The Idaho Four

Dear Readers,

Here it is!

The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy My new book, published by Little, Brown and Company, co-authored with the wonderful James Patterson. The pub date is July 14. You can pre-order it here.

This book is much different from my previous tomes, which as you know, focus on the apex of money, power, politics and the culture. But it’s this one with which I feel most personally engaged.

First, there’s my partnership with James Patterson.

I barely knew Jim when we embarked on this, and he barely knew me. I’d articulated that there was something about this story that touched me—most obviously that my sons are college students and the same age as the victims—to Bill Robinson, an old friend. Bill runs Jim’s business empire, and the next minute Jim was on the phone telling me that what happened had touched him too, so “let’s do it together.”

I had no idea how this partnership would work. Jim is the best-selling fiction writer in the world. And I am…just me. Which is not nothing—but it’s not him.

He phoned me early on and told me he’d spent the weekend reading my earlier book, Kushner, Inc. and that he’d got the point of it, but he was clear that he did not want this new book of ours to feel like Kushner, Inc. He was clear that we were not going to stand 40,000 feet above our subject matter, reporting dispassionately in the style of the New York Times, as if it had nothing to do with us.

No, he said. This book should feel personal. Through us, readers should feel that they are in the small town of Moscow, Idaho. They should feel there with the victims and their friends on that college campus of the University of Idaho as tragedy strikes and there with the townsfolk, the victims’ families, and law enforcement through the uncertainty, fear and fallout of the coming days, weeks and months.

I will be honest: I was nervous to try to write his way…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Trump and Nixon…

This morning I was re-reading my second book, The Liar’s Ball, published in 2014 about the world of New York real estate – about which Trump tweeted ““Just finished reading a poorly written & very boring book on the General Motors Building by Vicky Ward. Waste of time!” This was actually pretty helpful in terms of marketing.

In fact, I am not critical of Trump in the book; if anything: perhaps the Middle East leaders mulling the proposed “Riviera” in Gaza should take notes from it: his love of building and construction is readily apparent. No question he created value. And he made money.

But, in the book I do point out an unavoidable fact, which is that Trump lost the chance to buy the prestigious General Motors Building for very little, given that its owner, his partner, had gone bust. For this he blamed the 9/11 attacks, which rendered the offices of his lender, Deutsche Bank, out of action.

I was re-reading my book chiefly, because I suddenly remembered a small detail which now doesn’t feel so small – which is that, according to a senior executive who worked for Trump, one of Trump’s frequent guests at Trump Tower was Richard Nixon. Trump even wanted the Nixons to live at Trump Tower.

That strikes me as particularly relevant given Trump’s impounding of USAID – and much else.

In the 1970s it was President Nixon who told Russell Train, the administrator of the EPA he did not want to spend funds appropriate by Congress on an anti-pollution project in New York. But New York City turned around and sued Train. The Supreme Court settled it, saying, essentially if Congress has appropriated the funds, the president cannot simply impound them – which led Congress to pass the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

So: Does Trump think this Supreme Court, the background of which I have made an entire podcast series about and you can listen to here, might rule differently over USAID? That the court will agree that Trump should have the power over funds that Congress has already appropriated?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

White House Whiplash!

“Do you have the stamina to make it through four years of this?”

That’s the question one of my top DC sources asked me, slightly-tongue-in-cheek, this morning. I was checking in because I’ve been away in Europe and London for a few days, and I’ve also been focused on the copy-edits of my upcoming book with James Patterson. So the volley of extraordinary headlines flying out of the White House over the weekend, and last night, made me feel utterly disoriented, as if I’ve been away for a year, not a few days. In this short timespan, Trump appointed Marco Rubio acting head of USAID, having just abolished USAID (apparently the website went dark while Rubio was in transit and taken completely by surprise), and started to dismantle the CIA.

This was all before last night’s press conference with Bibi Netanyahu. My source told me that, like many of you probably, he’d checked out for an hour or so just to have an early dinner, but on re-emerging discovered that we were now possibly going to war: occupying Gaza, forcing 2 million Palestinians out, and rebuilding the place as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

It’s enough to cause anyone indigestion.

So, several thoughts on this…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Trump/MBS Tap Dance

Donald Trump just delivered spectacular proof of the truth in Shakespeare’s famous line about deception: “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

This morning, he spoke via video to the well-heeled crew at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, appearing to be fulsome about the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman. “He’s a fantastic guy,” he said. And then mentioned that he’s going to ask MBS to “round out” the $600 billion investment he promised yesterday on the phone to one trillion.

And then he blithely demanded that the Saudis and OPEC lower oil prices in order to end the Russia-Ukraine war…

“Saudi Arabia is f…..d” read one of the many astonished messages flooding into my WhatsApp.

Or is the picture more complicated?

My sources suggest that it is.

Even ahead of Trump’s lecture to the crowd at Davos, my phone was blowing up this morning around the news of the call, yesterday, in which MBS promised Trump $600 billion.

Most of the data suggests that Saudi Arabia cannot remotely afford that, as it pushes to wean itself away from an oil-dependent economy. On top of paying a projected minimum $1.3 trillion for Vision 2030, MBS needs to build the infrastructure to host the 2034 FIFA world cup.

In December, Saudi’s foreign reserves fell to $414 billion – less than the money he promised to Trump. If the reserves fall further there’s a risk Saudi Arabia will need to devalue its currency.

The Kingdom’s GDP is about $1 trillion. So in other words, if you take things at face value, MBS just pledged $600 billion over four years – which works out to $150 billion a year – in other words, 15 percent of the current Saudi GDP to invest in the US….

It hardly makes sense.

So, why did MBS make the phone call and promise to spend that amount?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Trump Family Turnover

Sunday, late afternoon, standing in a packed room in a DC hotel at a party in honor of incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, I found myself nose to nose with a charming man who told me was a banker.

A couple minutes more interrogation and then it emerged he wasn’t your average banker.

“My father was the dictator who ran …..[name of a well-known African country I won’t reveal to protect the source]. So, when he was kicked out I came here and became a banker…Now I might have to go back to XXX.”

Small talk at inauguration parties in DC is unlike small talk in New York – or London for that matter. Or Los Angeles.

I bring up LA, because inauguration weekend in DC reminded me eerily of the Oscars weekend, the only difference being the freezing temperature. There’s the same jostling for the best invites, the same energy, the same nightmarish traffic. (Actually the D.C. traffic gridlock was much worse.)

The only thing I found really baffling about the DC parties was the black tie dress code.

I get why you’d want to wear a long dress to the candlelight dinner on inauguration eve, for example. And there was a late night private dance party in a certain ambassador’s home that was by far the chicest event I’ve ever been to in DC and certainly merited getting dressed up for.

But most of the inaugural events, including the balls, don’t involve dancing by anyone other than the Trump family who are roped off, up on a stage. And there’s no sitting down.

So, why does one need to be in black tie to stand up, drink, eat and network? Most of the women put on their gowns at lunchtime so they don’t waste hours in horrible traffic changing. (But a wise piece of advice came from my host, who told me to wear my jeans or something comfortable to the weekend daytime events, because, he said, I’d stand out, which might be helpful, given my profession. I was skeptical but, of course, he was right.)

What I also hadn’t fully appreciated was just how difficult it is to get anywhere. The snow and the ice on Sunday night made it almost impossible. By the time I went to bed at 2 a.m. I felt like I deserved an Olympic gold medal for navigating the frigid streets of D.C. in three inch heels.

So when, on Monday, Trump mentioned that Melania’s feet were killing her, for once I was completely in sync with what the First Lady must be feeling.

My party experiences aside, two things stood out to me about the day itself:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Hegseth Hearing

I’m typing this on the train for a quick trip to DC for the first of many Inauguration parties. (I’ll be returning there Saturday for the full immersion.)

Steve Bannon, Erik Prince, and Sean Ryan are all speaking at tonight’s party, and having tuned in to Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing this morning, there is likely to be plenty to talk about.

The one thing I found jarring about this morning’s back and forth was when Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia – whom I mistakenly remembered as a mild-mannered milk-toast politician when he was Hillary Clinton’s running-mate – lit into Hegseth like a Rottweiler.

He pressed Hegseth about the now infamous extra-marital affair he had in Monterey, California, while he was still married to his second wife – and had just had a baby daughter with the woman who would become wife number three.

It was a brutal exchange.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

How To Translate Trump

You can all relax! Despite what you’ve heard from the horse’s mouth, Donald Trump is not going to send US troops to invade the Panama Canal, or Greenland.

How do I know this?

Yesterday I sat through a fascinating, on-record discussion with Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster at the Council of Foreign Relations.

McMaster, a three star General about whom I heard a lot when I reported Kushner, Inc, gave a humdinger of a talk. Perhaps he was motivated because he was there to sell his most recent book: At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Or perhaps he was motivated because, as was noted among members of the audience, he’s not going back in to another Trump administration. He did not appear to hold back.

(His honesty could also stem from the fact that, as I recall from my reporting for Kushner, Inc. McMaster was often on a losing wicket in the Trump White House that must have been frustrating for someone used to an orderly chain of command. He was viewed as too moderate and anti-isolationist by the hard core nationalist/populist Bannon wing – and, quite often, also by Trump, who said aloud he had wanted to hire a General with more stars.

McMaster argued, for example, to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement (a battle he lost). And he’d argued Trump should add troops in Afghanistan, not withdraw (another battle he lost). Plus, the end of his very brief tenure of just over one year, was marked ignominiously when Trump rushed in the more hawkish John Bolton as a replacement.)

So here’s what McMaster had to say about Trump’s recent “let’s go acquire them” pronouncements on Greenland and the Panama Canal (which he acknowledged as “outlandish” or “what many would regard as outlandish”…but, he also said, there’s “something behind it”).

Whenever Trump speaks about anything, McMaster said, he’s basically asking four business questions…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Where is the British Outrage about Elon?

It’s only the beginning of January and already it feels like we have descended into bewildering pre-inauguration insanity.

All I can think as I can scan the news is: Why?

Why is Elon Musk, a man who you’d think had enough to occupy him on these shores, disrupting British politics over something hideous – gangs of men, many of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin, who groomed under-age (mostly white) girls for sex – in the UK – over ten years ago? Yes, kudos to him for stirring up debate around the horrors of what happened and the lack of accountability for it, partly on account of lawmakers and enforcers worried about the ethnicity of the perpetrators; he has gotten me spending a few hours both online and on the phone to London, trying to educate myself about the history of Britain’s evil rape gangs.

But it seems as if there was a meaningful inquiry into the abuse and the cover-up. The problem was that the Conservative government, under whose watch this happened, didn’t implement the Inquiry’s list of recommendations, so it’s imperative that the current Labour government now does.

But after just a few hours of digging, I do not feel qualified to say whether there now needs to be a further national inquiry into what happened – or just a local one. And that’s the debate Musk has riled up, accusing the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer and a Labour MP Jess Phillips of blocking a national investigation for self-serving reasons. (Keir Starmer was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time all the horrific abuse came to light).

But I do feel qualified to ask: why is the normally fizzy British press so non-critical of Musk’s brazen intervention in their national domestic policy?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Happy New Year!

Dear Everyone,

This is the last post of 2024.

I was in the UK this past week with family and friends – and there’s plenty to report.

First, before flying to London, I wrote a deep-dive here about Syria’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad based on an interview with her cousin Abdu al-Dabbagh, whose arrest is also sought in Syria. No coincidence, surely, that various news stories then popped up in England’s Daily Telegraph, quoting anonymous sources saying that Mrs Assad’s leukemia has worsened and she wants to leave Moscow and return to her native country, the UK. Some reports in the Middle East even had her filing for divorce from her husband.

According to al-Dabbagh, whose mother, Saadat, talks to her sister, Sahar, Asma’s mother who is with her in Moscow, it’s all garbage. Propaganda most likely.

1. She isn’t at death’s door. She is in remission. There was a time when her health was so vulnerable that everyone, including her husband, wore Hazmat uniforms so as not to pass on any germs but, as I reported last week, she received a bone-marrow transplant from her son, Hafez in August, and so she is no longer in isolation. She hasn’t been in months. She’s getting better.

2. She isn’t getting divorced. She’s a conservative muslim.

3. She may want to return to England – but Tant Pis, as the French would say. On this, I’m with the British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (alongside whom I used to work at the Independent newspaper in the early 1990s). Yvette has rightly said there are other things to consider besides Mrs Bashad’s health. War crimes, for instance.

I got a small shock when I read that Indian-American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan had been appointed as Trump’s advisor on AI policies and that Steve Bannon and the MAGA wing of the Republican party had gone berserk because Sriram, supports H1-B visas (for exceptional immigrants).

In one of life’s weird coincidences, I know Sriram Khrishnan.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Inside The Fall of Asma al-Assad

I am completely fascinated by the story of Asma al-Assad, the British born wife of the Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and brutal dictator who fled into exile in Russia on December 8th.

I’ve kept wondering as we read about the horrors of Assad’s Syria: How did this beautiful, privileged woman who grew up in Acton, a London suburb, and who worked for JP Morgan come to be the Lady Macbeth of the Middle East, someone who is banned from her native Britain, sanctioned by the US and reviled by the West?

She’s only a few years younger than me and some of my closest British friends overlapped with her at JP Morgan.

It’s a conundrum that has sat with me.

So, these past two weeks, I’ve phoned around sources in the Middle East – and in a stroke of luck – I got to Asma’s cousin, Abdu al-Dabbagh, 59. As you might imagine, given Abdu is an Assad relative, he fled Syria in a hurry on Sunday December 8th, hours after Bashar left, and is now residing in a rental home in Beirut, Lebanon.

Abdu is a Syrian “businessman” who tells me he owns some jewelry stores in Dubai. He moved his businesses out of Syria in 2000 because he determined (correctly) very early on in Bashar Assad’s presidency that Assad would appropriate all the private businesses he could to line his own coffers. Bashar’s cousin and uncle were already running a monopoly even then.

Despite the family ties, (Abdu’s mother, Saadat Otri is Asma Assad’s mother’s sister) there is no love lost between him and Bashar Assad, who, he says, put him into solitary confinement in January, where guards peed into his drinking water and onto his blanket – all because he criticized the five “illiterates” running the Syrian economy. He was released he says because he went on a hunger-strike and his mother put pressure on Asma.

And yet fifty years ago Abdu and Bashar were childhood best friends. In the same class. In the same school. And Abdu’s father, Ahmed Adnan Dabbagh, was the Syrian Minister of Intelligence and then the Interior under Bashar’s father, President Hafez Assad, who was an even more tyrannical ruler than his son. Abdu says, that Hafez Bassad crammed the jails so full of people that they were so squashed that the myth spread they had to sleep standing up.

Abdu tells me that contrary to what Bashar al-Assad has said recently from Moscow – that he never planned to flee – that there were definitely clues that he was planning to leave Syria to go into exile the week before December 8th.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates