Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel’s disastrous war with Iran, the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and a raging conflict between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition.

Yet Jared Kushner is more than one of the many ghouls who have clambered over a track record of failure right back into Trump’s second-term White House, where he’s still a top envoy. He also got owned by the Dutch, according to an excerpt from Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, published in Vanity Fair.

According to Cole, Dutch intelligence services captured and flipped a Russian hacker operating for the GRU (Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency) in late 2017. By the end of the year, the operative had given them access to a GRU server containing screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone X, and the Dutch spies were able to reverse-engineer the original method the GRU used to penetrate the phone’s then-state-of-the-art security. This gave them access to a continual image feed (albeit without audio) of the phone’s screen.

This roughly overlaps with the timeline during which Kushner was allegedly using a personal cell phone instead of a secure government device, using his private email (allegedly routed to Trump Org servers in 2017) to conduct official government business, and receiving Top Secret intelligence without a permanent security clearance , by the way.

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