1. In the middle of a middle-of-the-night impeachment, a nuclear bomb went off -- the smoking gun linking a powerful world dictator (and key Trump ally) with a criminal plot against press freedom in America. Whatever happens in the Senate, we need to find out...
2. ...what did the president know and when did he know it about Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and MBS' hacking of Post owner Jeff Bezos' phone washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/…
3. There's so much to unpack here I thought a timeline was important. Read this and I think you'll agree that the House needs to immediately launch a probe of MBS, his ties to Trump and Jared Kushner, and our military and nuclear support for the Saudi monarchy. So here goes...
4. Aug. 2, 2016: Right after Trump's shock GOP nomination, Don Jr. meets in Trump Tower with a mysterious Israeli owner of a "psy-ops" firm, Joel Zamel, Middle East fixer George Nader, and Blackwater founder Eric Prince. In that meeting... nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/…
5 ...Nader tells the son of the future POTUS that Saudi Arabia and its ally the United Arab Emirates are willing to spend big to put Donald Trump in the White House. Zamel's Psy-Group pitches a covert pro-Trump campaign on social media.
6. The participants swear nothing came of this meeting, despite fact that a) Nader (a once and future convicted pedophile, too) later paid Zamel $2 million and b) Zamel's team later gave an "if-I-did-it" presentation on secretly working for Trump
7. Dec. 5, 2016: Well-known Saudi-born journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is banned by regime in Riyadh. His crime? Writing columns critical of...Donald Trump. Khashoggi establishes U.S. residency in 2017 as an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.
8. Jan. 20, 2017. Trump becomes 45th president and soon announces, in a break with precedent, that Saudi Arabia will be his 1st overseas trip. Meanwhile, his ME point man and son-in-law Jared Kushner becomes fast friends with the youthful MBS
9.. July 2017: Trump welcomes an old friend to the White House, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who brings along a French adviser and confidant of...MBS. Pecker plays up his WH connections while trying to win lucrative business from the Saudis nytimes.com/2018/03/29/bus…
10. Pecker, as the world would later find out, had a long history of doing dirty deeds for Trump during his decades as a tabloid celebrity. He even owned a safe where Trump secrets were stored, and he helped cover up sex scandals in the '16 campaign nytimes.com/2018/03/29/bus…
11. September 2017: MBS tells a top Saudi aide of his irritation with Khashoggi's Washington Post columns and that if the writer did not stop and return home to Saudi Arabia that he would use "a bullet" against Khashoggi nytimes.com/2019/02/07/us/…
12. October 2017: Kushner -- with full access to U.S. intelligence despite lacking a security clearance -- flies to Saudi Arabia, unannounced, to hang with MBS. There's rampant speculation they shared intel ahead of a crackdown on Saudi dissidents nytimes.com/2018/03/29/bus…
13. March 2018: National Enquirer's Pecker (remember him?) publishes a bizarre glossy magazine that appears in U.S. megastores hailing Saudi Arabia as "the Magic Kingdom" and larded with special praise for its young visionary leader, MBS thedailybeast.com/trumps-publish…
14. April 2018: MBS conducts a whirlwind U.S. tour in which he meets media moguls, Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos, also seeking lucrative Saudi business, and MBS exchange phone numbers.
15. May 1, 2018: MBS sends his new fellow billionaire friend Bezos what appears to be an innocuous message through WhatsApp. Unbeknownst to the Post owner, the message allegedly contains Israeli malware that allows Saudi intelligence to hack his phone
16. October 2, 2018: Khashoggi, seeking Saudi documents he'll need for his pending wedding, shows up for an appointment in their consulate in Istanbul, where agents murder him and hack up his body, which has never been found. CIA later concludes the hit was ordered by MBS.
17. October 21, 2018: Post journalists are furious at their colleague's murder, with publisher Fred Ryan blasting a Saudi "cover-up" and urging the U.S. and other nations to find the truth. It's believed that MBS is angered at the fierce response from Bezos-owned Post.
18. November 2018: Pressed on Khashoggi's murder, Trump says he accepts MBS denial of any involvement. It's later reported by Trump-official-turned-author Anonymous that the president was worried about the effect on the price of oil. Meanwhile... newsweek.com/donald-trump-s…
19. Trump has his own long-running beef with Bezos over the Post's critical coverage of his presidency. He uses the power of his office to push for higher postal rates for Amazon and leans on the Pentagon to deny the firm a $10 billion contract washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
20. Fall 2019: And despite the uproar over the Khashoggi murder, Trump also secretly approves the transfer of top-secret American nuclear technology to the Saudis -- without informing Congress. Team Trump also backs MBS' brutal, long-running war in Yemen thetimes.co.uk/article/trump-…
21. January 2019: Bezos makes a surprise announcement that he's divorcing his longtime wife MacKenzie -- hours before racy texts and pictures of Bezos and his secret girlfriend are published...in David Pecker's National Enquirer! inquirer.com/opinion/commen…
22. Within minutes of the Enquirer's report on Bezos, Trump weighs in with a thuggish tweet that, in bad-mob-movie style, calls him "Jeff Bozo" and suggests the Post should get a new owner
23. Despite attempts by the Enquirer to deflect blame for the hacking onto the brother of Bezos' girlfriend, the billionaire publisher immediately suspects the Saudis, boosted by evidence from a top security consultant medium.com/@jeffreypbezos…
24. Over the course of 2019, Trump shrugs off the Khashoggi murder to strengthen ties with MBS and the Saudis. Despite his promise to end U.S. "forever wars," the president sends thousands of new American troops there, with the Saudis writing the U.S. a $500 million check.
25. September 2019: As a scandal over his dealings with Ukraine envelops the president, it's revealed that summaries of Trump's phone calls with Saudi rulers have been placed on a formerly secret White House server. The content of those calls has never been revealed
26. January 21, 2020: A UN report confirms what Bezos long suspected -- that the Saudi government, with the direct personal involvement of MBS -- had hacked his phone in 2018, before the scandalous texts were published nytimes.com/2020/01/22/wor…
27. What's more, the January leak was amplified with a social media campaign that traced back to Saudi official sources, all seeking to smear Bezos and the Washington Post. In other words, a foreign autocrat led an orchestrated effort to...
28. ...silence the press freedom of one of America's two most prominent newspapers by murdering and dismembering one of its journalists and hacking and blackmailing the newspaper's owner. Meanwhile...
29. ...the U.S. government under Donald Trump has done absolutely NOTHING to investigate the truth on arguably the most significant outside attack on the 1st Amendment in American history, and in fact condoned the attack and rewarded the culprits
30. I demand, and we all should demand, a full investigation by Congress. What transpired on the Trump-Saudi phone calls that are hidden away on the White House server? What U.S. intelligence did Kushner unlawfully share with MBS? Also...
31. ...what did Trump and Kushner know about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and when did they know it? What role, if any, did Team Trump play as an intermediary in connecting the Saudis with the National Enquirer to smear Bezos? This case shows...
32 ...that we can't let the sham trial that's currently occurring in the Senate become the be-all and end-all of investigating Trump's corruption, because Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg. What MBS seems to have pulled off here is nothing less than...
33. ...an attack on America, our journalism, and our values. And he did it with the cooperation, witting or unwitting, of the 45th president of the United States. We simply can't allow this to stand unchallenged -30-
If you want to read this as a column, including my fiery anger, here it is! inquirer.com/columnists/att…
