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Americans Want Trump's Iran War To End, But His Paymaster Isn't Ready Yet

Donald Trump knows that his reckless and pointless war on Iran is exceptionally unpopular, which must be why he now claims that the United States has already “won” – and why he sometimes seems to be promoting a negotiated exit. Yesterday he claimed that the Iranians sent him a big and very expensive “present,” like other nations that have sought favors from this eminently corruptible president.

Officials in Teheran still deny any talks about ending this round of hostilities, as they continue missile and drone strikes on other states in the region. Despite the destruction they and their people have suffered from US bombing, the mullahs enjoy a strategic advantage over the critical Strait of Hormuz, which the Trump White House evidently forgot to consider.

So pulling back from yet another flawed Mideast military venture is plainly the preferred course now. But bad news came this morning for everyone who hope to end this conflict before we sacrifice even more lives and treasure. Whatever Americans may want, there is a figure with far more influence over the Trump family than any voter, and he reportedly wants the war to conclude with “the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government.”

According to the New York Times, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is pressing Trump to continue the war, despite his government’s public pronouncements to the contrary. Although the Saudis were not eager for this war and its predictable impact on their oil exports and security, the crown prince reportedly believes that a wounded but extant Iranian regime will be extremely dangerous to his country.

Quoting “interviews with people who have had conversations with American officials, and who described the discussions on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of Mr. Trump’s talks with world leaders, the Times noted the crazy zigzag of the president’s daily comments on the war –sometimes claiming that it will soon be over, sometimes vowing to bomb Iran into oblivion and regime change. Notably, the White House didn’t deny the Times story when asked about Trump’s conversations with the crown prince.

What the stunning Times report didn’t mention is the troubling relationship between the Saudi ruler, known as MBS, and Jared Kushner, the Trump adviser and son-in-law who led the negotiations with Iran that ended so abruptly with US and Israeli bombing. Not only has Kushner’s investment fund received $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, but he has been seeking another $5 billion even as the Iran crisis unfolded. Moreover, the Trump organization has recently booked at least $50 million in Saudi-linked projects through real-estate licensing agreements, golf tournament deals, and an unknown amount from purchases of Trump crypto-currency products.

To underline the corrupt relationship between the kingdom's ruling family and the Trump extended family of crooks, the president will deliver the featured address at the Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s Miami investment conference on March 27 -- just as he did one year ago. A senior Saudi delegation — including the head of the nearly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund and the kingdom's finance minister — will mingle with top US officials, business leaders, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump diplomatic amateur Steve Witkoff (as well as Witkoff's son Zach, who runs a crypto business with the Trumps).

As they assess the daily barrage of propaganda and smoke from the White House, Americans shouldn’t deceive themselves about the motives behind this war. We did not need to sacrifice American troops, innocent civilians, and hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It seems that the proponents of wanton destruction, global chaos, and “regime change” have paid hefty bribes to get their way.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.

Saudi Lobbyist Escorting Hegseth On Hill As He Pleads To Save Nomination

While Pete Hegseth scampers around Capitol Hill – desperately pleading for votes to confirm him as defense secretary, despite his thin resume and ample scandals -- it’s easy to spot a white-maned wing man trailing just behind him. That would be Norm Coleman, the last Republican senator from Hegseth’s home state of Minnesota.

Beyond partisan loyalty and shared roots, Coleman has a powerful commercial interest in who oversees the US military and its mammoth budget. He happens to be one of the principal Washington lobbyists for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, perhaps not coincidentally, a top fundraiser of dark money for GOP campaigns. And he also chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, another dark-money outfit that spends millions backing GOP candidates with campaign ads centered around Jewish community concerns.

With this extraordinary network of political warchests and secretive donors behind him, Coleman exerts enormous influence over Republicans in Washington. He was a founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund SuperPAC, which he continues to chair, and also oversees the American Action Network, a tax-exempt “social welfare” group that uses tax-exempt donations from undisclosed donors to support GOP campaigns (as boasted by his bio on the website of his lobbying law firm, Hogan Lovells). Those two outfits, backed by tens of millions of dark-money dollars in every cycle, are wings of a single organization with a shared office and staff based only a block from the White House.

Despite Coleman’s longstanding service to the Saudi dictatorship, a spokeman for CLF has insisted that none of its funding comes from foreign donors. But as disclosed in a 2022 report by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, both AAN and CLF have promoted Saudi interests here. Between 2021 and 2022, those outlets reported that “Coleman wrote over 1,000 emails to House and Senate staffers…as part of his paid work for Saudi Arabia. Coleman and several of his law firm colleagues are registered as foreign agents of the Kingdom,” which pays well over $2 million a year to Hogan Lovells. The former Minnesota senator was among very few public figures willing to defend the Saudi regime publicly after the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist and democracy crusader Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate.

Should Hegseth prevail in his confirmation struggle, the Saudis and their premier lobbyist will enjoy renewed influence in the Pentagon and US decisions about weapons sales and America’s military posture toward Iran and other states in the Gulf region. But that would only reinforce the close and potentially corrupt ties between Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and the Trump family, on whom he has lavished enormous sums of money through the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which gave a $2 billion investment deal to Jared Kushner and has a lucrative deal with the Trump Organization to promote its LIV golf consortium.

Trump’s Saudi grifting is even more open and brazen than Coleman’s conflicted lobbying setup. When the president-elect and his entourage attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at Madison Square Garden on November 17 in a post-election celebration, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was seated right next to him.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Financial Analyst Exposes Kushner's Unprecedented Saudi Grift

During Monday's segment of MSNBC's Morning Joe, economic analyst Steve Rattner left panelists astounded after providing an in-depth look into the root of ex-President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's "$3.1 billion cash haul."

Rattner shared a chart displaying a breakdown of the sources of Kushner's money via Twitter Monday, writing, "Jared Kushner spent much of his White House tenure cozying up to MBS [Mortgage-Backed Securities] & Saudi Arabia. Six months after leaving Washington, his private equity firm landed $2 billion in investments from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund."

During the show segment, MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire noted how Kushner's "background in real estate" does not exactly qualify him "as a hedge fund magnate or peace broker in the Middle East."

"You're right, Jonathan. Jared Kushner did work in the White House," Rattner said. "He worked very hard. It's becoming less clear what he worked hard at, because after he left the White House, he went out and raised $3.1 billion -- that's billion with a 'b' -- for a private equity fund and he's not a private equity guy, he is a real estate guy. So where does the money come from? Some of it we know from filing. Some from press reports.What we know for a fact is that he raised $3.1 billion and only about $30 million of it actually came from investors in the United States all the rest of it is foreign money. And of that foreign money, $2 billion came from the Saudis."

The analyst emphasized, "I've been in this business 40 years. I've never seen somebody get two-thirds of their money from a single investor. Usually a single investor might be a few percent of the fund, might be 5 percent, occasionally 10 percent — I've never seen this. Another $200 million we believe came from Qatar and another $200 million from the United Arab Emirates and then the $625 million from foreign investors that we don't even know who they are. So what was Jared Kushner doing in the White House? And, by the way as a fun fact, on January 6, the famous January 6, Jared Kushner was in the Middle East."

Morning Joe panelist Elise Jordan then asked Rattner, "There's not much out there on how Jared has actually been able to execute his funding. He has all this money, but his background is not in private equity and I've seen only one news report of a small European investment. He's sitting on all this money. Are the Saudis investing with him just to hedge their bets politically in case Trump comes back into office?"

Rattner emphasized, "We haven't seen him do a lot with this money. He has hired some people, I do know that. I've seen nothing else about what he's actually done with the money. It is normal to invest this money over a period of several years, so I don't think we can draw a firm conclusion yet. But, again, we're going back to a guy who's a real estate guy, and frankly not a particularly good one at that, who's suddenly got $3 billion trying to do private equity deals competing against people who've been in this business for a long time. And I wouldn't, if I were the Saudis, count on making a lot of money from this any time soon."

Rattner concluded, "U.S. private equity firms still raise the vast bulk of their money from U.S. investors. This is extraordinary — unprecedented — I've never seen anything like it."

Watch the video at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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Americans Want Trump's Iran War To End, But His Paymaster Isn't Ready Yet

Saudi Lobbyist Escorting Hegseth On Hill As He Pleads To Save Nomination

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Financial Analyst Exposes Kushner's Unprecedented Saudi Grift

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