abu dhabi dubai
OOPS SEE uae TWO
==
Dubai is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai.
---
---
---
---
AN --> MSNBC?
Apr. 11, 2026,
By Matt Gertz
Fox News programs that fixated on the international business interests of Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, are utterly uninterested in the voluminous conflicts of interest between President Donald Trump and his family members and the Persian Gulf states affected by his strategically disastrous war of choice against Iran.
The president, his eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are enmeshed in a sprawling set of business deals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar. Those deals often involve members of the royal families of those states or the entities they control.
But since just before the beginning of the year, as Trump’s saber-rattling led to U.S. military deployments and became the war launched by American and Israeli forces on Feb. 28, through April 8, Fox’s evening programs that air from 5 p.m. to midnight ET have referenced such Trump family conflicts of interest only twice — both of which were passing mentions, and neither of which came during a discussion of the Iran conflict — according to a Media Matters review of the Nexis transcript database.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Many of the network’s highest-rated hosts carried out a yearslong obsession with what Fox host Sean Hannity described as the “Biden Crime Family,” mentioning Biden’s son at least 13,440 times over a period of less than 16 months of Biden’s presidency. Their feverish conspiracy theory postulated that Hunter Biden had served as a “bag man” for his father, soaking up money funneled from foreign entities and kicking a share back to Joe Biden, who would then use his elected office to help his son’s business partners.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. The dealings in question largely occurred when Joe Biden was a private citizen, and the primary instance the conspiracy theorists have cited as evidence of him taking state action on behalf of one of his son’s clients — that he, as vice president, pushed for the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to benefit one of his son’s clients — was manifestly bogus.
But Trump and his family members appear to have adopted influence-dealing on a dramatically larger scale than the Biden family was ever accused of. And the Trumps’ sprawling set of business deals with Gulf state royals and the sovereign wealth funds they control cannot be disentangled from the president’s decision-making in launching and continuing a war of choice against Iran.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE reportedly urged Trump to launch the war against Iran, and both states reportedly pressed the U.S. to protect them by escalating the conflict “until Iran is decisively defeated.” Qatar, meanwhile, traditionally serves as the regional intermediary between the Iranian regime and Western governments, and has pushed for negotiations.
Play
Former MAGA allies push back on Trump as Iran war fractures the rightMarch 25, 2026 / 10:27
Those states aren’t just U.S. allies whose views must be weighed by American leaders — their leaders have spent the past few years enriching the president’s family.
In perhaps the most noxious of the myriad entanglements, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — an Abu Dhabi prince known as the “spy sheikh” for his leadership of the UAE’s intelligence service — secretly agreed to buy a huge stake in a crypto company partially owned by the president and his family, paying $500 million in what The Wall Street Journal described as a “hugely profitable” deal for its founders.
The dealing is so egregious that it even raised eyebrows in Trump-friendly circles. “You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?” Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy asked in a February piece for National Review. “You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”
But that’s just one of numerous business deals in the Gulf involving the president’s family.
The network’s evening programs have mentioned the Trump family’s myriad Gulf state conflicts just twice since late last year.
The Trump Organization, which the president owns and Eric and Don Jr. oversee, is partnering with a developer who has ties to the Saudi government on a series of Trump-branded real estate projects in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman — including a $7 billion development deal financed by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, whose board of directors is headed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Kushner’s private equity fund received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi PIF — reportedly forced through by bin Salman over the board’s objection — as well as $200 million from the UAE.
The Qatari royal family gave Trump a $400 million “super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet” to serve as Air Force One.
The Associated Press reports that Powerus, a Florida-based drone manufacturer partly owned by Don Jr. and Eric, is reportedly “trying to sell” defensive drone interceptors “to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.” (Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich told the AP that the company “is doing many demos across the Middle East right now” but did not name the specific countries.)
In December 2024, Eric said of potential conflicts of interest, “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.” Don Jr. denied trading on his father’s name in a May 2025 statement to The New York Times, saying, “It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children.” In an October 2025 CBS News interview alongside Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, Kushner brushed off ethical concerns, saying, “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world.” And in November 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the president and his family are compromised by business interests, insisting it is “frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
For Fox News, their word is apparently sufficient. The network’s evening programs have mentioned the Trump family’s myriad Gulf state conflicts just twice since late last year.
In the first instance, Jessica Tarlov, the Democratic co-host of the panel show “The Five,” raised the issue of “Donald Trump and his family, their corruption” while discussing the president’s poor polling performance during a Feb. 10 segment about the midterm elections.
“This story [Fox contributor] Andy McCarthy is doing a series for the National Review on it,” she said. “All the crypto money that they’re taking in from the [United Arab Emirates] and others is a really big deal.”
Play
Fox News pushing Trump’s Iran war agenda, while support for the war plummetsMarch 25, 2026 / 10:27
The only other Fox News mention of the Trump family’s conflicts of interest in the Gulf that our study found came during a segment on Trump’s planned presidential library-hotel that aired on the network’s flagship, ostensibly straight news broadcast, “Special Report.”
“Guests will be welcomed into the lobby by Air Force One, presumably the Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar,” Fox correspondent Aishah Hasnie said during the March 31 news package.
When an interviewer asked “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier last year if the news media should provide the business dealings of Trump’s sons with the same scrutiny they gave those of Hunter Biden, he replied, “100%.”
“If you’re going to play it one way, you’ve got to play it another way and you’ve got to cover all of those things,” he said.
But that’s not how things have played out on Baier’s network, even with the alleged corruption far more direct, the sums vastly larger and the potential consequences far more dire.
Matt Gertz
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.
---
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nbc-executive-chris-kitze-became-a-boss-at-epoch-times-pro-trump-outlet
This article was co-published with Responsible Statecraft.
A former NBC executive who founded one of the earliest—and more successful—fake news websites quietly assumed a leadership role at The Epoch Times as the news outlet ramped up its pro-Trump messaging after the 2016 election.
Epoch’s influential role as a Trump-friendly media outlet coincided with access to Trump allies seeking friendly interviews, uncritical coverage of the administration’s policies, and a venue to advance the White House’s militant anti-Beijing and hyper-nationalist messages.
That change in direction—which included a flood of omnipresent YouTube ads costing at least $1 million, and a ban from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules about political advertising—appears to have occurred alongside the 2017 arrival of a new vice president at The Epoch Times, Chris Kitze, and huge jumps in the paper’s revenue from $3.8 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017 and $12.4 million in 2018.
Kitze, who now manages a cryptocurrency hedge fund, was listed as a member of the six-person board of the The Epoch Times Association, the nonprofit that operates The Epoch Times, as a vice president in 2017 and 2018 tax documents. But Kitze’s ties to The Epoch Timesgo back much further than 2017 and point to a mutually beneficial relationship. Since 2010, Kitze’s company, BeforeItsNews.com, an early fake news site that promoted conspiracy theories about then-president Barack Obama and offered extensive coverage of Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016, promoted Falun Gong—a spiritual movement that is persecuted by the Chinese government and has the stated goal of destroying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and The Epoch Times; meanwhile, Falun Gong-linked media properties quietly promoted Kitze’s other business ventures, including Unseen, an encrypted messaging platform.
LOONEY TUNES
Molly Jong-Fast
Chris Kitze’s career spans countless internet ventures and well-timed exits from companies across two tech bubbles. HisLinkedIn profile shows an impressive career starting in 1991 with the founding of Acris Media, a company selling clipart on CD-ROMs, a stint as the VP of Marketing at the early search engine Lycos from 1995 to 1996 (“I led the Lycos marketing team through one of the first internet IPOs,” says Kitze on LinkedIn) and founding and serving as chairman of free-website company Xoom.com, leading to a merger with NBC Internet (NBCi).
Kitze served as CEO of NBCi, NBC’s initiative to create an NBC controlled internet portal and landing page, from 1999 to 2000. Kitze’s post-NBC activities include serving as CEO of Yaga, a filesharing network, serving as chairman of Wine.com before pivoting his attention to a number of blockchain- and cryptocurrency-related companies five years ago.
Kitze’s public resume contains at least two noticeable omissions: the 2008 formation of BeforeItsNews.com and Kitze’s appointment as a VP at The Epoch Timesand membership on the paper’s board starting in 2017.
beforeItsNews.comappears to have begun operations in early 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration and, at launch, directly attacked the news media’s treatment of Obama, referencing then-MSNBC-pundit Chris Matthew’s March 2008 comment about how “I felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke.
BeforeItsNews.com’s “about” pageread:
Something strange happened during the 2008 U.S. election. The news media came down with a bad case of amnesia — they forgot exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. Instead of asking critical questions of those running for office, they went out of their way to "get a tingle up their leg" for some candidates, or to ignore the constitutional requirements of the political office.
We wanted to present a point of view that didn't seem to exist in the mainstream media. One that is hopeful, yet realistic, based on the natural law of truth, compassion and tolerance.
What that meant in practice was the rapid production of enormous quantities of user contributed news articles, wide dissemination on social media, and no editorial oversight or fact-checking.
The website encourages anyone to contribute articles, advertising itself as a “news utility—an internet platform that enables the hosting and distribution of any kind of news, worldwide.
It will get out through all the major search engines,” says the current “about” page.
Conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, UFOs, the New World Order, and imminent economic and societal collapse all made the front page of BeforeItsNews.com.
A 2017Guardian article guk ]on Facebook’s failures to address the dissemination of fake news on its platform specifically mentioned Kitze and BeforeItsNews.com:
Chris Kitze, who runs BeforeItsNews.com, said that although he allows users to post any content without fact-checking, he hasn’t noticed Facebook tagging any of his site’s articles as fake news. That includes a recent piece debunked by Snopes claiming to include leaked photos showing how Obama practiced Islam in the White House.
“A lot of people think Obama is Muslim. That’s what it plays on. Is it real? I don’t know,” he said. “The fact is a lot of people thought it was real or it reflects their sentiment.”
Alongside publishing a steady flow of factually questionable content, Kitze, BeforeItsNews.com, and Epoch appear to have enjoyed a thriving relationship with over 20,000 Epoch Times articles appearing on the site between 2010 and 2012.
Kitze’s involvement with Falun Gong was detailed in an Epoch Timesarticle publishedin June 2012, in which he described coming across Falun Gong practitioners in New York’s Times Square in 2005 and, remembering that encounter, educating himself in the movement and practicing its meditation techniques two years later.
The group’s persecution in China—the Chinese government banned Falun Gong and prohibits practice of the movement’s exercises in public and the dissemination of its written material—and freedom of participating in an activity defying the Chinese government clearly resonated with Kitze.
*The Epoch Times*explained that Kitze was drawn to Falun Gong’s openness and participants’ voluntary decision to practice and study the movement.
“Kitze said this may be why the Chinese communist regime was so afraid of Falun Gong that it launched a brutal campaign of hate and persecution against some 100 million practitioners, starting a decade ago in the country where the practice originated” said The Epoch Times. “Because it’s in your heart and mind—that’s something no government could ever control, that’s one reason why a totalitarian regime would oppose it,” Kitze told the paper.
Matthew Tullar, who served as director of circulation at The Epoch Times from 2012 to 2014 and director of sales and marketing from 2015 to 2016, recalled Kitze speaking to Epoch advertising salespeople at a 2012 San Francisco seminar.
“While I was already familiar with the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially persecuting Some [sic] 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China and that the leftist media [...] was strangely ignoring this story, even to this day, that included over 75 Communist government hospitals busy murdering thousands of these people every year since the early two thousands, to harvest and sell their body parts to U.S. and other world customers,” wrote Tullar in an email.
“Mr. Kitze was the first business guy I had ever met that was dedicating a significant part of his business profits and effort to exposing these facts. He struck me as a kind and genuine person who cared about his fellow man,” said Tullar. “While my understanding of and experience with him was limited, I was nonetheless inspired by his effort and compassion. And his presentation turned out to be useful as well.”
CASH IN
Eli Clifton
The Epoch Timeshas always maintained a hawkish editorial tone towards China but that line took on a more overtly partisan and focused U.S. political message over the course of the Trump presidency, pushing a steady onslaught of articles and videos labeling the novel coronavirus “CCP Virus” and advancing a series of thinly reported or unsubstantiated theories about vast Chinese government cover-ups to hide the origins of COVID-19.
TRY AGAIN
The paper’seditorial board even went so far as to claim, “If someone is unfortunately infected with the CCP virus, we suggest that he or she sincerely says ‘down with the CCP.’ Maybe a miracle will happen.”
“Staying away from the CCP and condemning the CCP can help any individual, organization, or country alleviate or even avoid attacks of the CCP virus,” the ed board added. “They may then embrace a wonderful future.”
Over the course of the Trump presidency, Epoch emerged as a prolific pro-Trump media outlet.
When Facebook banned the Epoch Media Group from buying ads in August 2019, it later said the news outlet spent over $9 million on ads, including approximately 11,000 pro-Trump Facebook advertisements, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign.
Epoch denied the ads were purchased by The Epoch Timesbut Facebook said Epoch evaded the company’s transparency rules for political advertising and “repeatedly violated a number of our policies, including our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior, spam and misrepresentation, to name just a few.”
Epoch’s pivot toward Trump appears to have coincided with the ramp up of BeforeItsNews.com’s drumbeat of pro-Trump articles, and Kitze’s conspiracy theories.
“[BeforeItsNews] was one of the first news websites to really cover Donald Trump and his candidacy in a serious manner and, you know, we took him seriously,” Kitze told a conspiracy oriented podcast, The Common Sense Show, in
. “We didn’t think he was just some flash in the pan.”
In 2017, the alliance between Kitze and Epoch became official, when Kitze joined Epoch’s board as a vice president in 2017—an association that is listed nowhere on Epoch’s website, Kitze’s online social media profiles, or in a2018 profile on him in the newspaper. His continued promotion of disproven or baseless conspiracy theories is seemingly in contradiction withEpoch’s “dedicat[ion] to truthful reporting.”
:{Meanwhile, Kitze kept elevating the strangest of right-wing conspiracy theories. In a 2018}
:{ on the Common Sense Show, }::{Kitze referenced the alleged “organ harvesting” of Falun Gong practitioners in China, explaining that he believed they were also being used for “satanic” ritual purposes “as we’ve just seen in the U.S. with all the Pizzagate things.”}:
Kitze’s reference to Pizzagate is particularly jarring as it came a year and a half after a man with an assault rifle was arrested outside a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. attempting to investigate online conspiracy claims that a pedophile ring was operating in the restaurant’s basement with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Kitze went on to echoa largely debunked assertion made by the Trump administration about child trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying:
All these kids coming across the border, these ones all the Democrats were up in arms about, you know, ‘how can you separate the families?’. Fifty-percent of them aren’t even with their family. They’re being trafficked and God knows where these poor kids are going to end up.
In 2019, Kitze appeared on the same show to discuss, among other topics, a conspiracy theory involving the Clintons selling “all of the U.S. secrets” to China. “The Clintons had asked for $1 trillion but [the Chinese] got a deal and only had to pay the Clintons $900 billion,”
, referencing reporting in The Epoch Times Chinese language edition.
Since forming BeforeItsNews, Kitze focused heavily on privacy-related products, including Unseen, a now shuttered secure messaging platform, and founding the cryptocurrency Flashcoin, both of which were featured in aglowing 2018 profile in The Epoch Times that made no reference to his role as an officer in the organization.
Kitze also serves as chairman of the Alphabit Fund, a Dubai and Cayman Islandsbased cryptocurrency fund aiming toraise $300 million thatReuters described in 2018 as “one of the world’s largest digital currency funds.”
PAY DIRT
Lachlan Markay
Alphabit’s co-founder and managing director, Saeed Al Darmaki, worked for over eight years at Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund,Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, raising questions about whether Alphabit has state backing. Kitze did not respond to a request for comment about the investors in Alphabit, his responsibilities as a vice president at Epoch or his current relationship with BeforeItsNews.
Epoch, for its part, offered incomplete and contradictory answers about Kitze’s role at the news organization.
Dr. Dana Cheng, a spokesperson for The Epoch Times, responded to questions about Kitze’s involvement, saying, “Mr. Kitze had limited involvement with The Epoch Times more than 7 years ago,” adding, “There is no relationship between The Epoch Times and any of Mr. Kitze’s endeavors, including beforeitsnews."
Cheng appeared to contradict her statement about Kitze’s involvement with Epoch more than seven years ago when questioned about his appearance on tax filings in the 2017 and 2018 tax years. “Yes, he was a board member in 2017 and 2018, with minimal involvement,” said Cheng, adding, “He is not a board member nor a VP now.”
==