Tag: Qatar

Donald Trump rebuffed U.S. airlines and trade adviser in a tense Oval Office meeting

The three largest U.S. airlines presumed that President Donald Trump would take their side in a ferocious, yearslong dispute with Persian Gulf-based airlines — if they could just get his attention.

They got his attention, by way of TV ads the president saw on Fox News. But when Trump finally gathered executives from both sides of the dispute this month in the Oval Office for a heated, “Apprentice”-worthy showdown, he ultimately sided against them.

During an hour-long session, the president ribbed American Airlines CEO Doug Parker over his company’s flagging stock price, asking why it’s so low at a time when the stock market is surging. He scolded Delta Airlines, whose CEO Ed Bastian did not attend, for buying billions in planes from the European firm Airbus while Qatar Airways is buying its jets from Chicago-based Boeing Co.

And he repeatedly harped on Bastian’s absence, questioning how he could be a no-show after his airline — more than any other — had been fanning the flames of the fight.

“The president kept going back to it,” one person who attended the meeting told NBC News. “There was a lot of yelling.”

The meeting was a stark illustration of the president’s freewheeling decision-making style, particularly in areas like U.S. business where he is most confident in his own instincts.

It was also a steep blow to Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, who found himself on the losing end of a tug of war with national security adviser John Bolton, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and others in Trump’s White House.

This account draws on interviews with 10 individuals, including senior Trump administration officials, airline officials, congressional aides and others who attended or were briefed on the unusual July 18 meeting.

Those individuals, who spoke anonymously because the meeting was intended to be kept private, said nobody knew what the president would do when he sat the CEOs or their representatives from both sides of the dispute down in front of the Oval Office’s Resolute desk and asked them one by one to make their case.

For more than four years, the “Big Three” U.S. carriers — American, Delta and United Airlines — have been waging a bitter battle with Qatar Airways and two Emirati airlines over flights between the U.S. and the lucrative European market. The U.S. carriers argue that the Mideast airlines are heavily government-subsidized and are undercutting them by offering below-market fares on flights that never stop in the Middle East.

Most recently, they’ve turned their focus to Air Italy, which added new flights between Milan and the U.S. after Qatar Airways bought a 49 percent stake. The U.S. carriers say it’s a scheme to circumvent restrictions in the U.S.-Qatar “Open Skies” agreement on civil aviation.

Navarro, Trump’s hard-charging trade adviser known for his staunch protectionist views, has kept the issue alive in the White House after overseeing agreements last year to resolve previous grievances by the U.S. airlines, several administration officials said.

But as the Qataris and the U.S. airlines clashed anew this year over Air Italy, Navarro’s campaign thrust him into conflict with the rest of the White House. It drew the attention of Bolton, who enlisted Kudlow and other agencies to wrest back oversight of the issue from Navarro, people familiar with his efforts said.

[NBC News]

Cohen asked Qatari government for $1 million in exchange for access to Trump

President Trump‘s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, reportedly offered Qatari government officials access to the president in exchange for at least $1 million.

The Washington Post reported that Cohen sought the arrangement in December 2016, around the time Qatari officials visited Trump Tower to meet with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Cohen did not attend those meetings, but reportedly spoke about the arrangement with Qatari investor Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, the Post reported. Qatar declined the offer, according to the Post.

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, first made Al-Rumaihi’s connection to Cohen public in a tweet last weekend.

“Why was Ahmed Al-Rumaihi meeting with Michael Cohen and Michael Flynn in December 2016 and why did Mr. Al-Rumaihi later brag about bribing administration officials according to a sworn declaration filed in court?” Avenatti tweeted.

Al-Rumaihi confirmed through a spokesperson on Tuesday that he attended meetings at Trump Tower in 2016. Al-Rumaihi said he was not a part of the meetings with Flynn.

Cohen’s reported attempts to broker a deal with Qatar follow recent revelations that multiple companies paid him in exchange for insights and access to the Trump administration.

Swiss drug company Novartis and AT&T have both acknowledged they paid Cohen for advice on how to approach the Trump administration on particular issues. Officials from both companies have called the arrangement “a mistake.”

[The Hill]

Qatar Refused to Invest in Kushner’s Firm. Weeks Later, Jared Backed a Blockade of Qatar.

Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s minister of finance last April, to solicit an investment in the family’s distressed asset at 666 Fifth Avenue, according to a new report from the Intercept.

The Qataris shot him down.

Weeks later, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates organized a blockade of Qatar. The Gulf monarchies claimed that this act of aggression was a response to Donald Trump’s call for the Arab world to crack down on terrorists — after taking in the president’s majestic sermon in Riyadh, the Saudis simply couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t take action to thwart Qatar’s covert financing of Islamist extremism.

In reality, the Saudis’ primary aim was to punish Doha for asserting its independence from Riyadh by, among other things, engaging with Iran and abetting Al Jazeera’s journalism. This was obvious to anyone familiar with the Saudis’ own affinity for (shamelessly) exporting jihadism — which is to say, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Middle East politics.

And it was equally obvious that the United States had nothing to gain from a conflict between its Gulf allies. Qatar hosts one of America’s largest and most strategically important air bases in the Middle East. Any development that pushes Doha away from Riyadh pulls it toward Tehran. Thus, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — and virtually every other arm of the U.S. government — scrambled to nip the blockade in the bud.

But Jared Kushner was (reportedly) an exception. Donald Trump was more than happy to endorse the idea that his speech had moved mountains, and commended the Saudis for punishing Qatar — first on Twitter, and then during a press conference in the Rose Garden. According to contemporary reports, his son-in-law was one of the only White House advisers to approve of this stance.

Perhaps, Kushner’s idiosyncratic view of the blockade had nothing to do with Qatar’s rejection of his father. Maybe the senior White House adviser simply wanted to tell Trump what the latter wished to hear. Alternatively, it’s at least conceivable that contemporary reports were wrong, and that Kushner played no significant role in Trump’s decision to support the blockade.

Regardless, the senior White House adviser is adamant that there was no relationship whatsoever between his family’s business dealings and the administration’s policy. “It is fantasy and part of a misinformation campaign for anyone to say or any media to report that Mr. Kushner took any action with respect to Qatar or any other country based on whether anyone in that country did or did not do business with his former company from which he disengaged before coming into the government,” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement. “Mr. Kushner has not taken part in any business since then. This is nonsense.”

The government of Qatar, however, suspects otherwise. As NBC News reports:

Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. in late January and early February considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country, four people familiar with the matter said. The Qatari officials decided against cooperating with Mueller for now out of fear it would further strain the country’s relations with the White House, these people said.

It’s worth noting that the project the Qatari foreign minister refused to finance wasn’t just one more item in the Kushner family’s portfolio; it was Jared’s baby — his misbegotten, sickly, drowning baby.

In 2007, Jared Kushner decided that the real-estate market had nowhere to go but up. And so the 26-year-old mogul decided to plow $500 million of his family’s money — and $1.3 billion in borrowed capital — into purchasing 666 Fifth Avenue for twice the price it had previously sold for. Even if we’d somehow avoided a global financial crisis, this would have been a bad bet: Before the crash, when the building was almost fully occupied, it generated only about two-thirds of the revenue the Kushners needed to keep up with their debt payments.

After the crisis, however, things got really hairy. The Kushners were forced to sell off the building’s retail space to pay their non-mortgage debt on the building — and then to hand over nearly half of the office space to Vornado as part of a refinancing agreement with the real-estate giant.

The office space that the Kushners retained is worth less than its $1.2 billion mortgage — which is due early in 2019. If their company can’t find some new scheme for refinancing and redeveloping the property by then, Kushner will have cost his family a fortune.

And Jared really doesn’t want that to happen. In the months between his father-in-law’s election and inauguration, Kushner divided his time between organizing the transition, and seeking capital from (suddenly quite interested) investors aligned with foreign governments: During that period, Kushner attempted to secure a $400 million loan from the Chinese insurance firm Anbang, and a $500 million one from former Qatari prime minister and billionaire investor Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, also known as “HBJ.” Anbang pulled out once the deal attracted critical media scrutiny, and HBJ jumped ship when the Kushners failed to find a second major source of capital.

In those same weeks, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, head of the Kremlin-affiliated Vnesheconombank. The senior White House adviser has insisted that this meeting was strictly political; Gorkov maintains it was strictly business.

All of these interactions are currently being scrutinized by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

They have also, apparently, been studied by top government officials in the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico — all of whom have privately discussed strategies for exploiting Jared Kushner’s business interests for geopolitical gain, according to a report from the Washington Post on Wednesday.

And if America’s allies and adversaries are looking for further (circumstantial) evidence that U.S. foreign policy might be for sale, the New York Times provided some this week, when it revealed that Kushner’s family company had won $500 million in financing last year from a pair of American firms right after their top executives had White House meetings with one Jared Kushner.

Maybe all of this looks worse than it is. But it looks like the president’s son-in-law worked to sour relations with a key U.S. ally in the Middle East — which has since drifted further into the orbit of a regime hostile to the United States — because it refused to bail out his family’s underwater real-estate investment.

Even if this is appearance is deceiving, why isn’t the mere semblance of such high corruption enough to bounce Kushner from the White House? Are Kushner’s personal skills really more valuable than his conflicts of interest are toxic? Is a real-estate heir who has no policy-making experience, background in geopolitics, or security clearance — but does have significant business interests in Israel — really such an ideal choice for brokering peace in the Middle East?

Kushner’s sole qualification for his senior White House position (beyond having been born and betrothed to the right people) is the business savvy that allowed him to avoid squandering his family’s enormous fortune — and if he doesn’t auction off American foreign policy for an emergency loan, he very well may have to delete that item from his résumé.

[New York Magazine]

Trump’s Plan to End Qatar-Saudi Arabia Deadlock Fails

 

President Trump’s plan to de-escalate the tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar ended in failure this week after the two countries released conflicting statements hours after a phone call organized by Trump.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that a phone call late Friday between the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, was meant to find common ground between the two nations. Instead, the two countries attacked each other hours later in the media over which country capitulated and agreed to peace negotiations first.

“The problem is as much about appearing to not capitulate to the other side as it is trying to solve any problems,” Michael Stephens of the Royal United Services Institute told the Times.

“Given the hypersensitivity of both sides to appearing weak,” he added, “it makes the problem considerably harder to solve.”

Trump himself seemed to hint that he was favoring Saudi Arabia in the negotiations on Thursday in comments at the White House, saying that “massive funding of terrorism by certain countries” was still a huge problem. Trump has accused the country of sponsoring terrorism in the region in the past.

“If they don’t stop the funding of terrorism, I don’t want them to come together,” he added.

Trump called the two leaders separately on Friday, urging them to work together to end terrorism in the region and work with the United States to counter Iran’s influence.

Unity among the Arab nations “is essential to promoting regional stability and countering the threat of Iran,” read a White House read out of the calls.

Trump “also emphasized that all countries must follow through on commitments from the Riyadh Summit to defeat terrorism, cut off funding for terrorist groups, and combat extremist ideology,” it added.

[The Hill]

Jared Kushner ‘Tried and Failed to Get a $500m Loan from Qatar Before Pushing Trump to Take Hard Line Against Country’

Jared Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500m loan from one of Qatar’s richest businessmen, before pushing his father-in-law to toe a hard line with the country, it has been alleged.

This intersection between Mr Kushner’s real estate dealings and his father-in-law’s international issues highlights the difficulties of an administration besiged with an unprecedented number of conflicts of interest.

Early in his real estate career, Mr Kushner purchased a building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York for $1.8bn – a record-setting deal at the time.

These days, however, more than a quarter of the office space in the building is vacant. According to The New York Times, the building has not generated enough to pay its debts in several years, forcing Kushner Companies to cover the multimillion-dollar difference.

In 2015 – while Donald Trump was firing up his presidential campaign – Mr Kushner was working with his biological father to keep the property from going underwater. The men zeroed in on Qatari billionaire sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani (HBJ) as a potential investor.

HBJ eventually agreed to invest $500m in the property, sources tell The Intercept, on the condition that Kushner Companies found the rest of the money for the multi-billion-dollar project on its own.

For help, Kushner Companies turned to Chinese insurance company Anbang. The company agreed to secure a $4bn construction loan to develop the property in early March. But weeks later, as concerns about conflicts of interest mounted, Anbang pulled out.

Without the help of Anbang, Kushner Companies could not meet the rest of HBJ’s funding demands. According to one source in the region, HBJ killed the deal. According to another, he simply put it on hold.

Either way, a diplomatic crisis centred around Qatar broke out shortly thereafter. In early June, at least six Gulf Region countries severed or reduced ties to the country, claiming it had supported terrorism.

The countries issued a list of demands necessary for Qatar to regain favour, including shutting down the media network Al-Jazeera, cutting ties with various Islamist groups, limiting ties with Iran, and expelling Turkish troops.

The move sent the tiny, isolated nation into an economic tailspin. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson quickly encouraged the countries to engage in “calm and thoughtful dialogue“ and asked for “no further escalation by the parties in the region”.

Mr Trump, however, unleashed a string of criticism toward the country, calling it a “funder of terrorism at a very high level”.

“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off,” he tweeted on 6 June. “They said they would take a hard line on funding, extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar.”

The President’s position took Mr Tillerson by surprise, and sources say he suspected Mr Kushner was behind it all.

A source close to Mr Tillerson told The American Conservative that the Secretary of State is convinced that some of Mr Trump’s remarks were written by UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba – a close friend of Mr Kushner.

“Otaiba weighed in with Jared and Jared weighed in with Trump,”  the source said. “What a mess.”

But even if the source’s account of the proceedings is true, it still leaves open the question of why Mr Kushner wanted to convince the President to speak out against Qatar.

Mr Tillerson’s reasons for supporting the small country, and urging a quick end to the conflict, however, are more clear: The US runs a crucial airbase out of the country, which runs air campaigns against Isis in Iraq and Syria, and helps protect Israel.

Mr Tillerson left on Monday for a trip to Turkey, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to help mediate an end to the crisis. Kushner Companies did not respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

[The Independent]

Trump Is Celebrating the Meltdown of the U.S.’s Middle East Alliance on Twitter

A number of Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, have cut off relations with Qatar, the super-rich state you may know in other contexts as home of Al-Jazeera and the controversial future host of the World Cup. It’s a major crisis and, like all other conflicts in the Middle East (and elsewhere on Earth) its causes are complicated, but one of the biggest elements at play is that other regional governments are angry about the clandestine support that Qatar provides to radical insurgent groups like ISIS. For his part, President Trump celebrated the Saudis’ aggressive moves Tuesday morning on Twitter:

Trump is not wrong about Qatar funding extremism; the problem, rather, is that Qatar plays both sides of the street and is also the home of the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Some 11,000 U.S. troops are stationed at al-Udeid Air Base, including the staff of the Combined Air and Space Operations Center, which supervises the U.S.’s air forces in such critical countries as Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. America also still maintains a close military relationship with Saudi Arabia, which of course has its own long history of fostering jihadism.

We actually know thanks to Russia and WikiLeaks that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta bounced around the idea of pressuring Qatar over its support for ISIS, so it’s not as if Trump is completely off the map here in terms of U.S. interests. But it does seem that there may be a more judicious—or, if you will, diplomatic—way to handle this fire than pouring gasoline on it.

[Salon]