Jeff Bezos’ affair leak may have been Saudi retaliation

It’s a surreal geopolitical development that can be described as “incredibly 2019.” 

Jeff Bezos’ security advisor has determined that the party responsible for hacking the Amazon CEO’s private messages and releasing evidence of his marital infidelity to The National Enquirer was … the government of Saudi Arabia. 

Gavin De Becker, who Bezos hired to investigate the phone hack that led to the public reveal of his affair with Lauren Sanchez, came to the conclusion that the Saudi government had targeted Bezos as retaliation for The Washington Post‘s coverage of the brutal murder of its journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in a Saudi consulate in October 2018. 

Bezos bought the Post for $250 million in early 2013.

De Becker wrote his findings in an article for The Daily Beast, alleging that the Saudi Government had been spying on his boss for months. “Some Americans will be surprised to learn that the Saudi government has been intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October, when the Post began its relentless coverage of Khashoggi’s murder,” De Becker wrote.

He outlined further cyberattacks on Bezos, the Post, and himself — all of which allegedly came from the Saudi government — and an attempt to paint Sanchez’ brother Michael as the only source for the Enquirer story. But as Michael Sanchez himself has said, the Enquirer had seen text exchanges between Bezos and his sister even before they contacted him.  

De Becker described a close relationship between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and AMI (American Media Inc.) chairman David Pecker, whose company owns The National Enquirer and other magazines. 

“Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information,” De Becker writes, in what he says is his last public statement on the matter. 

De Becker has passed on the results of his investigation to federal officials, and for that reason he says he is not revealing all its details. But the details in his article alone reveal a story that would almost be too outlandish if you saw it in a TV show or movie. 

A story where a foreign government conspired with a media company to punish an American billionaire with revenge porn for owning a newspaper that reported on a journalist’s assassination. 

Because that’s just what the world looks like now.