2015
As MBS ascends to power in Riyadh with the support and approval of MBZ, MBZ adviser Erik Prince insinuates himself into the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, Israeli business intelligence companies become involved with multiple GOP presidential campaigns. Trump’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, places itself at the center of a UAE-Israeli election-meddling scandal with Russian connections. The recently signed Iran nuclear deal and Trump’s secret negotiations with the Kremlin over a proposed Trump Tower Moscow lend urgency to the actions of key players in several countries.
As 2015—the year the Iran nuclear deal becomes fully effective—begins, America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are, with Israel, deeply concerned about whether the United States can be relied upon to help ensure security in the region as it once was. According to one senior Arab diplomat, “There is a determination among us now that if there are security issues, we have to take action [ourselves] and we will. We don’t have to ask America’s permission. We of course will collaborate with the U.S., but we won’t wait for America to tell us what to do.”1 This new ethos of radical independence—tinged as it is, at least in the American view, with the potential for recklessness by certain Sunni Arab states—will be a defining characteristic of 2015 in the Middle East. As CNN will note, the GCC (which in 2015 comprises Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman) is particularly emboldened by its divergence from the Obama administration’s view of the wisdom of engaging with Iran.2 Per CNN, “the Gulf states, along with Israel, worry that the deal with Tehran will pave the way for a nuclear bomb rather than prevent one, and unlock billions of dollars that Iran will use to wreak havoc in the region. That fear has forced the six [GCC] nations to overcome a host of internal differences, heal long-standing rifts and show a level of unity that has been lacking. It also has led the bloc to show less deference to the United States.”3 When representatives of the GCC nations travel to the White House and Camp David in May 2015 to meet with President Obama, their new unity will be on display; behind the scenes, the most powerful member of the bloc—Saudi Arabia—is ready to fundamentally change the composition of the GCC and significantly expand its already negative orientation toward engagement with Iran.
In January 2015, King Salman ascends to the throne of Saudi Arabia. Within sixty days, his twenty-nine-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman—a man with no military experience—is named minister of defense, deputy crown prince, and the head of Saudi Arabia’s oil company, Saudi Aramco.4 MBS immediately launches a war against Yemen to dislodge Houthi rebels, who have driven the Yemeni government into exile, from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital.5 To the great consternation of his older cousins, MBS’s war with Yemen is initiated without, as observed by the New York Times in October 2016, “full coordination across the security services”; indeed, as the kingdom’s first strikes in Yemen are being carried out in March 2015, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, the head of the Saudi National Guard, not only hasn’t been informed of the action but isn’t even in the country.6
Shortly thereafter, in April 2015, King Salman names his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef as the crown prince and his successor, though he has already taken actions suggesting that his ultimate successor will be MBS. According to the Times, beginning in January 2015 “new powers … flow[] to his [King Salman’s] son [MBS], some of them undermining the authority of the crown prince [bin Nayef]. King Salman collapse[s] the crown prince’s court into his own, giving Prince bin Salman control over access to the king. Prince bin Salman also hastily announce[s] the formation [in December 2015] of a military alliance of Islamic countries to fight terrorism,” a plan that effectively freezes bin Nayef’s Interior Ministry out of any meaningful role in the country’s new counterterrorism agenda.7 The Times notes that “Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, which means that Prince bin Salman was given all of his powers by a vote of one: his own father.”8
In its first year, MBS’s war in Yemen—one of his most “concrete initiatives,” notes the Times—“fail[s] to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital … drive[s] much of Yemen toward famine and kill[s] thousands of civilians while costing the Saudi government tens of billions of dollars.”9 Shortly after the hostilities begin in March 2015, bin Salman disappears for an unexpected “vacation” in the Maldives, during which period even Ashton B. Carter, the U.S. secretary of defense, is unable to reach the young Saudi prince. The Maldives is an island nation in the Indian Ocean where, after several meetings in the Seychelles, future Trump adviser Erik Prince will reportedly meet with Russian and Emirati agents on Trump’s behalf in early 2017 (see chapter 6).10
It is unknown whether Prince, or anyone else who will end up in the orbit of the Trump campaign, meets with the Saudi deputy crown prince (who is also the Saudi minister of defense) while MBS is “vacationing”—in the midst of a war he recently initiated—in the Maldives; there are indications this could have happened, however. At around the same time that bin Salman is mysteriously in the Maldives, allied intelligence agencies begin to intercept substantial chatter among Kremlin operatives discussing associates of Trump.11 According to the Wall Street Journal, “the volume of the mentions of Trump associates by the Russians … have [European intelligence] officials asking one another, ‘What’s going on?’”12 While there is, at present, no known direct association between bin Salman and Trump in spring 2015, it is clear that bin Salman’s “brawny foreign policy” aligns with Trump’s past statements about Saudi Arabia taking care of its own defense needs. MBS’s plan, according to the New York Times, is to have the kingdom be “less reliant on Western powers like the United States for its security”—an echo of the policy position frequently articulated by Trump on Twitter.13 Like Trump, bin Salman opposes any “thawing of America’s relations with Iran,” a euphemism for opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.14 Andrew Bowen, a Saudi expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., will in 2016 associate bin Salman’s belligerent policies with “a surge of Saudi nationalism,” yet another mirroring of Trump’s own political instincts.15 MBS’s “main message is that Saudi Arabia is a force to be reckoned with,” according to another Middle East expert, Brian Katulis of Washington’s Center for American Progress.16
Back in the United States, Paul Manafort spends the spring of 2015 in a clinic in Arizona, having suffered a “massive emotional breakdown,” according to his daughter Andrea.17 The onetime international operator calls his family daily with his voice “soaked in tears,” according to the Atlantic, and intimates to his other daughter, Jessica, that “suicide [is] a possibility.”18 One of his chief stressors is what Andrea describes as a “tight cash flow state” resulting from his former patron Viktor Yanukovych having recently fled to Russia to escape execution at the hands of a nationwide revolution in Ukraine; whether Manafort is aware that the FBI has already begun investigating him for his work in Ukraine is unclear, but his daughters note that he suddenly seems unwilling or unable to access any of the offshore bank accounts that might have alleviated the serious financial strain he is experiencing.19 He is also being hunted—quite literally—by Deripaska, to whom the United States has denied a visa due to what it believes to be his “ties to organized crime” and who, as Manafort would have been well aware, “won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called ‘aluminum wars’ of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry.”20 The previous year one of Deripaska’s attorneys had complained in open court that Manafort was on the run from Deripaska, saying of the former Yanukovych aide—and his business partner Rick Gates, who would soon end up as Trump’s deputy campaign manager—that “it appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared.”21
Manafort’s “disappearance” is short-lived, however. In February 2016, he surfaces at a business lunch with his old friend, longtime Trump confidant Thomas Barrack, telling the Lebanese American billionaire businessman and Colony Capital founder and executive chairman, “I really need to get to” Trump.22 When Barrack helps him do just that—in March 2016 winning him a job, through a course of lobbying Trump, as Trump’s “delegate counter”—the desperately cash-strapped Manafort, still owing millions of dollars to dangerous men overseas, nevertheless offers to work pro bono. As the Atlantic will note in early 2018, “When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign … he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures … evinced the character of a man … [with a] lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.”23
It is little surprise that Barrack has the influence with Trump to convince the GOP candidate to begin the process of replacing his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. As longtime Trump friend, adviser, and ally Roger Stone explains, “[Thomas Barrack] is the only person I know who the president speaks to as a peer. Barrack is to Trump as [Florida banker] Bebe Rebozo was to Nixon, which is the best friend.”24 But Barrack is also more than this to the extended Trump family: he is Jared Kushner’s lender, holding $70 million of the debt owed by Kushner on the worst real estate investment of his career, 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.25 Barrack’s late-2000s investment in Kushner helped save Ivanka’s husband from bankruptcy, a circumstance that could have materially affected Trump’s daughter as well.26 The billionaire speaks Arabic, worked for Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer—yet another Trump-circle confidant with Nixon ties, joining Roger Stone, Dimitri Simes, Ed Cox, CNI patron and Kushner acquaintance Henry Kissinger, and others—and made his fortune by networking with powerful Saudis and Emiratis, including an executive at the Saudi government-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco, the Emirati oil minister, a son of the Saudi kingdom’s then ruler, and a host of other “Persian Gulf royals,” to whom he became, according to the Times, a “concierge” who not only “look[ed] after their children on visits to the West” but also “vacation[ed] with them at his home in the south of France.”27 Barrack had even opened up a halal restaurant on the Sardinian coast specifically to cater to “Gulf royals who came by in their yachts.”28
Barrack’s skill at flattery, according to an account in the Times, has been directed most vigorously over the years at three targets: Donald Trump and the Saudi and Emirati royal families. During the presidential campaign, Barrack will tell the Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, that if he works in conjunction with Barrack, they “can turn [Trump] to prudence. He needs a few really smart Arab minds to whom he can confer.” Barrack adds that the Emirati ambassador is “at the top of that list.”29 Indeed, as Barrack predicts, the Emirates’ agent, al-Otaiba, will become one of the Trump campaign’s most important advisers—though also, like Dimitri Simes, one that the campaign never acknowledges, for reasons that will become clear over time (see chapters 4 and 6).
After announcing his candidacy for president of the United States on May 4, 2015, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican, begins forming a foreign policy team with a surprising number of experts on the nation of Israel—many of whom will move directly to the campaign of Donald Trump in the weeks before Carson officially suspends his flailing campaign in early March 2016.30 One of the Israel experts who joins Carson’s campaign as a foreign policy adviser is George Birnbaum, a longtime GOP operative who “has worked extensively as a campaign consultant for Israeli politicians and has developed a network of contacts with current and former Israeli security officials.”31 Another member of Carson’s team with substantial Israeli security contacts—though not an adviser to Carson exclusively, as he is also advising Donald Trump at the time—is Michael Flynn. Flynn will tell the Washington Post in August 2016 that Carson is one of the Republican presidential candidates who “would ask me about national security, what’s happening in the world, my thoughts on particular issues.” Flynn confirms to the Post that he met directly with Carson, and that “if I saw something I thought was important I would share it with [Carson and several other GOP candidates].”32
Prior to joining the Carson campaign as an adviser, Flynn had been approached by an Israeli business intelligence company, Psy-Group, whose owner, Joel Zamel, sought to recruit him.33 As the Daily Beast writes, “Zamel apparently wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynn to be a member of the firm’s advisory board; Zamel spoke with him about it on multiple occasions about the time Flynn was forming his ill-fated Flynn Intel Group,” a period between fall 2014 and summer 2015 that ended just weeks before Trump summoned Flynn to Trump Tower in August 2015 for the pair’s first meeting.34 Trump will later claim, falsely, that he did not know Flynn in 2015, though it was Trump who had his team call Flynn in 2015, and Trump who permitted his first meeting with Flynn to run for ninety minutes instead of the scheduled thirty minutes.35
The Daily Beast confirms that Flynn is extremely fond of Zamel in 2014 and 2015, having taken “a real shining” to him.36 Flynn’s Iranian American business partner at the Flynn Intel Group, Bijan Kian, who will later be indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on “charges of trying to influence American politicians” on behalf of Turkey without registering as an agent of a foreign government, is responsible for introducing Flynn to Zamel.37 Illegal lobbying on behalf of a foreign government is, according to CNN, a “rarely charged crime,” suggesting that federal investigators may in 2018 be more interested in Kian’s dealings with Flynn and Zamel during the 2016 general election than in Kian’s role as an intermediary between Flynn and the Turkish government during the same period. The Flynn-Zamel relationship appears to be key to Trump campaign–Israeli collusion in the months before Election Day.38
In late summer 2016, after he has been serving as a top national security advisor to candidate Trump for a year, Flynn meets at the JW Marriott Essex House New York hotel “with top Turkish government ministers and discusse[s] removing a Muslim cleric [Fethullah Gulen] from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey.”39 The action discussed by the parties would violate the federal kidnapping statute, as it would be orchestrated to “get Gulen … to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process,” according to the Wall Street Journal.40 One of the attendees at the meeting, former CIA director James Woolsey, will summarize the plan under consideration at the time as “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away,” and says the only reason he didn’t speak up to decry the proposed federal felony was that Flynn and the Turkish officials never got around to discussing “actual tactics for removing Mr. Gulen from his U.S. home.”41
Three weeks after the White House fires him in early 2017, Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, will file with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent for Turkey. When this happens, press secretary Sean Spicer will tell the media that “Mr. Trump was unaware Mr. Flynn had been consulting on behalf of the Turkish government when he named him national security adviser,” even though Congress had informed Vice President–elect Mike Pence (the head of Trump’s presidential transition team) of this fact in a public letter in November 2016, and President Obama had, in a face-to-face post-election meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, strongly warned him against hiring Flynn.42
That the summer 2016 meeting Flynn attended in which the kidnapping of Gulen was discussed was a high-level event is demonstrated by the fact that the Turkish president’s son-in-law and the country’s energy minister both attended it. Also present at the meeting were both Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin (see chapter 6) and Bijan Kian.43 Woolsey, who by November 2016 is serving as a “senior adviser” to Trump’s presidential transition team alongside Flynn and Kian, will later say that he was so concerned about the content of Flynn’s mid-2016 conversation with Turkish agents that he informed the sitting vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, through an intermediary—an exchange that may offer yet another explanation, besides what President Obama called Flynn’s “crazy ideas,” for Obama’s warning to Trump not to hire the former DIA chief.44 According to Politico, in their meeting at the White House two days after Trump’s election victory, Obama didn’t just advise Trump against hiring Flynn but “forcefully told [him] to steer clear of Flynn,” unambiguous advice from the nation’s commander in chief (and Flynn’s former boss) that Trump ignored for reasons that have never been explained.45
Kian is not merely a business partner of Flynn’s at the Flynn Intel Group as the presidential transition begins in November 2016 but also, with Flynn, an incoming member of Trump’s national security transition team; during the period from Election Day to Trump’s inauguration, the Flynn Intel Group is shuttered.46 As the Washington Times has noted, “[Kian’s] Trump transition role offered influence in the selection of intelligence agency candidates and access to internal discussions of U.S. national security policy.”47 In a filing in his 2019 criminal case, Kian will appear to allege, through his attorneys, that Flynn secretly had contact with Kirill Dmitriev after the 2016 election and never disclosed the meeting to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, or any other federal agency—a possibility that would fundamentally change investigators’ understanding of Dmitriev’s meeting with George Nader and Trump adviser Erik Prince at a bar in the Seychelles in early 2017 (see chapter 6).48 Dmitriev’s denials of any such clandestine meeting with Flynn will lose much of their weight after the Putin lieutenant offers innocuous descriptions of his meeting with Prince that are subsequently contradicted by major-media reporting.49
That Flynn’s connection to the Israeli Zamel—and Zamel’s connection to Kian—extends into Trump’s transition period is confirmed by the fact that Zamel met with Flynn, and possibly Kian, at least once during the presidential transition (see chapter 6).50 Flynn had also, just two months after Ben Carson’s presidential campaign closed down in spring 2016, joined the advisory board of a subsidiary of “hacking firm” NSO Group—“a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials”—and done consulting work for the private equity firm that controls NSO.51 A year later, NSO will sell $55 million worth of cell phone–hacking technology to MBS’s government; it is technology that becomes critical to MBS’s Kushner-assisted crushing of domestic dissent in Saudi Arabia in late 2017 (see chapter 8). Flynn’s involvement with NSO beginning in the midst of the 2016 presidential election—indeed, in the very month that his friend Zamel’s Israeli “business intelligence” operation, Psy-Group, first contacts the Trump campaign seeking to conduct covert intelligence-gathering on its behalf—establishes a high-level connection between Trump’s “shadow” national security team (including Simes, Prince, and Flynn) and Israeli government-associated spying outfits from May 2016 through Election Day and beyond. One of the two companies with which Flynn is most closely linked, NSO, deals in such sensitive technology that it must do so in conjunction with clearances from the Israeli Defense Ministry (see chapter 8).
Another Carson adviser with strong ties to Israel is an obscure Middle East energy analyst by the name of George Papadopoulos, who joins Carson’s campaign in late 2015 as (according to Papadopoulos) the GOP candidate’s “principal foreign policy adviser.”52 Lightly published and still largely unknown in his field, Papadopoulos boasts few international publications prior to joining the Carson campaign, though one is an essay he had written the year before in Arutz Sheva, a Zionist Israeli publication.53 In the essay, entitled “A Southern Strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Papadopoulos argues for America to adopt a Middle East policy identical to the one that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE will ultimately push Trump to accept; it is a view of America and the Middle East that is virulently anti-Obama, anti-Turkey, anti-Iran, anti–Muslim Brotherhood, and pro-el-Sisi.54 Papadopoulos’s focus is on how to negotiate Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East, with the young analyst noting that “Cyprus, Israel, Syria, and Egypt [are] seeking out greater ties with Russia to safeguard their national interests.… Russia’s last-minute negotiated deal to remove chemical stockpiles from Syria without an attack … has now allowed Russia to achieve its desired objective of becoming essential to all seemingly intractable conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean from Tehran to Cairo.”55 Papadopoulos admiringly speaks of Russia’s “leverage … increas[ing]” in the Middle East, and of the way that “Russia has politically outmaneuvered the U.S.” under Obama.56 He proposes that the United States augment its military partnerships with Cyprus, Israel, and Greece, the last of these an idea Papadopoulos will personally advance by meeting with Greece’s defense minister Panos Kammenos—a known “Putin ally,” according to BuzzFeed News—as a representative of the Trump campaign in May 2016.57 According to one NATO military intelligence officer BuzzFeed News will speak to in spring 2018, the very ministry of defense Papadopoulos was advising Trump to partner with in 2016 “is considered [by NATO] to be compromised by Russian intelligence.”58 The day after Trump is inaugurated, Papadopoulos; Trump’s new chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and one of the heads of the presidential transition, Steve Bannon, will meet with Kammenos at Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel.59 Kammenos had by then already met with Priebus once in D.C., on the day before Trump’s inauguration.60
Carson’s chief foreign policy adviser on Israeli issues, however, is George Birnbaum, who, according to the Times of Israel, “served as chief of staff for [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu during his first term” and is the business partner of “Arthur Finkelstein, the GOP public relations guru … who also has advised Netanyahu.”61
At some point during his ten-month candidacy for president, Carson and his team receive a “plan for voter manipulation in [general election] swing states” from an Israeli business intelligence company, Inspiration, which is “run by former Israeli Defense Force officers.”62 After Carson exits the presidential race in March 2016, he “personally present[s] Trump with Inspiration’s plan,” and thereafter Inspiration receives “enormous amounts of information” from a pro-Trump super PAC, information it uses to “compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”63 According to a major digital media outlet in Israel, Walla News, Inspiration is “managed by a former senior [IDF] intelligence official” from the Israeli government.64 Located in a “mysterious building in central Israel” with “no sign or information on it,” Inspiration is, per Walla, a company whose “website does not reveal anything about its founders or employees,” but whose activities in 2016 and even before then are quite clear: Inspiration’s “main activity in recent years has been working for the election of Donald Trump as president.”65 One Inspiration employee said that “the person who connected her to Trump [in 2016] was Ben Carson,” adding that “Carson knew the company after working with a research body that worked for us.”66 That the “research body” referenced here may be either NSO (to which Flynn was linked in 2016) or Joel Zamel’s Wikistrat or Psy-Group business intelligence firms (the latter of which Zamel sought to recruit Flynn to in 2014 or 2015) is underscored by the presence of not just Flynn but also George Birnbaum as an adviser to Carson’s campaign. Birnbaum will, not long after Carson’s campaign folds in March 2016, introduce Zamel to Rick Gates, Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager.67
Another former Inspiration employee tells Walla that Inspiration began “work[ing] for Trump’s election … about three months before the 2016 election,” placing the beginning of its involvement in the same month—August 2016—that Donald Trump Jr. responds approvingly to an offer of assistance from Zamel’s firm after a meeting in Trump Tower, thereby providing more evidence that the Israeli “research body” Inspiration worked with to ensure Trump’s election was Zamel’s (see chapter 4).68 Indeed, Inspiration will concede that it worked in August 2016 “in cooperation with another Israeli company in order to understand which voters are more likely or less likely to vote on election day … [and] trying to predict the behavior of the voters in … the swing states … [O]n the basis of this assessment, various [types of] content intended for different types of voters were prepared in a focused manner.”69 This description of Inspiration’s research partner matches the sort of work done by Psy-Group, as well as a company closely linked to Psy-Group, Cambridge Analytica, which was Trump’s data firm for the entirety of the 2016 general election season. While Inspiration will state publicly that its partner was not Israeli business intelligence firm Black Cube, it will not issue a similar statement with respect to either Psy-Group, Wikistrat, or NSO.70 Inspiration’s concurrent claim that it did not work with Cambridge Analytica is consistent with other evidence that when, prior to its dissolution in 2018, Cambridge Analytica worked with Israeli firms, as it has acknowledged doing, it did so through subcontractors rather than directly.71 Even so, that Inspiration denies working with Cambridge Analytica in response to a question about working with Israeli business intelligence firms—which Cambridge Analytica is not—is curious.
In his June 16, 2015, speech at Trump Tower announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, Donald Trump declares, “I love the Saudis. Many are in this building.”72 He repeats his long-standing complaint, however, that the Saudis enjoy the benefit of military assistance from America without properly paying for the aid they receive. “If the right person asked them, they’d pay a fortune,” Trump tells the assembled crowd, noting that the Saudis “have got nothing but money.”73 He does not explain in his speech how or why he is the “right person” to deal with the Saudi government regarding its domestic investments.
During his speech, Trump also makes a telling and unusual comment about the political situation inside Saudi Arabia that goes largely unnoticed at the time. Discussing the need for a new American leader who will deal differently with our traditional geopolitical competitors, Trump says of Saudi Arabia that it “is in big, big trouble. Now, thanks to fracking and other things, the oil is all over the place.”74 The comment—which implies that oil is now more plentiful in the United States and elsewhere due to advanced extraction techniques, and that Saudi Arabia’s economy will therefore have to quickly evolve to accommodate this new reality—is one of the more informed observations Trump makes in his announcement address.75 It is unclear what Trump would like to do as president to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s new vulnerability on energy issues, however. He avers that a new president can make decisions that force the Saudis to pay more money to the American government than they currently do, but he remains silent on how the Saudis’ need to eventually transition away from oil can be exploited by a new U.S. foreign policy. It is an open question that the first major recruit to Trump’s national security team, Michael Flynn, will shortly be able to assist him in answering—as Flynn by June 2015 is well aware that Saudi Arabia and its neighbor the United Arab Emirates are looking to move to nuclear power (see chapter 4).
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that in his announcement speech the chief clue Trump provides with respect to his agenda on Middle Eastern energy issues is his somewhat opaque interest in nuclear energy. “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work,” opines Trump, later adding, “We’ve got nuclear weapons that are obsolete.”76 Though the nuclear deal Obama has negotiated with the Iranians has by June 2015, per international inspectors, been successful at halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump echoes on June 16 the strongly held belief of the Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis that Obama’s negotiations will not “stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons”—implying that some more dramatic action will have to be taken to ensure an Iranian nuclear weapon never tilts the balance of power in the Middle East against America’s regional allies.77
Within three weeks of Trump’s announcement of his candidacy, his friend Thomas Barrack—the billionaire real estate investor who has called Trump “one of [his] oldest friends”—is telling associates at a business lunch on the French Riviera that he believes Trump will become president of the United States.78 At the time, Trump is facing off against at least sixteen Republicans who have declared their candidacies or else formed exploratory committees to consider a presidential run. Barrack’s lunch mates consequently scoff at his prediction. In the months to come, however, Barrack will make Trump winning the 2016 presidential election his “obsession,” according to Bloomberg, going so far as to “all but disappear[] from the company he’d founded in 1991 [Colony Capital] and built into one of the world’s highest-profile real estate firms.”79 His commitment to a Trump election victory is so unwavering that Trump will eventually name Barrack, post-election, his inaugural committee chairman—even as Barrack also regularly volunteers his New York City office for “sensitive” meetings of the presidential transition team (PTT) to avoid tipping off the many media outlets assembled in the Trump Tower lobby as to whom the PTT is meeting.80 Between his early support for Trump and his chairmanship of Trump’s inauguration, Barrack will also “help[] install [Paul Manafort] as head of Trump’s campaign,” engage in regular “strategy calls” with Trump, and initiate contact between Trump’s campaign and the United Arab Emirates (see chapter 4).81
During the same month Barrack is in the French Riviera discussing Trump’s candidacy with wealthy friends, a very wealthy man and his son arrive in the French Riviera for a holiday: King Salman and MBS, joined by an entourage of more than a thousand aides, advisers, assistants, and hangers-on.82 While in France, the young prince—who, as part of coming into his own as a royal power broker, has imposed draconian austerity measures on the Saudi government—spots and allegedly impulse-buys a 440-foot yacht owned by Yuri Shefler, a fugitive Russian vodka tycoon who is a longtime enemy of Vladimir Putin.83 MBS purchases the yacht for approximately $550 million, demanding that the Russian oligarch vacate the boat—at least one media outlet will say “kicking [him] off” it—on the day of the purchase.84 The power play is likely to please Putin, whom Shefler has “publicly battled for years” and began attacking in the press in 2014 for the Russian president’s annexation of Crimea, opining at the time that “it’s terrible when a country captures a neighbor’s territory. I feel sorry for the Crimean people.… [T]here are no laws in Russia. There is only one law in Russia, and it’s called ‘Putin.’ Only one justice, called ‘Putin.’”85
As Thomas Barrack is becoming deeply invested in Trump’s campaign, so too is another Republican billionaire: Erik Prince. Not long after Trump’s June 2015 announcement of his presidential candidacy, Prince—a longtime employee of MBZ—begins secretly advising the Trump campaign on foreign policy, despite never being named to any of Trump’s official foreign policy or national security teams and later telling Congress under oath that he had no role, official or unofficial, on the Trump campaign or Trump transition team. As to the latter claim, the truth, as Bloomberg will report in April 2017, is that Prince spent the transition period “providing advice to Trump’s inner circle, including his top national security adviser, Michael Flynn.”86 Bloomberg explains Prince’s assistance of the PTT by noting that “Trump was weakest in the area where the stakes were highest—foreign affairs. Among those his aides turned to was Prince.”87 Even so, it will be clear from the beginning of Prince’s advising of the Trump campaign in 2015 that neither Trump, Prince, nor anyone on the Trump team wants Prince’s involvement in the development of Trump’s foreign policy to be discovered; it is for this reason, Bloomberg notes, that after Election Day Prince always “entered Trump Tower through the back, like others who wanted to avoid the media spotlight, and huddled with members of the president-elect’s team to discuss intelligence and security issues.”88 The result: Prince, according to several sources familiar with his activities in November and December 2016, was “very much a presence” at Trump Tower during the post-election months.89 Despite this, a Prince spokesman in London will issue a prepared statement in response to the Bloomberg report, declaring that “Erik had no role on the transition team”—a statement that is technically true, as Trump never gave the longtime mercenary any formal PTT role.90 In his statement to Bloomberg, Prince also appears to accuse deep-state operatives in the intelligence community of illicitly monitoring his activities—an accusation that Trump will soon echo with respect to his own communications inside Trump Tower.91
Despite his public claims to the contrary, “over a two to three month period around the election,” writes Bloomberg, Prince was himself telling “several people that … his role was significant.”92 As for the transition period in particular, “current and former U.S. officials” say that “while Prince refrained from playing a direct role in the Trump transition, his name surfaced so frequently in internal discussions that he seemed to function as an outside adviser whose opinions were valued on a range of issues.”93
Bloomberg reports that the topics on which Erik Prince secretly advised the president-elect included, among others, terrorism, counterintelligence, and potential government appointees.94 While Prince’s meetings with the PTT usually began with Prince entering Trump Tower through its private back entrance, on occasion they occurred elsewhere; Bloomberg details one meeting between Prince and two PTT members on the Acela Express train from New York City to Washington.95 This “meeting” was attended by both Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s third and final campaign manager, and Kevin Harrington, a future member of Trump’s National Security Council.96 One of Bloomberg’s sources, a person close to Prince, tells the media outlet that “the discussions [Prince had with the campaign] were intended to remain private.”97
Prince was also in contact with Trump and his inner circle prior to the transition, however, and not just at various social-cum-political events attended by both Trump and Prince, such as Robert Mercer’s “Heroes and Villains” party or Trump’s election-night victory party.98 Despite telling Congress under oath that he “played no official or, really, unofficial role” on the Trump campaign, Prince also concedes that he donated to Trump, attended multiple Trump fundraisers (including some Trump attended), and, most importantly, wrote policy papers “on different foreign policy positions and … kicked them up into the adviser-sphere on what should be done on Middle Eastern or African counterterrorism issues.”99 Given that Prince had, in the early 2010s, all but run the United Arab Emirates’ military operations, and that his boss MBZ had participated in George Nader’s secret fall 2015 summit on the Red Sea—indeed, to put a finer point on it, that MBZ did business with Erik Prince via a $529 million contract to “help bring in foreign fighters [to the UAE] to help assemble an internal paramilitary force capable of carrying out secret operations and protecting Emirati installations”—Prince’s admission that he advised Trump on “Middle Eastern counterterrorism issues” prior to Election Day means that he was simultaneously a counterterrorism adviser to the UAE and to Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.100 This suggests that Trump and his inner circle had more pre-election interlocutors connected to members of the Red Sea Conspiracy than just Nader and Emirati ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba; Prince had access to Trump through his top advisers—including, according to Prince’s concession to Congress, Bannon and Flynn—for the whole of the presidential campaign.101
In March 2015, the Obama administration declines to enforce its “ambitious” conditions on the release of military aid to Egypt, sending several weapons systems to el-Sisi in Cairo after pleas from “Egypt’s regional allies—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates,” all of whom have “lobbied hard” against the hold.102
The following month, Donald Trump apparently has contact with alleged Kremlin spymaster Alexander Torshin at the annual NRA conference in Nashville. According to Business Insider, “Torshin tweeted in November 2015 that he knew ‘D. Trump (through NRA)’ … [and] later added that he saw Trump in Nashville, Tennessee in April 2015”; just eight weeks after the event in Nashville, Torshin’s protégé, Kremlin operative Maria Butina, will pose as a reporter at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in order to invite Trump to issue a televised public statement on Russian sanctions.103 The Russian woman’s unusual question to Trump—on an issue surely of limited interest to most U.S. voters—gives Trump an opportunity to declare in a televised public forum his categorical opposition to Russian sanctions. Within a month of his declaration, Trump will be contacted for an interview by a Russian digital media outlet run by former Duma member Konstantin Rykov, who has just registered two pro-Trump websites in Russia: Trump2016.ru and DonaldTrump2016.ru.104 Rykov, the founder of Moscow’s first and largest “dark web” brothel, is a friend of Artem Klyushin, who had been a part of Trump’s Moscow entourage during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant—an event during which kompromat of Trump with Russian prostitutes was allegedly acquired by the Agalarov family.105
At an Alabama campaign rally on August 21, 2015, a few weeks after FreedomFest, Trump says of the Saudis, “I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me, they spend $40 million, $50 million, am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”106 Nevertheless, Trump complains that the Saudi government “makes $1 billion a day [from oil revenues] … [but] we get nothing” in compensation for the military protection the U.S. military offers the kingdom.107 Trump’s statements will cause the Washington Post to write that “everything in foreign policy is personal with [Trump] … and he likes the Saudis. And why does he like them so much? Because they pay him.”108 Calling “appalling” Trump’s statement about liking wealthy Saudis—including Saudi royals—because they’re customers of his, the Post notes that Trump’s confession of venality is difficult to process even when heard several times: “Here you have a candidate for president of the United States saying that he is favorably disposed toward a foreign country because they have given him millions of dollars, and all but promising to shape American foreign policy in their favor for that very reason.”109
Only a few weeks after Trump implies that his foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia is influenced in part by his receipt of significant revenues from Saudi royals and other wealthy Saudis, MBS breaches international protocol to publicly embarrass President Obama during a press conference. At a September 2015 meeting in D.C. between President Obama, King Salman, and MBS, the young prince “delivers a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy” while sitting before the American president—an action considered a transgression under the conventions of international diplomacy because it is done in public.110 According to the Middle East Eye, within a matter of weeks of seeking to embarrass President Obama in this way, MBS is on a yacht in the Red Sea plotting with other Middle East leaders on how to strike a bargain with the man they hope will be Obama’s Republican successor.111
At around the same time that MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi are meeting on the Red Sea—and during the same period that Trump’s primary national security advisor, Michael Flynn, is working directly with the Saudis on what he calls a Middle East Marshall Plan to counter ISIS and Iran (see chapters 4 and 5)—Trump makes a startling statement at a campaign stop.112 On November 12, 2015, at a community college theater in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump tells the assembled crowd, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do. Believe me.”113 Trump also tells the crowd that he has a plan for defeating ISIS—but that it’s a secret.114 No one in the crowd could know that Trump’s top national security adviser at the time indeed had such a plan, let alone that it had been developed with direct input from the Saudis. Trump’s seeming willingness to listen to input from foreign agents over U.S. intelligence will be confirmed in February 2019, when it is revealed that in mid-2017 Trump told his intelligence briefers that on the question of whether North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-Un, had just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States, “I believe Putin.” The president of the Russian Federation was at the time was telling Trump, contrary to what the U.S. president was hearing from his own intelligence community, that no such launch had occurred.115 By July 2017, however, the Trump administration will have conceded that the launch did in fact take place.116
Just a matter of weeks after he meets with Nader, MBZ, and el-Sisi on the Red Sea, MBS announces, on December 14, 2015, a new “Saudi-led Islamic alliance to fight terrorism … and train, equip, and provide forces if necessary for the fight against Islamic State militants.”117 One of the men most likely to be intrigued by MBS’s new anti–Islamic State alliance is Michael Flynn, who sources in the American intelligence community will tell the New York Times in June 2017 was “willing [in 2015 and 2016] to be used by Russia if he could advance his views on forging a united front to battle the Islamic State.”118 A united front to battle the Islamic State is exactly what MBS is offering by mid-December 2015, and his proposed alliance will indeed require Russian assistance—as the Russians are already fighting the Islamic State in Syria, just as MBS’s Saudi-led coalition is hoping to do.
On December 2, less than two weeks before MBS’s announcement, Flynn and his son meet with Russian ambassador Kislyak at his home in Washington.119 According to emails later reviewed by the House Intelligence Committee, not only is the meeting set up by the Flynns rather than Kislyak, but Flynn Jr. contacts the Russian embassy following the meeting to describe the encounter as “very productive.”120 In May 2017, Reuters will report that, according to six “current and former U.S. officials,” “before the election, Kislyak’s undisclosed discussions with … Flynn focused on fighting terrorism and improving U.S.-Russian economic relations,” which the news outlet takes to mean an adjustment of the sanctions regime leveled on the Kremlin after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014.121 Prior to the Reuters report, it had not been known that Flynn secretly met with the Kremlin’s top agent in the United States during the presidential campaign, and, moreover, at a time when he was Trump’s top national security advisor.
Reuters makes a further revelation, however, that is even more surprising: that Flynn’s December 2015 face-to-face contact with Kislyak was not his only pre-election conversation with the Russian ambassador. As part of its reporting that in 2016 “there were at least 18 undisclosed calls and emails between Trump associates and Kremlin-linked people in the seven months before the November 8 presidential election, including six calls with Kislyak,” Reuters will note that two U.S. officials “familiar with those 18 contacts said Flynn … [was] among the Trump associates who spoke to the ambassador by telephone.”122 The report will also indicate that Jared Kushner spoke to Kislyak via telephone—and failed to report it—sometime between April 2016 and Election Day, with the exact date of the call unknown. According to Reuters, it is “not clear whether Kushner engaged with Kislyak on his own or with other Trump aides,” nor whether the call occurred before or after the nation learned, in mid-2016, that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.123
Flynn’s pre-election contacts with Kislyak involved even more than phone calls and a meeting at the Russian ambassador’s personal residence, however. In December 2018, a major investigative report by Mother Jones will reveal that in the months leading up to Election Day, Michael Flynn told close associates that he was having a series of clandestine contacts with Kislyak—contacts that apparently included not just phone calls but also texts and in-person contacts.124 The nature and timing of these contacts creates the appearance of Flynn “try[ing] to strike a ‘grand bargain’ with Moscow as it attacked the 2016 election,” writes Mother Jones—a particularly troubling prospect given that Flynn was present with Trump at the August 17, 2016, classified intelligence briefing at which Trump was thoroughly briefed on the scope of the Kremlin’s illegal election interference (see chapter 5).
The extent to which the “grand bargain” Flynn is discussing with the Russians in the weeks before the 2016 election is the same as the bargain discussed by MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi on the Red Sea a year earlier is unknown—but there are compelling indications that the two are in fact one and the same. Per Mother Jones, one of the Flynn associates who speaks with Flynn about his pre-election contacts with Kislyak reports that “Flynn discussed with Kislyak a grand bargain in which Moscow would cooperate with the Trump administration to resolve the Syrian conflict and Washington would end or ease up on the sanctions imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Ukraine.”125 A second Flynn associate tells Mother Jones that “Flynn said he had been talking to Kislyak about Syria, Iran, and other foreign policy matters that Russia and the United States could tackle together were Trump to be elected.”126 A third associate of Flynn’s speaks of identical subject matter being discussed by Flynn and Kislyak, without specifying the timing of the discussion: the “associate recalls that shortly after the election, Flynn told him he had been in contact with Kislyak about Syria,” writes Mother Jones.127 The Mueller Report will indicate, with respect to Flynn’s pattern of behavior in 2016, that his known telephonic negotiations with Kislyak in December 2016 only occurred after repeated check-ins with the campaign to be certain he was authorized to say what he planned to say.128 Whether Flynn followed a different protocol with respect to any pre-election negotiations he had with Kislyak is unknown.
The December 2018 report by Mother Jones, written by David Corn, author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, implicitly makes the case that—if Flynn indeed had the contacts he claims, and if he indeed sought approval for his pre-election Russia contacts just as he did for all his post-election ones—the Trump campaign committed the federal crime of “aiding and abetting” Russian election crimes after the fact, as it offered the Russian Federation policy inducements after it learned, via the briefing Trump and Flynn received in August 2017, that the Kremlin was committing crimes against the United States.129 Aiding and abetting a crime that has already been committed or is in the midst of commission is an act that falls under a different federal statute, with different statutory elements, than a before-the-fact “conspiracy”—the statutory offense investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller with respect to the Trump campaign and two Russian government entities, the Internet Research Agency and Russian military intelligence (GRU).130 As Corn writes for Mother Jones, if “Flynn held clandestine meetings or communications with Kislyak during the 2016 general election, it would mean Trump’s chief national security aide was secretly interacting with the representative of a foreign power as that government was mounting information and cyber warfare against the United States. Such an interaction could signal to the Vladimir Putin regime that Trump didn’t mind the Kremlin’s interference in the election and would be willing to work with Moscow despite its efforts to subvert the U.S. election.”131 Moreover, writes Corn, “If Flynn held such conversations with the Russian ambassador, this could have bolstered the Kremlin’s preference for Trump … especially if there was any talk of a sanctions-for-Syria deal.”132 Such actions could therefore be considered “inducement” under the federal aiding and abetting statute (18 U.S.C § 2), with their immediate and foreseeable effect being that the Kremlin would continue to commit computer crimes against the United States.133
Eight days after Michael Flynn and his son meet with Sergey Kislyak at his D.C. home in December 2015, and just four days prior to MBS’s announcement of a counterterrorism alliance almost certainly requiring Russian cooperation, Flynn—who is in contact with the Saudis on foreign policy issues (see chapter 5)—receives $45,000 from RT, the Kremlin-financed news network, to attend and speak at a gala event in Moscow; at the event, which his son also attends, Flynn dines with Vladimir Putin.134 As NBC News will note, Flynn was “already advising” Trump at the time of both his face-to-face meeting with Kislyak in D.C. and his face-to-face meeting with Putin in Moscow, and was almost certainly brought to Moscow because of that role. “It is not coincidence that Flynn was placed next to President Putin [at the RT gala],” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tells NBC in April 2017. “Flynn was considered a close Trump adviser. Why else would they want him there?”135 Whether Flynn and Putin discuss in more detail the secret counterterrorism plan Trump had hinted at in Iowa four weeks earlier—a plan the evidence suggests was Flynn’s—is unknown.
While in Moscow, Flynn “trie[s] repeatedly to meet officers at the C.I.A.’s station in Moscow—housed inside the American Embassy—to press for closer ties with Russia’s spies.”136 The CIA declines to have anyone meet with him, however.137
In his address to an audience of influential Muscovites at the RT gala, Flynn offers a plan for the Middle East consistent with the contours of the Red Sea Conspiracy that George Nader had (with the assistance of MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi) orchestrated just weeks earlier. In Flynn’s own words, “I basically told the audience that Russia should get Iran to back out of the proxy wars that Iran is running so we [can] stabilize the Middle East. That was my whole purpose for going.”138 The plan for “stabilizing the Middle East” Flynn presents in Moscow in December 2015 will mirror the so-called Middle East Marshall Plan Flynn supports a year later as Trump’s designated national security advisor (see chapter 7).139 The plan calls for “Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin … [to] cooperate on a project that would boost Middle East economies” by “ending Ukraine’s opposition to lifting sanctions on Russia by giving a Ukrainian company a $45 billion contract to provide turbine generators for [nuclear] reactors to be built in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations. The contract to state-owned Turboatom, and loans to Ukraine from Gulf Arab states, would ‘require Ukraine to support lifting United States and European Union sanctions on Russia.’”140
That Flynn in December 2015 would have wanted to relay to Sergey Kislyak in D.C. and Vladimir Putin in Moscow the same Middle East Marshall Plan that he was then supporting and would still be supporting in November 2016 is nearly certain. The reason: Flynn was working in secret for an American company called ACU Strategic Partners on a closely related plan from summer 2015 through at least June 2016—and indeed, other documents will suggest, until he was fired as Trump’s national security advisor in February 2017.141
In summer 2015, Flynn had taken a trip to Saudi Arabia to “talk about nuclear power plants”; shortly thereafter, “the Saudis made a $100 billion deal with the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, to build 16 nuclear power units.”142 Documents subsequently produced confirm, according to McClatchy DC, that Flynn made his trip to Saudi Arabia “on behalf of a U.S./Russia business plan to build nuclear reactors.”143 According to Newsweek and McClatchy, Flynn’s summer 2015 trip was part of a “joint venture … involv[ing] U.S. companies, a Russian state-sponsored company, and Saudi financing, and was geared towards providing nuclear power to the Arab world.”144 One indication that Flynn sees the complications inherent in attempting to broker such a transnational deal is that he fails to disclose this trip to Saudi Arabia when he seeks a new federal security clearance in late 2016.145 Moreover, he fails to properly disclose a second, October 2015 trip to Saudi Arabia that is part of the same joint venture. In hiding the details of this second trip from federal authorities, he makes up the name of the hotel he allegedly stayed at, and obscures his business interests in Saudi Arabia under the false claim that he was in the kingdom “for six days to speak at a conference.”146 He also fails to disclose the identity of the “friend” who traveled with him to Saudi Arabia and the company that paid for his trip.147 It is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison per offense to “knowingly falsify or conceal a material fact” on a federal security clearance application.148
Flynn makes at least two additional trips for ACU during the summer of 2015: one trip to Egypt and one to Israel, both in June.149 The Washington Post confirms that these trips are related to the same joint venture as Flynn’s trip to Saudi Arabia, that being ACU’s “hope[] to build more than two dozen nuclear plants in [the Middle East], in partnership with Russian interests.”150 As with his trip to Saudi Arabia, Flynn will fail to disclose these Middle Eastern business trips: federal law requires that all such trips be disclosed in security clearance paperwork.151 It is unclear why Flynn would want to hide his efforts to connect the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel just a matter of weeks before becoming an adviser to the Trump campaign in August 2015, though it is noteworthy that within a month of Flynn’s return from his trips to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel Trump publicly announces his opposition to sanctions on Russia—a prerequisite for broader cooperation between the very countries Flynn was at the time secretly working with.152 That Maria Butina (the Russian “journalist” whose question at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas in July 2015 allows Trump to express his opposition to U.S. sanctions on Russia) is indicted as an unregistered Kremlin agent three years later further complicates all of these events.153
Shortly after ACU’s managing director, Alex Copson, hires Flynn in April 2015, Flynn begins linking ACU’s multinational nuclear power deal to American national security, “warning publicly,” according to the Washington Post, “that America’s national security would be at risk if the United States allowed Russia and other countries to spearhead nuclear energy projects in the Middle East”—though his odd solution to the problem is to partner with Russia, rather than to supplant it as the major player in the Middle East energy market or else flatly oppose any nuclearization of the Middle East altogether.154 In Israel in June 2015, Flynn “assure[s] Israeli officials that ACU’s plan [to contract Ukrainians to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East as part of a deal that would end Russian sanctions] could prevent Israel’s enemies from obtaining material for nuclear weapons”—an apparent reference to Iran, which just weeks later will announce the “nuclear deal” with the Obama administration aimed at curtailing its nuclear weapons program.155 The rhetorical link Flynn seeks to establish between his 2015 and 2016 private consulting arrangements and America’s national security offers significant intelligence on what Flynn might have discussed with Trump when the two men first met at Trump Tower, at Trump’s invitation, in August 2015—and what Trump may have been referring to when he said in Iowa that November, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do.”
As Lawfare has observed, “In order for [the ACU] deal to go through, Flynn would have to convince the Trump administration to ‘rip up’ the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration on Russia for their interference in the U.S. election,” so it is little surprise that by December 2017, as the digital media outlet notes, “a whistleblower has come forward with information suggesting that Flynn’s true motive to soften these sanctions wasn’t to ease tensions with Russia, but to further the financial interests of those selling these reactors.”156 Just as significant, Flynn’s advocacy with ACU for a nuclear deal involving Russian entities, and later for a similar deal—with another company, IP3—involving Chinese entities, poses a clear national security threat as, per the report in Lawfare, while “U.S. civilian nuclear technology sales require significant national security provisions … Russian and Chinese technology agreements do not.”157 Specifically, deals involving American nuclear technology require what is called a “123 agreement,” an Atomic Energy Act–derived standard that precludes American materials and technology from being developed into nuclear weapons when sold to a foreign power.158
To the extent the “consortium” idea Flynn was advocating around the globe in 2015 and 2016 opened the door to sales of U.S. nuclear materials and technology without a 123 agreement—and to the extent Flynn was simultaneously opposing the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, which was provably curtailing Iran’s nuclear program—the retired lieutenant general’s foreign policy agenda has made more likely a nuclear confrontation in the Middle East in the medium term.159 In a September 2015 interview with the New York Observer, whose owner and publisher at the time was Jared Kushner, Flynn laid out his idiosyncratic plan for nuclear weapons in the Middle East: “Open the entire region to nuclear energy to neutralize Iran from starting a nuclear weapons arm[s] race in the region. Have other nations outside the region, such as Russia or the U.S., conduct the advanced levels of the nuclear in and out fuel cycle processing required to create a nuclear energy program.”160 That Flynn was ambivalent about whether the United States or Russia should oversee the accelerated nuclearization of the world’s most volatile region could not have come as anything but a shock to the U.S. Defense Department and Department of Energy when Flynn first aired the view in mid-2015, which may offer an additional explanation for why President Obama advised President-elect Trump to keep Flynn out of the White House in the forty-eight hours after the 2016 election.161
Trump had not spent the 2016 general election backing denuclearization in the Middle East and around the world, however; instead, he had argued that the United States must “renovate and modernize” its nuclear arsenal, at one point even advocating for precisely the view of a nuclearized Middle East Flynn had been advancing both in the media and behind closed doors: that Saudi Arabia should have not just nuclear energy but nuclear weapons.162 As early as a CNN town hall event in March 2016, Trump indicates that Saudi Arabia could “absolutely” be in line for nuclear weapons, with two proffered justifications: first, that the United States would otherwise be paying for Saudi Arabia’s defense, and second, that Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons “is going to happen anyway. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time.”163 The first of these two justifications for arming the Saudis with nuclear weapons calls to mind Trump’s repeated claims on Twitter that Saudi Arabia does not pay enough for its own defense; these complaints, along with his statement on CNN, may well have served as a signal to the Saudis—and their allies—that as president Trump would get out of their way if they ever sought to begin arming themselves in “self-defense.”
Flynn’s 2015 and 2016 policy prescriptions for Saudi Arabian energy and nuclear weapons development would not merely impact Riyadh, however. Lawfare explains that, “in 2009, the United Arab Emirates voluntarily included a legally binding provision to its 123 agreement to never acquire or develop enrichment and reprocessing technology. The agreement also bound the U.S. to impose those same conditions in future agreements on other countries in the region, or if not, to lift them on the UAE.”164 MBZ therefore knows, in 2015, that any decision the U.S. government makes on nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia—including a decision to allow or even encourage Saudi Arabia to pursue nuclear weapons—applies to the UAE as well. Moreover, Egypt, another member of the Red Sea Conspiracy, has a clause identical to the Emiratis’ in its own nuclear agreements with the United States.165
As Vladimir Putin is hosting Michael Flynn in Moscow on December 10, 2015, the Kremlin is also playing host to other individuals central to Trump’s campaign: top officials at the National Rifle Association (NRA) who make a trip to the Russian capital, from December 8 through December 13, that is jointly orchestrated by the organization and U.S.-dwelling Kremlin operative Maria Butina.166 In Moscow, the NRA officials and some of their most prominent U.S. supporters—a travel group that includes former NRA president David Keene, future NRA president Pete Brownell, NRA fundraiser Joe Gregory, NRA “benefactor” Arnold Goldschlager, and high-profile Trump surrogate David Clarke—meet with Kremlin officials. The NRA pays for the group’s travel expenses and for the gifts they present to their Kremlin hosts.167 Keene in particular is interested in securing a “private interview” with Putin.168
According to the Daily Beast, Maria Butina’s boyfriend, GOP operative Paul Erickson—who will later be indicted for wire fraud and money laundering—exchanges emails with certain of the NRA travelers prior to their Moscow trip. The emails reveal that the officials “believed they were meeting with Kremlin power players who could influence the country’s president.”169 The reason officials at the NRA would want to “influence” Putin is likewise revealed in Erickson’s emails: the GOP operative’s plan, apparently embraced by the NRA brass with whom he spoke, was to “creat[e] a way for the Kremlin to connect with a future Republican president.”170 Because U.S. presidents ordinarily can call other world leaders at will, the implication in the Erickson-NRA effort is that the channel they wish to create to the Kremlin is a covert back channel—an ambition that carries with it the desire to hide GOP-Kremlin contacts from the American public, U.S. media, the U.S. intelligence community, or all three. Indeed, Erickson will represent in his emails to the NRA officials—possibly on intelligence received, at least in part, from his Russian girlfriend—that “Russia believes that high-level contacts with the NRA might be the best means of neutral introduction to … the next American President.”171 Erickson underscores that the officials’ Moscow trip therefore has “enormous diplomatic consequences.”172 He adds that the Kremlin’s interest is only in communicating via back channel with a Republican president, and that nothing he has said to NRA representatives applies if the next U.S. president is a Democrat.173
Among the Kremlin officials the NRA delegation meets in Moscow are Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister—whose ministry will make contact with the Trump campaign using Ivan Timofeev and Joseph Mifsud as cutouts just ninety days later—deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, and Dimitri Simes’s Russian Central Bank contact (and its deputy governor) Alexander Torshin, who will later be accused by federal prosecutors, as an unnamed and unindicted co-conspirator, of being Maria Butina’s handler in the United States.174 Many of those the NRA officials meet with, including Rogozin and Torshin, will later be sanctioned by the United States as punishment for the Kremlin’s election hacking and interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.175 As for the NRA, it will ultimately contribute at least $30 million toward Trump’s election, a sum still being investigated by both media and federal law enforcement as possibly having been illegally commingled with “Russian money.”176
More of Trump’s lucrative but clandestine connections to the NRA will surface in 2019, when the Daily Beast reveals that “the Trump 2020 campaign is reportedly using a shell company to buy ads in coordination with the National Rifle Association, using the same potentially illegal techniques as the 2016 campaign.”177
On April 7, 2015—eight months before he hosts NRA officials in Moscow—Torshin, along with Butina, is introduced by Simes to Federal Reserve vice chairman Nathan Sheets and treasury undersecretary for international affairs Stanley Fischer.178 Not long after these meetings between two Kremlin agents and two of America’s top public financial institutions, the Kremlin makes its first contact with a unit of the Treasury Department, the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, to propose what it calls the “ISIL Project”: an information-sharing agreement between the Kremlin and the United States focused on “financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS.”179 Incredibly, officials within the Treasury Department agree to the Kremlin’s proposed project using “a Gmail backchannel with the Russian government”—a channel that thereafter will be used by Kremlin agents not to track ISIS but to “press[] their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens … [including] sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin.”180 That the Kremlin is seeking information on the Ziff brothers months before it releases a summary of its principal conclusions on the subject to the Trump campaign only underscores how seriously the Kremlin takes this research. Indeed, U.S. intelligence officials have since said that the Russian outreach to the Obama administration’s Treasury Department in 2015 was by 2016 almost certainly an espionage operation directly orchestrated by Russian intelligence.182 The Treasury Department has “refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents [to the Kremlin] in response.”183 The Kremlin’s 2015 espionage, and the Treasury Department’s silence over what it ultimately disclosed to the Russians, does suggest that by the time Kremlin agents arrived at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, they knew or had good reason to suspect that the individuals on whom they would be providing the Trump campaign so much information, the Ziff brothers, were indeed Clinton donors.
In February 2015, two months before he sets up a meeting between Torshin and Butina and Treasury and Federal Reserve personnel Fischer and Sheets—and just over a year before he becomes a key Trump campaign national security and foreign policy adviser—Dimitri Simes, along with the Russian-born publisher of the Center for the National Interest’s in-house publication, the National Interest, travel to Moscow to meet personally with Vladimir Putin.184 While it is unknown what Simes, his publisher, and Putin discuss in Moscow, that it may well have involved Donald Trump is underscored by the fact that, in the same month Trump announces his presidential run, Simes publishes an article by Butina stating that “certain U.S. politicians and Russians share many common interests,” an article that at the time appears to apply only to one GOP candidate: a New York City businessman with a surprisingly sunny view of both the Russian Federation and its president.185
When the Mueller Report reveals, in April 2019, that Simes acted as perhaps the Trump campaign’s most indispensable adviser on Russia, it will give many Americans an opportunity to learn about the Soviet-born think tank director and his Center for the National Interest for the first time. Simes’s center was founded by former president Richard Nixon as the Nixon Center in 1994; Nixon personally installed Simes as the president and chief executive of the conservative think tank that year.186 In 2011, the center changed its name to the Center for the National Interest, but the Nixon family remains closely involved in the think tank, with Julie Nixon Eisenhower—whose brother-in-law is Ed Cox, the New York state GOP chairman who introduced Carter Page to Trump’s campaign—sitting on CNI’s board along with Simes, his fellow Trump adviser Richard Burt, and (by spring 2016) Jeff Sessions, head of Trump’s Simes-concocted national security advisory committee.187
Simes’s decades at the Nixon Center/Center for the National Interest apparently also include contact with Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, the onetime Manafort boss who infamously said, “I don’t separate myself from the [Russian] state.”188 In 2005, when Deripaska, as part of his push to transform Western perceptions of Putin’s regime, approached Paul Manafort for this task, he also reportedly sought out Simes and the Nixon Center; in 1972, President Nixon had famously worked toward a long-term détente with the Soviet Union at a conference in Moscow—a conference also attended by Ed Cox and the honorary chairman of CNI during the 2016 presidential campaign, Henry Kissinger, who helps facilitate the first meeting between Kushner and Simes in March 2016.189 Simes, described in 2005 in Kommersant—Russia’s largest business daily—as “close to Vladimir Putin,” meets with Deripaska in 2005 at a time when, according to both the Moscow Times and Kommersant, the oligarch was considering whether to “bankroll a new think tank in Washington to focus on Russian issues,” with “Moscow hop[ing] for a ‘well-disposed’ approach … [to] Russian present-day life.”190 Deripaska’s—and Putin’s—evident hope in 2005 was that any resulting think tank would aspire to have the same effect as the public relations campaign for which Deripaska had just begun paying Paul Manafort. According to the Mueller Report, “A [Manafort & Davis Consulting] memorandum describing work that Manafort performed for Deripaska in 2005 regarding the post-Soviet republics referenced the need to brief the Kremlin and the benefits that the work could confer on ‘the Putin Government.’”191
According to Kommersant, the Kremlin’s proposed new think tank was the “brainchild of [Kremlin political consultant] Gleb Pavlovsky and Dimitri Simes”—and Pavlovsky, for his part, was interested in working with Deripaska.192 Simes, while approvingly citing as “background” for such a project the then developing plans for an English-language version of the state-owned RT (plans that called for, per Simes, “a 24-hour, English news channel funded by the Kremlin”), nevertheless expressed uncertainty about whether a Deripaska-funded think tank would be received as credible by the D.C. political establishment. That Simes was willing to discuss a new pro-Kremlin think tank with Kremlin agents in 2005 is clear, however: as the Moscow Times would report at the time, citing Deripaska by name as a potential funder of the project, “Plans are in the works to set up a Washington-based think tank that would be funded with Russian money and combat the U.S. perception of Russia ‘as a bad pupil,’ Kremlin-connected consultant Gleb Pavlovsky said Monday.”193 It is telling that Simes’s co-ideator in envisioning this prospective pro-Kremlin think tank (indeed, a man the Nixon Center actually contracted with for this purpose) was a “Kremlin-connected consultant” whom Simes’s think tank had “paid for … [along with] several other Russian political analysts to visit Washington in November [2005] for a research project.”194 Given Simes’s and Pavlovsky’s “closeness” with Putin at the time, Simes could have had no illusions about Pavlovsky—a man Vanity Fair has since called a “Kremlin political consultant and manipulator.”195 Pavlovsky has even bragged publicly about working with Putin in Russia on a “strategy” to get “everyone … thinking the way we want[] them to.”196
Whether or not the Kremlin’s imagined institute ever progressed beyond the ideation stage, that Deripaska was associated in international media as a possible patron for a pro-Kremlin Simes-Pavlovsky think tank project at the very same time the Russian oligarch was acting as Manafort’s patron for a pro-Kremlin public relations project is deeply troubling. Manafort would go on, a little over a decade later, to be Donald Trump’s campaign manager, even as Simes would, at the same point in Trump’s campaign—March 2016—appear in Trump’s orbit as the GOP candidate’s top behind-the-scenes adviser on Russia; moreover, Manafort is the Trump campaign official who “enlisted” CNI board member Richard Burt to “join Trump’s campaign and help[] draft his [foreign policy] speech” at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016.197 While it is unclear whether Simes ever developed, like Manafort, a long-term relationship with Deripaska, he clearly stayed in touch with Pavlovsky after 2005, inviting him to a conference hosted by CNI in 2008.198
In 2013, less than sixty days before Trump was to arrive in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant—an event during which Trump himself said he expected to meet with Putin, a meeting that he had been promised by his Russian business partner—Simes “graced the stage alongside Putin [in Russia] at the Valdai International Discussion Club, a conference … frequented almost exclusively by Putin apologists. At Valdai, Putin referred to Simes as his ‘American friend and colleague,’” and Simes, for his part, said he “fully support[ed]” Putin’s “tough stance” on the Syrian civil war.199
Within a few weeks of returning to the United States from his 2013 visit to Moscow, Trump is talking to New York state GOP politicos about his political ambitions. Chief among Trump’s advisers on his possible run for governor of New York is Ed Cox, connected to the board of Simes’s CNI through his sister-in-law and from having worked alongside honorary CNI chairman Kissinger; Cox will, oddly, become the first person in the New York State Republican Party to voice to his peers that he does not believe the governorship is the job Trump really wants.200 In March 2014, Cox meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the businessman’s political future; while the content of their conversation is unknown, within days of Cox leaving Mar-a-Lago Trump announces on Twitter that he has “much bigger [political] plans in mind” than the governorship of New York, and that readers should “stay tuned” because his new political plans “will happen.”201 It is Trump’s first public indication that he will eventually declare his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Trump communications adviser Michael Caputo will later say that, when Trump was deciding between the New York governor’s race or a run for the presidency, the man whose actions most clearly forced Trump down the latter path was the CNI-connected Ed Cox.202
Twenty-one months after his consequential meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Cox is responsible for Carter Page being the first hire for what eventually becomes (at Simes’s urging) Trump’s national security advisory committee.203 At the time Cox recommends Page, the energy consultant is less than a year removed from admitting to federal agents that he transferred nonpublic information about the U.S. energy sector to two men he knew were Russian spies. Page, like Cox, also has an evident connection to Simes’s center: like CNI board member Richard Burt, Page has for years been involved with Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom.204 Page and Burt end up not merely as Trump campaign Russia advisers but as two of the key writers and editors—along with Stephen Miller, George Papadopoulos, and Simes—of Trump’s Russia policy.205 While Page’s path to involvement in the Trump campaign runs through Ed Cox, Burt’s path, per Politico, runs through Manafort.206 The monthslong formalizing and public dissemination of Trump’s pro-Kremlin foreign policy that begins in March 2016 is therefore a joint effort of Simes, Kushner, and Manafort, with Burt and a small number of individuals on the national security committee Simes and Kushner conceived of in mid-March acting as executors of the policy: Sessions, Gordon, Page, and Papadopoulos.
When one of Simes’s key Kremlin contacts in the United States, Maria Butina, is arrested in Virginia in August 2018, the reaction of the Trump campaign’s trusted Russia adviser is telling.207 Within a matter of days, Simes, a man the Washington Post calls “the Washington expert most well connected in Moscow and whose organization [CNI] provides a unique link between the two cities’ elite,” leaves the United States for Moscow—and a job running a political talk show on a Kremlin-owned television network for a mid-six-figure salary.208 The sudden disappearance of the “native Russian” (as Bloomberg describes him) from the day-to-day operations of the Center for the National Interest catches his assistants and employees entirely unaware; per the Washington Post, “Many organization employees were shocked when, in mid-2018 … Simes decided to take a job co-hosting a prime-time news and analysis show on Channel 1, a major Russian television network that is majority-owned by the Russian government. The new job suddenly focused a spotlight on Simes’s ties to Moscow.”209 The Kremlin-funded, Moscow-based television program Simes now co-hosts is called Bolshaya Igra (The Great Game), a reference to the high-stakes, decades-long diplomatic cat-and-mouse game that the Russian Empire played with the West in the nineteenth century, with Russia’s ambition throughout being the establishment of an even larger empire than it already had—and the frustration of the British Empire’s similar designs.210 Numerous media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, begin writing stories shortly after Simes’s show premieres in September 2018 indicating that Russia is, under Putin, “back in the ‘Great Game’”—but this time with the United States as its chief adversary.211 That Trump’s chief campaign adviser on Russia now runs the television edition of the Kremlin’s “Great Game” on behalf of Vladimir Putin can give no comfort to those who fear that Simes’s advice to the Trump campaign was given implicitly or explicitly at the Kremlin’s bidding. Indeed, the sight of Simes and his co-host Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, chatting with Kremlin officials like Sergey Lavrov—the man the Steele dossier alleges coordinated Russian election interference in 2016, and to whom Trump boasted about firing FBI director James Comey over the Russia investigation in 2017—is surely unsettling to many.212
Lavrov’s appearance on Simes’s Kremlin-run talk show isn’t the first time the two men have sat down together since Trump’s election, however. In late February 2017, almost immediately after Trump finally fires his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Simes travels to Russia to meet with Lavrov.213 The two men discuss the ongoing Russia investigation being conducted by the FBI, including the danger that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak will be caught up in it. Simes is well aware that Kislyak will be named in the investigation, as he has facilitated the Kremlin agent’s contacts with the Trump campaign in the past.214 Within 120 days of the Simes-Lavrov meeting in Russia, Kislyak will be recalled to Moscow by Putin, putting him beyond the reach of special counsel Mueller.215
In December 2015, Michael Flynn dines in Moscow with Putin, Putin’s spokesman and “de facto national security adviser” Dmitry Peskov, and Sergey Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff—two of whom (Putin and Ivanov) are under U.S. sanctions at the time. All three Russians are men who, just a few weeks later, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen will consider central to closing a Trump Tower Moscow deal.216 According to emails released to and summarized by international media, in January 2016 Cohen emails Peskov “to request a meeting either with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s then-chief of staff Sergey Ivanov or Peskov himself”; in a telephone response, Peskov’s office invites Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg economic forum in June 2016, an event at which Felix Sater (Cohen’s conduit to the Kremlin) says the Trump attorney may be able to meet, via Peskov’s introduction, Putin himself.217
Part of Sater and Cohen’s plan to secure a Trump Tower Moscow deal is to offer Putin a $50 million penthouse to entice him to approve the development—as his approval is essential to the Trump Organization proceeding with the deal with Russian businessman Andrey Rozov.218 As Sater tells Cohen across two November 3, 2015, emails, if Trump can close the Trump Tower Moscow deal after a meeting with Putin, Putin will be more likely to support his presidential candidacy, a premise that takes on a sinister cast in light of Sater’s proven access to Kremlin officials and the illegal hacking and propaganda campaigns the Kremlin has, by late 2015, already initiated. As Sater explains it to Cohen in November, if “Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon-cutting for Trump [Tower] Moscow,” Trump will be proving—not to American voters but to Putin—that, unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump “doesn’t stare down, he negotiates.”219 Sater adds that, as to the 2016 presidential campaign and the ongoing U.S.-Russia diplomacy that will necessarily succeed it, “Putin only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader.” As Sater, presumably searching for additional euphemisms for the dropping of sanctions on Russia, summarizes the philosophy that he believes both Putin and Trump share, “Business, politics, whatever … it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal.”220 In the United States, the sort of juxtaposition of business and politics Sater describes is often chargeable as bribery under 18 U.S.C. § 201; bribery is also one of the two enumerated impeachable offenses in the U.S. Constitution.221
Sater has an additional reason to urge Trump to please Putin, however: there are early indications that, due to the intended height of the tower Trump intends to build with Rozov, direct approval from the Russian government is actually needed as a matter of Russian law.222 This, as well as Sater’s proposed commingling of personal profit and presidential politics, may explain in part why Sater tells Cohen that the Trump-Kremlin negotiations over the Trump-Rozov tower are “very sensitive” and are being conducted, through Sater, with “Putin[’]s very very close people.”223 In one October 2015 email Sater is even more direct with Cohen, writing that “we need … Putin on board.”224 As for Trump’s views on the matter, the GOP presidential candidate expresses during his presidential campaign the same degree of comfort as Sater with the fusion of moneymaking and policymaking, telling his lawyer Cohen at one point that his candidacy is an “infomercial” for the Trump Organization with respect to potential new business clients—including, as by then would have been clear to both Trump and Cohen, Russian nationals.225
After telling media in October 2017 that “he received [Cohen’s January 2016] email but did not reply … [and does] not remember any discussions about Cohen attending the St. Petersburg economic forum,” Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov will, in November 2018—once Cohen has pled guilty to federal crimes and admitted the truth of his contacts with the Kremlin—reveal that his office at the Kremlin “told [Cohen and the Trump Organization] that … if they want to invest in Russia we will be happy to see them at [the] St. Petersburg [International] Economic Forum” in mid-June 2016, an invite-only event.226
November 2018 is also the month that the Department of Justice announces that “Russian trolls are interfering online with the [2018] midterm” elections, further undercutting Trump’s statement from a few months earlier—made while standing beside Putin himself in Helsinki, Finland—that “I don’t see why it would be Russia” interfering in U.S. elections. It is a statement Trump will try to walk back shortly thereafter, following significant outcry in U.S. media, by contending that what he meant to say was, “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be Russia.”227 A Senate report published before the 2018 midterms will declare that, prior to those elections, “Kremlin-linked trolls consistently push[ed] narratives supportive of President Donald Trump and critical of impeachment talk.”228
When the Mueller Report on Russian election interference and allegations of obstruction of justice against Trump is released to the public, with redactions, in April 2019, Americans will learn much more about Cohen’s 2015 and 2016 efforts to help Trump build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The report will reveal not only that Cohen did “provide updates directly to Trump throughout 2015 and 2016” but that their conversations about the project “were not off-hand … because the project had the potential to be so lucrative.”229 It will also reveal that, according to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, discussions between Trump, Cohen, and the Kremlin about a Trump Tower Moscow “went on throughout 2016 … the president can remember having conversations with him [Cohen] about it.… The president also remembers … could be [the conversations went] up to as far as October, November [2016].”230 At another point in the report Giuliani is quoted as saying that, according to what Trump told him, discussions of Trump Tower Moscow were “going on from the day I announced [in June 2015] to the day I won [in November 2016].”231 On November 29, 2018, when pressed on whether it was appropriate for him to be negotiating a business deal with the Kremlin while running for president on a pro-Russia foreign policy and claiming to have no involvement with Russia at all, Trump tells members of the media, “It doesn’t matter because I was allowed to do whatever I wanted during the campaign.”232
It is consistent with this mantra—one Trump only reveals post-election—that on November 2, 2015, the candidate secretly signs a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow that he believes will require Kremlin approval, even though he is in the midst of a presidential campaign in which the formulation of and basis for his foreign policy, particularly with respect to Russia, has already become a topic of public discussion.
Within ten days of Trump signing the letter of intent with prospective Russian business partner Andrey Rozov, Ivanka Trump receives an email from Lana Erchova, the wife of the Russian energy minister’s former press secretary, Dmitry Klokov.233 At the time Ivanka receives the email, Klokov is working for the Russian government as director of external communications for the state-owned “Federal Grid Company of Unified Energy System [sic].”234 Klokov offers his “assistance” to the Trump campaign through his wife’s email to Ivanka, who forwards the email to Cohen, who thereafter has multiple contacts with Klokov about helping the Trump campaign achieve “synergy on a government level” with the Russian Federation through a meeting in Russia between Trump and Putin.235 Rather than rebuffing the offer of a face-to-face meeting with the Russian president for then-candidate Trump, Cohen discusses with Klokov his desire to do “site surveys” for the Trump Tower Moscow project and to speak to “local developers” in Moscow, adding that he would like to meet with Klokov on Trump’s behalf, or have Trump himself travel to Moscow as part of an “official” visit (a visit pursuant to a formal invitation from the Kremlin).236 Klokov’s insistence that the visit “has to be informal” suggests that he understands that what Trump’s attorney is suggesting is both politically and diplomatically improper.237
In his several interactions with Cohen, Klokov is coy about the entangling of business and politics, at one point insisting that he must “separate their negotiations over a possible meeting between Trump and [Putin] from any existing business track,” even as at another point in the conversation he emphasizes to Cohen that a Trump-Putin summit would be publicized in such a way as to have a “phenomenal” impact on the “business dimension” of Trump’s interest in the Russian president, and that Putin’s prospective support for Trump would have, as the Mueller Report quotes Klokov, “significant ramifications for the ‘level of projects [Trump can do in Russia] and their capacity.’”238 Klokov’s message is clear: if Trump can please Putin and earn his support, Putin can ensure that Trump enjoys nearly boundless business opportunities in Russia. While Klokov may be correct in telling Trump’s lawyer that there is “no bigger warranty in any [Russian building] project than the consent of the person of interest”—Klokov’s euphemistic appellation for Putin—in America’s legal and political systems affairs of state are conducted differently, a fact neither Cohen nor Klokov acknowledges in their negotiations despite the involvement, in the deal they are discussing, of a candidate for the U.S. presidency.239
That the Cohen-Klokov discussion is part of a Kremlin effort to bribe Trump is made clear by a subsequent email from Erchova to the special counsel’s office, in which the Russian national confirms that her then husband (they have since divorced) was offering Trump “cooperation … on behalf of … Russian officials.”240 She adds that these “officials” wanted, among other things, to offer Trump “land in Crimea” alongside the benefit of an “unofficial” meeting with Putin.241
Less than two months after declining to pursue Klokov’s offer, Cohen decides to contact the Kremlin directly to win its support for Trump Tower Moscow.242 His “ask” of the Kremlin ultimately goes beyond “support,” however; he tells a Kremlin agent from the office of Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, Elena Poliakova, that he wants the Kremlin to help Trump with “securing land to build the project and with financing,” according to the Mueller Report.243 Poliakova promises to follow up on the Trump Organization’s request. Within twenty-four hours, the Kremlin has gotten in touch with its intermediary to Trump’s business, Sater, who thereafter tells Cohen that he has the necessary permission to arrange for, as the Mueller Report will describe it, “an invitation … signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ” for Cohen to travel to “Moscow for a working visit” about the “prospects of development and the construction business in Russia,” “the various land plots available suited for construction of this enormous Tower,” and “the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by Mr. Donald Trump.”244 Though the invitation Sater secures will be signed by an agent of MHJ, Sater explains, the actual host of Trump’s trip to Moscow would be VTB, one of the largest state-owned banks in Russia and—at the time of its prospective invitation to Cohen—an entity subject to the very sanctions the Kremlin wants Trump to eliminate if he wins election in November 2016.245 Sater explains that VTB is merely being used as a front for the Kremlin, however, as VTB is allowed to discuss financing for a Trump Tower Moscow but “politically neither Putin’s office nor [the Russian] Ministry of Foreign Affairs cannot [sic] issue [an] invite, so they are inviting [you] commercially/business.”246 Most startlingly, Sater tells Cohen that not only will VTB CEO Andrey Kostin be present at Cohen’s meetings in Moscow, but so too will Putin himself.247 The presence of Kostin at the meetings, Sater explains, is to make each meeting plausibly “a business meeting not political.”248 Cohen’s plans to travel to Moscow to meet Kostin and Putin get as far as Cohen sending his passport to Sater and acquiring Trump’s passport from Trump’s personal secretary.249 Cohen tells Sater that Trump will travel to Moscow “once he becomes the nominee[,] after the convention.”250
On May 5, 2016, just as Trump is clinching the GOP nomination for president, Sater informs Cohen that the Kremlin’s press secretary, Peskov, wants to personally invite Cohen to be his “guest” at the St. Petersburg economic forum from June 16 to June 19. According to Sater, Peskov “wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or [Russian Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev … the entire business class of Russia will be there as well. He [Peskov] said anything you want to discuss including dates and subjects are on the table to discuss.”251 By early June, Sater is telling Cohen there is a “very strong chance” that he will meet Putin in St. Petersburg.252 On June 14—the day it is revealed that Russian government hackers have penetrated the DNC and stolen materials from the committee—Cohen informs Sater he will not be traveling to St. Petersburg after all.253 Cohen will subsequently tell the special counsel’s office that his only reason for declining Peskov’s personal invitation to attend the St. Petersburg economic forum was that he suddenly decided, on June 14, that “Russian officials were not actually … interested in meeting with him”—a view strongly contradicted by the whole of the Kremlin’s correspondence with him through Sater.254 Cohen appears to offer the special counsel’s office no additional information about his decision.
Whether known to Cohen in June 2016 or not, a deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Prikhodko, had in December 2015 invited Trump himself to the St. Petersburg forum, shortly after Flynn dined with Putin in Moscow.255 A February 2018 report will link Prikhodko to Oleg Deripaska, alleging—with both audio, video, and photographic evidence—that Deripaska has been bribing Prikhodko, and that among the topics the two men have discussed during their clandestine meetings is Russian election interference.256 Deripaska’s then girlfriend, Nastya Rybka, will claim to have sixteen hours of audio recordings establishing Deripaska’s involvement with Russian election meddling; Rybka is arrested in Moscow and held by local police until she agrees to relinquish the tapes in her possession to Deripaska.257 A viral video released in January 2019 shows Rybka’s arrest at an airport in Moscow; the young woman is unceremoniously dragged through the airport by unidentified law enforcement officers just before she is about to speak to a bank of reporters about her evidence of Deripaska’s alleged involvement in Kremlin crimes.258
Rhona Graff, Trump’s personal secretary, declines Prikhodko’s December 2015 invitation in January 2016. Prikhodko repeats his offer in March 2016, just seventy-two hours after Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos makes his first contact with the Kremlin—a conversation with Joseph Mifsud he immediately reports to the campaign.259 On the same day Graff is preparing Trump’s second letter of declination to Prikhodko, a New York–based investment banker, Robert Foresman, emails Graff to say that a presidential aide at the Kremlin has asked him to reach out to Trump personally to convince him to come to St. Petersburg.260 In his entreaty to Trump, Foresman brags of his “personal and professional expertise in Russia and Ukraine … [and] his work in setting up an early ‘private channel’ between Vladimir Putin and former U.S. President George W. Bush.”261 Foresman insists to Graff that he is asking for Trump’s attendance at the St. Petersburg economic forum following an “approach … from senior Kremlin officials” on the subject.262 Foresman also tells Graff he has things he needs to discuss with Trump that he cannot discuss over “unsecure email.”263 It is unknown whether Trump’s demurrals regarding the St. Petersburg forum stem from his belief, at the time, that Cohen would be attending in his stead.
Just a few weeks after MBS announces his new anti-terrorism alliance in December 2015, Trump’s attitude toward Saudi Arabia on Twitter undergoes an about-face. Whereas previously Trump had falsely accused the Saudis of secretly and illegally colluding with candidate Obama during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, and had seemingly approached U.S.-Saudi relations as an opportunity for America to increase its revenue from overseas military and peacekeeping operations, on January 3, 2016, Trump for the first time accuses Obama of being hostile to Saudi interests—implicitly positioning himself as the pro-Saudi alternative in American politics. “Iran, with all of the money and all else given to them by Obama, has wanted a way to take over Saudi Arabia & their oil. THEY JUST FOUND IT!” tweets Trump, referring to the rollback of certain international sanctions against Iran pursuant to its compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.264
The sanctions rollback required under the Iran nuclear deal unfreezes about $100 billion in Iranian funds then held by the United States, which the Obama administration thereafter returns to Iran; according to CNBC, “Tehran will only have access to roughly $55 billion because much of that money will go toward repaying loans and other long-term commitments. The rest will likely be used to address Iran’s ailing oil operations and other infrastructure that went without maintenance for years.”265 According to a summary of remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry published by CNBC, while Iran, post-deal, will likely continue to support groups the United States considers terrorist organizations, “support for such groups has never made a difference in the power structure in the region … [as] Saudi Arabia alone spends much more than Iran per year on defense.”266 Iranian and Saudi defense spending “is so incredibly disproportionate,” says Kerry, “that I believe that working with our Gulf state partners … we have the ability to guarantee that they will be secure, that we will stand by them.”267 Trump’s tweet about the deal imagines instead that Saudi Arabia is gravely threatened by the sudden influx of funds Iran will receive subsequent to confirming that it is not enriching uranium beyond the exceedingly low level (3.67 percent) permitted by the nuclear deal it has signed.268 Uranium must be enriched to over 90 percent to be weaponized, according to a May 2019 BBC report on the deal.269
Trump’s tweet—and his outspoken opposition to the deal negotiated by Kerry—comes less than twenty-four hours after Kerry has issued a rare rebuke to the Saudi royal family following its execution on January 2, 2016, of forty-seven people, including most notably a dissident Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, who, per CNN, “had repeatedly spoken out against the government and the Saudi royal family.”270 Amnesty International calls the mass executions “appalling,” the European Union expresses “serious concerns regarding freedom of expression [in Saudi Arabia] and the respect of basic civil and political rights,” the UN secretary-general calls the killings “deeply dismay[ing],” and the U.S. State Department says it is “particularly concerned” about Saudi actions “exacerbating sectarian tensions” in the kingdom. But Trump’s tweet implies that were Obama to be replaced by someone with his own inclinations, it would help protect both Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves.271 CNN, recounting al-Nimr’s arrest, imprisonment, prosecution, and execution, will quote a 2011 interview al-Nimr gave to the BBC in which he advocated nonviolence in opposing the Saudi government, preferring “the roar of the word against authorities rather than weapons. The weapon of the word is stronger than bullets, because authorities will profit from a battle of weapons,” he says.272
According to BuzzFeed News, by December 29, 2015, American mercenaries employed by private U.S. companies are working with the United Arab Emirates to assassinate enemies of the Emirati royal family.273 The digital media outlet reports on a December 29 operation its reporter Aram Roston calls “the first operation in a startling for-profit venture. For months in war-torn Yemen, some of America’s most highly trained soldiers [will work] on a mercenary mission of murky legality to kill prominent clerics and Islamist political figures.”274 While it is unknown whether the mercenary company run for MBZ by Trump shadow national security adviser Erik Prince supplies mercenaries for this December operation, or whether the “anti-terrorism” alliance announced by MBS days earlier corresponds in part to this clandestine assassination agenda promoted by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, it is clear that the operation occurs simultaneously with another event of dubious legality: the discussion Michael Flynn participates in regarding the possible kidnapping, rendition, and prosecution for treason of Turkish cleric and prominent Erdogan critic Fethullah Gulen.275
The December 2015 operation chronicled by BuzzFeed News is executed by Spear Operations Group, an American company founded by Abraham Golan, a Hungarian Israeli contractor who, coincidentally like the cleric Gulen, lives in the Pittsburgh area.276 In speaking with BuzzFeed News, Golan concedes his company “ran” a “targeted assassination program” sanctioned by both the UAE and the coalition fighting alongside the Emiratis in Yemen—a coalition including nine countries, of which the two chief participants besides the UAE (and the only other countries with troops on the ground) are Saudi Arabia and Sudan.277 Golan’s statement about the multinational nature of the Emiratis’ assassination squad increases significantly the odds that MBS’s “anti-terrorism alliance”—which few of its member nations even knew they had joined—is the same entity as the project established by MBZ, which itself may enjoy significant overlap with Erik Prince’s Emirates-based Reflex Responses unit. Just so, all three of these entities may be connected to Saudi Arabia’s Rapid Intervention Group (RIG), which MBS creates to carry out his own extrajudicial killings and kidnappings (see chapter 6).
Abraham Golan tells BuzzFeed News in October 2018 that from December 2015—the very month MBS created his “anti-terrorism alliance”—onward, his mercenaries were “responsible for a number of the [Saudi-Emirati-Yemeni] war’s high-profile assassinations.”278 He argues that the Trump administration should institute an assassination program modeled on that executed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, adding, “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”279 BuzzFeed News will call Golan’s program part of a larger trend in contemporary warfare (indeed, one being strongly advocated for by Trump adviser Erik Prince at the time): “War has become increasingly privatized, with many nations outsourcing most military support services to private contractors.”280
Given Prince’s communication with—at a minimum—Trump advisers Flynn and Bannon on national security matters during the 2016 presidential campaign, even more striking in Roston’s reporting for BuzzFeed News is his assessment of whether anyone in America knew about the Emiratis’ targeted assassination program in 2015: “Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the United States would not have known that the UAE—whose military the United States has trained and armed at virtually every level—had hired an American company staffed by American veterans to conduct an assassination program in a war it closely monitors.”281 Roston adds, chillingly, that “a former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News that there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: ‘There were guys that were basically doing what you said.’ He was astonished, he said, by what he learned.… The mercenaries, he said, were ‘almost like a murder squad.’”282
Golan’s particular squad has been contracted to do its wetwork by Mohammed Dahlan, a former security chief for the Palestinian Authority who by 2015 has been exiled to the United Arab Emirates.283 According to former CIA officials, Golan is “ruthless” and “calculating” and is “the kind of guy you hire” when you need someone to do “crazy shit.”284 As for Dahlan, he lost his senior position in the Palestinian Authority in 2007, when he was accused of secretly conspiring with both Americans and Israelis.285 After fleeing to the UAE, he became a “key adviser” to MBZ and, per a former CIA officer who knows him well, a “pit bull” for the Emiratis.286 In 2013, Dahlan destabilized the Palestinian Authority and delighted Benjamin Netanyahu by suing Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, for “corruption [and] intimidation,” and doing so using an “Israeli law firm”; the same year, he assisted el-Sisi in coming to power in Egypt by orchestrating the delivery of messages and financing from MBZ and MBS to el-Sisi’s collaborators in the Egyptian military.287 In 2014, Dahlan, now cemented as an ally of both MBZ and el-Sisi, entered “talks” with Netanyahu to formally become Abbas’s chief political rival in the Palestinian territories and a prearranged “peace partner” for Netanyahu.288 That same year, he also “act[ed] as a proxy for the United States and Israel” in the Middle East, according to the Middle East Eye, which noted at the time that, on MBZ’s behalf, Dahlan invested in the Serbian arms trade in a way that allowed him to distribute weapons across the Middle East to advance not just Emirati but American and Israeli interests, which were threatened at the time by the prospect of Turkish encroachment into the Balkans.289 Dahlan’s connections in the Israeli government are said to reside in the Israeli intelligence community—precisely where those of Trump national security advisers Prince and Flynn do.290 That Mohammed Dahlan ends up in exile in the UAE in 2015 points toward the long-standing but sub rosa synergy between Israeli and Emirati military interests that will later become public.
Dahlan spends 2015 “raising money in Gulf countries” and lobbying el-Sisi to open the Gaza-Sinai border in preparation for his return to Gazan politics, with his hope, according to reports, being to right the mistakes of Palestinian leaders past—most notably, in Dahlan’s view, Yasser Arafat’s rejection of a 2000 Clinton-backed peace plan that would have given Palestinians “statehood in more than 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”291 In 2016, Dahlan is accused of helping to funnel money into Turkey to fund the July 2016 military coup there, another effort of which Netanyahu—who has publicly said he considers Erdogan a dangerous anti-Semite—is likely to have been supportive, and which Egypt and the UAE are, at the time, widely suspected of bankrolling.292 During the fallout from the coup’s failure, Dahlan flees from the UAE to his other safe harbor, Egypt.293 Meanwhile, there is again talk in July 2016 of the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan—the last of these one of the original Red Sea conspirators, but one that leaves the conspiracy well after mid-2016—secretly plotting to install Dahlan in Abbas’s place to facilitate a new round of peace talks with Netanyahu’s government.294 MBZ is said to be the plan’s chief architect.295
Erik Prince eventually becomes more than just an adviser to the Trump campaign: Prince gives Trump’s campaign at least $100,000 through a political action committee run by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who is also the primary funder for both Steve Bannon’s longtime media outlet Breitbart and Trump’s general-election data firm, Cambridge Analytica.296 Prince later becomes connected to Mercer’s post–Cambridge Analytica data company, Emerdata, when the deputy chairman of Prince’s Frontier Services Group, Johnson Chun Shun Ko, is named to its board.297 Other Emerdata board members include Mercer’s daughters Rebekah and Jennifer (the former a Trump transition team official), while Emerdata directors include Julian Wheatland (chairman of Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm SCL Group), Alexander Tayler (Cambridge Analytica’s chief data officer), the aforementioned Ko, and Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, Alexander Nix—who in 2018 is suspended from his job “following revelations that it [Cambridge Analytica] misused millions of Facebook users’ information, plus incriminating undercover recordings which show the executives boasting of their ability to manipulate elections and even blackmail political opponents.”298
All told, Prince gives Trump a quarter of a million dollars in the less than 120 days between the Republican National Convention and Election Day, spreading his giving across direct donations to Trump’s campaign, the national Republican Party, and Mercer’s super PAC.299 More broadly, the Washington Post reports that “Prince and his family were major GOP donors in 2016. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that the family gave more than $10 million to GOP candidates and super PACs, including about $2.7 million from his [Prince’s] sister, [Trump secretary of education Betsy] DeVos, and her husband.”300
The direct and indirect involvement of Prince, Bannon, Mercer, Kushner, and other top Trump aides, allies, and family members with the British company SCL Group—and, more important, its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica—is deeply troubling, given what is now known about Cambridge Analytica as reported in American and British media from 2017 and 2018. According to the New York Times, in 2015 and 2016 Cambridge Analytica, incorporated in 2013 by GOP mega-donor Mercer and future Trump campaign CEO Bannon, “harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission … one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate.”301 Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica co-founder and subsequently its chief whistleblower, will eventually tell the Times that for Cambridge Analytica, “Rules don’t matter.… For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair. They want to fight a culture war in America.… Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”302 Indeed, there is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica has divested itself of the “psychographic” voter data it improperly compiled in 2015 and 2016, with the Times reporting that as of March 2018 the company “still possesses most or all of the trove” of data it took from Facebook prior to the 2016 presidential election.303
The data that Cambridge Analytica took from American voters in 2015 and 2016 was in the first instance “harvested” by an “outside researcher,” who purportedly was collecting it for “academic purposes.”304 Facebook has called the actions of this researcher, a Russian American named Aleksandr Kogan, a “scam” and a “fraud”; as of 2018, however, it could not conclusively confirm for its users that either Kogan or Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data in their possession.305 Inquiries in 2017 and 2018 will reveal that Nix, who was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica during its tenure as the Trump campaign’s data firm, not only lied repeatedly about having or using any data from Facebook—including offering false testimony at a British parliamentary hearing on the subject in early 2018—but lied about ordering the data deleted once Cambridge Analytica finally acknowledged possessing it.306 England’s information commissioner is now investigating whether Cambridge Analytica “illegally acquired and used” the information it was employing for modeling purposes during the 2016 election.307
The scope of Cambridge Analytica’s work for the Trump campaign is still being investigated—as is its connection to the Russian Federation. According to the Times, many “Cambridge Analytica employees … worked for the Trump team”; the company’s “British affiliate [SCL Group] claims to have worked in Russia”; shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Flynn took on an advisory role with SCL Group, a fact he did not reveal publicly until an August 2017 financial filing; and in October 2017 Kremlin cutout Julian Assange revealed that Alexander Nix himself “reached out to him during the [presidential] campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton”—a revelation that, along with Flynn’s secretive work for SCL Group, puts SCL Group and its offshoot Cambridge Analytica squarely in the midst of the Trump campaign’s repeated attempts to secure Clinton’s stolen emails from Russian sources throughout the summer of 2016.308
Cambridge Analytica begins its work for the Trump campaign in June 2016 as the result of a decision made by Jared Kushner; Kushner’s decision is opposed by outgoing campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—it is unknown if his opposition is in part responsible for his exit—as well as incoming campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has his own reasons for wanting internal campaign data to remain within his own sphere (and that of his handpicked pollster, Tony Fabrizio) rather than anyone else’s, particularly that of a company co-founded by Steve Bannon (see chapter 4).309 That Lewandowski leaves the campaign just as Cambridge Analytica joins it, and that Manafort’s departure from the campaign on August 17, 2016, is immediately followed by Bannon’s ascension to the role of campaign CEO, underscores the central position the data firm has during the 2016 general election.
The New York Times reports that in co-founding Cambridge Analytica in January 2013, Christopher Wylie’s ambition was to use “inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behavior”; in funding Cambridge Analytica, Mercer’s hope was to become “a kingmaker in Republican politics”; and in steering Cambridge Analytica first toward Texas senator Ted Cruz’s GOP primary campaign and ultimately into Trump’s general election campaign, Bannon aimed to “shift America’s culture and rewire its politics” through “personality profiling.”310
In 2014, after the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University had refused to work with Wylie and his team, a professor at the university, Kogan, agreed to do so, beginning his work in June, three months after Trump’s “soft” announcement of his presidential candidacy on Twitter.311 Kogan in short order authored an app that represented to end users that any personal data it harvested would be used exclusively for academic purposes; in reality, copies of everything were being transmitted to Bannon, Mercer, Wylie, and Nix.312 Yet the situation was far worse than even this for most social media users caught up in the scheme, as only 270,000 users actually consented—by participating in a survey with substantial fine print—to have their data harvested at all, even as Kogan was providing more than 50 million raw profiles to Cambridge Analytica (30 million of which were robust enough to produce psychographic voter profiles).313
In transmitting the profiles, Kogan tells Bannon and his team that the profiles he has created have predictive qualities: they reveal whether a given voter is open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic, satisfied, intelligent, fair-minded, male or female, old or young, and conservative or liberal. They can even offer information on a voter’s job, religion, hobbies, major at university, and belief in astrology.314
Impressed with Kogan’s 2014 work, Mercer and Bannon, who had formed the American company Cambridge Analytica as an offshoot of the British firm SCL Group in late 2013, form SCL USA (later renamed Cambridge Analytica UK) at the beginning of 2015; the duo’s two transatlantic incorporations appear to be a byzantine effort to either honor or subvert U.S. election laws—which one being a subject of ongoing investigation. Of the original Cambridge Analytica the New York Times will report, “the firm was effectively a shell … any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL [Group] and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.”315 The business model the Times describes is a problem—potentially a serious violation of federal law—as months earlier, in July 2014, “an American election lawyer advising the company, Laurence Levy, warned that the [Cambridge Analytica–SCL Group] arrangement could violate laws limiting the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections.”316 According to the Times, by the time of the 2016 general election, Cambridge Analytica had—its 2015 incorporation of SCL USA/Cambridge Analytica UK notwithstanding—made few substantive changes to its employment model, “hir[ing] more Americans to work on the races that year” even as it remained the case that “most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries.”317 These foreign nationals “performed a variety of services,” reports the Times, including “designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads, and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.”318 In a U.S. presidential election Trump wins in the nation’s Electoral College by only 80,000 popular votes, there is no way to know whether his presumptively illegal use of foreign nationals in his campaign data operation is what puts his campaign over the top; what is known is that Trump’s digital director and liaison to Cambridge Analytica in 2016, Brad Parscale, is now the campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection effort.319
As for how effective Cambridge Analytica was in assisting the Trump effort in 2016, Nix has declared, as the Times summarizes, that its work “helped shape Mr. Trump’s strategy.”320 While others have disputed Nix’s account, suggesting that Facebook had plugged any holes in its data leakage by the end of the summer of 2016 and that the Trump campaign ultimately used “legacy data” from Ted Cruz’s primary effort, neither circumstance renders Cambridge Analytica’s data any more legally obtained than it was when harvested for Republican usage in late 2015.321
In June 2018, investigative reporters Carole Cadwalladr and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, writing for the Guardian, will reveal that immediately after Trump’s inauguration, Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy in London to discuss the election. The two reporters also discover that Kaiser had previously claimed to friends that she “channeled cryptocurrency payments and donations to WikiLeaks.”322 Coupled with the additional revelation that Nix’s July 2016 outreach to Assange included, too, an offer to “index and disseminate” WikiLeaks’ stolen Democratic materials, news of Kaiser’s WikiLeaks payments startles on both sides of the Atlantic.323 In March 2019, Cambridge Analytica will stand accused in a British court of “trying to liquidate the company before a full investigation into the company [can] be held” and of having compiled “up to 87 million clandestinely harvested Facebook profiles to create a state of the art voter database that helped Trump win election in 2016.”324 The company itself has claimed to have “4,000 data points on some 230 million Americans.”325
In December 2018, the Daily Beast will report that “a trove of digital artifacts from Trump’s [2016] social-media campaign … provides the first hard evidence that Team Trump made continuous use of audience lists created by Cambridge Analytica to target a portion of its ‘dark ads’ on Facebook. The ads were deployed from July 2016 through the end of the election—and beyond, to the inauguration in January 2017.”326 By the end of 2018, Channel 4 in the United Kingdom will have run an undercover sting operation on Alexander Nix that reveals him “boasting about his company’s work for Trump and effectively claiming credit for the Apprentice star’s election victory. Cambridge Analytica, Nix says, ‘did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy’ for Trump’s presidential campaign.”327 Nix adds that he met Trump personally “many times.”328 Nix’s claims are bolstered by statements made by Trump’s 2016 digital director, Parscale, immediately after the election, when he tells associates, according to CNN, that “Cambridge [Analytica] provided a much-needed infusion of data staff for a bare-bones campaign.”329 Parscale tells one questioner during a 2016 Google forum that “Cambridge [Analytica] actually provided a full-time employee that could sit next to me all day” to help process data.330 While the Trump campaign also uses RNC data during the campaign to target voters, Parscale has conceded that there were some purposes—for instance, the development of supplemental data to daily tracking polls—for which Cambridge Analytica’s work was essential to the campaign.331 The contradictions between Nix’s and Parscale’s claims about the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election have never been resolved.
News of Nix’s boasts, his discussion with Channel 4 of clandestine and illicit methods for assisting Cambridge Analytica clients, and the Cambridge Analytica–fueled “dark ads” used by the Trump campaign sits uneasily beside the declaration by a “senior Trump official” in October 2016 that the campaign was then secretly running “three voter suppression efforts” through its digital operation—efforts targeting liberals, young women, and black voters. These efforts reportedly occurred at a time when “as much as 45 percent of Trump’s campaign budget in a given month” was being devoted to “digital outreach and research,” according to Fortune.332 A 2018 Bloomberg article on this chilling claim by a senior Trump official is titled “Russia’s Voter Suppression Operation Echoed Trump Campaign Tactics.”333 Evidence recently unearthed by the New Yorker also reveals that Cambridge Analytica played a much larger—but still secretive—role in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom than was previously appreciated, and that Steve Bannon was entwined with that effort as well.334 The exposé discloses that Bannon “was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company [Cambridge Analytica] and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization.”335
In view of the foregoing, a pressing question remains: Did the Russians gain access to any of Trump’s data firm’s psychographic data in the course of their own 2016 efforts to target American voters? The answer appears to be yes. Christopher Wylie has said publicly that “when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St. Petersburg, tested U.S. voters’ opinions on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia—all while Bannon was in charge.”336 Kogan, Cambridge Analytica’s “academic” researcher, has since been revealed as an employee of Russia’s Kremlin-owned St. Petersburg State University as well as Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; his work at the Russian institution included not only a teaching position but “grants for research into the social media network,” according to the Guardian.337 In 2014, the Guardian found that a few months before Cambridge Analytica was founded, its British parent company, SCL Group, gave a “presentation” of its work on “micro-targeting individuals on social media during elections” to Russian energy firm Lukoil, an entity “with links to the Kremlin.”338 SCL Group documents shown to Lukoil in 2014, as the Internet Research Agency’s propaganda campaign in the United States was just ramping up, included “posters and videos apparently aimed at alarming or demoralizing voters, including warnings of violence and fraud.”339 Nor were the SCL presentations low-level affairs, as the materials were shared with Lukoil’s CEO, a “former Soviet oil minister who has said the strategic aims of Lukoil are closely aligned with those of Russia.”340
Cambridge Analytica has troubling intersections with Israeli business intelligence firms, as well. While Joel Zamel’s Psy-Group was doing work for Ben Carson’s ill-fated presidential campaign in late 2015, so too was Cambridge Analytica, according to CNN.341 More important, however, on December 14, 2016, five weeks after the 2016 election, Psy-Group and Cambridge Analytica were reunited when the two announced a partnership to “provide intelligence and social-media services … to an array of clients.”342 This joint effort was apparently connected to Trump’s election victory, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that “the partnership was intended in part to help win government contracts—something that Cambridge [Analytica] and its parent company, SCL Group, were aggressively seeking to do as their allies in the Trump administration took power.”343
But Psy-Group had also sought business with Trump prior to his election, with Zamel pitching Donald Trump Jr. directly at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016, by “extoll[ing] his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign,” according to the New York Times, which notes that Zamel and Psy-Group had by the August 2016 meeting “already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.”344 Several aspects of this meeting raise serious questions about possible connections and overlap between Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group: that Zamel’s pitch came just a few weeks after the campaign had hired Cambridge Analytica as its data firm; that Cambridge Analytica had been accused in 2015, by seven individuals with “close knowledge” of a Cambridge Analytica election campaign in Nigeria that year, of “work[ing] with people they [the seven individuals] believed were Israeli computer hackers”; that in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election Michael Flynn, who had been actively (if apparently unsuccessfully) recruited by Psy-Group, took on an advisory role with SCL Group; that by the end of 2016 Psy-Group and Cambridge Analytica would announce a formal partnership; and that in 2018 both Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group would declare bankruptcy within seventy-two hours of each other—at a time when both outfits were under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.345
Most troubling, however, is that on August 3, 2016—just a few weeks after Cambridge Analytica came aboard the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr., according to the New York Times, “responded approvingly” to a proposal from Psy-Group that was on its face redundant with the work already being done (and that would continue to be done) by Cambridge Analytica.346 Apropos of this confusion, the Times notes that “the details of who commissioned it [the August 2016 Psy-Group proposal] remain in dispute.”347 What is clear is that during Channel 4’s undercover investigation into Alexander Nix and Mark Turnbull, two top executives at Cambridge Analytica, Turnbull tells two reporters posing as prospective Cambridge Analytica clients that his firm does “intelligence gathering” using “specialist organizations that do that kind of work” and with whom Cambridge Analytica has “relationships and partnerships”—a description that perfectly fits Psy-Group, a business intelligence outfit.348 Turnbull says to Channel 4 on camera that these “specialist organizations” allow Cambridge Analytica clients to learn their opponents’ “secrets” and “tactics.”349 In another Channel 4 video, Turnbull speaks of his firm offering, as part of its suite of services, the involvement of “various intelligence-gathering operations that operate very discreetly to find [political opponents’] information”—he accepts the term “dirt” when it is offered to him by the undercover reporters, and he himself adds the phrase “skeletons in the closet.”350 What Turnbull describes is identical to the services Psy-Group pitches to the Trump campaign with respect to Hillary Clinton. Tellingly, Turnbull tells Channel 4 that when Cambridge Analytica is engaged in intelligence-gathering activities, sometimes the firm “contract[s]” with “a different entity” with “a different name,” so that “no record [of the intelligence-gathering operation] exists with our name attached to it at all.”351 Nix, for his part, discusses with the reporters the use of “honey traps” (ruses involving sexual seduction and blackmail) to target and destroy selected politicians.352 He says further that Cambridge Analytica is “used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows.”353
According to the Wall Street Journal, “One person familiar with the work of both firms [Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group] said Mr. Nix in the [Channel 4] video appeared to be referring to Psy-Group, which does work that tracks closely with Mr. Nix’s description.”354 The Journal notes that, per its sources, Psy-Group was as of 2016 known for using honey traps on clients’ political opponents.355 The reporting by the Journal seems to be conclusively confirmed by Nix’s most candid comment on the question: the Cambridge Analytica CEO at one point tells Channel 4’s undercover reporters that “we use Israeli companies,” among other entities, as they are “very effective in intelligence gathering.”356
The initial outreaches from the Trump campaign to Cambridge Analytica and to Psy-Group both occur in spring 2016. According to reporting by the Times of Israel and the Daily Beast, three Trump campaign members—Rick Gates and two unnamed “members of Trump’s inner circle”—solicit Psy-Group in April 2016 to create “secretive proposals for the Trump campaign” that will involve not only mass disinformation operations but also “collecting opposition research on Clinton and ten of her associates” using both open-source methods and unnamed “complementary intelligence activities.”357 After Gates allegedly “reject[s]” the resulting proposals—in June, around the time the campaign decides to use Cambridge Analytica’s services—Psy-Group’s Zamel nevertheless is given the opportunity to pitch directly to Trump’s son Don: a development, partially coordinated by Erik Prince, that throws into doubt whether Gates’s response to Zamel was in fact a rejection or merely a referral up the chain of command. Certainly, the campaign had previously used Trump Jr.—a trusted member of the Trump family, but also outside the campaign’s infrastructure—to vet potentially explosive campaign gambits, such as the receipt of Clinton “dirt” from Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016.
The proposals Gates sees in late spring 2016 are so top-secret within and outside the Trump campaign that they use code words for the two major-party candidates: “Lion” (Trump) and “Forest” (Clinton).358 Zamel’s initially “rejected” proposal would have cost more than $3 million, a hefty price tag partially explained by the fact that, at the time, it included a primary-related pre–Republican National Convention targeting of Ted Cruz (denominated “Bear” in Zamel’s proposal).359 Notably, immediately after the 2016 election George Nader, MBZ’s adviser, pays Zamel $2 million, an amount roughly commensurate with Zamel having provided only the general-election work he pitched to Gates in spring 2016.360 Indeed, the New Yorker reports that certain of Psy-Group’s services were available for as little as six figures; “one company document reported that Psy-Group’s influence services cost, on average, just $350,000.”361 That Zamel did not conduct any GOP primary work for the Trump campaign is confirmed by the fact that, per the New York Times, he didn’t receive any approving signal from Trump’s campaign until he met with Trump Jr. in August 2016, several weeks after the RNC in Cleveland.
In estimating the cost of the services Zamel might have provided the Trump campaign, the Guardian offers a report establishing that $2 million—the exact amount Nader pays Zamel immediately after the 2016 election—was Cambridge Analytica’s total fee for the complex, large-scale, last-minute general-election campaign it had been hired to conduct in Nigeria in 2015.362 During its campaign in Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica represented to its client that its intelligence-gathering partners for the project actually worked for Israeli intelligence; some of the firm’s own staff, speaking months later to the Guardian, said they were surprised to learn that Israelis working on the project, whether governmental or nongovernmental, were in possession of a large trove of hacked materials from Nigerian servers.363
Tellingly, the period in which Gates first fields proposals from Psy-Group is the same period during which Cambridge Analytica is pitching some—though perhaps, in retrospect, not all—of its services to the Trump campaign.364 The possibility that the Emiratis used George Nader to pay for the illicit components of the media package Cambridge Analytica provided to the Trump campaign—and that this arrangement was sealed at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016, with representatives of Trump, Psy-Group, and the UAE all present—is never addressed in the Mueller Report, which notes that it has omitted counterintelligence information in favor of providing it directly to the counterintelligence division of the FBI.365
Nader and Zamel have since 2016 provided contradictory accounts regarding the $2 million post-election payment the former made to the latter, suggesting that one of the two—or both—is not telling the truth about their relationship.366 Just so, while the New York Times reports that Trump Jr. in August 2016 “responded approvingly” to Psy-Group’s proposal, Trump’s son, through his current attorney, has claimed that he “was not interested.” Here again, one of two sources is evidently not telling the truth.367
Significant to unpacking both of these mysteries—that of Nader’s payment to Zamel and that of Don Jr.’s disposition toward Zamel’s proposal—might be the following: that Psy-Group’s attorney (up until the firm’s dissolution and his own departure for a new job) was Marc Mukasey, a longtime law partner of future Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and also, more important, the longtime attorney for Donald Trump Sr., Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump.368 In a similar vein, the presence of the UAE-dwelling, UAE-advising Erik Prince at the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting, coupled with the May 2018 revelation by the Wall Street Journal that Zamel not only had been “making contacts” in the UAE since 2014 but had begun working for MBZ via his company Wikistrat, significantly increases the odds of Trump-UAE-Zamel coordination.369 Tellingly, Zamel’s work with MBZ began around the same time Trump first made his presidential ambitions public in 2014.
Campaign donations to the Trump campaign by the UAE would be illegal under 52 U.S.C. § 30121, as would any efforts by the Israeli government to direct toward the Trump campaign clandestine Israeli intelligence services that might have assisted Trump in securing victory against Hillary Clinton.370 The Times of Israel reports that Psy-Group does much foreign intelligence work that is “known to the Israeli government … specifically the Ministry of Strategic Affairs,” even though the work is not paid for by the government.371 The Times reports, moreover, that Rick Gates “first heard about Psy-Group from … George Birnbaum”—Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime chief of staff.372 Birnbaum did much more than passively direct Trump’s deputy campaign manager to Zamel and Psy-Group, however, as he “introduce[s]” Gates to Psy-Group at a meeting at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington in March 2016 that Birnbaum himself attends.373 Birnbaum will later say that he believed Psy-Group was a good fit for the Trump campaign, which he calls “interested” in Psy-Group’s offerings, because the Israeli business intelligence outfit had “the technology to achieve what they [the Trump campaign] were looking for.”374 Whether Birnbaum would have dared insert himself into an American presidential election, particularly through the intermediary of an Israeli company whose work was known to be followed by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, without first consulting with the Israeli leader for whom he had worked for so long, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Netanyahu is a longtime Trump ally who is personal friends with Jared Kushner and his family. According to the New Yorker, Netanyahu has had “a long friendship with Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner. In recent years, the Kushners, Orthodox Jews who made their fortune in the real-estate business and hold conservative views on Israel, have donated large sums of money to Israeli causes and charities, including tens of thousands of dollars to a yeshiva in the Beit El settlement, in the West Bank. When Netanyahu visited the Kushners at their home in New Jersey, he sometimes stayed overnight and slept in Jared’s bedroom, while Jared was relegated to the basement.”375 Meanwhile, Netanyahu has known Trump for so long that Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, recalls “accompanying Netanyahu to Trump Tower, in New York, in the early aughts for a meeting with Donald Trump.”376 As for Psy-Group itself, the Wall Street Journal notes that several individuals closely linked to the company are “veteran Israeli intelligence officials.”377
Of equal significance to the question of Zamel’s and Nader’s connection to the Trump campaign is the matter of the two consultants’ employers. Not only do Zamel and Nader share an employer in MBZ, with Nader acting as an “adviser” and Zamel, according to the New York Times, as a “consultant,” but Zamel, like Nader, has also worked closely with individuals closely linked to the Russian government. Per the Times, Zamel has previously worked for “oligarchs linked to Mr. Putin, including Oleg V. Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, who hired the firm for online campaigns against their business rivals.”378 The Zamel-Deripaska link is particularly intriguing given the Mueller Report’s finding that Paul Manafort was secretly sending polling data and strategy updates to Deripaska through Konstantin Kilimnik during the presidential campaign, and given additional claims by Nastya Rybka that the oligarch was involved in Russian election interference. As for Rybolovlev, besides being involved in a mysterious business transaction with Trump in 2008 that netted Trump tens of millions of dollars more than the value of the property he was selling, he has also faced allegations, based on flight data, that he twice secretly met Trump on airport tarmacs in the last days of the 2016 general election.379 That MBS, with the assistance of MBZ, publicly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to Rybolovlev in 2017 through a bizarre international art auction is also a source of significant concern (see chapter 8). As for Nader, the New York Times notes that the Lebanese American businessman “visited Moscow at least twice during the presidential campaign as a confidential emissary from [MBZ]” even as he was, in the United States, meeting “often” with Kushner, Flynn, and Bannon “in the hectic final weeks of the [2016] campaign.”380 In view of the foregoing, it is not difficult to imagine both Nader and Zamel having a strong grasp of the Kremlin’s interests, intentions, and efforts with respect to the 2016 presidential election at the time they met with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower in August 2016.
That Zamel has previously worked for both a man known to be a business associate of Donald Trump and another man accused of being involved in Russia’s 2016 election interference raises another troubling—if remote—possibility that may be addressed in any ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s election victory. In its undercover exposé of Cambridge Analytica and the exploits of its CEO, Alexander Nix, England’s Channel 4 captures Nix revealing that a favored Cambridge Analytica tactic, executed through one of its “vehicles” rather than itself, is to send an operative to a politician and “offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded. These sorts of tactics are very effective—instantly having video evidence of corruption.… We’ll have a wealthy developer come in—somebody posing as a wealthy developer—they will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign, in exchange for land, for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras.”381 Nix also discusses using “very beautiful Ukrainian girls” to catch a politician in an indelicate position on camera.382 Apropos of Nix’s reference to Ukraine, and in the process of providing a specific example of how Cambridge Analytica can and does work with outside outfits, Nix’s deputy Mark Turnbull tells Channel 4’s undercover reporters, “We’ve just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in a, um … Eastern European country … where they did a really—no one even knew they were there. They were just ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out, and produced really, really good material. So we have experience in doing this.”383 In light of Trump’s acknowledgment that his Moscow hotel room in late 2013 was audio and video bugged, and representations by Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who is a mutual business associate of both Trump and Aras Agalarov, to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen that “videos” of Trump were indeed produced during that trip (see chapter 5), the possibility remains that Cambridge Analytica’s intelligence-gathering capabilities might have been used not only against Clinton but also to create—or, alternatively, to confirm or deny the existence of—compromising video or audio of Trump himself.384 Moreover, Nix’s reference to his subcontractors, some of which are Israeli business intelligence outfits, offering their politician marks “a deal that’s too good to be true” calls to mind Lana Erchova’s claim that Russian officials wanted to offer Trump “land in Crimea among other things.”385 Joel Zamel’s long-standing business relationships with Russian oligarchs connected to both Trump and Kremlin election interference would therefore have made either Psy-Group or Wikistrat valuable adjuncts in any effort by the Kremlin to entrap Trump or, far more likely, efforts by the Trump campaign to determine whether or not the Kremlin indeed had kompromat involving the GOP candidate.
As for George Nader’s many foreign connections—and his willingness to use them during the 2016 presidential campaign—the New York Times reports that, beginning in May 2016, while Zamel was working on social media and intelligence-gathering proposals for the Trump campaign, Nader “began making inquiries on behalf of the Emirati prince [MBZ] about possible ways to directly support Mr. Trump, according to three people with whom Mr. Nader discussed his efforts.”386 While the special counsel’s observations or conclusions as to non-Russian foreign aid flowing to the Trump campaign during the 2016 general election fall outside the scope of his April 2019 report, the New York Times notes that there are indeed “indication[s] that countries other than Russia may have offered assistance to the Trump campaign in the months before the presidential election,” adding that these “interactions are a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III” and that Mueller has “questioned numerous witnesses in Washington, New York, Atlanta, Tel Aviv and elsewhere about what foreign help may have been pledged or accepted, and about whether any such assistance was coordinated with Russia, according to witnesses and others with knowledge of the interviews.”387 The Times adds that according to two people familiar with the Trump campaign’s pre-election meetings with Saudi and Emirati emissaries, “the Trump campaign officials [who met with the emissaries] did not appear bothered by the idea of cooperation with foreigners.”388
According to the Mueller Report, any such information on multinational collusion gathered by the special counsel’s office would have been considered, in the words of the report, “foreign intelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission” and would have been “identif[ied] and convey[ed]” to the FBI rather than being included in Volume 1 of the report.389 For the purposes of detailing counterintelligence evidence, therefore, and especially evidence involving foreign governments other than Russia’s, the special counsel underscores that the report is merely a “summary”—missing not only redacted counterintelligence material and any counterintelligence material considered outside the narrow scope of the inquiry but also any material deemed unnecessary for the purposes of the summary.390 While the size of the special counsel’s underlying investigative case file is unknown, the Times proposes that “Mr. Mueller probably collected and generated hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages of paper during his investigation,” and the report itself notes that the special counsel’s office “issued more than 2,800 subpoenas … executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants; obtained more than 230 orders for communication records … obtained almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers; made 13 requests to foreign governments pursuant to Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties; and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, including almost 80 before a grand jury.”391
While the Mueller Report is silent on when Joel Zamel first encountered George Nader and MBZ, and how any of these three men came into the orbit of the Trump campaign, in advance of any future counterintelligence report derived from Mueller’s and more than a dozen other ongoing FBI investigations, reporting from across the world fills in many of the gaps in public knowledge on these topics.392 According to the Wall Street Journal, Zamel “began making contacts in the UAE” in 2014, so quickly “becoming close to the national security adviser [of the UAE]” that he was able to sign up the royal government in Abu Dhabi as one of his company Wikistrat’s “major clients.”393 Wikistrat, like Psy-Group an Israeli business intelligence outfit, did work for MBZ that included conducting “war-games scenarios for the government of the UAE,” though many Wikistrat employees at the time say that the identity of their client was hidden from even them—a fact underscoring the level of secrecy with which MBZ operates out-of-country.394 That “there are no known publicly available pictures of [Zamel],” according to the Daily Beast, points toward Zamel’s own penchant for secrecy.395
It is while Zamel is working with the UAE that he launches Psy-Group, which quickly expands its operations into America and the United Kingdom.396 Psy-Group’s marketing materials lean heavily on the firm’s association with the Israeli military, inasmuch as they emphasize that the Israeli company was “founded and is managed by an experienced group of former high-ranking officers from elite units of some of the world’s most renowned intelligence agencies. [Psy-Group] has a proven track record in information gathering, analysis, research, special intelligence operations and technology in the physical and cyber domains.”397 Tellingly, Psy-Group appears to begin its operations in the weeks and months immediately after the fall 2015 meeting MBZ attended with MBS and el-Sisi on a yacht in the Red Sea, at which meeting the three Arab leaders agreed to work to elect Donald Trump as U.S. president. Certainly, Wikistrat and Psy-Group’s corporate histories confirm that Zamel was at least a “consultant” to MBZ at the time of the meeting; notably, part of the Red Sea Conspiracy’s underlying scheme was to bring several Sunni Arab Gulf states more closely in league with Israel, particularly the Israeli military.398
As Zamel is winding down Wikistrat in 2015—the firm goes up for sale in 2016—ostensibly because he wishes to spend more time on Psy-Group, Wikistrat completes a major new war-game simulation.399 By 2015, war-game simulations (that is, simulations of how a business intelligence company can intervene in an election) have made up the bulk of Wikistrat’s work for UAE, though it is unclear if the unusually large simulation Wikistrat works on in 2015, so close in time to its closure, was commissioned by the UAE, one of Zamel’s Kremlin-connected past employers, both UAE and Russian oligarchs in tandem, or some other client.400 What is known, according to the Daily Beast, is that just “days after Donald Trump rode down an escalator at Trump Tower [in mid-June 2015] and announced he’d run for president, a little-known consulting firm with links to Israeli intelligence [Wikistrat] started gaming out how a foreign government could meddle in the U.S. political process. Internal communications, which the Daily Beast reviewed, show that the firm conducted an analysis of how illicit efforts might shape American politics. Months later, the Trump campaign reviewed a pitch from a company [Psy-Group] owned by that firm’s founder—a pitch to carry out similar efforts.”401
This major investigative report in the Daily Beast, conducted in late 2018 and early 2019, strongly points toward MBZ having commissioned Zamel to generate Wikistrat’s 2015 war-game simulations, as the “similar” pitch Zamel made to Trump Jr. in August 2016 was made alongside George Nader—one of MBZ’s top advisers—and Erik Prince, the man running the Emirates’ mercenary army. Moreover, as the Daily Beast observes, at the time Zamel first pitched his plan to the Trump campaign—in April 2016, to Rick Gates—it “echoed … the real election interference already underway by the Kremlin,” an observation that becomes more troubling when added to the fact of MBZ adviser George Nader’s repeated trips to Moscow during the presidential election and his substantial past engagements with top officials in the Russian government.402
Zamel incorporated Psy-Group in Israel in December 2014.403 According to the Daily Beast, as the head of Psy-Group “Zamel took part in at least two meetings in Washington in 2016 and 2017. And his staff at Psy-Group made several connections about their social media manipulation plan with individuals who represented themselves as close to the Trump team.” More explicitly, “former employees of [Psy-Group] … said part of the plan [for the Trump campaign] was carried out.”404 Peter Marino, a Wikistrat employee who worked on Zamel’s election-interference war-game in 2015, notes the similarity of his work to what actually occurred during the 2016 election: “At the time we were discussing the subject of cyber-interference in democratic processes, it seemed and felt like just another idle intellectual exercise and scenario planning project for political scientists.… But retrospectively, it feels a bit too on-the-nose not to be disturbing.”405 Another Wikistrat analyst who spoke to the Daily Beast analogized the Israeli firm’s style of work to that of the Internet Research Agency, pointing to a 2015 summary of Wikistrat’s suite of services that echoed IRA techniques at a time, the digital media outlet notes, “after the St. Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency had begun its U.S. election interference, but well before the American public knew about it.”406 A third 2015 Wikistrat employee was even more direct, referencing Zamel’s work with Nader, and Nader’s subsequent attendance at a UAE-Russia summit with Erik Prince in January 2017, and adding, “The problem is when you combine that [information] with the fact of all the other allegations against Mr. Zamel, including the allegations that he received payment from George Nader, that Psy-Group was allegedly involved with a social media manipulation campaign first during the primary and then during the general [election in the United States]—you combine all of that with the fact that at another company he owns, Wikistrat, his analysts came up with a scenario that’s eerily similar to what wound up happening [with Russian election interference] … it is very concerning.”407
When one considers that Joel Zamel began working with the UAE just as the Emirati government was initiating a massive cyberhacking initiative called Project Raven, the level of concern required by Zamel’s 2015 and 2016 actions deepens. As one Project Raven employee will put it to Reuters, “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting U.S. persons. I am officially the bad kind of spy.”408 A recent New York Times report reveals that, whether this practice is connected to Project Raven or not, the UAE “use[s] Israeli phone-hacking technology to spy on political and regional rivals as well as members of the media,” noting that at least one Israeli company, NSO, directly “participat[es] in the cyberattacks”—an observation suggesting that NSO and Zamel’s Psy-Group, the two Israeli business intelligence companies with which Michael Flynn has been linked, simultaneously were working with the Emirati government on related projects in 2014.409 The Times of Israel adds to this report by reminding its readers that for the UAE to access certain Israeli technologies from an Israeli intelligence company in the first instance, the company must “receive the express permission of Israeli’s Defense Ministry”—raising the question of whether Wikistrat or Psy-Group ever sought or received express permission from the Israeli Defense Ministry or the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs to do business with the Emirati government, especially if that work could have influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.410 Moreover, since the Saudis have been using NSO’s Israeli Defense Ministry–approved Pegasus 3 hacking software since 2013, if any Wikistrat or Psy-Group work with the UAE in 2014 or thereafter used Pegasus as part of a Saudi-UAE joint venture, it would lay at the doorstep of the Israeli government a good deal of the responsibility for any illegal intrusion into America’s electoral processes that may have resulted.411
Given that Pegasus has been called “one of the most sophisticated pieces of cyberespionage software” ever created, it is difficult to imagine the UAE declining to use it in conjunction with any business it did with Zamel, especially if Nader’s entreaty to Trump Jr. in August 2016 indeed imported that the Saudis and Emiratis were working together to advance Trump’s cause. The Times of Israel confirms that the UAE has used Pegasus to “spy on foreign government officials” many times in the past, including during the period of the U.S. election—and confirms, too, that Pegasus has been used to spy on North American officials, for instance in Mexico—leaving only the question of whether any U.S. political figures were targeted by the Emiratis, the Saudis, or any of their Israeli contractors.412 As to this question, it must be noted that in November 2018 ex-CIA contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged that Pegasus had been used by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to track Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—an allegation that NSO has denied.413 The Times of Israel confirms, however, that NSO’s Pegasus technology had been sold to the Saudis by the time Riyadh was using the surveillance tools available to the royal family to track, ensnare, and ultimately assassinate Khashoggi (see chapter 9).414 As for whether Psy-Group was in 2015 and 2016 willing to work in the United States, the answer is yes. The New Yorker reports, for instance, that in 2016 and 2017 Psy-Group “mounted a campaign [Project Butterfly] on behalf of wealthy Jewish-American donors to embarrass and intimidate activists on American college campuses who support a movement to put economic pressure on Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians.”415 Per the New Yorker, Project Butterfly demonstrated Psy-Group’s closeness to the Israeli government: one of the operators involved in the project was Ram Ben-Barak, who not only was one of Psy-Group’s “biggest hired guns” but, after serving as a deputy director for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad through 2014, was promoted to director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.416 Another adviser for Psy-Group during Project Butterfly was Yaakov Amidror, “a former national-security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”417 And the outside counsel Psy-Group worked with during the project had “advised five Israeli Prime Ministers, including Netanyahu,” the New Yorker reports.418
There were also other, less visible connections between Psy-Group and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election cycle. For example, one of Psy-Group’s twenty-nine employees was Eitan Charnoff, who simultaneously worked for Zamel during the presidential election and directed iVote Israel, a “right-leaning” entity focused on helping Americans in Israel vote in presidential elections; Charnoff’s operation has been accused of “intentionally suppressing votes” and maintaining “ties to the Republican Party” despite its formal nonpartisan status.419 According to the Jerusalem Post, Psy-Group employee Charnoff’s outfit “was perceived,” at its 2012 founding, “as having a true aim of unseating Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.”420 Even Charnoff admits that many observers perceive the “purpose of the organization” to be “to get Republicans [in Israel] registered [to vote]” in U.S. presidential elections.421
With the revelation of the existence of UAE’s Project Raven, the question of whether the Emiratis have used the technology at their disposal to track American targets has been answered in the affirmative.422 According to Reuters, Project Raven is a massive UAE cyberintelligence operation that began running in 2009 with the Israeli cyber tool Karma, limited American oversight, and virtually no ethical or legal strictures in place; it did not accrue FBI Counterintelligence Division attention until 2016, during the presidential election.423 Three former Project Raven operatives report that, after years without FBI oversight, the FBI suddenly wanted to know, as the presidential campaign progressed, “Had they been asked to spy on Americans?”424 This sudden FBI interest in the Emiratis’ hacking activities in the United States, after seven years of only modest CIA oversight, seems plausibly related to activities happening stateside at the time—including the possibly Emirati-sponsored approach to the Trump campaign by an Israeli cyberespionage company.425 Indeed, the answer to the FBI’s query about the UAE targeting American citizens inside the United States in 2016, the Reuters investigative report into Project Raven confirms, was yes.426
What is less clear is whether Trump himself was aware of Joel Zamel’s and George Nader’s actions during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to Haaretz, shortly after dropping out of the presidential race in early March 2016, Republican Ben Carson “personally presented Trump with [Israeli business intelligence firm] Inspiration’s plan for [general election] voter manipulation in swing states.”427 Haaretz further reports that Inspiration subsequently received “enormous amounts” of information from a pro-Trump super PAC, “which it then used to compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”428
It is widely suspected that Israeli business intelligence firms do at times work with one another. Ongoing legal litigation initiated by Canadian hedge fund West Face Capital has accused, for instance, Zamel’s Psy-Group of “conspiring” with one of its apparent competitors in the Israeli business intelligence market, Black Cube, “to provide reporters, news agencies (including the National Post, Bloomberg News and the Associated Press) … with edited, distorted or otherwise falsified recordings and/or transcripts of meetings between operatives of Black Cube and its targets, including current and former employees. According to the complaint, Psy-Group … worked in tandem with Black Cube, publishing defamatory articles and social media posts about West Face and using sophisticated masking techniques to hide their tracks.”429 Inspiration, the company Carson pitched directly to Trump, has been accused of working “in cooperation with another Israeli company in order to understand which voters are more likely or less likely to vote on election day”—a description that fits the public-facing, Cambridge Analytica–run segment of the work the Trump campaign contracted for, possibly along with complementary “dark” intelligence work by Psy-Group, during the presidential election.430 An additional possibility raised by some Psy-Group employees in speaking with the Daily Beast is that Zamel “developed his own separate operation,” apart from but still connected to Psy-Group, during the 2016 presidential campaign—but because of Zamel’s predilection for secrecy, it was impossible for them to know for sure.431
MBS launches a war against Yemen to dislodge Houthi rebels, who have driven the Yemeni government into exile, from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital.
The Shiite Houthi movement began in the early 1990s as a “theological movement” that “preached tolerance and peace,” according to Ahmed Addaghashi, a Houthi expert and professor at Sana’a University.432 Officially known as Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the Houthis, per Addaghashi, are a discrete religious group with a “stronghold in the northern province of Saada” but “originally held a considerably broad-minded educational and cultural vision … [that] fell into internal strife between two lines; the first called for more openness, while the second urged sticking to the traditional legacy of the Shia sect.”433 The movement’s first leader, Hussein Bader Addian al-Houthi, favored the former approach, but the Houthis nevertheless took up arms—in self-defense, they insisted—when their first major conflict with the Yemeni government began in 2004.434 The issue at the time was whether the Houthis would be permitted to protest in mosques; when al-Houthi refused to order his followers to stop the practice, the government sought his arrest, leading quickly to outbreaks of violence.435 It was therefore little surprise when, in 2011, the Houthis were among the many anti-government factions that rebelled against then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh.436 Equally unsurprising was the movement’s resistance to the subdivision plan intended to end the 2011 conflict. The plan, which would have reestablished Yemen as a six-region federal state, would have put the Houthi stronghold of Saada into the region most directly controlled by Saleh (the Sana’a region).437 While the Houthis did not demand or even propose complete independence from the government in Sana’a, they did seek “regional autonomy” under the new federal system, according to Al Jazeera.438
By August 2014, the Houthi movement had gained so much popularity in Yemen that it was in a position to credibly demand that the existing Yemeni government in Sana’a disband.439 Al Jazeera reports that, “Among other demands, Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi requested that fuel subsidies, which had been cut significantly in late July [2014], be reinstated. If the government failed to meet an ultimatum, he said, ‘other steps’ would be taken. The Houthis also demanded a more representative form of government that would reflect the seats allocated to political groups and independent activists during Yemen’s 10-month National Dialogue Conference, which mapped out the political future of Yemen after its 2011 uprising.”440 Thereafter, the rebels “raided key government institutions in the capital” and “pushed into other provinces, taking over the strategic port city of Hodeida on the Red Sea.”441 This, despite Yemeni president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi having previously “called for a dialogue with the Houthis, inviting the group to join a ‘unity government’ … [and] sign[ing] a peace deal brokered by the UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar.”442 According to Al Jazeera, the rebels did not ultimately comply with the deal.443
In October 2015, Hadi named Yemen’s envoy to the United States, Khaled Bahah, as the nation’s new prime minister, a pick that seemed to have bipartisan (both government and Houthi) support. This concurrence lasted only until January 2016, however, when the Houthis objected to a first draft of the country’s new constitution, which proposed dividing the country into six regions. The Houthis demanded Hadi abandon his plan for subdivision, and when he refused, they stormed his palace, pressured him to appoint their allies to key positions in government, placed him and two of his ministers under house arrest, and ultimately, in February 2016, forced him to resign. A temporary five-person council was installed in his place. Hadi subsequently fled to Aden and declared himself the rightful Yemeni president. Within a few weeks, the Saudis had given shelter to Hadi in Riyadh and a Saudi-led military coalition had begun bombing Yemen.
It is little surprise that Barrack has the influence with Trump to convince the GOP candidate to begin the process of replacing his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. As longtime Trump friend, adviser, and ally Roger Stone explains, “Thomas Barrack is the only person I know who the president speaks to as a peer. Barrack is to Trump as [Florida banker] Bebe Rebozo was to Nixon, which is the best friend.”
Barrack and Trump are not just friends—they are also business associates. “I’ve been a financial partner of his on many things that he’s done, [and] he’s been a partner of mine on many things I’ve done,” Barrack tells Bloomberg TV on June 1, 2016.445 In his interview with Bloomberg, Barrack repeatedly assures his interviewer, “I’m not political.” He adds that “I spend half my time in the Middle East.”446
When Trump is elected, Barrack refuses all proffered roles in the Trump administration—including ambassador to Mexico and secretary of the treasury—angling instead for “special envoy for Middle East economic development,” a role that would put him at the center of hundreds of billions of dollars in Middle East commerce.447 He is unable to secure the posting he wants, however.448 Later events suggest that Barrack’s long-standing ties to Qatar may have put him at odds with both Kushner’s private ambitions as a businessman and his public ambitions as an amateur diplomat. By the time of Trump’s May 2017 visit to Riyadh, Kushner has become close to MBS—and MBS is just weeks away from initiating an air, land, and sea blockade on Qatar. Moreover, in November 2017 MBS arrests and detains for three months Barrack’s former Saudi investing partner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. According to The Intercept, bin Talal may have been on a list of MBS’s enemies that MBS claims was given to him by Kushner in October 2017 (see chapter 8).449
Given bin Talal’s long-standing business relationship with Barrack, one of Trump’s closest friends, a call bin Talal makes just days prior to his arrest and detention in November 2017—after the first wave of MBS-ordered arrests and detentions in October 2017—will in 2018 draw significant media attention. Shortly before MBS’s agents place him under arrest, bin Talal calls Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, to “praise MBS” and his “vision” and to invite Khashoggi “to come back to the Kingdom and be part of [that vision].”450 Khashoggi “resist[s] [the] pressure from Riyadh” and does not return to Saudi Arabia.451
After Trump names Barrack the chairman of his inaugural committee instead of special Middle East envoy, Bloomberg quotes two sources who say they heard Barrack unhappily compare his transition role to that of a “wedding planner.”452
After announcing his candidacy for president of the United States on May 4, 2015, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican, begins forming a foreign policy team with a surprising number of experts on the nation of Israel—many of whom will move directly to the campaign of Donald Trump in the weeks before Carson officially suspends his flailing campaign in early March 2016.
Like several of his campaign aides, Ben Carson will end up on Trump’s transition team in November 2016.453 Trump thereafter successfully nominates him to be secretary of housing and urban development.
Another member of Carson’s team with substantial Israeli security contacts—though not an adviser to Carson exclusively, as he is also advising Donald Trump at the time—is Michael Flynn.
Flynn—whose foreign policy views, according to the New York Times, were in 2015 undergirded by a devout belief that America “needed to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight [against terrorism]”—spent that year and the next receiving money from entities connected to three foreign countries: Israel (via a cyberweapons firm specializing in cell phone hacking), Turkey (via work for GreenZone Systems Inc., a firm run by an Iranian American businessman simultaneously working as an agent of the Turkish government), and Russia (via contracts with or appearances for Kaspersky Lab—“a Russian research firm that works to uncover Western government spyware, and whose founder has long been suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence services”—Volga Dnepr Airlines, and RT, the “Kremlin-financed news network”).454 For his efforts, Flynn earns in 2016, while acting as Trump’s top national security advisor, between $1.37 million and $1.47 million.455 Another company for which Flynn does consulting work, Brainwave Science, had previously seen one of its board members—and its principal investor—get “convicted [in the 1990s] of trying to sell stolen biotech material to the Russian KGB espionage agency.”456 The company’s chief scientist warned Flynn against working with Brainwave, in part due to the company being “the target of a federal investigation … [about which he] declined to provide further details” to the New York Times, but Flynn ignored him.457 “I’m a capitalist at heart,” Flynn tells the Times in October 2016.458
Prior to joining the Carson campaign as an adviser, Flynn had been approached by an Israeli business intelligence company, Psy-Group, whose owner, Joel Zamel, sought to recruit him.
The Daily Beast, writing of Zamel’s other business intelligence company, Wikistrat, notes that “the vast majority of Wikistrat’s clients [are] foreign governments … [and] the company work [is] not just limited to analysis. It also engage[s] in intelligence collection.”459 Zamel, who considers himself “the Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world,” per the Daily Beast, “exploits ‘in country … informants’ as sources.”460 Indeed, the digital media outlet confirms that prior to its closure 74 percent of Wikistrat’s revenue came from partnerships with governments, not private individuals, and that while Zamel unsuccessfully sought to recruit Flynn to his operations, he did successfully recruit another former DIA director, David Shedd.461 James Kadtke, a former senior analyst for Wikistrat, says that while the company was still extant that there was “more to this company than meets the eye. ‘[When I interviewed] it was clear to me that both of these guys [the two Wikistrat executives with whom he interviewed] had intelligence backgrounds, [and were] intelligence professionals, not academics or analysts. They were using their experts for tacit information going on in various parts of the world. I got the impression they were doing things outside of Wikistrat. It seemed mysterious.’”462 As the Daily Beast summarizes, “Wikistrat appeared [to Kadtke] to be more about intelligence collection than anything else.”463 When asked about covert intelligence collection, another Wikistrat employee confirms that, indeed, Zamel “could have done this.”464 A third Wikistrat employee tells the Daily Beast, “I felt like I had no real visibility into what the company was really doing. [Zamel] was very secretive, everything was highly compartmentalized.… It was clear that he kept the entire company in the dark. Even [company executives] didn’t have the whole picture. I suspected he was involved in other stuff simply because a man without secrets doesn’t need to be secretive. If he had nothing to hide, he would’ve been much more open. I thought he was involved in other operations [outside the company].”465
The chances that Zamel was in fact an Israeli government agent while ostensibly working in the Israeli private sector in the intelligence business are increased by the fact that, as one of his employees confirms to the Daily Beast, Zamel would not allow himself to be photographed, and would never allow even Wikistrat employees to go anywhere near his phone or laptop.466 Evidence of Zamel having unusual government connections includes the fact that, as the Daily Beast recounts, “one of his connections was the former head of the Israeli intelligence directorate, Amos Yadlin”; his COO was a “former counterterrorism officer for Israeli intelligence”; and his director of analytic community and chief security officer, Shay Hershkovitz, was previously a “major in an elite Israeli intelligence-analysis unit.”467 Whether or not Zamel was himself an Israeli agent, the question remains whether he would have been willing to work on behalf of a U.S. presidential campaign without informing any of his contacts in Israeli intelligence—men and women who might well have considered information-sharing under such circumstances obligatory rather than optional.
At some point during his ten-month candidacy for president, Carson and his team receive a “plan for voter manipulation in [general election] swing states” from an Israeli business intelligence company, Inspiration, which is “run by former Israeli Defense Force officers.” After Carson exits the presidential race in March 2016, he “personally present[s] Trump with Inspiration’s plan.”
Inspiration is run by Col. Ronen Cohen, “the head of the terror division in the Research Division of [Israeli] Military Intelligence [and] the deputy head of the Research Division … [who also served as an] intelligence officer of the [Israeli] Central Command.”468 Cohen had retired from serving with Israel’s military intelligence units approximately thirty-six months before Trump formally announced his presidential run, and less than twelve months before Trump made the decision to run shortly after Election Day in 2012.469
On November 12, 2015, at a community college theater in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump tells the assembled crowd, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do. Believe me.” Trump also tells the crowd that he has a plan for defeating ISIS—but that it’s a secret.
At the time Trump says this, his top foreign policy and national security adviser, Flynn, has just returned from Saudi Arabia, where he has pitched (on behalf of ACS) a Middle East Marshall Plan that addresses the ISIS threat directly and in a way the Saudis approve of—one emphasizing hostility toward Iran and friendliness toward Russia rather than the reverse, which is, in the Saudi view, what the Obama administration has thus far been offering. Whether Flynn’s views on the subject are on Trump’s mind in Fort Dodge are unclear; what is clear, especially in coverage of the event by the Washington Post, is that something unexplained is perturbing Trump on November 12. BuzzFeed News reports that it was around this time that Dmitry Klokov was promising Trump—unrealistically, it turns out—a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin to expedite his effort to build a Trump Tower Moscow with Russian oligarch Andrey Rozov; Trump had just signed a letter of intent to build the tower with Rozov (a letter of intent that even his organization’s lead attorney, Alan Garten, appeared not to know about) two weeks before the event in Iowa.470
According to coverage of the Fort Dodge rally in the Post, Trump arrived to the November 12 event forty minutes late with his voice “hoarse, his hair mussed, his tone defensive. He promised to take questions from the audience but instead launched into a 95-minute-long rant that at times sounded like the monologue of a man grappling with why he is running for president … Even for a candidate full of surprises, the speech was surprising.… He uttered the word ‘crap’ at least three times, and promised to ‘bomb the shit’ out of oil fields benefiting terrorists. He signed a book for a guy in the audience and then tossed it back at him with a flip: ‘Here you go, baby. I love you.’”471
In January 2019 the New York Times will report, after Trump has launched a public assault against his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, his CIA director, Gina Haspel, and other top intelligence agents, “While it is unusual for a president to pick a fight with his intelligence chiefs, this is not the first time for Mr. Trump. After the 2016 election and before he took office in 2017, Mr. Trump was publicly skeptical of intelligence conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and he mocked intelligence agencies for their role in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Mr. Trump also contradicted last year’s global threat assessment from senior intelligence officials, whom he had appointed to his administration. While his top intelligence officials warned [in 2018] about Russia’s continuing efforts to conduct influence operations, Mr. Trump continued to dismiss any notion that Russia had interfered in American elections.”472
Trump’s willingness to listen to input from foreign agents over U.S. intelligence will be confirmed in February 2019, when it is revealed that in mid-2017 Trump told his intelligence briefers that on the question of whether North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-Un, had just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States, “I believe Putin.”
Early 2019 will see Trump publicly disregard the assessments of his intelligence chiefs as to nearly every major geopolitical hotspot, including the influence of Iran in the Middle East, the war in Afghanistan, the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, and the current battle-readiness of ISIS forces. When director of national intelligence Dan Coats, CIA director Gina Haspel, and other top intelligence officials disagree with Trump’s opinions of these topics in testimony before Congress, Trump will announce on Twitter that his own government’s foremost intelligence experts are “passive and naive” on Iran—an opinion that happens to be shared by his allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE—and likewise “wrong” on the other topics they spoke of. “They need to go back to school,” he will say.473 At no point during or after his diatribe does Trump reveal which intelligence sources he trusts, or offer any hint of where he has been getting his intelligence since he began his presidential run in mid-2015.
Moreover, [Flynn] fails to properly disclose a second, October 2015 trip to Saudi Arabia that is part of the same joint venture. In hiding the details of this second trip from federal authorities, he makes up the name of the hotel he allegedly stayed at, and obscures his business interests in Saudi Arabia under the false claim that he was in the kingdom “for six days to speak at a conference.” He also fails to disclose the identity of the “friend” who traveled with him to Saudi Arabia and the company that paid for his trip.
According to the Washington Post, Flynn’s “friend” appears to have been ACU Strategic Partners’ senior scientist, Thomas Cochran, which would explain why Flynn wouldn’t have wanted to disclose the name to the federal government—it would have raised questions about Flynn’s ties to ACU and his need for (as the Post terms Cochran) an “expert on nuclear nonproliferation issues” during his travels in Egypt and Israel.474 The Post reports in November 2017 that ACU paid for Flynn’s Israel and Egypt trips and wrote him a $25,000 check for “the loss of income and business opportunities” that ACU claimed—in a letter to the House Oversight Committee—the trips represented.475 Despite Flynn’s claim of being a proud capitalist, he for some reason never cashes the check that ACU gives him.476
Roston adds, chillingly, that “a former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News that there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: ‘There were guys that were basically doing what you said.’ He was astonished, he said, by what he learned.… The mercenaries, he said, were ‘almost like a murder squad.’”
In an eerie echo of the October 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed because of his opposition to MBS (see chapter 9), Spear Operations Group mercenary Isaac Gilmore concedes that on occasion “there is the possibility that the target [the UAE asked his team to kill]” was not a valid target but just someone “MBZ doesn’t like.”477
Between 2009 and 2018, the United States government approves at least $27 billion in arms sales and defense services to the United Arab Emirates, according to a 2018 BuzzFeed News article.478 But “the UAE is hardly alone in using defense contractors,” the digital media outlet writes. “In fact, it is the US that helped pioneer the worldwide move toward privatizing the military. The Pentagon pays companies to carry out many traditional functions, from feeding soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding convoys. The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire mercenaries to carry out attacks or engage directly in warfare.”479 Even so, Pentagon protocols implicitly facilitate freelancing by U.S. veterans; according to a high-level Navy SEAL officer who speaks to BuzzFeed News, “If the soldiers [who wish to work as for-profit mercenaries abroad] are not on active duty … they are not obligated to report what they’re doing.”480 Because, as of 2018, the pay scale for in-demand, well-trained military veterans on security details begins at $500 a day, whereas Abraham Golan is in 2015 offering $830 a day—or $25,000 per month—to members of his murder squads, it may be easier for some veterans to put aside their qualms and sign on to legally dubious work details abroad.481 Nevertheless, Golan business associate and former Navy SEAL Isaac Gilmore tells BuzzFeed News that “a lot” of the elite American ex-soldiers Golan approaches about working in Yemen turn him down.482
During the December 2015 operation in Yemen that is the subject of the BuzzFeed News investigative report on Golan and his crew, Gilmore admits to a reporter that he didn’t know which of his twenty-three UAE-identified Yemeni targets were politicians, which were religious figures, and which were alleged terrorists.483 The deck of playing cards from which Gilmore is working, supplied to him and his peers on Golan’s squad by an Emirati military officer, gives no information about why the targeted individual is designated for assassination.484
With respect to U.S. policy on the use of manned wetwork operations overseas, it is clear from recent American political history that the Saudis and Emiratis would have every reason to support a Republican presidential candidate over a Democratic one. Whereas, as BuzzFeed News notes in 2018, “under President George W. Bush … the CIA developed covert assassination capabilities” that went beyond drone strikes, “President Barack Obama halted the agency’s secret assassination program” while ramping up the use of drones.485 As the Saudis and Emiratis lack the drone capabilities of the United States, the more acceptable targeted assassinations conducted by mercenaries are to a given U.S. presidential administration, the easier it is, presumably, for the Saudis and Emiratis to recruit former U.S. special forces personnel either experienced in such actions or willing to engage in them despite a lack of experience.486 BuzzFeed News notes that “President Donald Trump has further loosened the rules for drone strikes” compared to those established under President Obama, underscoring that Trump’s attitude toward the killing of foreign nationals in targeted strikes is more permissive than his predecessor’s.487
According to Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen who works at Oxford, those individuals on Abraham Golan’s hit list who are members of the Al-Islah political party in Yemen work through the political process, not—like al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups in the region—through violence.488 This commitment to the political process led Al-Islah to receive more than 20 percent of the vote in Yemen in the most recent (2018) elections.489 Asked about the distinction between killing unarmed Al-Islah politicians and armed terrorists, Golan tells BuzzFeed News that to him, the divide between the two groups is “a purely intellectual dichotomy.”490
Al-Islah is a Sunni Islamist party whose chief political rival in Yemen is the Houthis. Al-Islah accuses the Houthis of being an Iranian proxy, while the Houthis contend that during the 2011 Yemeni uprising that led to the overthrow of then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, Al-Islah waged aggressive military campaigns against the northern Saada province that had long served as the Houthis’ stronghold in Yemen.491 Even as now exiled Yemeni president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi accuses Iran of arming the Houthis, the Houthis accuse Al-Islah of inciting nonsectarian Yemenis to fight them, even encouraging government military regiments to engage them in armed conflict.492 The Houthis deny receiving any assistance from Iran, and indeed for a time in 2012 and 2013 it appeared that Hadi would successfully keep government forces from undue entanglements in local struggles between the Houths and Al-Islah.493 This effort broke down, however, during a 2013 National Dialogue Conference intended to resolve the political, sectarian, and military chasms left by the 2011 uprising.494 The Houthis, who held 35 of 565 seats at the conference—just over 6 percent—rejected efforts to gerrymander their Saada stronghold into the Sana’a (capital) region.495