I don’t know what to make of this story. But the fact that it is actually believable is what makes it newsworthy.
It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office.
The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel. Back at the table, a line of men in fezzes stamp out the dabka, an Arab folk dance, in tribute to Khawaja. He’s delighted. One of the fez dancers is banging a huge drum. The music is deafening and we have to scream to be heard.
‘They fucked me, Paul, they fucked me. First, they destroyed my business. Now they’re coming after me.’ Andy Khawaja believes he’s being persecuted because of what he knows. And what he knows, he tells me, is that Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi bought the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
Over the past year, we’ve met at his palatial home high in the Hollywood Hills, at the Kempinski hotel in Qatar and at the cigar bar of the Mayfair Arts Club in London. One minute, he’s showing me a picture of himself with the Pope (he gives huge sums to charity); the next he’s on a video call with what seems to be an official in Tehran, trying to free an American hostage. There’s always a touch of the fantastical, even the impossible, about Khawaja’s life and his stories. I’ve come to Beirut to get him to go on the record about something he’s been talking about privately to me for many months: what happened in the 2016 elections.
Khawaja claims the Saudis and the Emiratis illegally paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign in 2016. He says that to keep it secret, they disguised the money as small donations from Americans, using stolen identities and ‘virtual credit cards’ or gift cards — donations of less than $200 do not have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission and made public. He claims the Saudis and the Emiratis were able to make thousands of such small donations at a time using the latest payment processing technology. Khawaja knows this, he says, because he sold the know-how to their middleman, George Nader, who will be the central character in this story.
All those supposedly involved in this have issued denials or preferred not to comment. They include Nader’s lawyers; the Saudi and Emirati embassies in Washington, DC; the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee; and Stripe, the company that took credit card payments for them both during the election. Khawaja says he’s tried and failed to get the FBI to investigate. The Bureau isn’t saying what it makes of his story. Khawaja also says he has spoken to a National Security Council member, a congressman, a senator and a former general. Nothing has come of that, either. Meanwhile, his life has been shattered, his company wrecked. But he believes he will be vindicated in the end.
Let’s just say that if we didn’t have a pathologically narcissistic president who inexplicably has a very special spot in his heart for Saudi Arabia and UAE in a way , it would be easy to just dismiss it as another crank. It might be. But it’s all too believable that it isn’t.
You can read the whole thing here. It may very well be bullshit. But it’s a good read anyway.