Unsurprisingly it turns out the guy Trump has been touting as a ‘bigly’ middle east advisor in the new administration doesn’t have the credentials Trump claims. Worse, the job Trump has tapped daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law for is a visible and important one but doesn’t require Senate confirmation. However Trump has touted Massad Boulos as a (multi) billionaire and accomplished lawyer. As we will see it’s another case of Trump lying as easily as he breathes. Oh, and Boulos doesn’t have any experience in middle east diplomacy or any diplomacy for that matter in case you’re wondering.
Now, over the years and especially when Boulos’ son and Tiffany became an item he’s gotten some scrutiny. Tiffany had kept her distance from Trump world until after graduating law school, then decided it seems to celebrate not with champagne but guzzling Trump orange Kook Aid and joining the Trump Org. Until then journalists mostly gave her a pass because she was something of an outsider. However even though she broke her mom’s heart by signing on (did she sign her employment contract in blood?) with her sperm donor/father she’s still mostly gotten a pass. That extended to her romance and marriage to a Lebanese-American guy who’s father was a ‘businessman.’ The Boulos family certainly seems to live a plush life, but are they as rich as they look? It never mattered before but with Trump talking up Massad Boulos as a member of his middle east policy team just who the hell this guy is and what credentials he actually has matters. More than a little bit.
Ok, so before now some journalists actually did do a little (and apparently little is the exact word for it) checking and let’s just say ole Massad wasn’t eager to correct mistaken impressions about either his own or his family’s wealth. Well, some actual checking has started to take place and it’s not a pretty picture. Multiple outlets have short pieces about Boulos not making clear the family in Nigeria with the multi-billion dollar, successful family empire is a completely DIFFERENT family that happens to have the same last name. Massad had gotten away with, when questions were posed about his and his family’s wealth with playing the ‘bashful’ game, not wanting to ‘boast’ about such things to the various outlets that wanted to write about him.
There are as I said multiple short pieces now online but this article from Business Insider does a fairly deep dive. And exposes both the myth of Massad Boulos’ wealth (or lack thereof), his legal credentials and Trump’s boasts about how accomplished he is.  It’s a bit of a read but worth the time. Seeing the family Tiffany married into it seems like she was more like her half-siblings than anyone ever realized! Anyway let’s start with the ‘what is Boulos worth?’ (financially) question. It was back in 2018 when Tiffany and Boulos’s son Michael became ‘news’ and a narrative was created by The New York Post. An outlet we all know peddles plenty of RWNJ bullshit. The NY Post claimed Massad Boulos’ family owned a ‘multi-billion dollar conglomerate’ and also mentioned ‘Boulos Enterprises.’ The theme was this was a family worth LOTS of money and in Africa a force to be reckoned with. Vanity Fair picked up on the article and echoed it, and so did the Times.
However as I said earlier no mainstream outlet did any actual fact-checking or digging. Even recently they don’t seem to have bothered:
On December 2, the New York Times said Massad Boulos built “his wealth in West Africa” and runs two companies, SCOA Nigeria and Boulos Enterprises. The Financial Times called him an “auto tycoon” who leads both companies, while ABC called him a “billionaire businessman” who “runs Boulos Enterprises.”
The thing is, a little checking at say Boulos Enterprises would have revealed multiple employees, including the ACTUAL boss (Boulos Boulos) saying Massad isn’t the least bit in charge. And in fact Boulos Enterprises is part of the Boulos Group, a holding company owned by a different bunch of Lebanese-Nigerians that simply have the same last name. I mean come on Journalists! This isn’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein level literal shoe leather, knocking on countless doors fifty years ago. Well, at least finally a little actual investigative journalism is taking place.
It turns out a due-diligence report for Boulos Enterprises Ltd. created by Moody’s Orbis database doesn’t mention Massad Boulos. But there’s more. Archives of the Boulos Group website from 2016 and 2018 don’t mention Massad Boulos either. Finally, Elephant Africa Holding, a Mauritius company created by the Boulos Group to hold its paper businesses, also has NO mention of Massad in ITS corporate filings. Well, the Times seems to have decided they should look into and write about this matter. Yesterday they put an article out (I won’t bother with a link since it’s behind a paywall) which includes an interesting tidbit: they say Massad Boulos had at some point ‘misled’ one of its reporters by answering “yeah” when asked if it was accurate to call his company a multi-billion dollar business.
Business Insider goes on to say they couldn’t find any evidence to suggest Massad Boulos is a billionaire. Instead they note the company Massad Boulos actually does run, SCOA Nigeria, which has a subsidiary called SCOA Motors, is a penny stock. Its shares trade for about two Nigerian naira, roughly a tenth of a US cent. Translated into American money terms that means his entire business is worth about $865,000. That’s not even a Billion, much less ‘multi-billionaire’ territory. However the linked article does allow that amount of money could be a a 957-square-foot condo in Queens.
I rather doubt a delusions of grandeur real estate guy like Trump would be impressed if he knew the actual truth. I’m guessing he bought into the “show” lifestyle the Boulos family has made for itself. It does however explain why some of the shorter (than the BI article I linked to) describe Boulos as a glorified truck salesman!
In any case the dude, and Trump too have lied their asses off about Massad’s wealth and business experience/acumen. So let’s talk about the law and his legal credentials. Or as in the case of the mythical multi-billions lack thereof. It’s far from clear Boulos is, as Trump has described him a “lawyer.” It’s not that hard to check although if one wants to be diligent and check all the places where someone could obtain a license to practice law it can be time consuming. At least someone at BI decided to do a deep dive. In the U.S. every jurisdiction except South Dakota and Alaska have confirmed Boulos has never passed the Bar and/or been licensed to practice law. I rather doubt the two states mentioned would be places where he’d want or need to set up shop I might add.
Well, what about overseas since that’s where the family’s business is located? That’s a fair question so BI went looking overseas too! The linked article notes that “L’Orient Le Jour, a Lebanese newspaper, reported that Boulos is also a citizen of Lebanon, Nigeria, and France. There’s no public evidence that Boulos is licensed as a lawyer in any of those places.” That’s rather interesting, wouldn’t you say? I’m not sure if the reporter(s) decided they’d done enough checking or will keep at it but the article does go on to say:
He was not listed in the directories for the 11 largest French bar associations, which cover two-thirds of French lawyers. Lawyers in Lebanon must be registered with one of two bar associations; one of them, the Beirut Bar Association, said Boulos wasn’t in its database, and the other didn’t respond to repeated inquiries. The Nigerian Bar Association and the country’s Supreme Court, which maintains its registry of lawyers, did not respond to emails about whether Boulos was an attorney.
So the dude is NOT a lawyer, but did he even go to law school somewhere? Not everyone who goes to law school wants to actually become a lawyer. And some decide after a while to do something else and let their Bar membership lapse. Well, BI looked into all that too since some news outlets have reported Boulos has a law degree from the University of Houston. However THEY say that’s incorrect. What the University says is that Boulos has a bachelor’s degree, in “general business” from one of it’s smaller affiliated schools. Specifically the University of Houston-Downtown.
Still, the notion the guy is a lawyer has been out there:
In a 2015 interview on Nigerian TV, Sarah Boulos said her husband “graduated as a lawyer from Thurgood Marshall School,” part of Texas Southern University, before they moved to Nigeria. Massad Boulos also listed a law degree from the school on his LinkedIn profile before the profile went offline, according to information saved in the contact database Rocketreach.
Texas Southern officials didn’t respond to requests for information on Wed. or Thursday before BI published. I find it interesting that the LinkeIn profile about this went offline all of a sudden. Here’s why. Boulos might indeed have attended law school – somewhere. I can see why a school named after a legal icon wouldn’t want this critter’s name associated with them in any way. Perhaps he did attend law school there, or part of law school and finished up somewhere else. Who the hell knows? But, to be fair it looks like he managed to get a law degree somewhere. However, getting a law degree and becoming a lawyer are two separate things. Many a law school graduate has trouble passing a state bar exam. But it seems Boulos at least signed up to try – but never took the exam:
But graduating from law school doesn’t make someone a lawyer. Nahdiah Hoang, the executive director of the Texas Board of Law Examiners, said in an email that Boulos applied to take the July 1996 bar exam, but he either didn’t take it or didn’t pass.
A spokeswoman for the Texas Bar said Boulos “is not now, and never has been, an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas.”
This has gotten longer than I intended so I won’t go into the issue of Boulos’s lack of diplomatic experience and/or credentials. Let’s just say they are about as real as his “vast wealth and legal experience” and leave it at that. I wouldn’t have even bothered except for the intriguing possibility of TIFFANY making a move in Trump World. We all know how ‘playing government’ worked out for Wannabe Princess Ivanka and with HER seeming to not want another round of ridicule perhaps Tiffany is angling for the top spot amongst Trump’s evil spawn. Let’s face it, Fredo 1 and Fredo 2 (Don Jr. and Eric) are lightweights. Barron we simply don’t know yet, and it’s still possible Melania will decide he’s better off overseas once college is done.
Tiffany however showed some brains and work ethic for a good while. Of course she then dropped off the real-work train for a cushy job and fat salary at the Trump Org. Since daddy doesn’t seem to have spent decades obsessing about f**king her she might have figured she could jump over her idiot half-brothers in Trump’s eyes. Like Ivanka she sure as hell married into a family as messed up as her own. Like the Trumps and the Kushners the Boulos family Tiffany married into seems best at grift and self-promotion. Putting on a good show of wealth. Enough to get to run around big cities like NYC and DC and play big-shot some of the time. Hell, Trump might even be impressed at how well Massad Boulos has marketed himself. At the very least Boulos did deliver where it counted.
Boulos is no diplomat but has lots of friends back in Lebanon in particular. Enough in fact that he headed a campaign to get American Muslims to turn on Biden, and then Harris and it made a big difference in the outcome of the election – especially in Michigan. Just what all those disaffected Muslims who turned on Biden/Harris think Trump will do that Biden or Harris did/would not is an entirely different subject.
However, if or more likely when Netanyahu goes scorched earth (you ain’t seen nothin yet) to clear Israeli soil of every Palestinian, even if it takes genocide that petulance will haunt American Muslims for the rest of their lives. But the main thing is that for the transactional Trump, Massad delivered what he said he would. And his son is married to Tiffany. So regardless of the truth, Trump will spout outrageous lies about how ‘awesome’ his pal Boulos is!
So he’s actually a talent-less hack and fraud with a completely fabricated back story of lies and false boasting of education and accomplishment, with no real wealth – but with the ability to convince people he’s rich ?
He’ll fit right in with the rest of the Trump mis-administration.
He’s one of them.