How Tiffany Trump’s Husband Benefited From Proximity to Power

Michael Boulos was an aspiring businessman, just a few years out of college, when he knelt in the White House Rose Garden in January 2021 and asked President Trump’s daughter Tiffany Trump to marry him.

Almost immediately after she said yes, Mr. Boulos, his family and their associates were benefiting financially from his proximity to his soon-to-be in-laws.

The first deal was a family affair. Mr. Boulos, working for his cousin’s international yacht brokerage, sold his future brother-in-law Jared Kushner on an investment in a roughly 50-meter superyacht. Unbeknown to Mr. Kushner, the firm overcharged him and worked to conceal the true price from him, contemporaneous text messages show. The exact amount is unclear but the messages and a lawyer’s written description of the deal say the overcharge was $2.5 million.

Everyone involved denies wrongdoing, and both deals went bad. Mr. Kushner’s yacht sits unfinished in Greece. And the Saudi businessman never got the access (or the wedding invitation) that he had been offered. But Mr. Boulos received about $300,000 from the yacht sale, his cousin says, and $100,000 from the Saudi businessman.

A spokesman for Mr. Boulos and Ms. Trump said that Mr. Boulos had received only a prenegotiated finder’s fee in the yacht deal and had since ended his business relationship with Mr. Frangi, the yacht broker. “Mr. Boulos is proud of and honored by his close, familial relationship with Mr. Kushner,” the spokesman said in an email.

As for the money from the Saudi businessman, the spokesman said it had nothing to do with access to the Trumps but was instead to settle an unrelated debt. He said Mr. Boulos had no involvement in the plan that his cousin had described in text messages.

The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and government, with the president conducting diplomacy with the same foreign governments that are negotiating cryptocurrency and real estate deals with his family.

The Bouloses are a variation on that theme. The previously unreported deals — which The New York Times pieced together through contracts, court records, contemporaneous text messages and interviews — show that Mr. Boulos, his family and his associates were in a position to benefit financially as soon as he became engaged to Ms. Trump, the only child of Mr. Trump and his former wife Marla Maples.

The wedding, held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, raised the family’s profile and turned the patriarch, Massad Boulos, into an important Trump campaign surrogate. News coverage portrayed him as a billionaire business magnate, even though there is no evidence that he has significant wealth resulting from his own commercial activities. Massad Boulos’s stake in his in-laws’ Nigerian truck company was worth less than $2, The Times found last year.

Mr. Trump’s election in 2024 propelled Massad Boulos into government. He became a presidential adviser on the Middle East and then a senior State Department adviser on Africa.

And Michael Boulos is seeking business there, according to the former prime minister of Guinea.

“He is pursuing work,” the former prime minister, Lansana Kouyaté, said in an interview. He would not discuss details but said that Michael Boulos told him a few months ago that he was working to “put together some investors from the United States and some governments in Africa.”

Mr. Kouyaté said that, as far as he was concerned, the business of Michael Boulos and the political role of his father were inseparable.

The former prime minister recounted his conversation with Michael Boulos in two separate interviews. But after Mr. Boulos was asked to comment, Mr. Kouyaté sent an unsolicited email suddenly denying knowing or speaking with him. Asked to explain the discrepancy, he blamed spotty cell service and said to rely on Michael Boulos’s account of the events. He said that someone, whom he would not identify, had told him to email The Times.

A spokesman for Mr. Boulos said he did not know Mr. Kouyaté and had never spoken to him.

Today, Mr. Boulos and Ms. Trump are raising a family. They welcomed their first child, Alexander, in May. Ms. Trump has kept a low profile but this week shared photos on Instagram of the family boating and of scenes from the French Riviera.

With the Boulos family close to power, associates are also seeking their own opportunities. Around the time of the presidential inauguration, Habib Saidi, a businessman and close friend of the Bouloses, was sitting with Michael Boulos at Mar-a-Lago when he spotted Kacy Grine, a financier with deep ties in Saudi Arabia, dining on the terrace.

Mr. Saidi stepped away from Mr. Boulos and, in front of others, introduced himself to Mr. Grine. Mr. Saidi said that he and his friends wanted to use the opportunity, while they were close to the center of American power, to do business in the Middle East, according to a person who witnessed the conversation. Mr. Saidi mentioned construction projects in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Saidi said he had no recollection of the conversation. Mr. Grine said he would not discuss his business interests.

The Superyacht ‘Solstice’

As a young yacht broker, Michael Boulos had a knack for business development, his cousin Jimmy Frangi recalled.

Mr. Boulos identified his soon-to-be brother-in-law Jared Kushner as a potential client, and brought Mr. Frangi to meet him. The cousins made an investment pitch: Get a good deal on a yacht, refurbish it and sell or lease it as a moneymaker.

By June 2021, documents show, Michael Boulos was sending Mr. Kushner sales presentations about an unfinished yacht, later named the Solstice.

The firm told Mr. Kushner that the price to acquire the yacht was 12.5 million euros, or about $15 million at the time. That included costs and a flat brokerage commission of 1 million euros for Mr. Boulos, Mr. Frangi and their colleagues.

“Just so we understand the business deal,” Mr. Kushner said on a call, according to portions of a transcript, “you are going to make 1mm on the closing.”

But according to Mr. Frangi’s text messages at the time, his firm was making much more than that. The brokers were spending millions less to acquire the yacht than they claimed to Mr. Kushner, according to Mr. Frangi’s messages. “THIS MAKES US 3.5,” Mr. Frangi told an associate.

The text messages show that his brokerage worked to conceal the details from Mr. Kushner. “It’s going to be difficult to hide,” an executive at the firm wrote. He said it was important that Mr. Kushner not hire an independent appraiser.

The family spokesman said that Ms. Trump had “no knowledge of or interest in any part of these transactions.”

The sale closed in early 2022. Mr. Frangi said that he had made about $400,000 from the commission, and that Mr. Boulos had made $300,000.

Mr. Frangi also acknowledged taking extra money that had been earmarked for transaction fees. But he said it was a few hundred thousand dollars, not millions. He said that it was wrong to think of the price as inflated. He said the deal called for Mr. Kushner’s investment group to pay a single sum to buy, transport and insure the yacht. If Mr. Frangi could do it all for less, then of course he’d make more profit, he said.

If that was the deal, that is not what the contracts say.

As for his text messages, Mr. Frangi said they were unreliable. “I write usually very erratic and I just throw things and I always live in the future and everybody knows that about me,” he wrote in a text message to The Times.

Mr. Kushner eventually realized that he had been overcharged, according to a lawyer who recounted the deal during a client’s financial dispute with Mr. Frangi. The lawyer, Taylor Howard, wrote that Mr. Kushner had been overcharged by $2.5 million and confronted Mr. Frangi, who concealed the reason for the higher price. “In reality, Mr. Frangi was using that to bolster his returns on the transaction,” Mr. Howard wrote.

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner declined to comment on details of the deal. He said that Mr. Boulos had recently been doing a “great job” working to find a new buyer for the yacht, and that a deal was pending.

The Saudi Deal

On June 22, 2022, a few months after the yacht deal closed, Michael Boulos and Mr. Frangi gathered at the Virginia home of a wealthy Saudi businessman. Mr. Frangi knew the businessman, Abdulelah Allam, through the yacht business and was millions of dollars in debt to him.

Mr. Allam was in Virginia in self-imposed exile. He had potentially billions of dollars in real estate seized by the Saudi government during a 2017 corruption crackdown by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and was desperate to get his property back.

Mr. Frangi came up with a plan, text messages show: He could use his relationship with Mr. Boulos and the Trump family to help Mr. Allam persuade the crown prince to return his property. In exchange, Mr. Frangi said, he wanted Mr. Allam to forgive his debt and cut him in on a future business deal.

Mr. Boulos had needs of his own, Mr. Frangi said. “He needs 25,000$,” he told Mr. Allam in a text message in advance of the meeting. “Is loan. I told him.” He included Mr. Boulos’s name and bank account information.

The day of the Virginia meeting, Mr. Allam texted that he had deposited $100,000 into Mr. Boulos’s account.

Everyone involved said the money was not intended to buy access. But they offered contradictory explanations for it.

According to Michael Boulos’s spokesman, Mr. Frangi’s “financially struggling company” owed Mr. Boulos money. So, at Mr. Frangi’s request, the Saudi businessman settled the debt by paying Mr. Boulos himself, the spokesman said.

But an aide to Mr. Allam said the money was a loan to Mr. Boulos that Mr. Boulos still intended to repay.

Mr. Frangi has explained the money in different ways, at times calling it a loan to Mr. Boulos and at other times calling it the settling of a debt.

Whatever the purpose, in the weeks and months that followed the $100,000 bank deposit, Mr. Frangi detailed plans to “soften up” Saudi officials. Part of that involved presenting Mr. Allam as being close to the Trumps. “We have a month and a half to get everything started before the wedding,” Mr. Frangi wrote in text messages.

They strategized about photographs and access. “Would be good you fly with Michael and Tiffany pls,” he wrote to Mr. Allam. Later, in Arabic, he added, “Please delete all texts.”

Mr. Boulos was not copied on those text messages. Mr. Allam’s aide, Rashad el-Hassanieh, said: “Mikey never promised anything. He said, ‘I’ll listen, but I can’t promise anything.’”

Mr. Boulos was not involved, his spokesman said. “Mr. Boulos has never dealt with, been involved with, nor discussed Mr. Allam’s Saudi Arabia concerns with anyone, including Mr. Allam himself,” he said.

As months went on, people around Mr. Allam warned him that the plan had little chance of working, messages show.

They were right. Mr. Allam never got his wedding invite, his access or his property back.

Justin Scheck reported from London; Athens; Ibiza, Spain; and Paris. Tariq Panja reported from London; Tripoli, Libya; and Athens. Jo Becker reported from Los Angeles, Washington and Istanbul. Bradley Hope reported from London.