Everyone’s Talking About Kushner’s Money. Nobody’s Talking About His Phone.

By Rachel Hurley October 23rd, 2026

A new book says Russian spies could see his screen. Now he’s the one sitting across from Putin.

The Vanity Fair article about Jared Kushner that came out on Thursday was jaw-dropping. But it was behind a paywall, so here’s my take based on my own research on Kushner over the last two years.

Buckle up.

On September 5, Vladimir Putin shook Jared Kushner’s hand inside the Kremlin. Then Putin sat with Kushner and Steve Witkoff for more than three hours to talk about ending the war in Ukraine. On Wednesday, Kushner dialed in remotely while Witkoff met Putin again - and praised him for being a humanitarian.

Hilarious.

Anyway, the Vanity Fair piece was an excerpt from a new book. Hold that Kremlin picture in your head while I tell you what the book says Putin’s spies allegedly had on him.

The headlines focus on the Dutch and the bank accounts. Nobody seems to be talking about the phone.

The money’s bananas, and honestly, I get why everyone’s stuck on it. Investigative reporter Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves, claims Gulf royals put at least $2 billion into accounts Kushner could use. That’s a story about what he allegedly did back then. The phone is a question about what he’s doing right now, at the table with the guy whose spies allegedly had it.

Cole’s version goes like this.

In late 2017, Dutch military intelligence, called the MIVD, caught a hacker working for Russia’s GRU and flipped him. The GRU is Putin’s military spy agency. The hacker gave the Dutch access to a GRU server, where screenshots from Kushner’s iPhone X sat.

The Dutch figured out how the Russians got in and used the same trick themselves. By early 2018, they could allegedly watch his screen like a silent movie.

Picture that for a second. The president’s son-in-law, the guy running Middle East policy, allegedly had a phone so wide open that two countries’ spies were peeking in - and one of them was Russia.

So, what was playing?

Cole says Kushner was logging into an account at First Abu Dhabi Bank that the book calls Alpha. It belonged to a UAE government-funded charity, the Watani Al Emarat Foundation, and Kushner was a signatory. About $750 million had come in, routed through Azerbaijan.

A second account, Beta, allegedly sat at Israel’s central bank with about $1 billion in it. Netanyahu supposedly wanted a heads-up before Kushner touched it, with messages passed through then-Ambassador David Friedman.

Now, here’s what that means if it’s true. Russia wouldn’t just know Kushner had secret money. They’d know where it sat, who sent it, and who he had to check with before he spent it. In the spy world, that’s called leverage, and you never have to say it out loud. You just need the other guy to know you know.

Friedman says that’s 100% false - and Kushner calls the whole thing “completely insane.”

His lawyer, Chad Mizelle, sent publisher Simon & Schuster a 13-page denial and is threatening legal action. The White House says the book leans on two anonymous sources who only heard about this secondhand. Cole’s excerpt also points to other sources, including someone who claims a direct role in moving the money. But the excerpt includes no bank statements or surveillance screenshots, and the Dutch government hasn’t confirmed a word.

But they also have not denied it.

Right now the hack is still just an allegation, same as the money, and I’m holding it that way. Then I went back through what’s already on the public record, and that’s where my stomach dropped.

The screenshots are the detail I can’t shake.

In December 2018, Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, met with House Oversight leaders. In March 2019, then-chairman Elijah Cummings disclosed what Lowell told them.

Kushner preserved his WhatsApp messages by screenshotting them and forwarding them to his White House email. Cummings said those chats included foreign leaders.

So Kushner’s official paper trail was literally screenshots of his phone screen, and now a book says Russian spies were passing those screenshots around.

Then there’s the timeline.

Cole says the Dutch were watching Kushner’s screen in early 2018. The New York Times reported that in May 2018, Trump ordered John Kelly to grant Kushner a permanent top-secret clearance anyway. That was over objections from intelligence officials and White House counsel Don McGahn, and both Kelly and McGahn put their concerns in writing.

Earlier that year, the Washington Post reported that officials in the UAE, Israel, China, and Mexico had discussed ways to exploit Kushner’s business troubles and inexperience. The Post said his contacts with certain foreign officials were one reason he couldn’t get a permanent clearance.

So, the security pros said no - but Trump overruled them.

Now play it forward with me, cause this is where it gets ugly. A permanent top-secret clearance opens the country’s most guarded intel. If his phone was as leaky as Cole says, the obvious question is whether anything he read, texted, or screenshotted after May 2018 ever touched it.

And look at today.

The White House calls Kushner a private citizen who volunteers as an envoy. That’s why he hasn’t filed the financial disclosures government employees must.

Meanwhile, he’s working on Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, and he’s sat with Putin in the Kremlin repeatedly since last December. His private equity firm, Affinity Partners, takes money from Middle Eastern investors. That’s separate from Cole’s alleged first-term accounts, but it’s the same neighborhood.

The watchdog group CREW sued on October 14 to block him from the role, since the Senate never confirmed him, and to make him disclose like everybody else.

The bottom line is: if Russia ever got a window into Kushner’s phone, and anything on it could still embarrass him, then the man negotiating the end of a war might be sitting across from the one guy on earth who knows his secrets. Putin’s a former KGB officer, and collecting leverage on people was literally his old job.

If anyone is wondering why the US keeps bending the knee to Russia - well - it shouldn’t be hard to theorize a reason.

And even if every dollar in this book turns out to be fiction, the hack is a question we can check. Either the GRU had his phone or it didn’t. Either the Dutch told us or they didn’t. Either American intelligence knew or it didn’t.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee already want Kushner to answer these questions in public, but it seems to me they still have a lot more people to round up to get to the bottom of all this.

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Everyone’s Talking About Kushner’s Money. Nobody’s Talking About His Phone.

A new book says Russian spies could see his screen. Now he’s the one sitting across from Putin.

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