19 January 2018 01:21 pm
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has boasted that he had the backing of President Donald Trump for his November ‘coup,’ a source in the country has told DailyMail.com.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, told his close aides that Trump had given his explicit support for a power grab, which involved the arrests of 11 princes and hundreds of officials and businessmen in midnight raids across the kingdom.
A source close to the Saudi leader, known by his initials MBS, told DailyMail.com that Salman ‘bragged’ about his cozy relationship with the U.S. president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, claiming that the president backed Salman’s takeover.
The claim closely matches an insider account in Michael Wolff’s explosive book ‘Fire and Fury’ that the president told his friends, ‘We’ve put our man on top!’ – implying that he and Kushner had engineered the Saudi coup. The princes, including one of the world’s richest men, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, were arrested suddenly at the beginning of November, held in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, and - a source told Dailymail.com later that month - being tortured.
The White House declined to comment to DailyMail.com but Wolff’s book revealed the warm relations with MBS and reported how Trump told friends: ‘Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal.
Wolff writes that Salman, 32, befriended Kushner, 37, after the U.S. election, and ‘offered himself to Kushner as his guy in the Saudi kingdom.’
-Saudi Arabia, (Daily Mail), 17 January 2018