Thread by @VickyPJWard

I have come across new information that appears to imply that Jared Kushner may be extorting the nation of Qatar.

I spoke to @krassenstein and @EdKrassen for a special report today: hillreporter.com/bombshell-new-…

Jared Kushner went into this administration with a financial albatross around his neck: his family’s troubled 666 Fifth Avenue, a building that was bleeding money. The Kushners had until Feb 2019 to pay off their $1.4 billion debt, but no American investors would touch it.

I cover this in #KushnerInc. What I reported was how Jared Kushner swiped the Middle East foreign policy portfolio from under Rex Tillerson’s nose and started running around the Middle East using it as a private casino to solve his and his family’s very real financial problems.

Kushner communicated with MBS, MBZ, and the Qataris (via WhatsApp, etc) without letting Tillerson or anyone from the National Security Council know what he was talking about. This was an EXTREMELY dangerous and unprecedented abuse of protocols.

Then, in May 2017, Trump made his first official visit abroad to a fairly unusual place: Saudi Arabia, not a country exactly well known for its democratic values. He attended a summit in Riyadh where the theme was supposed to be cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

Ten days after the summit, Saudi Arabia turned around and blockaded Qatar, a neighboring country with whom they’d had a long-standing feud. But it’s also a country with an American airbase.

A Tillerson aide told me, “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody—[and] that person must have been Jared.”

How did that all happen?

In April 2017, Charlie Kushner lined up a meeting at the St. Regis Hotel with the Qatari finance minister. I learned from someone who was in that meeting that Kushner asked for a billion dollars. Dexter Filkins reported the same for the New Yorker: newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…

The Qataris turned Kusher down because the deal was a bad one—a VERY bad one.

What I have learned from people coming forward after #KushnerInc came out is that, in the ensuing month before Trump’s first official visit to Saudi Arabia, Jared Kushner flew to Doha, the Qatari capital, and reamed the Qatari ruling family for not doing the deal with his father.

During the summit in Riyadh, Jared and Ivanka had an unmonitored dinner with MBS. Nobody knows what they talked about. Then, ten days later, the United States supported the blockade of Qatar.

The Qataris reported there were Saudi and Emirati troops on their border. My sources in the State Dept confirm this. The Qataris interpreted the presence of troops as Kushner saying, “If you don’t pay my father, the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country.”

Nine months later, in the spring of 2018, Brookfield Partners—a Canadian company whose second-largest investor is a state-run sovereign wealth fund controlled by the government of Qatar—bailed out the Kushner building in a deal that makes ABSOLUTELY no economic sense.

They do a 99-year lease and they pay the ENTIRE 99-year lease up front. You don’t need to be good at math or be in the New York real estate community to understand how crazy that is.

Around the same time as the deal gets underway, the U.S. withdraws its support of the blockade of Qatar. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I’m on this story and I’m going to stay on it. For the full story that's been reported, see #KushnerInc. And for what comes next, stay tuned... There is *much* more to come.