2013 to 2014
Shortly after Trump decides to run for president, the Kremlin begins its covert election interference campaign. Tensions in the Middle East rise as Russia and a large alliance of Western nations sign a nuclear deal with Iran that both Israel and a Saudi-led Sunni axis in the Gulf strongly oppose. Two men with Kremlin ties who will have a profound effect on Trump’s 2016 campaign, Dimitri Simes and Joseph Mifsud, make visits to a prestigious discussion venue in Moscow of which Vladimir Putin is the chief patron.
On January 1, 2013, Donald Trump tells one of his closest friends and advisers, Roger Stone, that he intends to run for president of the United States.1 Shortly thereafter—knowing he will be a candidate but having not yet made it official—Trump records a video for distribution in Israel in which he enthusiastically endorses Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister.2 “[A] strong prime minister is a strong Israel,” Trump says in the video. “And you [Israelis] truly have a great prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s nobody like him. He’s a winner. He’s highly respected. He’s highly thought of by all.… So vote for Benjamin. Terrific guy. Terrific leader. Great for Israel.”3 Trump will later claim Netanyahu “personally solicited” his “help” in the form of “an ad or a statement,” a claim the Israelis will deny.4
It is also in 2013 that Mohammed bin Zayed enters into a multibillion-dollar co-investment with Vnesheconombank’s and Kirill Dmitriev’s RDIF.5 The co-investment, according to the New York Times, is “part of an effort [by the UAE] to build close relations to Russia.” The immediate effect of the joint venture is that the UAE invests in a slew of major projects in Russia, including the building of roads, an airport, and several cancer treatment centers.6
Once the RDIF-UAE deal is signed, Dmitriev, considered by the Emiratis “a key conduit to the Russian government,” becomes a regular visitor to Abu Dhabi, where Nader has begun advising MBZ.7 By 2015, the Emirates’ ambassador to Russia will be describing Dmitriev as a “messenger” who can transmit information directly to Putin.8 Dmitriev also begins coordinating with the Israelis as his term as RDIF manager continues; by late 2017 or early 2018, the fund is “negotiating with Israeli government ministers on a $100 million project to open Israeli-run dairies in Russia.”9 The RDIF thereby becomes a crucial fulcrum in communications between Russia, Israel, and the Saudi-led axis of Sunni Arab nations plotting a new alliance.
In June 2013, a year after assuming the leadership of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), future Trump national security advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn asks his superiors whether he can travel to Russia to visit the headquarters of Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU.10 The GRU is, as the New York Times will report in January 2017, “the same agency that has since been implicated in interference in the 2016 presidential election.”11 In an August 2016 interview, Flynn will say of his 2013 visit to GRU headquarters, “I had a great trip. I was the first U.S. officer ever allowed inside the headquarters of the GRU. I was able to brief their entire staff. I gave them a leadership OPD [professional development class] and talked a lot about the way the world is unfolding.”12
In March 2014, just weeks after Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine—an action that leads to punishing international sanctions against Putin’s regime—Flynn “pushe[s] to maintain a dialogue with Russian military intelligence … making plans to meet with Russian officials [in late March 2014].”13 As reported by the New York Times, however, “When his [Flynn’s] superiors found out about his plans, they ordered the meeting canceled.”14 In October 2014, six months after Flynn is forced out of the DIA, his former employer informs him via letter that he is prohibited from receiving, without advance approval, any “consulting fees, gifts, travel expenses, honoraria, or salary from a foreign government unless congressional consent is first obtained.”15
Even as Flynn is exhibiting an unnatural fondness for the Russian military, and specifically Russian military intelligence, dramatic changes are afoot within the military of another country in which Flynn will shortly have a significant interest: Egypt. In July 2013, Egyptian minister of defense and commander in chief of the Egyptian armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, leads a coup of the government of Egypt’s “first freely elected president,” Mohamed Morsi.16 Within a few months, President Obama has halted military aid to Egypt—a decision that President Trump will reverse upon entering office—and between July 2013 and January 2017 “repeatedly criticize[s] the Egyptian government’s crackdown on political opponents.”17 According to a September 2018 Al Jazeera story, human rights groups estimate that el-Sisi’s government detains forty thousand political prisoners in its first sixty months of rule.18 In light of these and other troubling developments in Egypt, the Obama administration refuses, upon el-Sisi’s ascension to power, to participate in America’s formerly biennial joint military exercises with Egypt—and temporarily refuses, too, to return to Cairo several Apache helicopters that the Egyptians had sent to America for maintenance.19
In November 2013, Donald Trump travels to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. While there, he negotiates a lucrative deal for a Trump Tower Moscow with several Kremlin agents, including the Kremlin’s premier real estate developer, the head of a state-owned bank, and the Kremlin official in charge of building permits in Moscow—this last a Kremlin employee whom Putin has personally sent to the pageant in his stead. Social media posts tracking the event and discussing its aftermath, written by people who are with Trump’s entourage in Moscow, indicate that Trump spends much of his time in Moscow discussing presidential politics.20
Within a few weeks of his return to the United States from Moscow, Trump is telling officials in the New York State Republican Party that he intends to run for president. For instance, in December 2013, at a meeting of New York state Republican officials at Trump Tower, Trump makes “it clear he want[s] to run for president,” according to one attendee.21 Trump will later confirm this, saying of his many meetings in Manhattan with Republican officials who wanted him to run for governor of New York that “even then, what I really wanted to do was run for president.”22 The GOP officials seeking to convince Trump to run for governor are so aware of Trump’s ambitions in late 2013 that they even couch the governor’s mansion in Albany as a springboard to a 2016 White House bid.23 Among the state party officials in regular contact with Trump about his political ambitions is former president Richard Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox, a veteran politico who will become instrumental in the early staffing of the 2016 Trump campaign’s national security advisory committee—an intimate cadre of advisers under whose auspices most of the illicit Trump-Russia contacts eventually itemized by the Mueller Report occur (see chapter 4).
In March 2014, Trump finally ceases to hide what he has already indicated to his GOP allies in New York: that he plans to run for president of the United States. In the midst of his allies’ ill-fated efforts to draft him to run for governor, Trump alerts his many Twitter followers that “[w]hile I won’t be running for Governor of New York state, a race I would have won, I have much bigger plans in mind—stay tuned, will happen!”24 According to witnesses close to Trump whom Fox Business will interview in 2018, by 2014 Trump is fully “committed” to running for president, despite him falsely tweeting in February 2018 that he could not have colluded with any “Russian group … formed in 2014” because he “didn’t know” he was going to run for president until 2015.25
Trump’s earlier-than-acknowledged public commitment to run for president is presaged by an event that occurs in January 2014: Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen secretly pays an IT firm, RedFinch Solutions, to rig two online presidential polls in Trump’s favor.26 Trump will ultimately cheat the man he hired to cheat the two polls, one on the CNBC website and one on the Drudge Report; though Trump owes RedFinch $50,000 for fraudulently casting votes on his behalf in both polls, what Cohen gives the firm’s owner as payment is “a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 and, randomly, a boxing glove that Mr. Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter.”27 In January 2019, Cohen will confirm that Trump—who spent much of 2016 and 2017 decrying alleged voter fraud in the United States—“knew he [Cohen] was trying to have the [CNBC and Drudge Report] polls rigged. ‘What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of [Mr. Trump],’” Cohen will say.28
At around the same time that Trump tweets about his national political ambitions, a strange saga begins at the London Academy of Diplomacy, a small outfit described by the New York Times as a “for-profit continuing education program.”29 In 2014 the academy is run by an obscure Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud.30
That year, an attractive young Russian woman named Natalia Kutepova-Jamrom appears at Mifsud’s financially faltering operation with what the Times calls “an improbably impressive résumé.”31 It is unclear why Kutepova-Jamrom, who is fluent in four languages, has worked in the Russian government as a “legislative aide,” and thereafter worked for a state-owned newspaper in Russia, would want to apply for an internship at a nearly bankrupt for-profit academy in London—or indeed have anything at all to do with Mifsud, a man who has been described as a “snake-oil salesman” by a colleague.32 What is clear, however, is that the mysterious twenty-four-year-old has connections at the highest level of the Russian government, and that after becoming professionally acquainted with Mifsud, she begins “introduc[ing] Mr. Mifsud to senior Russian officials”; even more startlingly, she gains him entry, in October 2014, to one of the most exclusive think tanks in Russia, the “prestigious” Valdai Discussion Club, which the Times reports is an “elite gathering of … academics that meets each year with Mr. Putin.”33 Mifsud is even given “a speaking slot” at Valdai during his very first appearance there; he uses the occasion to argue for the dissolution of U.S. sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea earlier in 2014.34
It is quickly clear to at least one Valdai Discussion Club member that Mifsud does not belong there. His admittance to the group is “very, very strange,” according to James Sherr, a Valdai member, and “might suggest he does have connections.”35 Indeed, by the time Mifsud appears at Valdai in October 2014, he has already begun his ascent to becoming “a popular pundit with state-run news outlets in Russia, praising the country and Mr. Putin.”36
The 2014 Valdai meeting, at which Putin gives a lengthy address to the assembled 108 members of the club, is attended by another figure who, like Mifsud, is not just a club member but someone with “high-level Kremlin relationships” and a presence on state-run Russian media: future Trump campaign adviser Dimitri Simes.37
In December 2015, a former adviser to the Kremlin-owned natural-gas company Gazprom, Carter Page, asks Cox to help him get a job working for the Trump campaign.38 On Cox’s recommendation, Page is hired in January 2016 after Trump’s national co-chair, Sam Clovis, does, he claims, no more than “a quick Google search” on him.39 Just days after the Trump campaign brings Page aboard, its new hire sends an email to “senior Campaign officials” to tell them that, coincidentally, he has just “spent the past week in Europe” and has been “in discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin” who tell him they believe Trump can have a “game-changing effect … in bringing the end of the new Cold War”—and that, as a result of “discussions with these high level contacts,” it is now possible that “a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.”40 Page adds at the close of his email that he opposes U.S. sanctions on Russia.41 For all its energy, the email does not address how—or by whom—a Trump-Putin meeting can be orchestrated.
Fortunately, within days of Page’s unusual email to senior Trump campaign staff, the campaign receives a job query from the very individual whose job on the campaign will ultimately be to set up exactly the sort of meeting Page has just proposed: George Papadopoulos.42 Papadopoulos’s broader campaign function, besides being one of Trump’s first five national security hires, will be to keep the possibility of a Trump-Putin meeting on the campaign’s radar at a time when the candidate himself has been told by his attorney Michael Cohen that—per the Kremlin-linked Felix Sater—meeting Putin can seal the $1 billion real estate deal Trump and Cohen have been secretly negotiating with the Kremlin for six months (see chapter 3).43 Cohen has communicated not just to Trump but also to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski that a trip by Trump to Moscow is critical to the project.44
Carter Page is an odd job candidate for the well-connected Cox—who claims to know Page from “business and political circles”—to endorse.45 Clovis’s “quick Google search” on Page fails to turn up what a standard pre-hire background check might well have uncovered, had either Clovis or Cox undertaken one: that just months before Cox provided him with an introduction to the Trump campaign, Page was wrapped up in criminal proceedings relating to the federal investigation of two Russian spies in the United States.46 During the course of this investigation, federal law enforcement determined that Page gave two Kremlin agents nonpublic information about the U.S. energy sector; the Mueller Report notes that when questioned, “Page acknowledged that he understood that the individuals he had associated with were members of the Russian intelligence services,” but said that he gave them nonpublic information anyway because, as he explained it to the special counsel’s office, “the more immaterial nonpublic information I give [to Kremlin agents], the better for this country.”47 In fact, after Page delivered the material to the two Russian spies, he “spoke with a Russian government official at the United Nations General Assembly and identified himself so that the official would understand” that he had previously given information to Kremlin agents; his purpose in making this disclosure to a Russian official so soon after being informed by the FBI that he had been dealing with Russian spies, or for that matter his purpose in calling himself an “informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin” in a letter to a publisher in 2013, will not be disclosed in the redacted Mueller Report.48 How or why Page found himself once again in contact with Kremlin agents just days after being hired by Sam Clovis for the Trump campaign is unknown, though the same phenomenon occurs almost immediately after Clovis hires Papadopoulos in March and—yet again—almost immediately after Clovis appears on a conference panel with Papadopoulos in July. It is clear that the men to whom Clovis gives access to the Trump campaign’s small national security shop very shortly thereafter are contacted by agents of the Kremlin (see chapter 4).
One of the senior Trump officials who receives Carter Page’s January 2016 email about a Trump-Putin summit is Michael Glassner, the Trump campaign COO; Glassner is likewise the recipient of George Papadopoulos’s job query, which he thereafter sends to Clovis via an intermediary, Joy Lutes.49 At the time Papadopoulos sends his query to Glassner in early February, he is working for a company at which Valdai Discussion Club member Joseph Mifsud is a senior employee. Clovis ultimately hires Papadopoulos for the same committee for which he has already hired Page: Trump’s national security advisory committee. The committee is the brainchild of two men, Jared Kushner and Valdai Discussion Club member Dimitri Simes (see chapter 3).50
Simes, the president and CEO of a pro-Kremlin conservative think tank, the Center for the National Interest (and a man Putin calls a “friend” at a Valdai Discussion Club event in 2013), will become active in the Trump campaign behind the scenes—indeed, the campaign’s informal go-to adviser on Russia—just a few days after Papadopoulos is formally hired by Clovis in early March.51 Within days of Simes becoming involved in advising the campaign, he and Jared Kushner agree that Trump must create a national security advisory committee of foreign policy experts.52 By March 21, Trump has announced both Papadopoulos and Page as among the first five members of his national security advisory committee.53
Despite Dimitri Simes, Michael Flynn, and Erik Prince eventually becoming the Trump campaign’s most trusted national security advisers—and the advisers with the most direct access to members of Trump’s inner circle—none are ever publicly named to any Trump campaign national security or foreign policy advisory committee. Instead, they operate in the shadows, with their actions and advice not revealed to American voters until well after the 2016 election. As Politico will note of Simes in particular, “the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser” despite his repeated contacts with senior campaign officials on the subject of Russia, with whom Simes laid out plans for a “new beginning” in several policy memos sent to Jeff Sessions and Kushner.54 That Simes is never acknowledged by the Trump campaign, but is mentioned in the Mueller Report 134 times, tells the complex story of a campaign looking to hide many of its most relied-upon foreign policy and national security assets from public view.55 As Politico observes, “Trump made a point of publicly announcing a foreign policy advisory team in mid-2016, [but] his campaign never openly discussed Simes’s quiet role.”56
Even among “people who know Simes” there are some who consider him, per Politico, “at best a mysterious—and at worst alarming—player in Washington’s foreign policy community … [a man] who cloaks his true agenda in Washington”; Simes’s agenda is described by one former top Pentagon official, Michael Carpenter, as “completely pro-Kremlin.”57 Even a longtime friend of Simes’s, Leslie Gelb, will acknowledge to Politico that there are many people in Washington who (in Gelb’s opinion unfairly) suspect Simes of being “a secret Russian agent.”58 Whether Jared Kushner knew any of this when he recruited Simes as a Russia adviser for the Trump campaign in March 2019 is unclear; what is clear is that the concerns of the members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment are not without basis. For instance, during the 2016 presidential campaign, not long before Simes began advising the Trump team in developing a pro-Kremlin foreign policy agenda, the CNI president was repeatedly asking a Russian alleged spymaster, Alexander Torshin, for help with a complex financial issue in Russia—a course of negotiation that could have put Simes deeply in debt to the Kremlin in advance of his work advising Kushner and, through Kushner, Trump.59 According to private text messages Torshin sent to Kremlin operative Maria Butina months after Trump began running for president, Simes was “pressuring” and “appealing” to him to be his “helper” in dealing with the Russian Central Bank to resolve an issue involving tens of millions of dollars and a possible interruption of funding to the CNI.60 Though Torshin at first rebuffed Simes—because of the “threat” Torshin believed helping Simes in the way Simes demanded posed to Torshin’s “reputation”—once the CNI director became the Trump campaign’s Russia whisperer six months later, one imagines the Kremlin coming to a very different conclusion. If it had previously been unclear to Torshin whether helping Simes was in his interest, after Simes’s elevation to an informal advisory role within the Trump campaign it might have seemed to Torshin, as well as to his supervisors in Moscow, that any risk was worth the benefit of being on the right side of Simes’s ledger of favors.
Certainly, the Kremlin had made this decision with respect to its handling of Simes by September 2018, when it decided to pay him roughly half a million dollars a year to work as a talk-show host for Kremlin-funded media—a Moscow-based job the Trump campaign’s oft-relied upon Russia adviser still holds.61 When Simes first entered into negotiations for this extremely profitable position within Russia’s state apparatus is unknown; what is clear is that, as Politico reports, Simes “did use the opportunity [to advise the Trump campaign] to influence the campaign’s posture toward Russia … [using] the brash billionaire [Trump] as a vehicle to drive the GOP toward his longtime project of improving U.S. relations with Moscow”—an ambition Simes was determined to pursue “despite Putin’s ongoing election interference.”62
There is already some evidence that Simes anticipated a quid pro quo from Torshin during the presidential campaign, as he aggressively pursued assistance from Russia’s Central Bank via Torshin while “arrang[ing] meetings for Torshin with U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials”—an indication that as Simes was facilitating Torshin’s access to federal banking institutions, he might have thought it reasonable to expect Torshin to do the same for him with respect to banking institutions in the Russian Federation.63 According to National Public Radio, both the Kremlin operative Butina and her handler Torshin had wanted access to top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve—access they received, with the help of CNI, in April 2015—to initiate an “unofficial channel of diplomacy,” as Butina would later call it.64 As for the role of Simes’s CNI deputy Paul Saunders in setting up the meetings, Saunders will concede in May 2019 that CNI wanted to facilitate Kremlin contact with influential American officials because “we were about a year into U.S. sanctions on Russia following their annexation of Crimea, [so] we thought it would be interesting for Americans to hear from a Russian central bank official about the status of the Russian financial system” under the new sanctions regime.65 Saunders’s confession casts doubt on Simes’s claim—already belied by his actions in linking up the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak and Richard Burt (see chapter 3)—that neither he nor CNI ever sought to put anyone in the Trump campaign in touch with agents of the Russian government. This was, in fact, exactly the sort of interlocution his organization had already sought and achieved with respect to Torshin, Butina, and several U.S. government officials, including undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs Nathan Sheets and Federal Reserve vice chairman Stanley Fischer.66 According to the NPR report, CNI had originally sought to get Torshin and Butina an audience with Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, settling for Fischer only when Yellen “passed on the meeting.”67 That the CNI donor Simes was ostensibly seeking Torshin’s assistance on behalf of appears to have had no knowledge of Simes’s efforts—“There’s no evidence that [former AIG CEO Maurice “Hank”] Greenberg requested the outreach [to Torshin] or was even aware of it”—adds yet another troubling dimension to Simes’s contacts with Torshin during the presidential campaign.68 After Simes’s clandestine lobbying of the Kremlin ostensibly on his behalf, Greenberg makes the decision to have his philanthropic foundation cut “much of its support” for CNI; its current level of aid is approximately 4 percent of what it was previously.69 A Greenberg spokesman says the former executive is simply “scaling back his commitments to focus on his company and philanthropy”—the latter a category to which the foundation’s donations to CNI appear to no longer belong, in Greenberg’s view.70
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Simes will profoundly influence, from behind the scenes, the four most controversial components of candidate Trump’s foreign policy agenda: his stances toward Putin, Russian election interference, the Kremlin’s military adventures in Ukraine, and U.S. sanctions against Russia. From March through Election Day and beyond, Simes “provide[s] counsel … regarding Russia” to the campaign and transition, including, at a minimum, the following: helping, in April 2016, to “draft Trump’s CNI-hosted foreign policy speech,” in which “Trump called for an ‘easing of tensions’ with Russia”; “advising Trump on ‘what to say about Russia’” during the summer of 2016; sending a policy memo with “several policy recommendations” to the head of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Jeff Sessions, in June 2016; sending another “Russia policy memo” directly to Jared Kushner in August 2016; “peddl[ing] alleged compromising information to Jared Kushner on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia” in mid-2016, including information that “the Russian government had tapes of Bill Clinton having phone sex with Monica Lewinsky”; setting up yet another meeting between Sessions and the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Kislyak, after the election; and “recommend[ing] for administration jobs” certain “longtime associates” during the presidential transition, including former Gazprom lobbyist and Russian Alfa Bank board member Richard Burt.71 In his August 2016 memo to Kushner, Simes directly addresses Putin’s top policy goal—the dissolution of the sanctions regime established by the U.S. government after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea—by making “suggestions [to Trump] about how to handle Ukraine-related questions.”72 According to his colleagues at CNI, Simes believed his role on the Trump campaign to be a broad one, trying “to take Trump’s intuitions [on Russia] and turn them into something coherent.”73 Russian American historian Yuri Felshtinsky, who co-wrote a book with Alexander Litvinenko—the London-dwelling Russian-intelligence defector the Kremlin assassinated using radioactive tea in 2006—has observed “the peculiarity of Simes’s high-level Kremlin relationships and … his ability to address Putin directly at high-level public forums, like at the Valdai International Discussion Club,” adding that, when it comes to the media’s understanding of Simes’s role in American and Russian politics, “we only know the tip of the iceberg.”74
The Mueller Report calls Simes’s CNI “a think tank with expertise in and connections to the Russian government” and explains that, in addition to the contacts with the Trump campaign already noted, Simes had “various other contacts” with the chairman of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Jeff Sessions, during the 2016 campaign, even making Sessions a member of CNI’s “board of directors … and advisory council.”75 The result of Sessions’s acceptance of this position is that three close Trump advisers on Russia—Simes, Sessions, and Richard Burt, already a CNI board member at the time of Sessions’s elevation—are part of “a think tank with … connections to the Russian government” even as they are advising Trump on Russia policy during the 2016 presidential campaign. Sessions goes on to have numerous contacts with Russian officials during the campaign, even as his friend Simes continues to be known for, per the Mueller Report, his “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials” and his center’s “unparalleled access to Russian officials and politicians among Washington think tanks.”76
If what is already known of Simes’s advisory role on the Trump campaign is concerning, so too is the timing of his contacts with its senior staffers. Simes’s first contact with Jared Kushner is on March 14, 2016, the day the Kremlin first makes contact with George Papadopoulos through Joseph Mifsud. Simes’s second contact with Kushner comes on March 24, the day MBZ meets Putin in the Kremlin—the two men having just discussed “friendship and co-operation” between the UAE and Russia in a phone call eleven days earlier—and the day the Kremlin makes its second contact with Papadopoulos, with Mifsud this time introducing him, in London, to the mysterious “Olga Polonskaya,” who presents herself as Vladimir Putin’s “niece.” Simes’s third contact with Kushner comes on the day Trump’s national security advisory committee meets for the first time, during which meeting Simes and Kushner speak of—apropos of the day’s main event—Simes’s advice, apparently already accepted by the campaign, that “the best way to handle foreign-policy issues for the Trump Campaign would be to organize an advisory group of experts to meet with candidate Trump”; seventy-two hours later, Simes’s CNI publishes an article predicting, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the moment, that the Saudi royal family will “eventually soften its anti-Assad approach and diplomatically engage with Russia.”77 Simes also meets with Kushner on August 17, the same day Kushner’s father-in-law has his first classified national security briefing—a briefing that warns the campaign about its possible infiltration by Kremlin agents.78
Three days after the DNC publicly announces, in mid-June 2016, that it has been hacked by the Russian government, Simes sends Sessions’s deputy, J. D. Gordon, a memo urging the campaign to embrace “a new beginning with Russia.” The memo references a recent Simes-Sessions meeting—whose timing with respect to the announcement of the DNC hack is unknown—and proposes an initiative Trump would shortly adopt: the narrowing of his original national security advisory committee to a “‘small and carefully selected group of experts’ to assist Sessions with the Campaign.”79 Consistent with this advice, from mid-June 2016 onward the group advising Trump on national security and foreign policy issues is composed entirely of men who would thereafter have meetings with Russian nationals: Jeff Sessions, J. D. Gordon, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, professor and political pundit Walid Phares, Michael Flynn, and Erik Prince.80 There is no record of any other individuals—including any individuals originally appointed to Trump’s national security advisory committee in March 2016—being involved in advising Trump on national security issues after Simes urges Trump to winnow down his team of national security advisers.
Simes, former Gazprom adviser Page, and Papadopoulos—along with CNI board member and former Gazprom lobbyist Richard Burt—help Trump adviser Stephen Miller shape, write, and edit Trump’s first major foreign policy address in April 2016, even as CNI board member Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, is organizing the Mayflower Hotel event at which Trump will deliver the speech.81 Simes even offers input on the location of the speech, the logistics of the speech, and the roster of individuals who will be invited to the intimate pre-speech VIP reception—one of whom, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Simes invites to the speech personally.82 At the VIP event, another brainchild of Kushner and Simes, Simes introduces Kislyak to Trump, and Kushner and Kislyak have a conversation during which the Kremlin representative tells Trump’s son-in-law that “we [the Kremlin] like what your candidate is saying.”83 After Trump’s speech at the Mayflower there is a private, unannounced luncheon attended by Simes, Kushner, and others, none of whose names are released to the press.84
Trump’s Mayflower address, delivered on April 27, comes a day after Mifsud tells Papadopoulos that the Kremlin is willing to assist the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Hillary Clinton.85 Papadopoulos is, at the time, part of the speechwriting team for the foreign policy speech Trump intends to give the next day. In the speech, Trump urges a détente in the form of a “deal” between the United States and Russia.86 Papadopoulos tells investigators he does not recall telling candidate Trump about Mifsud’s revelation before his speech at the Mayflower, but John Mashburn—who at the time is working alongside Rick Dearborn, the Mayflower event’s organizer, in the campaign’s policy shop—tells Congress that in fact he recalls receiving an email from Papadopoulos about the Kremlin having damaging information on Clinton and believes other senior Trump campaign officials received it as well.87 Papadopoulos himself will “waver” on whether he remembers Sam Clovis (the man who hired him and originally assembled Trump’s national security advisory committee, and who therefore would have been likely to receive any email Papadopoulos sent to Mashburn) getting angry at him for telling him about Mifsud’s disclosure.88 The day of Trump’s Mayflower speech, Papadopoulos writes one of his “newfound Russian contacts,” a colleague of Joseph Mifsud’s named Ivan Timofeev, to say that the speech is the “signal” for Trump and Putin to meet.89
On May 23, four days after Trump names the longtime Kremlin-linked public relations man Paul Manafort his campaign chairman—he will elevate him again, to campaign manager, on June 20—Sessions attends Simes’s and CNI’s Distinguished Service Award dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. CNI invites Sergey Kislyak to the event, and Simes’s deputy Paul Saunders creates a seating plan that places him next to Sessions, though stories vary as to whether Kislyak appears at the dinner or not.90 Simes’s attempt to again facilitate direct discourse between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin would not have gone unnoticed by either party, however. Indeed, Simes will invite Sessions to two further dinners after May 23, both of which are also attended by Richard Burt, whom Simes later petitions Trump to name U.S. ambassador to Russia.91 Burt, the former Russian Alfa Bank board member, is, in 2016, sufficiently known to the Kremlin that when Putin indicates to a man he has identified as one of his fifty most powerful and influential oligarchs, Petr Aven, that after the U.S. election Aven needs to contact the Trump transition team to protect Alfa Bank’s assets in the event of a new round of sanctions from the Obama administration, it is to Burt that Aven turns (see chapter 6).92
After Kushner and Simes’s conveniently timed March 2016 meetings, and the Mayflower Hotel event and foreign policy speech they coordinate, the two men have so many private meetings that the Mueller Report is unable to provide a date for each one, calling them simply “periodic” and indicating they include both “in-person meetings and phone conversations” that are often about directing the committee—Trump’s national security advisory committee—that “Simes had proposed.”93 Simes’s impossible-to-verify contention that he at one point told Kushner “it was bad optics for the Campaign to develop hidden Russian contacts” is belied by the fact that the campaign Simes was advising, which throughout its life span repeatedly took his advice on matters relating to Russia, had more hidden Russian contacts than any campaign for the presidency in U.S. history.94 Simes’s placement in the shadows of the Trump campaign policy shop obscures not only his level of access to the candidate’s son-in-law but also his course of advising, as noted by the Mueller Report, on the two topics that were the subject of all the campaign’s clandestine contacts with Kremlin agents: “what Mr. Trump may want to say about Russia” and “questions about Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea”—that is, sanctions.95
Most troubling, in the timeline of Trump campaign–Simes connections, are Simes’s attempts to peddle Russian kompromat to the campaign in advance of the first presidential debates.96 In mid-August 2016, Simes writes and speaks to Kushner of “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton and the Russian government,” claiming that the Kremlin is now “blackmailing” the Clintons.97 While Simes will claim to the special counsel’s office that his information on Bill Clinton originated from “U.S. intelligence sources,” the former CIA operative named by Simes as his source has since confirmed that some of the information “was intercepted while the president [Bill Clinton] was traveling on Air Force One”—a clear indication that the provenance of the intelligence Simes urged the Trump campaign to use in 2016 was in fact Russian spycraft and kompromat.98 Simes was so enthused about injecting this Russian-held blackmail material into the U.S. general election campaign that, according to Mueller’s report, he even “provided the same information at a small group meeting of foreign policy experts that CNI organized for Sessions.”99 What is unclear is why Simes was discussing with his CIA source, in “2014 or 2015,” what the Washington Examiner calls “a claim that Russians recorded President Bill Clinton having phone sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky”; while the Kremlin had already initiated its election-interference campaign by 2014—a campaign that included the spreading of negative information about the Clintons—it was not until mid-2015 that Trump joined the presidential race and not until spring 2016 that either Clinton or Trump had clinched their respective parties’ nominations.100 That Simes was collecting kompromat information on the Clintons as early as 2014 raises the question of who if anyone had urged him to do so, and to whom he expected he would ultimately transmit the information he was gathering.
After the 2016 election, Kushner relied on Simes to “identify which Russian emissaries had political clout in Moscow,” and was indeed so reliant on the CNI director that when he needed to confirm the name of the Russian ambassador to the United States, he had his staff consult Simes instead of Google.101
During the spring of 2014, as Trump is making his plans to run for president public and the Kremlin is beginning its outreach to Papadopoulos’s eventual Kremlin conduit, Joseph Mifsud, the Internet Research Agency—a Kremlin-linked disinformation project overseen by Yevgeny Prigozhin, known in Russia as “Putin’s chef”—begins to “hide its funding and activities” and “consolidate [its] U.S. operations within a single general department, known internally as the ‘Translator’ department,” according to the Mueller Report.102 These shifts signal a new stage in the Kremlin’s upcoming election-interference effort, and are followed in June 2014 by a clandestine visit to the United States by four IRA employees.103 Internal IRA documents will not reflect the agency’s pro-Trump position until February 2016, however, with the operation purchasing its first anti-Clinton ads on social media in March 2016 and its first pro-Trump ads in April 2016 (see chapter 4).104
In May 2014, Russia ramps up its nuclear infrastructure investments in the Middle East, revealing its plans to build eight more nuclear reactors in Bushehr, Iran, having signed its initial contract to build reactors for the plant there in 1995 and then seeing the nuclear plant reach full reactor capacity in August 2012.105 The Kremlin’s late-spring announcement comes as Russia is one of six nations—with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and China—working with the European Union to seal a nuclear deal with Iran that will prohibit it from enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known colloquially as the “Iran nuclear deal”), Iran will agree to process uranium ore to only 3.7 percent enrichment—90 percent being the minimum enrichment required for a nuclear weapon—for the next fifteen years, and to allow international inspectors into the country to confirm its compliance with this limitation. In exchange, the punishing international economic sanctions that had been leveled against Iran over its nuclear weapons program will be lifted.106
The Iran nuclear deal is vehemently opposed by Israel, whose “existential fear of a nuclear-armed Iran,” as the Atlantic terms it, causes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say of the accord, just two weeks after it is signed, that it is a “stunning historic mistake” and “a very dangerous deal … [that] threatens all of us.”107 Meanwhile, Saudi officials, opining that the deal does not permanently end the Iranian nuclear threat, call it “extremely dangerous” and “unacceptable” and worry that the removal of sanctions will “allow Iran to fund proxy wars [in the Middle East] and extend its regional influence.”108 One result of the deal, according to a CBS News summary of the views of Tariq Al-Shammari, president of the Council of Gulf International Relations, is that “behind the scenes … Gulf Arab countries will work to try and keep Iran isolated politically and economically … [with] Saudi Arabia in particular … already mov[ing] to improve ties with Russia, which is a strong ally of Iran.”109
In the Middle East, the New York Times has written, “many major players are closely allied with or supported by either Shiite Iran or Sunni Saudi Arabia, and any gain by one is often seen as a loss by the other.”110 This dynamic explains why the July 2015 Iran deal leads almost immediately to discussion of a “regional arms race,” with the Saudis and their Emirati allies beginning to consider how they might match what they presume will be increased Iranian uranium enrichment activity in the years ahead—despite the explicit terms of the nuclear deal Iran has signed.111 The first step in this new nuclear standoff would be Saudi Arabia and its Sunni peers in the Gulf gaining the agreement of their Western allies to let them enrich uranium ore, and to do so at a higher level than previously thought appropriate for a country with no interest in weaponizing nuclear material. With this aim in mind, soon after the Iran deal is signed a “Saudi diplomat [says] his nation will look at embarking on a nuclear energy program so it can be closer to having nuclear weapons if Iran breaks the deal and weaponizes its [nuclear] program.”112
Outside Saudi Arabia, attitudes toward the deal are mixed. The Washington Post will note that Qatar and Oman “have moved toward improved relations with Tehran” and therefore choose to register no public disapproval of the deal’s terms; Turkey stands to “boost its oil imports from Iran” post-deal; and Iran’s ally Syria calls the deal “a great victory” in a statement from President Bashar al-Assad.113 All four of these nations will be left out of the historic geopolitical reorganization in the Middle East plotted by Saudi Arabia in late 2015. More unsettling to the Saudis, surely, is the ruler of its closest ally, the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, publicly congratulating Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on the deal and saying that he hopes it will “contribute to strengthening regional security and stability.”114 Al-Nahyan’s statement gives Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman additional grounds to seek an even closer alliance with MBZ, who occupies a separate and distinct matrix of power in the UAE.
As CBS News will note, none of the Sunni Arab nations in the Gulf are privately very enthusiastic about the deal, “worry[ing] that a deal gives Iran the means—through an economic windfall—and an implicit green light to push influence in the region.”115 Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, a professor of political science at United Arab Emirates University, tells CBS, “Deal or no deal, tension in the region is not going to go away. If Iran is bent on acting as a hegemon, as a regional power, I think we are in for some difficult times.”116 This lingering doubt over the repercussions of the Iran deal explains in part why, despite Sheikh Khalifa’s words of congratulation to President Rouhani following the deal’s signing, his younger brother, MBZ, will take a very different view of the accord in 2015 than the UAE’s president. That by 2015 the UAE is enmeshed in another proxy war with Iran—this time fighting an army of allegedly Iran-sponsored Houthi rebels in Yemen—does far more to explain why the Emiratis’ view of the Iran deal will soon change, however.
Though former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had left the U.S. State Department more than two years before the signing of the Iran nuclear deal, CNN will report in 2015 that “supporters, critics and experts agree: Clinton’s fingerprints are all over the nuclear agreement.”117 It is all but certain that this fact is on the minds of MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi as they meet on a yacht in the Red Sea in fall 2015 and make a decision about whom to support in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In June 2014, six months after Trump tells GOP officials in New York that he will be running for president, and seven months after discussing American foreign policy and presidential politics with his Russian business partners, the Agalarovs, in Moscow, the Trump Organization announces that it will purchase the Turnberry golf resort in Scotland from Leisurecorp—a unit of the Emirati government—for $48.5 million, an astounding $44.2 million less than the Emiratis had paid for the property just seventy-two months earlier.118 Several weeks later, Trump travels to Turnberry to announce that he will pour approximately $130 million into the resort, just under three times its total purchase price.119 Trump is, at the time, in the midst of building Trump Estates in the UAE, a development of more than a hundred “luxury villas” that will overlook a Trump-branded golf course to be named Trump International Golf Club Dubai.120
In less than forty-eight months, the new Trump-branded Turnberry property—Trump Turnberry—will lose $39 million despite Trump’s $130 million in improvements (he will later claim $260 million, while his project manager will insist it was $181 million).121 Nevertheless, by August 2018 Trump will announce that in addition to the $130 million (up to $260 million) he has already invested in his money-losing operation at Turnberry, he will now invest an additional $200 million in his other Trump-branded golf course in Scotland, Trump Aberdeen.122 Quartz will call Trump’s investments in golf properties in Scotland “a string of investments … that appear to make little business sense” and have consistently performed “terribly.”123 With Trump Aberdeen losing $9.2 million in its first six years of operation—2012 to 2018—and Trump Turnberry losing $39 million from 2014 to 2018, the Atlantic will note in August 2018 that the source of funds for Trump’s planned improvements on these properties is a “mystery.”124
Whereas, prior to 2006—around the time Felix Sater became Trump’s fixer for real estate investments in Russia—the historically illiquid Trump denominated himself the “King of Debt,” from that year on he inexplicably finds himself able to pay for all his projects, including his two Scottish golf courses, in cash.125 The Atlantic reports that “onlookers have struggled to explain both this new [investment] model [for Trump] and Trump’s Scottish projects.” According to Adam Davidson of the New Yorker, Trump’s purchase of Turnberry from the Emiratis is, from a business standpoint, “a bizarre, confounding move that raises questions about the central nature of his business during the years in which he prepared for and then executed his presidential campaign.”126 Davidson will observe, in a July 2018 report on Turnberry, that Trump’s investment in the golf course “is so much bigger than his other recent projects that it would not be unreasonable to describe the Trump Organization as, at its core, a manager of a money-losing Scottish golf course that is kept afloat with funds from licensing fees and decades-old real-estate projects.”127
Davidson’s assessment—which includes the notation that, even at a staggering discount, the purchase of Turnberry from the Emiratis consumed “more than half of the [Trump Organization’s] available cash”—is bolstered by the small amount of data publicly available on the Trump Organization’s finances.128 The Wall Street Journal finds that from January 2014 through June 2015, the pretax income for the entire Trump Organization was $160 million—an approximately $106 million annual income before taxes—yet during this period Trump was, by his own accounting, in the midst of a four-year, $260 million investment in Trump Turnberry and gearing up for an investment, in 2018, of $197 million at Trump Aberdeen.129 All told, just these two investments—in a pair of golf courses in Scotland—add up to over 400 percent of the annual pretax revenue of the Trump Organization during the period assayed by the Wall Street Journal.
Incredibly, Trump’s planned $197 million investment in Trump Aberdeen is just a down payment on a much larger investment: according to the Atlantic, in order to get permission to construct any additions at all to the Aberdeen property, Trump had to “promise [to] … spend $1.3 billion on two golf courses, a luxury hotel and hundreds of homes” on the site.130 Even with that figure thereafter being dialed back to $971 million, there remains no explanation for how, absent massive loans, Trump could possibly afford the development he was planning in Aberdeen at the time of his inauguration in 2017.131 Based on publicly available data, Trump should have been hundreds of millions of dollars short of being able to afford the announced project in Scotland, even if the Trump Organization were to pause all its other real estate investments and pending projects. It is little surprise, then, that the New Yorker concludes in 2018 that “it is hard to understand where all of the money spent on Turnberry came from.”132
In May 2018, Eric Trump will insist to the Washington Post that the Trump Organization’s odds-defying budgeting is the result of “incredible cash flow” from existing sources.133 The Post will express some incredulity about the claim, noting Trump’s “string of commercial bankruptcies” at the time the Trump Organization was spending lavishly in Scotland as well as “the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.”134 And indeed Eric Trump’s claim that the Trump Organization has used neither outside investment, borrowing, nor the selling off of assets to raise hundreds of millions of dollars not otherwise evident on its balance sheet is belied by a statement Eric subsequently makes to Golf magazine.135 Trump’s second son, “who runs the golf side of the Trump business” according to the Atlantic, is asked by Golf reporter James Dodson in 2013 how it is that, after the 2008 recession—when, per Dodson, no banks were “touch[ing] a golf course”—the Trumps managed to move hundreds of millions of dollars into a series of new golf course properties.136 “Well, we don’t rely on American banks,” Eric tells Dodson. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.… We’ve got some [Russian] guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there [for money] all the time.”137
Internal IRA documents will not reflect the agency’s pro-Trump position until February 2016, however, with the operation purchasing its first anti-Clinton ads on social media in March 2016 and its first pro-Trump ads in April 2016.
According to the Mueller Report, the IRA’s activities will ultimately reach between 29 million and 126 million Americans via Facebook, across 80,000 posts and hundreds of thousands of followers of bogus IRA-run Facebook groups.138 On Twitter, the IRA runs 3,814 accounts, which, all told, tweet 175,993 times in just the ten weeks before the 2016 election.139 Approximately 1.4 million Americans are “in contact with” an IRA account on Twitter before the election, per the Mueller Report.140 IRA tweets are retweeted or otherwise engaged with by many associates of and advisers to the Trump campaign, including Michael Flynn, Michael Flynn Jr., Donald Trump Jr., Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Brad Parscale (now Trump’s 2020 campaign manager), and a Fox News personality who advises Trump regularly on domestic policy issues behind the scenes, Sean Hannity.141 “In total,” the report states, “Trump campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA.”142
The Mueller Report identifies an additional 50,258 Twitter accounts linked to the Kremlin—which combined send out more than a million tweets in the ten weeks before Election Day in 2016.143
Meanwhile, Saudi officials, opining that the deal does not permanently end the Iranian nuclear threat, call it “extremely dangerous” and “unacceptable” and worry that the removal of sanctions on Iran will “allow Iran to fund proxy wars [in the Middle East] and extend its regional influence.”
The three proxy wars the Saudis and Emiratis are particularly concerned about include Iranian support for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, who stands accused of war crimes in the Syrian civil war; alleged Iranian support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen fighting against a Saudi-Emirati coalition backed by the United States; and alleged passive Iranian support for Islamic State, as Iran “has extended its influence politically and militarily as the [Iraqi] government battles Islamic State extremists,” according to the Washington Post in 2015.144
The Wall Street Journal found that from January 2014 through June 2015, the pretax income for the entire Trump Organization was $160 million—an approximately $106 million annual income before taxes.
As the New Yorker notes, “With that money, Trump had to pay for his business, his taxes (if he paid any), his personal life style, and that of his family. His Boeing 757 alone cost more than ten thousand dollars per hour of use, not to mention the dozens of staffers at his various properties, the clothes and food and jewelry of a status-conscious family, and countless other expenses that could easily eat up all of that income. There simply isn’t enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent on Turnberry.”145
In 2014 Trump did more than buy Turnberry for $48.5 million, however. He also spent $29.2 million to buy yet another golf course, this one in Doonbeg, Ireland (ultimately named Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland).146 Between 2014 and 2018, the Washington Post reports, material improvements to the two properties notwithstanding, Trump had to drop another $164 million in cash just to keep Turnberry and Doonbeg open.147 Doonbeg was priced at $16 million when it initially went on the market, according to the Guardian, suggesting that Trump may have overpaid for it by as much as $13.2 million.148