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1. It came out of left field, but last night's bombshell developments seem to have exposed a tangled web involving the Saudis, MBS, their allies, Team Trump, global hacking rings, Khashoggi, the Washington Post and Bezos that could take everything down. Follow the chain here:
2. Let's start in 2017 -- when Muhammed bin Salman (MBS) consolidates power over Saudi Arabia and fumes about dissident Adnan Khashoggi writing for the Washington Post, saying he'd personally put "a bullet" in the U.S.-based journalist nytimes.com/2019/02/07/us/…
3. In 2018, Khashoggi is murdered by Saudi agents inside their Turkish embassy. Mourning journalists at the Post vow to use all of the paper's assets in a relentless quest to expose the truth, including MBS's role, until "meaningful action is taken" politico.com/story/2018/12/…
4. Meanwhile, the world is also learning that AMI, publisher of the National Enquirer, and its owner David Pecker, played a critical role in Donald Trump's rise to the White House, snuffing out would-be scandals and keeping dirt on POTUS 45 in a safe usatoday.com/story/news/pol…
5. During Trump's 1st year in the WH, the key players come together. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner forms close ties with MBS and possibly shares intelligence, while AMI's Pecker uses his Trump ties to get a White House meeting to tap Saudi billions nytimes.com/2018/03/29/bus…
6. An apparent result of that meeting was AMI's publication of a ridiculous (and ridiculously overpriced) magazine that puffed up MBS's Saudi Arabia as a "magic kingdom" and was placed on racks in Walmart, etc. thedailybeast.com/trumps-publish…
7. Jump ahead to the near present. Last month, Post owner Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, announced he's getting a divorce, hours before his intimate "sexts" with a mistress are published by...AMI's National Enquirer cnn.com/2019/01/10/med…
8. As often happens (remember Russia's 2016 election hacks) the news tends to obscure a somewhat more salient question: How did the National Enquirer get these texts. Bezos would not roll over. Instead, he hired a top investigator to find out usatoday.com/story/tech/tal…
9. Last night, it all hit the fan. Bezos went public with a new blackmail effort by the Enquirer -- a threat to publish lewd or racy photos of Bezos and his paramour unless he dropped the probe of AMI's hacking washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/styl…
10. Critically, AMI wanted Bezos to falsely state that his investigation led to "no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” The sensitive point, according to Bezos? The possible role of Saudi Arabia.
11. Talk about opening a Pandora's box! The Bezos-AMI affair should call attention to increased hacking wars that have consumed Saudi Arabia, its close ally the UAE and their newfound adversary Qatar, working with various mercenary types from the U.S. and Israel...
12. ...Is it a coincidence that just as the Bezos-AMI affair was exploding, Reuters exposed an operation called Karma in which "former U.S. intelligence agents" (!!!) helped the UAE hack the iPhones of its prominent adversaries. reuters.com/article/us-usa…
13. Karma was apparently part of a broader effort, Project Raven. That's just the latest twist in growing web that involves Trump, the Saudis, shadowy intelligence firms, a weaponized Nat'l Enquirer, hacking and blackmail going back to the 2016 election.
14. Remember this Trump Tower meeting in 2016 that involved Don. Jr., an Israeli intelligence firm, and a promise of Saudi/UAE money to elect Trump? It might be a coincidence, but it hints at what's exploding right now nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/…
15. Why did Pecker's AMI panic at Bezos' investigation and the inference of Saudi involvement, and initiate a blackmail attempt, when it had just promised the Justice Department to refrain from criminal activity in the Michael Cohen case? It seems like an insane risk.
16. Is that because the Bezos investigation threatens to expose secrets of much greater significance than just a billionaire's sexts? Such as, the conspiracy behind Khashoggi's murder? Or behind the election of Donald Trump?
17. Stay tuned. You know what they say about Karma -- it's a bitch. -30-
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First and hopefully last correction: *Jamal* Khashoggi -- my 1980s brain played a trick on me
OK, guys -- I put all of this in my Philadelphia Inquirer column. It ties everything all together, has a lot of new details about Saudi hacking capabilities and why this is so scary for democracy. Check it out! philly.com/opinion/commen…
