Reports concerning Jared Kushner’s interactions with foreign officials, now under investigation by Robert Mueller, paint a highly unflattering portrait of Donald Trump’s son-in-law as a wannabe international power player who was gleefully targeted by other nations as a diplomatic naïf. Former and current U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on Kushner say nations including United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico all discussed ways to use his complex financial entanglements to their benefit. According to one report, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia got into a pissing match over which royal had Kushner deeper in their pocket. George Nader, who managed to infiltrate Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing as part of a scheme to secure massive lobbying contracts on behalf of Middle Eastern clients, wrote in an e-mail to G.O.P. fund-raiser Elliott Broidy, “You have to hear in private my Brother what Principals”—his Saudi and Emirati patrons—“think of ‘Clown prince’s’ efforts and his plan!”

Unfortunately for the White House, Kushner’s malleability is now a liability—and one aspect of Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump administration colluded with the Russian government (among others, perhaps). The latest beat in the cautionary tale: shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Rick Gerson, one of Kushner’s closest friends, also met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (known informally as M.B.Z.) and Nader, around the same time they also met separately with a Trump campaign surrogate and a Russian financier.

According to an NBC News report published Friday, Gerson, a New York-based hedge-fund manager, had been communicating with Nader prior to the meeting, having previously met him at the New York Four Seasons hotel in December 2016. Kushner, along with M.B.Z., former White House political adviser Steve Bannon, and short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn, were also in attendance. (A spokesperson for Gerson said that he was there simply to escort former British prime minister Tony Blair to a talk on Israeli-Palestinian relations.)

Weeks later, just before Trump’s inauguration, Gerson happened to be in the Seychelles islands just as another meeting took place between M.B.Z. and several Emirates officials, Blackwater founder and Trump booster Erik Prince, and several Russian officials. That meeting is said to be a crucial part of the Mueller investigation, which is looking into whether the Russians were trying to establish a secret back channel with the administration. Though a spokesman for Gerson denied that he was present during that meeting, saying he was on “vacation” at the time and left before it took place, he did not comment on another crucial aspect of his Seychelles stay: that he took a meeting with M.B.Z. and communicated with Nader, the Middle Eastern fixer and liaison between the U.A.E. and the Trump administration. (Nader has been granted partial immunity in exchange for his cooperation with Mueller.)

Per NBC News: