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

What Luigi Mangione Got Wrong…

Like many people, I suspect, I’ve felt uncomfortable about the reaction to the arrest of Luigi Mangione for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Of course the act of cold-blooded, calculated murder is evil. And there are no “justifications” for taking a life.

And I think Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Rogan etcetera are plain wrong for giving wishy-washy caveats. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” said Elizabeth Warren. Rogan has said health insurers are “fucking gross.”

But Luigi Mangione wasn’t pushed – at least not specifically by UnitedHealthcare. There is no evidence he was ever even a member of United.

Further, I’d argue young Mangione (and the tragedy here, is that he is per his manifesto, clearly young) was wrong in his assumption that single payer systems, like the one we have in my native Britain are better. Reportedly he talked to the British writer Gurwinder Bhogal months before the murder and “complained about how expensive healthcare in the US was, and expressed envy at the UK’s nationalized health system.”

I’m a dual citizen: British and American, so I have experience of both systems.

Neither, I have to tell you, is perfect. It’s a case of pick your poison.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Mothers and Sons

Apologies for my absence for a few days. We’ve been closing out the book, which heads to the printers shortly.

Meanwhile, there’s so much going on in the news that it’s hard to know where to focus.

But when I saw the video of Elon Musk striding into the capitol last week, child slung across his shoulders, reminiscent of the way in which wealthy New York women used to flaunt the must-have-impossible-to-get accessory, their Birkin bags, it occurred to me that the sagas of parents and sons are a thing right now.

There’s the emergence of Barron Trump – who has literally found his voice – as someone who has “brand value” in the Trump family.

And then there’s the resurfacing headache of the Biden family’s perennial problem child: Hunter who required a literal “get out of jail free’ card from his dad for Christmas.

(I couldn’t understand the surprised reaction in the media about this. Everything we’ve ever known about Joe Biden has indicated that one of his great weaknesses is his lack of a clear eyes and a firm hand around his troubled offspring).

And then there’s the other parent in the news, the one who struck a chord with me: Penelope Hegseth, the Minnesota mom of Trump’s controversial nominee for Defense secretary, Pete.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Dear France, Meet Your New US Ambassador, Charles Kushner…

Dear French Readers,

The good news is that your incoming US ambassador, Charles Kushner, will fit right in to life in the mansion in Rue St Honore in Paris.

It’s true that the staff and the parties and the bodyguards will be no culture shock because he’s very wealthy. (But I suspect he may not want to drive the armored Mercedes you offer: It’s German and he, historically, hasn’t liked to drive German cars on account of history – see my book Kushner, Inc. for details).

But I am certain he will make the annual July 4th party for 1000 even more spectacular than his predecessors. You always want an American real estate developer to give grand parties…Why? Because they suffer from something the Germans call “profil-neurose” (fear of invisibility), so everything they do from collecting art, wives – and throwing parties – is therefore completely over the top.

When it comes to communication: Will Charlie’s French be anywhere near the level of that of his predecessors like Felix Rohatyn or Pamela Harriman who spoke the language “couramment”? That’s a rhetorical question because we know the answer is “non, non, non pas de tout.’” But it doesn’t matter because you all speak perfect English, anyway.

But I believe Monsieur L’ambassadeur Kushner will get you culturally – and vice versa – in a way that possibly none of his predecessors did.

That’s because La France, for which I have much respect is, the land of sexual sophistication and relaxed moraes.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jessica Reed Kraus (House InHabit) Unplugged

My second guest for the new vodcast series, Failing Up! (Sari, my former producer at Audible tells me that’s what this is called, rather than a podcast) is a woman who is no stranger to her hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Substack.

Jessica Reed Kraus, whose handle is

House Inhabit

, is the epitome of success in the new media landscape. She makes seven figures off her Substack and Instagram. Wired listed her as one of the key influencers in the 2024 election along with Tucker Carolson and Elon Musk. She has been profiled in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Elle and Mother Jones. Yet only a few years ago Jess was a mommy blogger in Orange County, California (where she lives with husband, Mike, and their four children).

 

For those who don’t know, during the pandemic, Jessica, 44, decided she wanted to cover things she thought weren’t getting enough attention – or the right sort of attention in the media. I met her in the winter of 2021 – on the steps of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where each morning, before dawn, we lined up to gain admission to the tiny courtroom (made even more diminutive thanks to Covid restrictions) in which Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial for abusing and trafficking minors. Every lunchtime we ate the crappy food in the cafeteria together with a couple of other friends. We gossiped about what we’d seen and how we thought the trial was going (initially not well for the government) and then we went home and wrote it all up. Only to get up at 4am and repeat it all over again, day after day, week after week.

It was an endurance test. I know that by the end I was so exhausted I could barely see straight. Sheer adrenaline and uncertainty got us through. I remember right until closing arguments we wondered about the strength of the government’s case. But the closing argument for the prosecution, delivered by James Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was one of the most unforgettable and powerful performances in a courtroom I’ve ever seen. Apparently, the jury agreed. They convicted Maxwell on all counts of sexual abuse and trafficking. Adding to the stress was that it took place in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Neither of us saw much, if anything, of our families.

But the thing about covering trials is that once you start, you feel locked in – or you do if the proceedings are not being televised, and the responsibility on the shoulders of the conduits to the public hangs heavy. It’s like becoming an actor in a play, not simply a spectator. I started grading the lawyers for each of their performances in my Substack and suddenly I found that various of their parents were writing in my comments box.

Jess was unafraid to say exactly what she saw. Which was that the woman in front of us had a distinct magnetism when she turned to look at us, even when wearing her mask and standing silent. “I didn’t think the trial told the whole story,” she says in our interview below. Jess found Maxwell intriguing, possibly even sympathetic. That was not and is not the “narrative” around Maxwell. But Jess points out she “had nothing to lose.”

From there she covered the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial. Her husband Mike told her that “no one is interested”. Thankfully, he was wrong. Again, she took a contrarian position, but it was the one that felt authentic to her sitting in the courtroom. As the proceedings unfolded, she began to feel sympathetic towards Depp – who then phoned her out of the blue. She put the details of that phone call behind a paywall. Her earnings took off.

Read on and watch at Vicky Ward Investigates

Jessica Reed Kraus (House InHabit) Unplugged

My second guest for the new vodcast series, Failing Up! (Sari, my former producer at Audible tells me that’s what this is called, rather than a podcast) is a woman who is no stranger to her hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Substack.

Jessica Reed Kraus, whose handle is House Inhabit , is the epitome of success in the new media landscape. She makes seven figures off her Substack and Instagram. Wired listed her as one of the key influencers in the 2024 election along with Tucker Carolson and Elon Musk. She has been profiled in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Elle and Mother Jones. Yet only a few years ago Jess was a mommy blogger in Orange County, California (where she lives with husband, Mike, and their four children).

For those who don’t know, during the pandemic, Jessica, 44, decided she wanted to cover things she thought weren’t getting enough attention – or the right sort of attention in the media. I met her in the winter of 2021 – on the steps of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where each morning, before dawn, we lined up to gain admission to the tiny courtroom (made even more diminutive thanks to Covid restrictions) in which Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial for abusing and trafficking minors. Every lunchtime we ate the crappy food in the cafeteria together with a couple of other friends. We gossiped about what we’d seen and how we thought the trial was going (initially not well for the government) and then we went home and wrote it all up. Only to get up at 4am and repeat it all over again, day after day, week after week.

It was an endurance test. I know that by the end I was so exhausted I could barely see straight. Sheer adrenaline and uncertainty got us through. I remember right until closing arguments we wondered about the strength of the government’s case. But the closing argument for the prosecution, delivered by James Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was one of the most unforgettable and powerful performances in a courtroom I’ve ever seen. Apparently, the jury agreed. They convicted Maxwell on all counts of sexual abuse and trafficking. Adding to the stress was that it took place in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Neither of us saw much, if anything, of our families.

But the thing about covering trials is that once you start, you feel locked in – or you do if the proceedings are not being televised, and the responsibility on the shoulders of the conduits to the public hangs heavy. It’s like becoming an actor in a play, not simply a spectator. I started grading the lawyers for each of their performances in my Substack and suddenly I found that various of their parents were writing in my comments box.

Jess was unafraid to say exactly what she saw. Which was that the woman in front of us had a distinct magnetism when she turned to look at us, even when wearing her mask and standing silent. “I didn’t think the trial told the whole story,” she says in our interview below. Jess found Maxwell intriguing, possibly even sympathetic. That was not and is not the “narrative” around Maxwell. But Jess points out she “had nothing to lose.”

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Palm Beach Notebook!

Dear Readers,

A quick note to let you know, yes, I am alive and kicking…I am also going over the edits of my book with my co-author James Patterson (with whom I lunched in Palm Beach on Sunday) so that’s keeping me out of trouble.

I’m still digesting my recent travels and immersion into Trump World and what it all means.

My knee-jerk takeaways:

1.Palm Beach is no longer the sunny enclave for snowy-haired, face-lifted Rolls Royce drivers who sip chardonnay at lunch time and who eat dinner at 6pm that I recall. (And I was last there less than a year ago.)

No, the place is now heaving with MAGA grifters. Walk into any of the restaurants, clubs and hotels and instead of the genteel hum one expects, the decibel level is high and the tables are crammed with with flush-faced daytime drinkers all in pursuit of the same thing: keeping up to date with the minute-by-minute news coming out of Mar-a-Lago. And then monetizing it. (The exception is the grand hotel, The Breakers, which looks and feels the same as it always did, and thus is considered to be of little value by the MAGA crew – because people with small children go there – and who wants that?! None of this lot, to be sure.)

Walk around and you bump into Rudy Giuliani podcasting. A lobbyist I promised not to name, who tells me he has made $200 million from representing foreigners anxious to get on Trump’s radar, spends his days bar-hopping to meet desperados (and they exist) who will pay him ridiculous sums to get in the Boss’s ear. That he has never met Trump is an unimportant detail.

And if you think that’s a head-scratcher, one night at dinner I sat between Brazil’s richest man, who has spent a little time in prison (he was charming, incidentally) and the strip club king of Miami (also, very charming. He’s not been in prison. I learned a lot; he gave me his card and I was momentarily perplexed by the two different icons for phones until I realized that one is a reservation line to get into his clubs). Across from me were some of the Trump kids’ friends who told me that Elon Musk is actually a very pleasant dinner guest. (Victoria Beckham apparently asked him recently “what is a black hole?” and he gave her an answer that was easy for everyone to follow, apparently, so that’s…something.)

But my biggest take-away is:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Scaramucci: “Trump loves me…like a 9.5/10”

Welcome to the first episode of my new video/podcast Q&A series: Failing Up!

If you are wondering about the title, it’s not because I’m interested in interviewing “losers” – to use Trump parlance – on the contrary, I will be interviewing “winners.” But people are so much more thoughtful and interesting when discussing overcoming adversity than when discussing smooth-sailing. Smooth-sailing is actually pretty boring.

I can’t think of anyone in my rolodex better to kick this off than my friend, Anthony Scaramucci (aka The Mooch), the financier, podcaster – and not least, the notorious Trump White House Press Secretary of just 11 days.

I met Anthony in 2016 before he went into the Trump White House. We clicked right from the start. He’s impossible not to like. (Even Trump – he believes, and I suspect he’s right – still loves him. That’s why he bothered to post on Truth Social a couple of days ago that Anthony is a “major loser.”)

I talked to Anthony often during that messy 11-day period. And I talked to him in the days and weeks right after. It’s extraordinary to watch someone you know and admire blow themselves up like that so publicly – but what’s even more extraordinary is the way he coped and recovered, bouncing back better and stronger than before.

I was looking through my notes before doing this interview to remind myself of what we talked about during that time. I wrote down that just 24 hours after he lost his job, Anthony hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

He answered his phone to me, “White House Communications Department.  Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry. Is this not the White House Communications Department?”

Ask yourself if you’d be capable of that when you are a punch-line on Late-Night TV.

I certainly wouldn’t be.

These days Anthony is hosting a podcast – The Rest is Politics (US) with Katty Kay, the former BBC anchor – on top of running his alternative asset management firm, Skybridge Capital.

He’s as irrepressible and honest as ever.

Watch on Vicky Ward Investigates

Scaramucci: “Trump loves me…like a 9.5/10”

Welcome to the first episode of my new video/podcast Q&A series: Failing Up!

If you are wondering about the title, it’s not because I’m interested in interviewing “losers” – to use Trump parlance – on the contrary, I will be interviewing “winners.” But people are so much more thoughtful and interesting when discussing overcoming adversity than when discussing smooth-sailing. Smooth-sailing is actually pretty boring.

I can’t think of anyone in my rolodex better to kick this off than my friend, Anthony Scaramucci (aka The Mooch), the financier, podcaster – and not least, the notorious Trump White House Press Secretary of just 11 days.

I met Anthony in 2016 before he went into the Trump White House. We clicked right from the start. He’s impossible not to like. (Even Trump – he believes, and I suspect he’s right – still loves him. That’s why he bothered to post on Truth Social a couple of days ago that Anthony is a “major loser.”)

I talked to Anthony often during that messy 11-day period. And I talked to him in the days and weeks right after. It’s extraordinary to watch someone you know and admire blow themselves up like that so publicly – but what’s even more extraordinary is the way he coped and recovered, bouncing back better and stronger than before.

I was looking through my notes before doing this interview to remind myself of what we talked about during that time. I wrote down that just 24 hours after he lost his job, Anthony hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

He answered his phone to me, “White House Communications Department.  Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry. Is this not the White House Communications Department?”

Ask yourself if you’d be capable of that when you are a punch-line on Late-Night TV.

I certainly wouldn’t be.

These days Anthony is hosting a podcast – The Rest is Politics (US) with Katty Kay, the former BBC anchor – on top of running his alternative asset management firm, Skybridge Capital.

He’s as irrepressible and honest as ever.

He begins, typically, by discussing our hair color: “you don’t want to go to Rudy Giuliani’s colorist,” but we move on to cover a lot of substantial ground: the reason he got into politics (to meet people who’d be helpful to his business); his experience one-on-one with Trump (as part of the 2016 transition team, he used to be able to give him his honest opinions – but that changed once Trump was actually in the White House); his thoughts about the longevity or brevity of the Trump/Musk bromance (he predicts Musk will be a Democrat by 2028); the next Treasury Secretary (it depends on Trump’s insecurity levels; if he feels aggrieved, he’ll appoint a “loyalty lackey”); the enormous cultural shift in this country; the worry that no one is talking honestly to Trump right now; the hope that Trump may govern moderately. And, lastly, I asked him if he’d ever return to the Trump White House…

There’s also some talk equating Elon Musk’s rockets to flying penises and a quip about the contest Trump had with Marco Rubio in 2016 (see a snippet below) that I probably should cut, but what the heck…after all, this is The Mooch. He was fired from the White House for saying worse things.

As I wrote last week, this series is for my paid subscribers. Your support is what allows me to bring you candid, independent political analysis and discussions like this one. So if it is within your means, please do sign up! I promise it will be worth your while…

Enjoy.

Watch the full interview at Vicky Ward Investigates

You’re Hired!

You have to hand it to Donald Trump: only he could turn a boring, snoring transition into a gripping, fresh season of reality TV.

Just like season one on The Apprentice there are shock winners (Matt Gaetz, Peter Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard), shock “you’re fired” losers (Ric Grenell, Mike Pompeo), a couple of boardroom side-kick judges (Elon Musk, Linda McMahon) and sporadic, sharp reminders, in case anyone forgets, about who is ultimately calling the shots: The Big Guy.

He’s even cast the caricature role that made the show’s first season a standout. Co-Transition head, and self-publicized candidate for Treasury Secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick seems to have stepped into the shoes of Omarosa Manigault Newman, who famously played the truculent attention-grabber who irritated everyone around her, but became a household name in the process.

And, just in case the audience was starting to nod off, there’s now a showstopper of a finale, keeping us on the edge of our seats as Trump rips up the original two-man race for Treasury Secretary and widens the field to include a whole new cast of characters….

Who knew that the search for America’s Next Top Banker could be so exciting?

It’s hard to concentrate.

So, instead of spending the time on a higher cause, I’ve bought in and spent a couple hours phoning my contacts on Wall Street to find out how they would handicap the race.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates