Sordid details of America’s amorality tale

In early 2017, as the world was still processing the geopolitical earthquake that had been the ascension of Donald Trump to the American presidency, a high-ranking GOP congressman — California’s Ed Royce, who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee — rose to speak on the House floor. Royce’s words about U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia entered the Congressional Record but made barely a ripple, except with his apparent audience: key, shadowy players in the connected inner circles of Trump and the rising Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, known to all as MBS.

Royce’s obscure speech was celebrated in an email by Trump ally and fund-raiser Elliott Broidy, at the time, newly minted deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Broidy had just maxed out in campaign contributions to the California Republican and boasted in his (later hacked) emails that not only had he influenced Royce to made a policy flip toward the Saudis and away from its rival neighbor, Qatar, but that he’d “caused” the congressman to mention a virtually unknown Saudi general in his address from the House floor.

The world, by and large, did not know anything about that Saudi — Major General Ahmed al-Assiri — in early 2017.

It does now.

This weekend, Assiri — credibly reported to be a leader of a Saudi “tiger team” of torturers and assassins — was ousted from his role as a top intelligence aide to MBS amid reports the Riyadh government is making Assiri into the “rogue killer” scapegoat for the shocking murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But almost no one — outside of the cowed posses around MBS and Trump — actually believes Assiri would have acted without orders from the Machiavellian prince.

How a future butcher of Istanbul came to be praised in the U.S. House of Representatives is just one mystery in a tangled web involving Trump, his closest aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s ever-growing and ever-sleazier coterie of hangers-on, hundreds of millions of oil-soaked dollars, an illegal offer of help in Trump’s 2016 election, alleged misuse of U.S. intel, and a filthy-rich despotic nation built on a foundation of torture, repression, and — we now know — murder.

Let’s walk down the sordid trail of money and blood that got us here.

Step 1: The buying of Trump Inc. Over the last generation, Saudi rulers reached the same conclusion about Trump that the Russians apparently reached after The Donald visited Moscow in 1987: That here was a high-profile American who could be bought. “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them,” Trump told an Alabama rally in August 2015, as his campaign was taking off. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million.”

Step 2. The 2016 election and an indecent proposal. On Aug. 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. convened a meeting at Trump Tower that included future anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller, Blackwater founder and Trump insider Erick Prince, a lobbyist with deep ties to the Saudi rulers and their allies in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, named George Nader, and an Israeli specialist in psychological warfare named Joel Zamel.

Nader said the Saudis and UAE wanted Trump to beat Hillary Clinton that November and were willing to put their wealth behind an illegal effort to make that happen. Specifically, they proposed a covert social-media campaign to target American voters on Trump’s behalf, run by Zamel’s Psy-Group. Team Trump says it never went through with the supposed Saudi and Zamel schemes. Maybe that’s true, but Nader did reportedly later pay Zamel $2 million. No one has been able to explain why.

Step 3: The Big Payback. Nader, a convicted pedophile with ties to the Gulf states that stretched back for decades, and his new pal, the once-obscure political fixer and businessman Broidy, strengthened their ties to both Trump and MBS as part of an effort that took them to the brink of astaggering payday of $1 billion. Broidy — named to his RNC post after raising money for Trump in 2016 — used his new prominence to shower cash on Republicans in Congress, leverage his access to the White House and sponsor forums that would advance Saudi aims.

Step 4: The Jared factor. While Trump’s friends cashed in, it was left to the ultimate White House insider, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as America’s main point of contact with MBS. He grew so close to MBS that they reportedly communicated directly through the secure channel known as WhatsApp, leaving the rest of the government in the dark over what they discussed.

To the majority of people who haven’t been paying attention, the president’s behavior in the past week — seemingly determined to help the Saudis develop and promote the implausible lie that Khashoggi died accidentally at the hand of “rogue killers” and that MBS had nothing to do with it — seems shocking. In fact, it’s just the logical conclusion of a tragic American amorality tale, in which a flood of money can wash away all sins, even murder. If this seems a low point in 242-year history of the United States, that’s because it is. bunchw@phillynews.com

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