friendly political alliance into a deepening post-White House business partnership that has drawn scrutiny from congressional investigators.
The 500-page book, portions of which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal, includes new details on how Mr. Kushner forged ties with Prince Mohammed. Mr. Kushner’s memoir details how he stood by Prince Mohammed after he was accused of ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, feuded with other Trump administration officials who accused him of being too cozy with the Saudi ruler, and leveraged the relationship to forge new ties between Israel and the Arab world.
Mr. Kushner’s close ties with Prince Mohammed proved to be one of the most fruitful and polarizing relationships for the Trump White House. Then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Mr. Kushner of sidelining him and running foreign policy out of his West Wing office. Human-rights groups accused Mr. Kushner of playing down Prince Mohammed’s heavy-handed crackdown on critics and his military campaign against Iran-backed militants in Yemen so the U.S. could secure lucrative military sales to Saudi Arabia. Congressional investigators now want to know if Mr. Kushner’s White House decisions helped him secure a $2 billion investment Prince Mohammed and Saudi Arabia made to jump-start Mr. Kushner’s post-White House investment firm.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said Mr. Kushner’s financial ties with Prince Mohammed warrant closer scrutiny.
“The American people deserve answers as to whether a top White House official used his office for personal gain and whether the promise of a future payoff for official actions affected U.S. foreign policy under former President Trump,” she said in a statement.
Mr. Kushner has dismissed accusations that his White House decisions were designed to advance his personal business ambitions. Saudi officials also rebuffed any suggestion that they made decisions to personally benefit Mr. Kushner. In Riyadh, where family relationships are tightly intertwined with political fortunes, Mr. Kushner was seen as a key figure in the Trump White House who had unique access and influence because he is married to Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter.
“Everyone understood the importance of working together,” one Saudi official said. “There was a strategic necessity.”
In “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” due to be released Aug. 23, Mr. Kushner provides a carefully framed defense of his relationship with Prince Mohammed. Mr. Kushner said he viewed Prince Mohammed as a historic figure who brought once-unimaginable social reforms to Saudi Arabia and steered the kingdom toward a warming relationship with Israel.
When Prince Mohammed was accused of sending a hit team to Turkey in 2018 that killed Mr. Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Washington Post writer, Mr. Kushner accepted the Saudi leader’s claim that he wasn’t personally involved. To Mr. Kushner, the brutal incident had to be calibrated with all the changes Prince Mohammed was enacting in Saudi Arabia.
“While this situation was terrible, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the reforms that MBS was implementing were having a positive impact on millions of people in the kingdom—especially women,” Mr. Kushner writes. “All of these reforms were major priorities for the United States, as they led to further progress in combating extremism and advancing economic opportunity and stability throughout the war-torn region. The kingdom was poised to build on this historic progress, and I believed it would.”
Later, a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Prince Mohammed ordered the fatal operation that killed Mr. Khashoggi, a finding Mr. Kushner previously said he didn’t dispute but doesn’t mention in his memoir.
At the time, Mr. Trump framed Mr. Khashoggi’s killing as an anomaly that shouldn’t undermine America’s relationship with the kingdom.
President Biden sought to take a different approach when he took office in 2021 by vowing to treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah because of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing. Mr. Biden shifted course earlier this month and flew to the kingdom, where he met Prince Mohammed with a fist bump. Mr. Biden said he raised Mr. Khashoggi’s case with Prince Mohammed but, like Mr. Trump, didn’t let the issue overshadow discussions about broader issues like regional security.
Mr. Kushner’s close relationship with Prince Mohammed created friction inside the Trump administration among other officials who viewed it with suspicion.
In one heated 2017 showdown relayed in the book, Mr. Tillerson accused Mr. Kushner of undercutting his authority as America’s top diplomat by working with Prince Mohammed behind his back. Mr. Tillerson opposed Mr. Kushner’s successful push to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and accused Mr. Trump’s son-in-law of backing Saudi Arabia’s move to cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar.
“You are lighting a match in a dry forest, and the whole Middle East is on fire,” Mr. Tillerson said, according to the book. “You might as well go before the Senate for confirmation because you are going to cause a war, and I am not going to be the one to be blamed for it.”
Mr. Kushner wrote that he immediately got Prince Mohammed on a call and, with Mr. Tillerson listening, asked the Saudi leader to disabuse the secretary of state of the notion that they were shaping policy without his input.
“I can’t operate like this!” Mr. Tillerson shouted before storming out of the room. Mr. Tillerson couldn’t be reached for comment, but he told U.S. lawmakers after he left the Trump administration that he thought Mr. Kushner undercut his authority.
Time after time, Mr. Kushner wrote that he picked up the phone to call Prince Mohammed to hammer out foreign-policy conundrums—such as on oil prices, warming relations with Israel or resolving the yearslong feud with Qatar.
One of Mr. Kushner’s crowning achievements was spearheading the Abraham Accords, a series of historic peace deals Israel signed in 2020 with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Mr. Kushner personally pressed Prince Mohammed to regularly allow commercial Israeli planes to fly over Saudi Arabia to aid the accords and urged the crown prince to join the group. For Prince Mohammed, the timing wasn’t right.
When Mr. Kushner joined Mr. Trump and other aides in the Oval Office for the call between Israel and the U.A.E. leaders that sealed their accord in August, 2020, Mr. Trump praised his son-in-law as a genius, according to the book.
“People complain about nepotism,” Mr. Trump joked. “I’m the one who got the steal here.”
Mr. Kushner replied that “maybe in the future, more presidents will haze their sons-in-law by tasking them with impossible problems.”
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com