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Abdulrahman Alfozan Was Allegedly Snooping While the Houthis Invaded
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Because I continue to wonder when Crown Prince Bonesaw Mohammed bin Salman will tire of the poor returns on his billions of investment in the Trump family, I want to compare the timeline of the alleged snooping on OpenAI by Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan and the burgeoning conflict between the Houthis and Saudis, in which conflict Trump has done nothing (at least publicly) to intervene and indeed, in which Trump pointedly ignored MbS’ plea for help back on September 10.To be sure, at least as laid out in the affidavit, OpenAI did not find the camera Alfozan is alleged to have placed in a key conference room until several weeks after Trump started ignoring MbS’ pleas for help in mid-September.
They did not find the camera itself until the day after Trump hosted an AI summit in DC on September 29.
But as the Houthis struck two critical points — the Riyadh airport and Aramco — Alfozan was in custody over a long weekend, the kind of thing you arrange to get someone to talk.
There are at least two details in the complaint that suggest Alfozan was targeting this conference room specifically. A query he or his spouse submitted on September 16 asked, “how about external partners, where would those usually meet with [OpenAI] at?” And OpenAI described that conference room as one that,
can be reserved only by executives and executive assistants’ and (ii) typically is used for internal leadership meetings and technical product sessions, as well as external briefings with government officials and business counterparts.
None of this suggests Trump is letting the Saudis sweat an invasion elicited by his own war in Iran because he caught them spying on him.
But he did say, months ago, that he wanted MbS to kiss his ass.
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