As future Trump advisers George Nader, Erik Prince, and Elliott Broidy establish deep Israeli and Arab ties, Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, engage in a series of suspicious business transactions with foreign nationals, and Paul Manafort begins years of work for pro-Kremlin interests. The Kremlin’s intense focus on connecting with Trump advisers during the 2016 election underscores foreign nationals’ ongoing interest in pursuing relationships with Trump and those close to him both before and after his entrance into presidential politics.
In 2002, George Nader shutters Middle East Insight and “disappear[s]” from Washington.1 A likely explanation for his disappearance is that in 2003 Nader receives a one-year prison sentence in the Czech Republic after he is convicted of ten counts of sexually abusing minors.2 According to the New York Times, at some point thereafter Nader begins working for Vice President Dick Cheney.3 He subsequently shows up in Iraq—shortly after the second American invasion of that country—having developed “close ties to national security officials in the Bush White House.”4 Nader’s ties by this point extend well beyond the U.S. government, however. He is also now connected to the newly arrived private contractors who are working in Iraq post-invasion, most notably Blackwater USA, a “private security company” whose founder, future Trump national security adviser and Steve Bannon confidant Erik Prince, has hired him as a Middle East dealmaker.5 Under oath during a 2010 deposition, Prince will claim—contradicting numerous American government officials who have worked with Nader over the years—that while in Prince’s employ Nader was “unsuccessful” in making deals in the Middle East, “did not work directly” with either Prince or anyone in Blackwater despite having been hired by the company, and “pretty much worked on his own.”6
Erik Prince will feature as a significant player in the many future interactions between Donald Trump, his inner circle of advisers and associates, and powerful Israelis, Saudis, Russians, and Emiratis. The Mueller Report will describe Prince as someone with “relationships with various individuals associated with the [2016] Trump Campaign, including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., and Roger Stone.… [He] sent unsolicited policy papers [to Trump campaign adviser and later CEO] Bannon on issues such as foreign policy, trade, and Russian election interference.”7 The report adds that after Election Day in 2016, Prince “frequently visited transition offices at Trump Tower, primarily to meet with Bannon but on occasion to meet Michael Flynn and others. Prince and Bannon would discuss, inter alia, foreign policy issues and Prince’s recommendations regarding who should be appointed to fill key national security positions.”8 By the time of the presidential transition, Nader, by then an adviser to Mohammed bin Zayed, had “received assurances … that the incoming [Trump] Administration considered Prince a trusted associate.”9
The Intercept, an online news organization, has referred to Prince as “America’s most famous mercenary,” but also, more important, as a man who has long been on an idiosyncratic personal mission: “He continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states,” the digital media outlet writes, “and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan … [but] Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now [in 2019] attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cell phone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.”10
While Prince’s present ambitions are grand—if chilling—The Intercept positions him, too, as a figure who poses a danger to international peace and stability as much because of his personality as his geopolitical designs. Prince is, the outlet reports, “a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world. Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary … who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he attempts.”11 Prince’s long string of failures appears to end at the dawn of the Trump era, however, as he finds in Trump and his aides, allies, and associates willing compatriots in some of his most audacious schemes.
In the late aughts, Prince’s sudden resurgence on the global stage was still well in the future, however. At the time, he was reeling from September 2007 allegations that mercenaries in his employ had murdered seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad, a federal criminal investigation in which Prince had been, the Nation wrote in 2009, “implicated.”12 As Prince licked his wounds and considered his next moves, he was developing close ties to the Israeli government as well as to strongmen across the Middle East, with Haaretz reporting that Prince’s “deep Israeli connections” came to include a long-standing business relationship with Ari Harow—former bureau chief and chief of staff to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and another with Dorian Barak, Harow’s onetime business partner.13 By 2018, Harow will have been convicted of fraud and breach of trust and be working with Israeli prosecutors to testify against Netanyahu—who in 2019 becomes the first-ever sitting Israeli prime minister to face charges of bribery and breach of trust—but when Prince first entered Harow’s milieu the latter was a well-connected businessman, and being linked to him put Prince in good stead in Israeli political circles.14
From 2012 on, Prince will hold an investment stake in a company co-managed by Harow and Barak, and by dint of his association with the two men he begins investing in Israeli security companies as well.15 Barak also tries—it isn’t known whether successfully or not—to get Prince to join billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz as a major investor in a new investment project: SCL Group, the parent company of the Trump campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica. Tchenguiz is known as well for being a close business associate of Dmitry Firtash, who is himself a business associate of 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.16 Tchenguiz is also an investor in Black Cube and Terrogence, two Israeli intelligence companies that will intersect consequentially with the Trump campaign, transition, and administration (see chapters 3, 4, and 8).17 Black Cube, in particular, has ties to the Israeli government through many employees who are former members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and its advertising “openly” features its “ties to Israeli spy agencies, including Mossad,” according to the New Yorker.18
By 2018, Prince will be notorious in the United States for misleading Congress and the public on the subject of his activities in the Middle East—including a key January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Kremlin agent that Nader successfully set up for Prince on behalf of MBZ and the Trump transition team (see chapter 6).19
Given his history of dealings with Nader, and Nader’s history of dealings with men to whom Prince is also connected, the mercenary’s mid-aughts account of Nader’s incompetence in the midst of sensitive Middle Eastern negotiations seems to be at odds both with Prince’s continued association with him and with an observation by a veteran State Department negotiator for the Middle East, Aaron David Miller, who will tell Politico in 2018 that Nader had “an absolutely amazing degree of contact with the people we [at the State Department] were talking to” in the Middle East.20 Al-Monitor, an American media outlet covering the Middle East, says that at the time Prince claims Nader was ineffectual at making deals in the Middle East, he was in fact “a deal broker in Iraq.”21 The outlet adds that “in Iraq in the mid-2000s, [Nader was] looking to translate his Rolodex of connections from his Middle East Insight days into work advising various Iraqi political clients, including some of Iraq’s new Shiite political leaders, as well as Kurdish officials.” According to Iraqi sources, Nader “helped arrange meetings for the 2005 visit to Washington of leading members of an Iraqi Shiite political party with close ties to Iran, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.”22
After his wide-ranging high-level work in Iraq, however, Nader falls off the grid again. Reached by CNN in 2018, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East center will call Nader a “man of mystery” whose name he hadn’t heard mentioned by anyone in the field of Middle East studies for a dozen years, while another Middle East expert will express surprise “at finding out Nader was still alive” when contacted for comment about Nader’s reemergence into the American news cycle.23
As Erik Prince is providing private security services in the Middle East during the early years of America’s occupation of Iraq, another future Trump adviser, Elliott Broidy, is in the same place doing the same thing. In 2005, Broidy, described by the New York Times as a “Republican fund-raiser who is [also] a California-based investor with a strong interest in the Middle East,” founds a private security company called Circinus, which, like Prince’s Blackwater (later renamed Academi), “provides services to both United States agencies and foreign governments.”24 It is unclear whether Nader, who is working for Prince in the mid-aughts, crosses paths with Broidy at this point; what is certain is that the two men will be closely linked by the beginning of the Trump administration.
At approximately the same time Broidy is founding Circinus, he is also beginning what becomes a “long history” with onetime and future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israel’s Haaretz. In 2003, the outlet writes, “then-Finance Minister Netanyahu took credit for convincing the New York State pension fund to invest $250 million in [the Broidy-led] Markstone [Capital Group]”—a firm whose success is later found to have been partly the result of bribes Broidy paid to the New York State comptroller.25 Broidy will be convicted of a misdemeanor for these bribes in 2012.26 Nader eventually establishes “long-standing connections” with Israel through Broidy, according to the Middle East Eye, including being “sent” by MBZ “during the [2016 U.S.] presidential elections” to “meet Israeli officials to discuss how the two states [UAE and Israel] can cooperate”—a course of negotiation that raises the question of whether Israeli officials were the first to point Nader in the direction of a key Israeli figure in the Trump campaign’s orbit, Joel Zamel (see chapters 3 and 4).27 The result of all these intertwining connections is that by the time of the 2016 election, three men who will be among Trump’s foremost clandestine foreign policy advisers—Nader, Prince, and Broidy—all have longtime ties to the Israeli government and deep roots in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Donald Trump spends the 2000s augmenting his own existing ties to the Middle East. In 2005, for instance, he attempts to partner with a billionaire from the United Arab Emirates, Hussain Sajwani, to build two massive Trump-branded towers in Dubai.28 The project is ultimately unsuccessful.29
As the New York City businessman is building connections in Abu Dhabi, D.C. political consultant Paul Manafort is busy building connections in a former Soviet republic, Ukraine—a course of ingratiation and shilling that will lead directly to revelations, during the course of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference years hence, that not only implicate Donald Trump but also provide a window into how and why several foreign nations saw such promise in the 2016 Trump campaign.
Manafort begins his work as a flack in Ukraine by agreeing to consult for the Party of Regions, a pro-Russia political party funded in substantial part by Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian tycoon who is one of the richest men in the country.30 Manafort was working at the time for Akhmetov’s System Capital Management (SCM).31 During the Trump-Russia scandal following the 2016 presidential election, Manafort will be accused by special counsel Robert Mueller of secretly transmitting proprietary Trump campaign polling data to foreign nationals through a man “the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Konstantin Kilimnik, with the evidence suggesting that Manafort intended this information to ultimately be seen by, among others, Akhmetov “and another Ukrainian oligarch” (see chapter 4).32
Manafort’s work for the Party of Regions—a political outfit “aligned with Moscow,” according to CNN—begins in 2005 and ends in 2012, a seven-year period during which Manafort, who in 2016 will offer to work for Donald Trump for “free,” earns $60 million for his services. Even after the Party of Regions payments cease, Manafort continues meeting with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politicians, including a 2014 meeting with Viktor Medvedchuk—a man who will ultimately fall under U.S. sanctions for his role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and who is so close to Putin that the Russian president is his daughter’s godfather—that takes place after Trump has made it known to GOP officials that he plans to run for president (see chapter 2).33
Most of Manafort’s Party of Regions work comes in support of Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Kremlin candidate for the presidency of Ukraine hobbled in significant part by the fact that he speaks fluent Russian but has “a hard time speaking Ukrainian.”34 A 2006 U.S. embassy cable describes Yanukovych as not only enjoying the backing of the Kremlin as Manafort tries to give him an “extreme makeover,” but also as belonging to a political party that is “a haven … [for] mobsters.”35 A 2017 Time article will describe Yanukovych’s mid-aughts political career as that of an “oafish and inarticulate” man with “rough manners and [a] criminal past,” including past convictions for both violence and theft.36 In the same article, the Party of Regions is described as “stained with blood” due to the abduction and beheading, organized by “some of Yanukovych’s political patrons,” of an investigative journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, who had been exposing high-level corruption in Ukraine.37 When Manafort successfully orchestrates a Yanukovych victory in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election, “among the first official acts of [Yanukovych’s] tenure [will be] to legally bar Ukraine from seeking NATO membership—a move that effectively granted Russia one of its core geopolitical demands.”38 Six years later, Manafort finds work with another presidential candidate, this time in the United States, whose candidacy is both supported by the Kremlin and marked by an intense hostility to NATO.
Another of Yanukovych’s first acts as Ukrainian president is to jail his chief political opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the “gold-braided heroine of the Orange Revolution”—a political movement that had successfully protested Yanukovych’s elevation to the presidency back in 2004, partly on the grounds that the Kremlin had interfered in that election.39 This, too, offers an echo of Manafort’s subsequent work as a U.S. campaign adviser, with Donald Trump calling for the jailing of his own chief political opponent, Hillary Clinton, just five years after Yanukovych jails Tymoshenko, and winning higher office only after substantial Kremlin interference in his 2016 election as president. In the case of Yanukovych, writes Reuters, Putin “bankrolled” the Manafort-managed candidate during his bid to become Ukrainian prime minister in 2006, “sowed division” in Ukraine as part of his plan to back his desired candidate, was suspected of supporting an attack against his chosen candidate’s opponent—Yanukovych’s anti-Kremlin rival was “not-so-mysteriously poisoned,” writes Reuters—and watched with satisfaction as Manafort “airbrushed” his favored candidate’s “record of corruption, mismanagement, and alleged ties to Russia.”40
Of Manafort’s first presidential campaign of the 2010s—Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign being his second—Reuters observes that “the [2010 Yanukovych] campaign came from Washington, but the money came from Moscow.”41 “There was no daylight between Yanukovych and Putin,” the media outlet writes of the Manafort-run campaign, “and no daylight between Yanukovych and Manafort.”42 Indeed, as part of his “more than a decade of service to a Putin puppet,” Manafort aided Yanukovych as the Ukrainian politician ensured that Ukraine was “allied with Russia,” anti-NATO, and gave preferential economic treatment to Moscow—an agenda strikingly similar to the one Manafort’s second candidate of the 2010s, Donald Trump, would propose in March 2016, in the midst of the Republican primaries.43
In 2006, Manafort signs a $10 million-a-year consulting and public relations contract with a man Reuters calls a “Putin crony,” Oleg Deripaska, who not coincidentally had also been the man who originally connected Manafort to Akhmetov’s Party of Regions.44 In May 2019, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) will quote a Treasury Department document to describe Deripaska as “a designated [U.S.-sanctioned] individual. He possesses a Russian diplomatic passport. He regularly claims to represent the Russian government. He’s an aluminum—and other metals—billionaire and he’s been investigated by the U.S. government and by … our allies for money laundering. He’s been accused of threatening the lives of his business rivals. He’s been charged with illegal wire tapping [and] taking part in extortion and racketeering schemes. He’s bribed government officials; he’s ordered the murder of a businessman; and he has many links to Russian organized crime … he’s a bad dude … a bottom-feeding scum-sucker and … he has absolutely no alignment with the interests of the U.S. people.”45 Deripaska is also, beginning in 2006 and extending into the 2010s, Paul Manafort’s boss and the source of much of his annual income.
While the precise scope of the 2006 Manafort-Deripaska contract is unknown, just months earlier Manafort had pitched Deripaska a course of advocacy that would see Manafort working to “‘greatly benefit the Putin government’ by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage inside the United States” and abroad.46
Shortly after he begins working for Deripaska, Manafort purchases a $3.7 million condo in Trump Tower—Trump’s home—using an LLC called John Hannah rather than a personal account, suggesting that the purpose behind the purchase of the condo may be business-related. John is Manafort’s middle name, while Hannah is the middle name of Manafort’s business partner at the time, Rick Davis; alternatively, John Hannah could refer to former Dick Cheney aide John Hannah, in which case the shell corporation’s naming takes on a different and potentially more sinister cast (see chapters 4 and 6).47 At the time that Manafort, now working for Putin ally Deripaska and, indirectly, Putin, moves into Trump Tower, the tower’s owner is considering a run for the presidency in 2008, according to Fox News.48 Per the cable network, by the end of the first week of 2006 Trump has “hinted” to the New York Post that “he may go for president in 2008” and has “strongly suggested he [is] interested in entering the national political arena in 2008,” telling the Post that his decision not to run for governor of New York in 2006 “doesn’t preclude me from doing something [political] in the future.”49 While Trump is coy about what this last comment means, “a political figure close to Trump” helpfully assists the Post in decoding the remark, telling the newspaper that “Donald is definitely interested in running for president in 2008, possibly as an independent candidate.”50
As Manafort moves into Trump Tower on Deripaska’s dime, he stands a good chance of coming into contact with the presidential-run-mulling Trump, as Manafort’s consulting firm has by 2006 “represented Trump for years”—in fact, Trump was the firm’s very first client after it was founded in 1980.51 The Atlantic notes that from the moment Manafort moves to Trump Tower, he and Trump “occasionally see[] each other and ma[k]e small talk.”52 The magazine observes, too, that “while Manafort is alleged to have laundered cash [from Ukraine] for his own benefit, his long history of laundering reputations is what truly sets him apart. He helped persuade the American political elite to look past the atrocities and heists of kleptocrats and goons. He took figures who should have never been permitted influence in Washington and softened their image just enough to guide them past the moral barriers to entry.… Helping elect Donald Trump, in so many ways, represents the culmination of Paul Manafort’s work. The president bears some likeness to the oligarchs Manafort long served.”53 In 2017, when a group of Manafort’s friends secretly gather to strategize how to help Manafort escape allegations of collusion with a foreign government, one person contacted as part of the effort will note to the Atlantic that “there wasn’t a lot to work with. And nobody could be sure that Paul didn’t do it.”54
By 2015, revenues from the course of work Manafort began in Ukraine in 2005 have “appeared to dry up,” according to CNN—though around the time of his firing as Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 Manafort will tell his accountant that he still has $2.4 million coming to him in November 2016 “for work he did in Ukraine,” suggesting that he was still in a business relationship with pro-Russia concerns while he was working atop the Trump campaign.55 Indeed, the New York Times notes in mid-August 2016, as Manafort is leaving Trump’s campaign amid recriminations over his past pro-Kremlin work, that “Ukrainian company records give no indication that Mr. Manafort has formally dissolved the local branch of his company, Davis Manafort International, directed by a longtime assistant, Konstantin V. Kilimnik.”56 Whether Manafort is in 2016 still business partners with Kilimnik—the man whom Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates calls a former Russian military intelligence officer, and whose co-workers in the 1990s at the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute called him simply “the guy from the GRU [Russian military intelligence]”—what is clear is that by 2015 Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska, his and Kilimnik’s old boss, has soured, with Manafort “deeply indebted” to the Putin crony.57 Why Manafort is in debt is unclear. It could be because he has not adequately advocated for Putin’s government in the United States under his contract with Deripaska, or because Deripaska at one point during his association with Manafort loaned the political consultant $10 million, or because Deripaska had unwisely “ploughed $18.9 million into a telecoms venture in Ukraine run by Manafort and his number two, Rick Gates,” or because by early 2016 Manafort had somehow come to owe Deripaska “close to $20 million” for unknown reasons, or some combination of all of these. What is clear is that Manafort, in Deripaska’s view, remains deeply in the red as the political flack lobbies for a job on the Trump campaign in early 2016.58
Soon after Manafort joins Trump’s presidential campaign on March 28, 2016, Deripaska dispatches former GRU officer Victor Boyarkin to pressure Manafort to square his debts with the oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin will tell Time in 2018, “and he was offering [in 2016] ways to pay it back. I came down on him hard.”59 Indeed, just two weeks after Manafort’s hire (a hire that occurs once Manafort tells Trump friend Thomas Barrack that he “really needs to get to” Trump), Manafort emails “his old lieutenant” Kilimnik asking him how he can “use” his “media coverage” as Trump’s campaign manager to “get whole” with Deripaska.60 In the ensuing 120 days, Manafort meets face-to-face with Kilimnik at least twice, once on May 7 and again on August 2, not long after the Republican National Convention; offers “private briefings” on the Trump campaign to Deripaska; transmits proprietary Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik with the aim of it reaching Deripaska, Manafort’s old boss Akhmetov, and another Ukrainian oligarch, Serhiy Lyovochkin; and, as the campaign’s overseer of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, helps orchestrate a change in the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform regarding the provision of arms to anti-Kremlin Ukrainian rebels—a change that delights both the Kremlin and pro-Russia elements in Ukraine.61 As to the last of these incidents, Kilimnik will tell associates in Europe just a few weeks after the convention that he played a role in the Republicans’ unexpectedly pro-Kremlin platform decision in Cleveland.62
The key Trump campaign executor of Kilimnik’s plan regarding the change to the GOP platform is J. D. Gordon, Republican senator Jeff Sessions’s deputy on Trump’s national security advisory committee—a body first conceived of by Jared Kushner and Dimitri Simes, the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for the National Interest (CNI), a conservative think tank that has consistently a pro-Kremlin viewpoint (see chapter 2). Both during and after the July 2016 convention in Cleveland, Gordon has substantial contacts with Russian nationals. According to the Mueller Report, on the third day of the convention, Gordon and Sessions both deliver speeches at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference.63 During Gordon’s speech, which Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak attends, Gordon argues “that the United States should have better relations with Russia.”64 The Mueller Report reveals that during Sessions’s speech Kislyak may have asked a question of the Alabama senator, who has been, since being hired by the Trump campaign in early March, the GOP candidate’s chief public-facing national security adviser.65 Gordon speaks with Kislyak after the event to tell him that he “meant what he said in the speech about improving U.S.-Russia relations”; Sessions also speaks with Kislyak after the event and likewise discusses “U.S.-Russia relations” with the Russian ambassador.66 At a reception following the event, Gordon has dinner with Kislyak, and they are joined by a fellow member of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Carter Page.67 Gordon and Kislyak speak for several minutes about U.S.-Russia relations, during which Gordon repeats to the Russian ambassador that “he meant what he said in his speech about improving U.S.-Russia relations.”68
Nine days before Sessions, Gordon, and Page interact with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference, Gordon participates in the Republican National Convention’s committee hearings to debate amendments to the party platform. Prior to the hearings, Trump’s policy director, John Mashburn—who will later testify to Congress that before the convention George Papadopoulos, another member of Trump’s national security advisory committee, told him of the Kremlin having damaging information about Clinton—explicitly orders Gordon to “take a hands-off approach” to the hearings.69 Gordon ignores Mashburn’s directive and furiously objects to a platform amendment proposed by delegate Diana Denman; the amendment would “include[] provision of armed support for Ukraine” against pro-Kremlin forces as part of the GOP platform.70 According to Mashburn’s subsequent congressional testimony, Trump “had not taken a stance on the issue,” and therefore Mashburn’s directive to Gordon that “the Campaign should not intervene” was intended to hold during discussion of the party’s stance toward the hostilities in Ukraine.71 Echoing Mashburn, Matt Miller, a campaign staffer working with Gordon at the platform hearings, will later say that he “did not have any independent basis to believe that this language [Denman’s proposed platform] contradicted Trump’s views,” and therefore he did not urge Gordon to get involved in a dispute with Denman, nor did he condone him doing so.72
Instead of remaining silent, however, Gordon—claiming to have heard Trump clearly articulate a position on Ukrainian rebels at a brief meeting in D.C. nearly four months earlier—feels “obliged to object to the proposed platform change and seek its dilution.”73 When his objection meets resistance from Denman and others, Gordon, according to Denman, picks up his phone, dials a number, and thereafter pretends, while arguing with Denman, to be on the phone with Trump campaign headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City—when in fact he appears to be getting his direction from a different source altogether, as he is actually on the phone with the office of his national security advisory committee supervisor, Jeff Sessions.74 Gordon, who had apparently lied to Denman about being on the phone with “candidate Trump,” will subsequently tell Mueller that not only Mashburn but Mashburn’s colleague in Trump’s policy shop, Rick Dearborn, “supported” Gordon’s position on the platform change—a claim Mashburn contradicts when he is confronted with it.75
The result of Gordon and Denman’s bizarre exchange is that the latter’s platform amendment proposal is defeated by, the evidence suggests, the machinations of Gordon and Sessions (the latter either directly or through a representative). Notably, Gordon and Sessions are the only two men involved in the platform dispute who are directly associated with Simes’s and Kushner’s national security advisory committee. Sessions in particular has, in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, been meeting and speaking regularly with Simes and other members of Simes’s think tank (see chapter 2). Sam Clovis, who hired some of the members of the national security advisory committee but is not one of its members, will later tell the special counsel’s office that “he was surprised by the [platform] change” Gordon orchestrated. Mashburn will be even more forceful, insisting that Gordon—and presumably Sessions, if indeed it was he who green-lit Gordon’s maneuvers in Cleveland—had “violated Mashburn’s directive not to intervene” in platform disputes.76
After Gordon’s July 11, 2016, actions at the Republican National Convention committee meetings, and his July 20 discussions with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference, the Russian ambassador invites Gordon to his home.77 Gordon tells Kislyak that he will have to take a “raincheck” because of bad press involving alleged connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. Before he can make good on his “raincheck,” however, Gordon departs the presidential campaign for the Trump transition team.78
Having failed to set up a meeting with the number two national security adviser on Trump’s national security advisory committee, Kislyak tries instead for the committee’s chairman.79 This time Kislyak is successful at setting up a meeting, scheduling a get-together with Sessions for September 8 in Sessions’s office; September 8 is the day after Trump is slated to deliver, in Philadelphia, the second major foreign policy address of his campaign, and his first one post-convention.80
In Trump’s September 7 speech, written, as was his April 27 foreign policy speech, with input from the man who created the committee of which Sessions is the chairman, Dimitri Simes (see chapter 2), Trump states the following about Russia: “Putin has no respect for President Obama or Hillary Clinton.”81 It is a sentiment he might easily have deduced from Kislyak’s repeated private statements of support to his national security advisers in the weeks prior (see chapters 4 and 5).82
At Sessions’s office the next day, Sessions and Kislyak discuss Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, and Kislyak once again informs a top Trump campaign representative—having consistently done so since Trump’s first foreign policy speech in April—that the Kremlin is “receptive to the overtures Trump [has] laid out during his campaign.”83 Trump thereby receives feedback from pro-Kremlin sources immediately before and immediately after both his first and second major foreign policy addresses (see chapters 2 and 4). After the Sessions-Kislyak meeting on September 8, attended as well by two Sessions aides, Kislyak invites Sessions to come to his house alone to dine.84 Sessions does not follow up on the invitation, however, as the Trump campaign—having recently asked Manafort to resign due to his ties to Ukraine and Russia—is just days away from asking two members of Sessions’s committee, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, to resign as well, and for the same reason.85 While Sessions does not dine privately with Kislyak, his meeting with the Russian ambassador in his Senate office is itself a significant anomaly; though Sessions will later claim he met Kislyak only as a routine obligation of his role on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a CBS News poll taken of twenty of the committee’s twenty-six members in March 2017 will reveal that not one of the twenty had met with Sergey Kislyak even once in 2016.86
Seventy-two hours before the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland, another member of Sessions’s team has contact with a Kremlin-linked Russian national. On July 15, 2016, Soviet-born U.S. businessman Sergei Millian—who will shortly “offer[] to serve as a go-between for a Belarusian author with ties to the Russian government and the Trump campaign”—contacts George Papadopoulos on LinkedIn.87 Just as Maltese professor and Kremlin agent Joseph Mifsud had contacted Papadopoulos mere days after Sam Clovis hired Papadopoulos in March 2016 (see chapter 2), Millian’s approach to Papadopoulos occurs shortly after the young Trump adviser has appeared on a conference panel with Clovis at the TAG Summit.88 Millian tells Papadopoulos that he has “insider knowledge and direct access to the top hierarchy in Russian politics,” and Papadopoulos agrees to meet him in New York City shortly after the convention.89 The two men ultimately have two meetings in New York, on July 30 and August 1; after the second, Millian invites Papadopoulos to Moscow to attend a September energy conference.90 Papadopoulos informs the campaign of his July 30 contact with Millian on the day it happens, as he does in other instances in which he has contact with a foreign national linked to the Kremlin—except, Papadopoulos will tell special counsel Robert Mueller, when Mifsud told him in April 2016 that the Kremlin had stolen Clinton emails—and is told on July 31 to hold off on further contacts with Millian because the press has begun connecting the Trump campaign with Russia far more than the campaign would like. Papadopoulos meets with Millian on August 1, anyway.91
On August 23, Millian sends a Facebook message to Papadopoulos—which Papadopoulos will insist to the special counsel’s office he has no recollection of—telling him that he wants to “share with [him] a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign.”92 Papadopoulos meets Millian twice more after this offer of campaign assistance, once in November 2016 and once at Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, apparently to discuss, among other things, a possible consulting partnership.93 The partnership—Millian’s idea—does not go forward.94
Less than six months after his fourth and final meeting with Millian, Papadopoulos will be approached in Tel Aviv by the founder of Terrogence, an Israeli business intelligence outfit dealing in digital marketing campaigns and intelligence services that could be considered “disruptive” technologies “instrumental” to those political campaigns willing to use them (see chapter 8). Millian is later revealed to be a key source—if an “unwitting” one—for much of the dossier compiled by former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in 2016 and published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed News.95
Just as well-connected Israeli politicos and other key players in Middle Eastern politics have identified George Nader, Erik Prince, and Elliott Broidy as key U.S. political connections by the mid-aughts, so too have the Russians come to appreciate this same quality in Paul Manafort by the end of that decade. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that long after becoming Trump’s de facto campaign manager, and just days before being officially named his campaign manager on June 20, Paul Manafort finds himself at a meeting in Trump Tower with a cadre of individuals sent to the campaign by the Kremlin.
Two days before this infamous June 2016 meeting—on June 7—Manafort attends what Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani will later call a “strategy” meeting; also at the meeting are Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Rick Gates, and at least one other (unnamed) person. The four (or five) Trump campaign advisers discuss how to approach the impending June 9 meeting with agents of the Kremlin, including a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has promised the campaign, through a British music promoter named Rob Goldstone, “very high level and sensitive information” that would “incriminate Hillary [Clinton]” and is “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”96
According to two articles in Business Insider, one in 2017 and one in 2018, despite Trump Jr.’s 2017 testimony to Congress that he has “no recollection of documents being offered or left for us” by Veselnitskaya on June 9, in fact the Russian attorney “provide[s]” a “memo” to Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner on June 9.97 The New York Times has since published the memo the Kremlin agent gave to Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager at Trump’s home in New York City. According to the arguments advanced by the five-page, highly detailed opposition research document, “the main sponsor[s]” of the Democratic Party and “both Obama election campaigns” committed serious federal felonies in order to raise a fortune that ended up, in part, in Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s coffers.98 The Times reports that the memo is similar, indeed in many respects identical, to one the Kremlin had previously given to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) during an April 2016 trip the congressman made to Russia. Rohrabacher had gone to Moscow with his then-staffer Paul Behrends, a longtime close associate of Erik Prince; in Russia, Behrends and Rohrabacher met with Veselnitskaya, during which meeting she made the same pitch on U.S.-Russia sanctions to the congressman and Prince’s associate that she would later make to the Trump campaign.99
The text of Veselnitskaya’s memo offers some indication of what the Russian attorney may have actually said at the June 9 meeting, a matter that remains in some dispute. The Russian attorney’s memo begins with two paragraphs on the Kremlin’s complaints over U.S. sanctions, and proceeds to accuse Ziff Brothers Investments (headed by American brothers Dirk, Robert, and Daniel Ziff) of participating in an illegal stock-purchase scheme in Russia involving shares of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas company.100 Perhaps not coincidentally, at the time Kremlin agent Veselnitskaya makes her accusation, the Trump campaign has two people formerly affiliated with Gazprom—Carter Page and Richard Burt—working on Trump’s foreign policy agenda with respect to Russia (see chapter 2). The memo’s outline of the Ziff brothers’ alleged scheme recites relevant names and dates, identifies purported shell companies, quotes the astronomical dollar figures supposedly involved in the brothers’ plot (at least $80 million), itemizes the federal statutes the Kremlin believes the brothers have violated, refers readers of the document to Rep. Rohrabacher for more information, and implicitly urges the Trump campaign to find out if the Ziff brothers have donated to Clinton as well as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and both Obama’s election and reelection campaigns—insisting that illegal foreign campaign donations to Clinton “cannot be ruled out.”101
The memo given to Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner is not, as Trump Jr. will subsequently say to Congress of Veselnitskaya’s presentation, “vague” and “ambiguous,” nor does it “ma[k]e no sense,” nor is it devoid of “details or supporting information,” nor does it lack “meaningful information.”102 Moreover, the Kremlin’s opposition research document had been represented to Trump Jr. as coming from “the Crown prosecutor [sic] of Russia,” a contention implying that the Kremlin had additional incriminating evidence in its possession, and that the Trump campaign had only received an evidentiary summary of a larger case file alleging suspicious donations to the Democratic National Committee and high-profile Democrats.103 This latter fact will become significant just days after the June 9, 2016, meeting, when the Trump campaign, along with the rest of America, learns that the Kremlin has hacked the Democratic National Committee and is indeed in possession of stolen private documents regarding its operations and transactions (see chapter 4).
When it is released in redacted form in April 2019, the Mueller Report will reveal that, contrary to Trump Jr. and his father’s mid-2017 contention that the Kremlin’s chief purpose in meeting with Trump officials and advisers at Trump Tower in 2016 was to discuss U.S. citizens’ adoptions of Russian children, the Russians’ primary ambition had been as Rob Goldstone first represented it to Trump Jr.: to aid the Trump campaign with valuable opposition research about Clinton and the DNC, an action prohibited by U.S. law. Roman Beniaminov—an assistant to Azerbaijani-Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov, who helped set up the June 9 meeting with Trump Jr. on behalf of his father, Aras, and Yury Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia—had before the meeting told Aras Agalarov employee Irakli “Ike” Kaveladze, an eventual meeting attendee, that “the purpose of the meeting was for Veselnitskaya to convey ‘negative information on Hillary Clinton’” to the Trump campaign, an aim Kaveladze subsequently disclosed to the special counsel’s office.104 Kaveladze himself wrote in an email to his daughter after the meeting that the meeting was boring because it featured no “bad info on Hilary [sic],” an assessment that at once confirms that the Kremlin’s opposition research stopped just short of implicating Clinton and implies that Kaveladze had gone to the meeting expecting derogatory information about the Democratic candidate to be the chief topic of conversation.105 Beniaminov and Kaveladze’s statements on the purpose of the Trump-Kremlin summit at Trump Tower thus mirror what Goldstone had told Trump Jr. in his initial email seeking the June meeting: “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his [Emin Agalarov’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin.”106
The information the Kremlin presents to the Trump campaign is self-assured with respect to its allegations of illegal foreign financing of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, and self-assured with respect to its allegations of illegal foreign financing of the Democratic Party; it is speculative with respect to illegal foreign financing of the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation. Even so, it gives the Trump campaign a possible line of attack in response to any future allegations that it is receiving illegal foreign campaign donations. It also augments the potentially damaging information about the Democratic Party that will be contained in the Kremlin’s July and October leaks of hacked DNC emails. Moreover, it leaves only one piece missing in a potential allegation against Clinton herself—a missing piece Trump’s opposition research team could locate simply by determining whether the Ziff brothers had donated to Clinton’s campaign. That information was readily available to Trump staffers; indeed, it was merely a gestural gap in the information the Kremlin had provided to the campaign. A basic Google search conducted during the general election campaign would likely have revealed to Trump Jr., Manafort, or Kushner that the Ziff brothers’ largest donation to a candidate for federal office in 2016 was indeed to Hillary Clinton.107 Moreover, by June 2016 the Kremlin had represented to the Trump campaign, via a conversation between Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos, that it was in possession of stolen Clinton emails, so the Trump campaign would have had, as of June 9, reason to suspect that any additional information on Clinton and the Ziff brothers held by the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” included incriminating emails written by Clinton herself. The campaign’s pursuit of such Clinton emails—which would ultimately extend through the summer of 2016 (see chapter 5)—gave candidate Trump and his policy shop every incentive to extend and even augment the campaign’s support for better relations with the Kremlin and an end to U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Both before and after his June 2016 meeting with Kremlin agents, Trump Jr. does all he can to conceal everything about the meeting from anyone but the very top brass on the Trump campaign.108 In addition to, according to his own congressional testimony, hiding the meeting from his father until the New York Times uncovers it a year later, Trump Jr. also labels his email invite to Kushner and Manafort to attend the event “private and confidential”; falsely tells “senior campaign staff” days before June 9 that while an upcoming meeting is focused explicitly on “negative information” about Clinton, the source of the information is a “group from Kyrgyzstan”; “denie[s] meeting” any “officials from Russia” for the entirety of the presidential campaign and afterward, as subsequently noted by meeting participant Rob Goldstone in an email to Emin Agalarov; and declines to be voluntarily interviewed about the meeting by the special counsel’s office.109 According to an FBI interview with Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, Trump Jr.’s concealment of the meeting includes false testimony to Congress insisting that he never told his father of the meeting—as Cohen testifies under oath that he himself was in “Donald J. Trump’s office on June 6 or 7 when Trump Jr. told his father that a meeting to obtain adverse information about Clinton was going forward.… From the tenor of the conversation, Cohen believed that Trump Jr. had previously discussed the meeting with his father.”110
That the June 9 meeting is considered significant at the time is underscored by the fact that Trump’s de facto (soon to be official) campaign manager, Manafort, takes notes throughout, and that Trump Jr., rather than shutting down the Kremlin agents once they proffer valuable but illegal campaign assistance, tells Veselnitskaya that his father “could revisit the [sanctions] issue” if he wins the presidential election—implicitly soliciting and encouraging a continuation of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” as previously spoken of by Goldstone.111 So it is little surprise that the New York Times will report in May 2018 that, according to two individuals familiar with the campaign’s multiple covert pre-election meetings with foreign nationals, “Trump campaign officials did not appear bothered by the idea of cooperation with foreigners.”112
Less than a week after Kremlin agents represent to the Trump campaign that the Kremlin has evidence of illegal foreign campaign donations to the Democratic National Committee, “a cybersecurity firm and the DNC announce[] that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the DNC,” according to the Mueller Report.113 That the hack may have captured emails confirming the opposition research the Kremlin had already given Trump’s campaign is not lost on at least one June 9 meeting participant, indeed the participant least interested in and knowledgeable about politics, by his own admission: Emin Agalarov’s music industry manager, Rob Goldstone, who will tell multiple media outlets, “I know nothing about politics.”114 Goldstone nevertheless writes Emin “shortly after the DNC announcement” to make “comments connecting the DNC hacking announcement to the June 9 meeting”—an association almost certainly also made, as the Kremlin would have anticipated, by the experienced politicos working for the Trump campaign, especially the Kremlin’s own longtime flack, Paul Manafort.115
With respect to Manafort’s pre-election transmission of polling data to pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, the New York Times will note that at the time Trump’s campaign manager secretly ordered proprietary campaign information transferred to Kremlin agents, “Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.”116 CNN will report in August 2017 that federal “investigators became more suspicious of Manafort when they turned up intercepted communications that U.S. intelligence agencies [had] collected among suspected Russian operatives, discussing their efforts to work with Manafort to coordinate information that could hurt Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House.”117 And in 2019 the Mueller Report will reveal that Manafort’s order to Gates to share polling data with a man connected to Russian intelligence, Kilimnik, was a standing order, with Gates doing so “periodically … during the campaign.”118 As the report details, “Manafort instructed Rick Gates, his deputy on the Campaign and a longtime employee, to provide Kilimnik with updates on the Trump campaign—including internal polling data.… Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in Ukraine and with [Putin ally] Deripaska.”119
When the special counsel’s office approaches Deripaska deputy Victor Boyarkin to find out the extent of Manafort’s “coordination” with pro-Russian elements—whether it be the Kremlin, Russian intelligence, Kremlin-linked oligarchs like Deripaska, or pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs like Rinat Akhmetov—Boyarkin tells the special counsel to “go dig a ditch.”120 Both Boyarkin and Deripaska will be, by 2018, under U.S. sanctions, the latter explicitly because he does not “separate [him]self from the [Russian] state,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Meanwhile, Boyarkin’s former employer, the GRU, will be found to be the very Russian intelligence agency that, the Times reminds its readers, “was engaged in a full-fledged operation … to boost Mr. Trump” during the 2016 election.121 In an email to Manafort in mid-campaign, Kilimnik had called pleasing Boyarkin, and his boss Deripaska, his own and Manafort’s “biggest interest.”122
While Trump’s degree of knowledge regarding Manafort’s communications and coordination with a Russian oligarch and a former GRU agent during the campaign is unknown, this much is clear: Trump knew Manafort well when he hired him as his campaign manager. Manafort made his overseas work part of his job application to the Republican candidate in February 2016, and the State Department was immediately “alarmed” by Trump’s hire of Manafort because of Manafort’s “relationship to Russia”; in January 2018, NBC News reports that, in relation to the Mueller investigation, “Donald Trump is telling friends and aides in private that things are going great” in large part because “a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”123 What crime Trump may have committed involving Manafort as a co-conspirator that would allow Manafort to “flip and sell him out” goes unreported by NBC News, though it is known that Manafort met with Kilimnik to discuss the presidential campaign not only in May 2016 but also in early August 2016, doing so on this second occasion in the Grand Havana Room, a private club located at 666 Fifth Avenue—a building owned by Jared Kushner’s family business, Kushner Companies, and located a fifth of a mile from Trump Tower (see chapter 5).124 The meeting occurred soon after Kilimnik had met with Deripaska, with Kilimnik thereafter using Deripaska’s plane to fly to the meeting with Manafort.125 Manafort also met with Kilimnik in Madrid in either January or February 2017.126 Kilimnik has called his pre- and post-election secret meetings with Trump’s onetime campaign manager “very significant meetings,” and special counsel Robert Mueller has since alleged, as has Gates, that Kilimnik had not just past but ongoing ties to Russian intelligence throughout the period he was meeting with Manafort.127
At the August 2, 2016, Manafort-Kilimnik meeting at the Grand Havana Room, Kilimnik conveys to Manafort a “message” from the Kremlin’s onetime puppet president in Ukraine, Yanukovych. The message is a “peace plan” for Ukraine that Manafort later concedes to the special counsel’s office was a “‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”128 According to the Mueller Report, Manafort and Kilimnik will again meet to discuss the plan, which also involves an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia, in December 2016, January 2017, February 2017, and spring 2018—with the most consequential meeting coming during the presidential transition, when Kilimnik tells Manafort, and Manafort thereafter communicates to the Trump transition team, that “all that is required to start the [Ukrainian crisis-resolving and sanctions-dropping] process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from [Donald Trump].”129 Whether Trump receives this message from Manafort is unclear; what is clear is that he shortly thereafter attempts to implement a plan constituting far more than just a “wink” or “push”: immediately upon taking office, Trump sets into motion a sub rosa scheme to drop all sanctions on Russia—a scheme blocked by alarmed career officials in the State Department after a series of desperate backroom maneuvers.130 Manafort will subsequently lie to the special counsel’s office about his communications with both Kilimnik and the campaign regarding sanctions relief for the Kremlin. He will also take actions that keep the special counsel from “gain[ing] access to all of [his] electronic communications” during the relevant period.131 A federal judge eventually finds by a preponderance of the evidence that, even while he was under a federal cooperation agreement and plea deal with the special counsel’s office in 2018, Manafort “made multiple false statements to the FBI, the [special counsel’s] Office, and the grand jury concerning his interactions and communications with Kilimnik.” Notably, it is during this period that Trump—who, his attorneys claim, remains in a joint defense agreement with Manafort even after the latter’s plea, meaning that the legal teams of the two men share both information and legal strategies—boasts to friends that he is safe from liability in the Mueller probe because Manafort will not “flip” on him.132
Trump’s private statements about Paul Manafort’s hold over his own legal future raise the specter that Trump had knowledge of his campaign manager’s collusive mid-campaign interactions with a Russian intelligence agent, a knowledge that subsequently compels Trump to engage in, per legal analysts speaking to NBC News, acts that “could amount to obstruction of justice or witness tampering,” such as floating a pardon in exchange for Manafort’s silence.133
Manafort’s initial lie to federal investigators about his involvement in negotiating a “peace plan” with a Kremlin agent sees him insisting that he discussed such a plan with Kilimnik only once, in August 2016. When prosecutors challenge his narrative, Manafort admits that he and the Russian intelligence agent discussed the plan at least three more times after August.134 The judge in one of Manafort’s two federal trials will ultimately say that Manafort’s lies about the “peace plan” and Konstantin Kilimnik go to “the undisputed core of the … special counsel’s investigation”—the question of Trump-Russia collusion.135
Manafort’s nearly a decade of public relations work in Ukraine came to a halt in 2014, when a revolution against his and Putin’s man in the country, Yanukovych, led to Yanukovych and his allies fleeing to Russia to seek Kremlin protection.136 Putin’s subsequent illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula was part of his pushback to this rebellion; his actions led to the very sanctions on Russia that Trump and Manafort would thereafter oppose throughout the 2016 primary and general election seasons.137 According to the New York Times, the approximately $12.7 million Manafort appears to have received from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions before his and Yanukovych’s simultaneous departure from Ukraine constituted “undisclosed cash payments … [that were] part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials”—in other words, the monies listed as earmarked for Manafort, often hidden in offshore bank accounts, may well have been evidence of an election-interference scheme partly backed by the Kremlin.138 Prosecutors in Ukraine now say that Manafort “must have realized the implications of his financial dealings” in that country preceding his purportedly “unpaid” work for Donald Trump.139 Whether this explains Manafort’s decision never to register as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice (DOJ) is unclear; regardless, Manafort’s failure to register permitted him to keep the money he received from Putin ally Deripaska and Putin stooge Yanukovych hidden from U.S. authorities until it was uncovered by Robert Mueller in 2017. It also allowed him to be an undisclosed agent of pro-Kremlin forces for the entirety of the time he was working for Trump, a fact it would have been difficult for Trump not to know given his familiarity with Manafort’s past political work.140
In 2006, the same year that Manafort moves into Trump Tower on a mission for Deripaska and Putin, the owner of the building—who has spent his career in real estate surfing on an ever-cresting wave of debt—suddenly shifts his philosophy on real estate development dramatically by putting up cash for most new projects. As the Washington Post explains, in 2006 Trump “began buying up land near Aberdeen [Scotland] … [for] $12.6 million.… [He] soon began to buy other properties in cash.… In 2008 and 2009, he paid $17.4 million in cash for two neighboring Beverly Hills homes. In 2009, Trump spent at least $6.7 million on two golf clubs.… In Charlottesville, he paid $16.2 million for a winery.… By 2011, Trump had spent at least $46 million on all-cash purchases” since 2006.141 The Post notes that Trump’s mysteriously accessible $46 million may have been attributable in part to a single transaction he completed in 2008: the sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is close to a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin, Yuri Trutnev.142 Trump had purchased the southern Florida estate for $41.4 million in 2004, and had sought to flip it immediately. After finding no takers for several years, in 2008 he was suddenly offered $95 million by Rybolovlev, an offer that at the time made the sale “the highest price paid for any single-family home” in the history of the United States. Trump’s $53.6 million profit was enough to fund every one of his all-cash purchases between 2006 and 2011.143
When Rybolovlev makes his mysterious offer on Trump’s unpopular Florida property in 2008, he calls it a “company investment,” yet he eventually tears down all the buildings Trump has put up on the site. In March 2017, during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump-Russia ties, Rybolovlev will suddenly change his story, claiming that, rather than a company investment, the purchase was for a “family trust.”144 These will be only two of Rybolovlev’s shifting explanations for paying Trump well over twice what the New York City businessman had paid for a property Rybolovlev razed after its purchase; at other times the Russian billionaire will say the house was for “his children, or maybe an inheritance, or it might be used in connection with his daughter because she was an equestrian.”145 David Newman, a lawyer who reviewed the transaction as part of a team at the New York City law firm Sills, Cummis & Gross, will tell the Palm Beach Post in 2017 that despite the historic size of Rybolovlev’s purchase, his team “never found any evidence Rybolovlev hired experts to weigh in on the property’s condition as a residence—or its value as a teardown—before he bought the place.”146 How Trump came to Rybolovlev’s attention in the first instance is unknown, though recent investigations suggest a connection to Trump’s longtime, Kremlin-connected rainmaker, Felix Sater—a man who had by the time of the Trump-Rybolovlev sale spent years attracting Russian business clients to Trump properties.147 Sater is a U.S. and Israeli citizen whose father, Mikhail, according to Haaretz, has been “named [by the FBI] as a lieutenant for Russian mafia kingpin [Semion] Mogilevich,” the latter a man who has been called “the most dangerous mobster in the world.”148 Mogilevich is a former associate of Boris Birshtein, a Russian oligarch who was once one of Donald Trump’s partners in a major building project in Toronto.149
In 2007, the parents of a longtime Elliott Broidy associate, Lisa Korbatov, purchase a Rodeo Drive mansion for $10.5 million. A year later, Korbatov’s parents sell the property for $10.3 million, taking a $200,000 loss, to “an Egyptian man with little money and a history of financial scams.”150 Six weeks later, this unlikely Egyptian purchaser of a Rodeo Drive mansion, Mokless Girgis, transfers the property to Donald Trump—for free.151 When the bizarre transaction is caught and becomes the subject of a lawsuit, Girgis claims, as summarized by the Center for Investigative Reporting, that there was a “$10 million clerical error” and that he was never involved in the Rodeo Drive transaction at all.152 He thereafter flees the country under threat of litigation from creditors.153 In 2009, Trump sells for $9.5 million the property that Girgis had gifted to him—thereby making a profit of $9.5 million in under a year and with virtually no effort.
Just six months before the Korbatovs purchase the mansion on Rodeo Drive that will, in short order, move through Trump’s hands, the New York City businessman incorporates two companies in Egypt that thereafter will remain (to all outward appearances) inactive: “Trump Marks Egypt Corp.” and “Trump Marks Egypt LLC.”154 It would take access to Trump’s tax returns to see what if any business Trump subsequently does with or through these companies; Trump has declined, however, to release his returns. As noted by the Center for American Progress, Trump “served as president, director, and chairman of Trump Marks Egypt Corp. and was listed as the president and a member of Trump Marks Egypt LLC. But because of Trump’s continued insistence on hiding his tax returns and general evasiveness when it comes to his business dealings, it is unclear the purposes for which these companies were created and their future plans.”155
The year 2007 also sees Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, make the worst business decision of his career in real estate: the purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City for $1.8 billion, “the highest price [ever] paid at the time for a U.S. office tower,” according to the Washington Post—which Kushner, then running his family’s real estate firm, Kushner Companies, pays despite a general consensus in the New York City real estate market that the property is significantly overpriced.156 The deal requires Kushner to put down $500 million in cash, and the company borrows the remaining $1.3 billion of the property’s purchase price.157 According to The Intercept, there are, at the time of Kushner’s purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue, “clear signs that the price was too high and the debt was too much. The Kushners paid $1,200 a square foot, twice the previous per square foot record of $600, while records show that even with the building almost fully rented out, revenue only covered about two-thirds of the family’s debt costs.”158
After the 2008 financial crisis, 666 Fifth Avenue declines dramatically in value, “wiping out much of … [Kushner family’s] initial investment.”159 Jared Kushner will spend the next decade struggling to keep the property from bringing the family business into deep financial distress, and 666 Fifth Avenue will come to be described in the press as “an extreme risk” and “severely underwater.”160 Kushner’s desire to atone for the error of his 2007 purchase of the building will appear to drive his perspective on global geopolitics well into his term of service as a top adviser to Trump—a circumstance that in 2018 “raises questions about a possible conflict of interest” when he appears to support the punishment of the nation of Qatar via blockade just a month after Qatar’s ministry of finance refuses to bail out Kushner Companies from its Fifth Avenue investment (see chapter 7).161
In the first months of the Obama administration, George Nader unsuccessfully tries to use his connections to the Syrian government to gain access to “senior members of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team,” according to the New York Times. He is at the time already working with “former advisers to President George W. Bush” to advance various business deals; the details of these deals, including the names of their principals, are unknown.162 While there are many thorny geopolitical quagmires across the Middle East in the months leading up to Obama taking office that Nader may have believed, based on his history in the region, he could aid the incoming Obama administration with, as of late 2008 the Saudis’ or Emiratis’ desire for American nuclear technology—whether for civilian or military uranium enrichment—is not one of them, as long-standing U.S. policy prevents the transfer of such technology to the Middle East, and indeed opposes any encouragement of such Saudi or Emirati ambitions. Nor do the Saudis or Emiratis expect any U.S. administration, with or without Nader’s assistance, to act otherwise.
It is therefore unsurprising when, in the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, issues a public warning to nations across the Middle East at “a gathering of ministers and senior officials from the Middle East, North Africa, the subcontinent and the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations” that “threats on the ground create a strong case for making the Middle East a region free of weapons of mass destruction. Any situation to the contrary would open the door for continuous conflicts and threaten regional and international peace and security.”163 The Emirates’ concern about multinational nuclearization in the Middle East soon leads the UAE to endorse a draft resolution at the United Nations establishing the Middle East as a “nuclear weapon free zone.”164 The sheikh’s admonition against the spread of nuclear weapons in the region, however, is a warning that the UAE and its closest ally, Saudi Arabia, will shortly ignore—as soon as they find an American politician willing to help them realize their long-dormant nuclear ambitions.
In 2009, mercenary company owner Elliott Broidy is convicted of a misdemeanor for paying $1 million in bribes to New York government officials; in exchange for these bribes, Broidy had secured $250 million in pension investments in a company he founded in Israel.165 In Abu Dhabi, an American diplomat sends a cable to Washington observing that MBZ is building up a mercenary army to counter a nuclearized Iran: MBZ “sees the logic of war dominating the [Middle East] region,” the cable says, “and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces.”166 That the Emirati military is small and “considered inexperienced” is a source of significant worry for MBZ.167
The man in charge of raising MBZ’s mercenary army in 2010, working under the project title “Reflex Responses” or “R2,” is Erik Prince—who is favored by MBZ not least because he is able to quickly congregate mercenary armies of non-Muslims, a critical skill set given that MBZ does not “believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims.”168 According to The Intercept, working on R2 gives Prince an opportunity he has long lusted for: “to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.”169 In running R2, Prince decides, as he has done with many of his prior companies, to create a shell corporation from which he can anonymously run his operation—the better to ensure, as The Intercept observes, that he can’t be connected with any documents related to the project, has more freedom to engage in illicit self-dealing, and if need be can make the case, however implausibly, that his actions were not subject to U.S. laws like the State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).170 Prince names R2’s controlling shell corporation Assurance Management Consultants.171 A former R2 colleague of Prince’s will observe to The Intercept that “everything he [Prince] does, he skims.… He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. What he doesn’t disclose is that he owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear.”172 Another former R2 employee will add that “there was a way to do it [run R2] legally and make lots of money, but Erik didn’t care. When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”173
Between May 2009—when another billionaire, Donald Trump, sets up his Twitter account—and Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign against Mitt Romney (R-MA), Trump tweets at least nine times about Saudi Arabia, in each case criticizing either the Saudis’ decisions regarding oil production or President Obama’s alleged “bow” to the Saudi king during a trip to Riyadh; a running theme in his tweets is the false accusation that Obama has entered into a covert conspiracy with the Saudis in order to win reelection to the White House.174 Indeed, Trump is conspicuously focused on the idea of a U.S. president gaining the White House partly through collusion with the Saudis, stating without evidence on April 4, 2012, that “Barack Obama made a deal with Saudi Arabia to pump the hell out of oil until after the election. Watch what happens to oil prices after the election (if he wins)—it won’t be pretty.”175 Ninety days later he repeats the accusation on Twitter: “I believe Barack Obama made a deal with the Saudis to increase oil production until after the election. Then OPEC can have a field day.”176 Trump’s theory of a clandestine Obama-Saudi conspiracy is substantially enlivened by the businessman’s concurrent claim that the purpose of the conspiracy is, in part, a war with Iran that will make for good domestic politics for whichever American president starts it. “In order to get elected, Barack Obama will start a war with Iran,” Trump tweets on November 29, 2011.177
While Trump’s 2009, 2010, and 2011 tweets about Saudi Arabia and the White House are public libels against President Obama—just a few of the many Trump will author, online and off, in the run-up to his own presidential campaign—his words also betray a conviction that, if a U.S. presidential candidate can convince the royal family in Riyadh that doing so is in their best interest, secretly colluding with the Saudis is a possibility. Indeed, as the 2012 election nears, Trump’s tweets about U.S.-Saudi collusion become even more melodramatic and oddly specific, with the then-businessman tweeting on October 11, 2012, again without evidence, that President Obama has collected “illegal donations” from the Saudis as an incumbent presidential candidate.178 Several weeks later, on Election Day, Trump reiterates in a tweet what he imagines Obama’s end of a collusive quid pro quo with the Saudis to be: the presidential candidate is permitting Saudi Arabia to get the better end of energy deals with the United States in exchange for an oil production schedule that keeps domestic oil prices low—a state of affairs that would be considered favorable to the U.S. political party then in power.179 Trump’s awareness, even if fanciful at the time it is expressed, of the benefits of covert pre-election collusion with Saudi Arabia will come to seem prescient in the years ahead, when Trump himself appears to engage in all of the behaviors he has falsely attributed to President Obama.
Shortly after Mitt Romney loses the 2012 presidential election, Trump makes the decision to run for president in 2016—revealing his plans to his close friend Roger Stone on January 1, 2013—and ceases tweeting conspiracy theories about Saudi Arabia’s ties to powerful U.S. politicians.180 He will not resume doing so for nearly a year. Thereafter, between October 2013 and October 2014, Trump’s ten tweets about the Saudis abandon accusations of collusion in favor of Trump’s long-standing policy complaint about the kingdom, which is that it does not pay enough for its own military defense.181 Trump’s focus in these ten tweets is on the presence of U.S. forces in Syria to fight ISIS, an effort Trump believes helps the Saudis more than their financial contribution to the effort would suggest.
As Trump nears the official announcement of his presidential candidacy, a shift in his tone toward Saudi Arabia is evident, with a number of his tweets being generally positive in tone beginning in January 2015. On January 29, 2015, for instance, Trump admonishes Michelle Obama for, in his view, not respecting Saudi culture enough to wear a headscarf in-country; “we have enuf [sic] enemies,” he tweets.182 Less than two months later, he warns that “Saudi Arabia is in big trouble” if the United States doesn’t move away from Obama’s Saudi policy—an expression of concern for the future of the Saudi people and their rulers that stands in contrast to his prior tweets on the subject.183 Nevertheless, Trump continues to demand that the Saudis pay more for their own defense. The calls for this that he makes in 2015, however, are more insistent and oddly personal, suggesting that he is trying to appeal to a domestic electorate. In March 2015 he tweets that Saudi Arabia “must pay dearly” if it wants “our help and protection.”184 Just a few weeks later he tweets, “We are getting ready to protect Saudi Arabia against Iran and others.… How much are they going to pay us toward this protection.”185 And in his final tweet about Saudi Arabia before announcing his presidential candidacy, Trump declares on May 11, 2015, that a better leader than Obama would be able to get the Saudi king to meet with him, given the “billions of dollars” that “we spend … protecting Saudi Arabia.”186
Throughout 2012, in the midst of Trump’s criticism for Saudi Arabia on Twitter, a future Trump adviser, George Nader, spends much of his time developing closer ties with Russian interests. In the run-up to the Obama-Romney tilt, Nader begins developing “a substantial record of dealing with Russian elites,” including “help[ing] broker a $4.2 billion arms deal between Russia and the Iraqi government.”187 Nader is so highly placed in both Russian and key Middle Eastern political circles that he not only acts as “an informal adviser to then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki” but actually “accompanie[s] him to Moscow” in October 2012 for the signing of the arms deal the Iraqis have agreed to with the Kremlin.188 This alone establishes, as Vox will note in 2018, that beginning in 2012—at the very latest—“Nader was a power broker with real influence among Russian elites.”189 The Lebanese American businessman’s close connection to prominent Kremlin agents will be of paramount relevance when he begins meeting regularly, and secretly, with top officials from the Trump campaign in the final months of the 2016 election (see chapter 5).
Nader’s role in negotiating a Russia-Iraq arms deal is so central that it becomes controversial. In Moscow in August 2012, two months before al-Maliki signs the deal with Putin, Nader supersedes the authority of Iraqi defense minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi by—with al-Maliki’s blessing—conducting negotiations with the Kremlin of which the Iraqi Defense Ministry is unaware.190 Al-Maliki is so committed to using Nader as one of his top three negotiators in Moscow, rather than his own defense minister, that when former Russian energy minister Yuri Shafranik travels to Baghdad to ask al-Maliki directly with whom he should be negotiating in Moscow—at one point even offering the Iraqi prime minister “a direct communication line with Russian President Vladimir Putin to avoid confusion and leaks”—al-Maliki “welcome[s]” the entreaty but nevertheless shows up in Moscow two months later with Nader in tow as one of his chief negotiators.191
In 2012 Nader also attends the exclusive, invite-only St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a meeting of the world’s top economic and political power brokers that is “organized by senior officials in Putin’s inner orbit.”192 The next year, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Kremlin investment vehicle run through state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank and directed by a Putin lieutenant named Kirill Dmitriev, enters into a co-investment agreement with the UAE that will eventually lead to an infusion of $6 billion in Emirati cash to various Russian infrastructure projects; the agreement between the Kremlin and Abu Dhabi comes after a face-to-face meeting between Putin and MBZ.193 By 2014, Nader has left his employ with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and is working as an adviser to MBZ, during which course of employment he becomes, according to the Mueller Report, a “close business associate” of Dmitriev, whom the report deems “closely associated” with Vladimir Putin. Though it is unknown whether Nader’s prior access to top Kremlin officials led to him having direct involvement in the highly lucrative 2013 RDIF-UAE negotiations, what is certain is that once Nader becomes an adviser to the Emirati royal court he “return[s] to Russia frequently,” according to the New York Times, and even “accompanie[s] [MBZ] … to Moscow on a number of those trips.”194 These contacts and trips make it “increasingly possible,” writes Vox, that by the time Nader convenes a secret meeting aboard a yacht in the Red Sea in fall 2015 he has “contacts deep inside Putin’s inner circle and could have acted as a messenger for key information about negotiations over how the U.S.-Russian relationship could be improved.”195 If indeed Nader is both a Kremlin intermediary and an Emirati agent as of fall 2015, the Red Sea Conspiracy must be seen as an agreement not only between the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt but involving Russia as well. Nader’s confirmed ties to Benjamin Netanyahu must also be considered relevant in light of subsequent actions by individuals connected to the Israeli government that seem to import the consent of Netanyahu’s office to any “grand bargain” agreed upon in late 2015 (see chapters 3, 4, and 8).
As Nader’s star is rising in the Middle East and Russia, so too is that of Erik Prince, who by 2010 has moved to the United Arab Emirates amid widening legal difficulties for his private security company, Blackwater. In the UAE, Prince soon signs his $529 million deal with the Emirati royal family to build a “secret American-led mercenary army,” specifically “an 800-member battalion of foreign troops,” for the wealthy Arab nation.196 R2, Prince’s battalion of non-Emirati mercenaries, is a precursor to the assassination squads the UAE will have developed by 2015 (see chapter 3). In 2011, however, Prince’s remit is to “conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country [UAE], defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts,” and “be deployed if the Emirates face[] unrest in their crowded labor camps or [a]re challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world.”197 Prince is thus put in charge of a substantial percentage of the Emirates’ military operations.
The mercenary’s broadest mandate, however—and a significant basis for the $529 million the UAE is paying him—is to “blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe.”198 That Prince’s official brief should be this broad is indicative of a sea change in military logistics that arrives in the Middle East with the twenty-first century. According to the New York Times, in hiring Prince to develop a battalion of foreign soldiers on Emirati soil, “the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.”199 An open question, however, is whether Prince’s army—which includes American, Colombian, South African, British, and French guns-for-hire, among those of other nations—violates federal laws prohibiting U.S. citizens from training foreign soldiers without first securing a license from the State Department.200 While it’s unclear if Prince secures such a license in 2010, it is known that in the twelve years from its founding in 1997 to 2009, the company Prince formerly ran, Blackwater, paid $42 million in fines for illegally training foreign troops around the world.201
In keeping with MBZ’s concerns about Muslim soldiers, Prince has, by 2010, established a strict “no Muslims” policy for his mercenary army, and is hoping, per the New York Times, to “build an empire in the desert, far from … trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials.”202 One of the contracts he signs upon moving to the UAE, in addition to his $529 million contract with MBZ, is a multimillion-dollar contract to provide security “to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants,” an arrangement that gives Prince a vested interest in the spread of nuclear power to nations in the Middle East currently prohibited from enriching uranium even for civilian use; it also suggests that by 2010 the Emirates is already transitioning away from its prior stance regarding the dangers of new uranium enrichment in the Middle East.203 Prince also anticipates earning “billions more” than he will receive under these two contracts by “opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments” besides the royal court in Abu Dhabi.204 In the meantime, Prince hides his involvement in all of these ventures by refusing to sign any contracts personally and by asking his subordinates to refer to him by the code name “Kingfish.”205 Many of his dozens of American, European, and South African trainers don’t even know that Prince is involved in their operations—as he rarely visits the compound he’s built, in an effort to avoid being seen even by his own employees.206 He also regularly changes the name of his company to avoid its operations being tracked, an approach he had also taken with his disgraced Blackwater outfit.207
How Trump came to Rybolovlev’s attention in the first instance is unknown, though recent investigations suggest a connection to Trump’s longtime, Kremlin-connected rainmaker, Felix Sater—a man who had by the time of the Trump-Rybolovlev sale spent years attracting Russian business clients to Trump properties.
In 2008, the year of the Trump-Rybolovlev real estate deal in Florida, Larisa Markus and Georgy Bedzhamov, co-owners of the Russian bank Vneshprombank, begin setting up shell companies with the assistance of a Russian accountant named Ilya Bykov.208 According to the Real Deal, a widely respected New York City real estate trade publication, Markus and Bedzhamov will by late 2015 stand accused of using the shell companies they have set up (with Bykov’s help) to launder money for Russian companies (including Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft) and prominent figures (including Russia’s minister of defense and deputy prime minister).209 The same month that Markus is arrested and Bedzhamov flees Russia to avoid arrest, Trump’s business partner Sater partners with Bykov on a multimillion-dollar real estate deal in New York. Bykov is also, at the time of his partnership with Sater, an accountant for Aras Aglarov, Trump’s business partner in a potential “Trump Tower Moscow” deal.
In May 2016, months after Sater’s partnership with Aras Agalarov’s accountant begins, Dmitry Rybolovlev intercedes to help Georgy Bedzhamov (who has been arrested in Monaco and is in prison there) make bail. Rybolovlev’s efforts free Bedzhamov, and Monaco thereafter announces that it will not extradite him to Russia. Thus—and partly as a result of Rybolovlev’s exertions—Bedzhamov may never have to answer questions about his dealings with Bykov, who by 2015 had come to be entangled with not just one but two of Trump’s business partners.210 Sater’s intersection with Rybolovlev on the Bedzhamov-Bykov matter suggests a possible prior relationship between the two men that Sater could have translated into a real estate opportunity for Donald Trump.
In late 2018, Rybolovlev is arrested on corruption charges in Monaco on an unrelated matter, with France’s Le Monde reporting that the Russian businessman “is at the heart of the investigation opened a year ago by the prosecutor general of Monaco into [alleged] acts of corruption, active and passive influence peddling, and complicity in these offenses.”211
The Emirates’ concern about multinational nuclearization in the Middle East soon leads the UAE to endorse a draft resolution at the United Nations establishing the Middle East as a “nuclear weapon free zone.”
As of 2008, Israel is the only country in the Middle East not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The small Jewish state is widely presumed to have nuclear weapons, even as Iran and Syria are, by 2008, generally believed by the same observers to be engaged in nuclear weapons development. While the official position of the UAE in 2008 is that the “states [of the Middle East], including Iran,” have a “right” to “develop peaceful nuclear energy programs,” and in fact the Emiratis themselves have by that year “evaluat[ed] the potential of a UAE nuclear energy program,” the conventional wisdom that even responsible nuclear energy exploration can soon lead to a nuclear weapons program will dominate the early 2010s.212