August 2016 to November 2016
As Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, makes a last-ditch effort to offer value to his former Kremlin-connected bosses via his work on the Trump campaign before being forced to resign, Trump’s son has a fateful meeting at Trump Tower with two foreign nationals that brings one of them, George Nader, into the campaign’s inner circle. Meanwhile, a cadre of enterprising Trump advisers is working in parallel to Manafort’s anti-sanctions efforts, joining their cause to those of the Red Sea conspirators in an all-encompassing geopolitical plan for the Middle East that will make them rich if Trump ends sanctions on Russia. In the midst of these plots, Trump and Flynn receive a classified security briefing that puts an end to any questions about Putin’s intentions.
On August 17, 2016, Trump, Flynn, and Trump’s transition chief at the time, Chris Christie, receive at the FBI field office in New York City the GOP candidate’s first classified national security briefing from U.S. intelligence agents. During the meeting, NBC News will later report, Trump is “personally briefed on Russia’s role in the [spring 2016] hacks by U.S. officials.”1 NBC notes, quoting “a senior U.S. intelligence official,” that during the briefing “the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election … [were] discussed extensively” with Trump, and that after the briefing Trump had “all the information … need[ed] to be crystal clear” on the Kremlin’s responsibility for attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.2 Specifically, Trump was shown “classified materials … [establishing] ‘direct links’ between Vladimir Putin’s government and the recent hacks and e-mail leaks.”3 According to Fox News, the hours-long briefing also lays out, more broadly, “threats to the United States and other security issues.” The night of the briefing, Trump is asked if he trusts the intelligence he’s just received; he responds, “Not so much from the people that have been doing it for our country.”4
Whatever Trump’s views on trusting U.S. intelligence services versus foreign intelligence services, or advice from his own national security advisers versus advice from his designated intelligence briefers, Trump’s August 17 briefing activates a legal trigger under 18 U.S.C. § 2, the federal aiding and abetting statute, as post-briefing Trump has what the law considers “foreknowledge” of the legal elements of Russia’s computer crimes.5 This means that Trump cannot, at any time after August 17, “knowingly” engage in any act, verbal or physical, that would “induce” either the continuation of Russian crimes against the United States or any new crimes that are both related to their predecessors and foreseeable to Trump following the briefing.6 Trump’s legally discernible “foreknowledge” is, shortly after August 17, augmented by a second classified intelligence briefing at which he—and possibly, again, Flynn and Christie, as the “candidate is allowed to choose two people to bring with them to the briefing”—“receive[s] additional briefings on the Russian hack.”7
The degree of specificity in Trump’s first two classified national security briefings is significant. According to CNN, during the first of these briefings Trump is “personally warned … that foreign adversaries—including Russia—would likely attempt to infiltrate his team or gather intelligence about his campaign.”8 Moreover, not only does Trump have Russia’s election interference activities explained to him in detail, but his briefers also explain to him “potential activities by China”—meaning that Trump’s briefing distinguishes between Russian and Chinese threats with respect to both Trump’s own campaign and attacks on the nation’s elections infrastructure.9 Finally, according to CNN law enforcement analyst Josh Campbell, formerly a supervisory special agent for the national security and criminal divisions of the FBI, at his two late-summer briefings Trump would have been “told to reach out to the FBI if they [he or anyone on his team] sensed anything suspicious.”10
Despite these warnings and requests regarding Kremlin attempts to “infiltrate” his campaign—an infiltration Trump knew had already occurred on several fronts, including, for instance, in his aide George Papadopoulos’s confession to being a Kremlin “intermediary” on March 31, 2016—there is no evidence that Trump passed any information to the U.S. intelligence community about what he and his campaign had already observed firsthand. Under the circumstances, his answers to any FBI queries on this score may have constituted an abetting of Russian crimes as well as an offense under 18 U.S.C § 1001, which prohibits making false statements to federal law enforcement officers.11
Despite Trump passing a legal watershed on August 17, after his classified briefings he does the following: (1) professes, at two 2016 presidential debates, to have no knowledge of whether Russia has attacked or is attacking the United States; (2) falsely declares, in May 2018, that “the FBI never warned his campaign that Russians might try to infiltrate his team”; and (3) continues to deny, well into 2017, Russian involvement in election interference. Trump’s recalcitrance stands in the face of a July 26, 2016, New York Times article reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies “now have ‘high confidence’ that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee”; Trump’s August 17 briefing and its follow-up; an October 7 public statement by U.S. intelligence officials confirming that “Russia’s senior-most officials … directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions”; a December 10 report that “U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘concluded that Russia interfered in … [the] presidential election to boost Donald Trump’s bid for the White House”; and a January 6, 2017, classified briefing that unfolded for Trump the entirety of the intelligence community’s evidence against the Kremlin’s hackers and propagandists.12 Moreover, as the Mueller Report will note, six weeks before the July 26 New York Times article revealing the U.S. intelligence community’s “high confidence” assessment on Russian election hacking, the “cybersecurity firm that had conducted in-house analysis for the Democratic National Committee posted a [public] announcement that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the DNC’s computer and obtained access to documents.”13
That the summer 2016 public warnings from the media, Democratic cybersecurity experts, and U.S. law enforcement about Russian election interference—as well as the substance of the private warnings Trump received in August and thereafter—reached the Trump campaign’s national security advisory committee is suggested by the actions of the members of that team. On August 8, the number two official on the committee, J. D. Gordon, “decline[s] an invitation to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s residence because the timing [is] ‘not optimal’ in view of media reports about Russian interference.”14 On August 19, Trump’s campaign manager is asked to resign, ostensibly because of “media coverage scrutinizing his ties to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and links to Russian business,” and a few weeks later the campaign “terminate[s] [Carter] Page’s association with the Campaign” on the basis of his “connections to Russia.”15 On September 8, after the chairman of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Jeff Sessions, has met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Sessions declines Kislyak’s invitation to dine with him at his home, on the advice of his legislative director, Sandra Luff, who tells him that he must be careful because Kislyak is an “old school KGB guy.”16 These and other similar incidents—for instance, Papadopoulos’s temporary dismissal from the campaign after he gives an interview to a Russian media outlet, Interfax, in September—demonstrate that the Trump campaign broadly writ was aware of the threat posed by Russia and its agents in August and September 2016.
The Trump campaign’s intermittent avoidance of visible conflicts of interest involving the Russian Federation occurs despite Trump having announced at a press conference on July 27—the day after the New York Times published the intelligence community’s “high confidence” assessment of Kremlin involvement in the hacking of U.S. persons and entities—that he would “be looking at” the lifting of sanctions on Russia, a statement he makes while, in the same address, inviting Russian hackers to steal Hillary Clinton’s emails.17 The latter comment, a request to the Kremlin made concurrently with the inducement of possible sanctions relief, will lead “within five hours” to “a Russian intelligence service … targeting email accounts associated with Hillary Clinton for possible hacks,” according to the Mueller Report.18 Shortly after the press conference, during which Trump says “I have nothing to do with Russia” five times, his attorney Michael Cohen confronts him with the fact that these statements about his non-involvement with Russia are untrue—to which Trump replies that his Trump Tower Moscow plans have not yet gone to final contract. “Why mention it if it is not a deal?” he says to Cohen.19 This late July 2016 comment to Cohen bears the additional significance of confirming that Trump believes his Trump Tower Moscow deal with Rozov to be an active negotiation, despite Cohen not having spoken about it with Kremlin officials since June.20
Despite the New York Times reporting in August 2016 that Trump asked Manafort to leave the campaign on August 19 because he felt the veteran politico was “low energy,” and Eric Trump telling the Times that his father “just didn’t want to have the distraction [of Manafort’s Ukrainian ties] looming over the campaign,” in fact Trump continues to be advised by Manafort long after his campaign manager “resigns.”21 According to the Mueller Report, “Despite his resignation, Manafort continued to offer advice to various Campaign officials through the November election … [including] Kushner, Bannon, and candidate Trump.”22 Manafort even advises the campaign, through an email in late October to Jared Kushner, on how it should handle a topic—WikiLeaks—by then intertwined with the very issues the campaign said it had separated itself from Manafort to avoid.23
Almost immediately after he departs the campaign on August 19, Manafort goes on a mysterious cruise in the waters off Greece with Thomas Barrack and “five friends from [Barrack’s] company, Colony NorthStar.”24 According to the New York Times, the cruise is now part of a federal investigation in New York into whether “anyone from Qatar or other Middle Eastern countries … contributed money, perhaps using American intermediaries,” to either the Trump campaign, pro-Trump super PACs illegally coordinating with the Trump campaign, or Trump’s post-election inaugural fund.25 One of the men Manafort and Barrack meet with during their cruise is Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, a former Qatari prime minister and, up until thirty-six months before the cruise, the director of Qatar’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund.26 HBJ is, in August 2016, “a highly influential member of the [Qatari] governing royal family” and “one of the world’s richest men.”27 Federal investigators are also looking into, apparently as part of the same sequence of events, possible illicit connections between Barrack and Rashid Al Malik, “an associate of Mr. Barrack’s who heads a private investment firm in the United Arab Emirates … [and is] close to a key figure in the UAE’s government”—though the New York Times report on this line of inquiry does not reveal whether the “key figure” referenced is MBZ or not.28
The Mueller Report notes that, after the election, Manafort travels to “the Middle East” to discuss, for a fee, “what a Trump presidency would entail.”29 The report also details a transition-period meeting between Manafort and former Russian embassy employee Georgiy Oganov—a meeting arranged by Kilimnik and Deripaska deputy Victor Boyarkin at a time when Manafort is still in touch with Trump campaign officials—focused on “Ukraine and Russia,” “global politics,” and “recreating [the] old friendship” between Manafort and Deripaska.30 Three days after his meeting with the former Russian embassy staffer, Manafort emails Trump’s number two national security official, K. T. McFarland, to tell her that he has “some important information” that he needs to convey to her.31 That same week, Manafort had met in Virginia with Kilimnik and Ukrainian oligarch Serhiy Lyovochkin to again discuss the pro-Kremlin “peace plan,” and its accompanying sanctions relief, that he had already discussed with Kilimnik both before and after his departure from the Trump campaign.32 At the time of the Manafort-Kilimnik-Lyovochkin meeting, Manafort is still close enough to Trump’s inner circle that the Russian-intelligence-linked Kilimnik believes Manafort might be named Trump’s “‘special representative’ … [to] manage [the] process” of ending Russian sanctions and delivering eastern Ukraine to Putin. At another point during the transition, Manafort proves his continued influence with Trump’s inner circle by writing Jared Kushner to tell him to find a position in the incoming administration for Manafort’s banker. “On it!” Kushner replies to him in short order.33
One reason Manafort’s August 2016 cruise with Barrack continues to be a subject of interest to federal investigators is that they suspect he may have met with Kilimnik during this trip as well, according to Business Insider.34 Just as important, the cruise is seen as having possible links to a pro-Trump super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, that Manafort set up in mid-2016 at Trump’s request. The super PAC was run by two men, Laurance Gay and Ken McKay, who had just weeks before taking over Rebuilding America Now been working for the Trump campaign—even though federal law requires a “120 day cooling-off period before a campaign staffer can play a role in a super PAC supporting that campaign.”35 The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit D.C. organization focused on “holding candidates and government officials accountable regardless of political affiliation,” observes that the cooling-off period mandated by federal law is intended to ensure that “a [campaign] staffer can’t take a campaign’s strategic plans to a super PAC and execute them with unlimited funds.” The center also alleges that “at several points during the 2016 cycle, Rebuilding America Now appeared to cross legal lines prohibiting coordination with the Trump campaign. But it nonetheless raised $23 million in the 2016 cycle, and was one of the top super PACs supporting Trump’s 2016 election.”36
Two outstanding questions are whether any money flowed to Rebuilding America Now from foreign sources and whether any monies from Rebuilding America Now ended up in Manafort’s pocket—the latter being one of many ways pro-Trump forces could have helped ensure Manafort’s silence about campaign activities after he was separated from the campaign. Of particular interest to federal investigators, according to Vox, is a limited liability corporation Manafort created the very day he left the Trump campaign, just before his cruise with Barrack: Summerbreeze LLC.37 Vox reports that shortly after the Manafort-Barrack cruise, Summerbreeze received a $3.5 million loan from Spruce Capital, an investment firm backed by Soviet-born businessman Alexander Rovt, a Trump donor and one of the authors of the “peace deal” Manafort began negotiating with Kremlin agents in early August and continued negotiating through early 2018; these negotiations were apparently on the Trump campaign’s—and then the Trump transition team’s, and then the Trump administration’s—behalf, given that they occurred both during and after an eight-month period following Manafort’s resignation from the campaign that he was in periodic contact with Trump himself (see chapter 8).38
Summerbreeze will mysteriously receive, during the presidential transition, $16 million more in loans from Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, whose CEO, Steve Calk, was a Trump economic adviser in August 2016 and reportedly was seeking an administration job—with Manafort’s help—after the election.39 Both Manafort and Spruce took actions to try to hide their transaction from federal officials, according to the New York Daily News.40 Several questions remain open: whether Manafort was given millions in loans either to buy his silence or to buy his influence with the Trump team, whether he was being paid to engage in clandestine sanctions negotiations with Kremlin agents in a way that induced the Kremlin to continue committing crimes against the United States pre-election, and whether, as the New York Times reports, “people from Middle Eastern nations—including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—used straw donors to disguise their donations” to Trump’s inaugural fund, Rebuilding America Now, or, for that matter, Manafort’s personal bank account.41 Investigators reportedly are looking at, among many other unusual intersections, Al Malik’s attendance at an expensive, difficult-to-access, Barrack-hosted inaugural dinner in D.C. in January 2017; during the same dinner, Kushner’s Emirati adviser, Yousef al-Otaiba, was seated with K. T. McFarland, Jeff Sessions, Sheldon Adelson, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer.42
August 2, 2016, is the day that Manafort, Trump’s then-campaign manager, enters into a course of clandestine negotiations with the Kremlin on the topic of sanctions relief that will extend into 2018.43 The day before, Trump had seemed to make reference to the “grand bargain” envisioned by MBS and MBZ in speaking to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio: “It would be really nice if we got along with Russia and others that we don’t get along with right now. And wouldn’t it be nice if we teamed up with Russia and others, including surrounding [Middle Eastern] states … and we knocked the hell out of ISIS and got rid of these people?”44 Manafort’s meeting with Gates and Kilimnik the next day is the beginning of just such a team-up: the three men congregate at the Grand Havana Room in New York City, a private club known to be future Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s “favorite New York City hangout spot.”45 The building in which the Grand Havana Room is located is 666 Fifth Avenue—the desperately underwater property purchased by Kushner in 2007 and now owned, to its great detriment, by Kushner Companies.46
By 2018, all three of the men who meet at the Grand Havana Room on August 2, 2016, will be under federal indictment for having committed crimes while working on behalf of a pro-Kremlin politician in Ukraine.47 Kilimnik, per Gates “a former Russian intelligence officer with the GRU,” had just days earlier met with Russian oligarch (and his, Manafort’s, and Gates’s former boss) Oleg Deripaska.48 Kilimnik had also, days earlier, flown from Kiev to Moscow to meet with longtime Kremlin stooge and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Kremlin politician in whose employ all three of the men who meet at the Grand Havana Room committed federal crimes.49
While future federal legal filings on the Grand Havana Room meeting will be heavily redacted, a review of these court submissions reveals that “prosecutors believe Manafort lied about refusing something that Kilimnik offered at the meeting,” and also lied about the “peace plan”—one of the chief subjects of discussion in the meeting—never being discussed again by Manafort and Kilimnik after August 2.50 Concerned that the fact of their meeting will be detected, Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik “[take] the precaution … of leaving [the Grand Havana Room] separately.”51
The U.S. State Department describes Deripaska as “among the two or three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad,” while for his part, Deripaska has famously said that he doesn’t “separate [himself] from the state”; in his words, “I have no other interests.”52 In 2016, Deripaska and Kilimnik were willing and able to meet openly; now that Kilimnik’s “former” unit, the GRU, has been formally accused of “waging ‘information warfare’ against U.S. politics using social media and email hacking,” Kilimnik and his family have left their home in Ukraine to live “in a gated community in Khimki, the same Moscow suburb that houses the GRU unit accused by [special counsel] Mueller in an 11-count indictment in July [2018] of spearheading the hacking of Democratic emails in 2016.”53
The August 2, 2016, Manafort-Gates-Kilimnik summit is months in the making. According to the Guardian, “right after Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016, he and Kilimnik began emailing and brainstorming about avenues to … improve ties with” the Kremlin-linked Deripaska.54 In May 2016, Kilimnik had visited the United States to see Manafort, though it’s unknown whether the two men discussed sanctions relief.55 Sometime after his hire by Trump but before mid-June 2016, Manafort—along with Rick Gates—had begun electronically transferring internal campaign polling data to Kilimnik, data that had been, according to the New York Times, “developed by a private polling firm” whose work product was nonpublic.56 In July 2016, Manafort had emailed Kilimnik to tell him to offer Deripaska, on Manafort’s behalf, “private briefings” on the internal workings of Trump’s campaign.57 And after their sanctions negotiations on August 2, 2016, the two men would discuss the topic again via email in December 2016; in person in January 2017; in February 2017 (possibly in person, according to a redacted special counsel filing); “in Madrid” sometime “in early 2017”; and again in the winter of 2018.58 The volume of these discussions, as well as Manafort’s willingness to lie about them at the risk of losing his cooperation deal with the federal government—an event that ultimately comes to pass—underscores both their significance to the Trump-Russia investigation and their deep entanglement with the upper echelon of Trump’s presidential campaign, possibly including Trump himself.59
On August 3, 2016, George Nader—as Vox notes, a man “so close to the Kremlin that he’s taken a photo with Putin”—arrives at Trump Tower for a meeting with Trump’s son Don, Joel Zamel, Stephen Miller, and Erik Prince.60 The meeting is arranged by Prince.61 Zamel has recently asked Nader, at the St. Petersburg economic forum in Russia, to fund Psy-Group’s work for the Trump campaign; at the meeting at Trump Tower, Nader says the Emiratis and Saudis are willing to assist Trump in winning his election—a statement that seems to presume, given that Zamel is one of the meeting attendees, that Nader, on behalf of MBZ and MBS, has accepted Zamel’s request for the Saudis and Emiratis to fund his initiative on the Trump campaign’s behalf. Prince has known Nader as a geopolitical power broker for more than a decade, and indeed worked with him in Iraq at a time Nader was negotiating with the Kremlin on the Iraqis’ behalf; he therefore likely knows, as Vox observes, that Nader’s “extensive personal ties to Russia” include the fact that he has “traveled to Russia, done business with Russia, and developed relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.”62 Nader’s network of associations with the Russian government, adds Vox, “raises questions of whether he could have benefited financially from helping establish more harmonious ties between the US and Russia. And it raises the possibility that he could’ve acted as an informal broker on behalf of Russia during those meetings [before and after the election] or provided expert counsel on how to get in touch with the Kremlin.”63 The New York Times notes that “Mr. Nader’s visits to Russia and the work Mr. Zamel’s companies did for the Russians have both been a subject of interest” to federal investigators.64
Nader presents himself to Donald Trump Jr. as far more than a potential Russia adviser, however, given that he brings Zamel with him to the meeting—a man who has done substantial work in the past not merely for Russian oligarchs generally, but for at least one (Deripaska) who self-identifies as a Kremlin agent. In October 2018, the Daily Beast will note that special counsel Robert Mueller questioned Zamel about his attendance at this August 2016 meeting, as the overtures Zamel makes to the Trump campaign at Trump Tower on August 3 “could have broken federal election laws.”65 Haaretz reports that, aside from any general-election plot Nader may have presented to Trump Jr. on August 3, the “secret plan” Nader pitched to Trump’s son on that date to “destabilize the Iranian regime [is] an objective now being pursued, despite their denials, by both Israel and the United States.”66 That the “plan” Nader presents to Trump Jr. is the Red Sea conspirators’ “grand bargain” is suggested by the fact that its ultimate ambition—as is the case with the grand bargain—is to weaken Iran and degrade its ability to threaten its neighbors directly or through proxies.
At the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting Nader is acting, per the New York Times, as an “intermediary for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman,” and as “a political adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates,” MBZ, meaning that based on his established international connections he is in a position to act as an agent or interlocutor for at least three nations—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Russia—in addition to having a long history of ties to the Israeli government.67
As the meeting occurs, Trump International Golf Club Dubai, in the UAE, is under construction and just six months from its grand opening. The New York Times will report in 2018 that the Trump Organization’s massive golf club project “needs permits from the UAE”—a government controlled by Nader’s boss, MBZ—“to function.”68 In August 2016, while his father is on the campaign trail, Trump Jr. is the Trump Organization representative in charge of the Trump International Golf Club Dubai project, and will attend its grand opening personally in February 2017.69 CNN notes that “the Dubai-based property developer [for Trump International Golf Club Dubai] stood by Trump even in the wake of comments Trump made about banning Muslims from entering the United States.” Notably, despite two Emiratis having participated in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City—and foreign terror being the primary stated basis for President Trump’s eventual designation of seven countries as subject to a travel ban—the United Arab Emirates will not be included on the Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban list.70 Citizens of the seven nations subjected to the ban, unlike the UAE, “have not carried out any deadly terrorist attacks in the United States,” per Politifact.71
According to the Atlantic, federal law enforcement’s interest in Nader’s meetings with Trump aides and associates focuses on “whether the United Arab Emirates funneled money into Trump’s campaign”—not merely his transition, administration, or future Trump Organization projects—“in return for political influence.”72 The magazine’s reporting appears to confirm that the pre-election collusive assistance Nader offered Trump Jr. in August 2016 on behalf of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and possibly either Israel or Russia or both, was indeed monetary. The Atlantic also confirms, citing a “person with knowledge of their [the Nader-MBZ] relationship,” that Nader was acting as “the crown prince’s ‘messenger’” during the 2016 presidential campaign.73
That Nader’s August 3 attempt to work his way into Trump’s inner circle goes well is an understatement. As New York magazine reports, “The [August 3] meeting clearly got Nader into Trumpworld. He went on to frequently meet with members of Trump’s inner circle [during the general election campaign], including son-in-law Jared Kushner, national security advisor Michael Flynn, and Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon. His relationship with these top officials … intensified in the final weeks of the election.”74 According to the New York Times, federal investigators will come to worry that in the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign Nader was doing more than just seeking to give top Trump campaign officials advice; per the Times, after his May 2017 appointment Robert Mueller “pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign.”75 Indeed, between his August 3 meeting with Trump Jr. and Election Day, and then on into the transition period, Nader is “embraced as an ally” by the Trump campaign.76 Nader’s longtime connection to Zamel, and Zamel’s repeated meetings with Rick Gates in spring 2016, leaves open the possibility that Nader had, like Zamel, met with Gates first, prior to August 2016, in order to gain access to the Trump family. Consistent with this possibility is the fact that in May 2019, Gates, by now a cooperating federal witness, sees his sentencing hearing delayed for a sixth time because he is still working on “ongoing investigations”—with one of these investigations, per the Daily Beast, being a federal probe of “possible Middle Eastern election influence.”77
Whereas Nader’s offer to the Trump campaign, according to the New York Times, is a broad one—he tells Trump’s son that “the princes who le[a]d Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates [are] eager to help his father win election as president”—Zamel’s possibly related offer is more tightly focused, involving “an influence operation to help Trump win the election.”78 Both offers appear to be illegal, however.
On August 19, Paul Manafort resigns as Trump’s campaign manager, though the move is a cosmetic one only. As the New Yorker will later report, “FBI wiretaps show that Manafort continued his association with Trump long after he resigned. Manafort was also in touch with his business partner,” Rick Gates, who after Manafort resigns remains on the campaign but “transition[s] to become [campaign] liaison with the Republican National Committee,” according to NBC News; post-inauguration, Gates will come to be regarded as a “White House insider.”79
As the Trump campaign’s RNC liaison, Gates will come into regular contact with Elliott Broidy, vice chairman of the Trump Victory Committee, a joint endeavor of the Trump campaign and the RNC. Gates’s association with Broidy will continue well past Election Day and Trump’s inauguration, with the two men being linked in a scheme to get Broidy defense contracts in Romania and in the financing of a film whose producers will be accused of defrauding investors.80
In May 2017, Politico will reveal that after his firing Manafort not only stays in touch with the campaign, and later the presidential transition team, but even advises Trump staffers—and Trump himself—on how to navigate the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia ties.81 As the digital media outlet writes in an article entitled “Manafort Advised Trump Team on Russia Scandal,” Manafort “remained in contact with the president and his aides” even after the FBI’s Russia probe began, “brief[ing]” Trump and his team on details of his own ties to Russian interests. Per Politico, these Trump-Manafort conversations include discussion of Ukraine as well as Manafort’s many conversations with Konstantin Kilimnik, which had focused on sanctions relief and a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian “peace deal.”82 Trump will later tell federal investigators, under penalty of a federal indictment for making false statements to law enforcement, that he “do[es] not remember Mr. Manafort communicating to me any particular positions Ukraine or Russia would want the United States to support.”83 As to whether Trump’s statement to the special counsel’s office is true, only he and Manafort would know. In January 2018, Trump will tell friends privately that he believes he can escape legal liability in the special counsel’s Russia investigation because “he’s decided that a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”84
Among the many topics on which Manafort will advise Trump administration officials is how Trump and his team can best “distract [public] attention from the parallel FBI and congressional Russia probes.”85 But even in the approximately ninety days between his resignation in August 2016 and Election Day, Manafort “continue[s] discussing campaign strategy with people on the campaign,” according to Politico, among them Jared Kushner, and will in many respects maintain his previous campaign duties by staying in “regular contact with key state directors” within the Trump campaign operation.86 Three Manafort associates will confirm to Politico that after Trump’s inauguration Manafort spoke directly to the president on a number of occasions, a practice that appeared to end only in March or April 2017.87 According to one of these sources, Manafort spends his post-inauguration calls with Trump offering “political input” just as an adviser would.88 By 2017, Trump has known Manafort for twenty-nine years, and Manafort has lived in the same building as Trump for eleven years; as noted earlier, Manafort moved into Trump Tower the same year he began working for Oleg Deripaska, and immediately after signing “a $10 million [deal] with Deripaska … to ‘influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.”89 On the evidence of his post-resignation activities, Manafort continued serving that function into 2017 and beyond—though the means of his compensation, if any, is a matter of dispute.
The Trump campaign’s clandestine summer 2016 efforts to secure the Clinton emails allegedly stolen by the Russians continue after Manafort’s departure—despite the fact that if the campaign were to receive the emails, it would be not only receiving stolen property but potentially aiding and abetting the computer crimes that led to the theft of the emails in the first instance. Alongside separate efforts to secure Clinton’s emails executed by Trump national security adviser Joseph Schmitz—a man once caught running a Saudi-financed scheme to sell Russian weapons in Syria—and longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone, another effort, led by a GOP operative named Peter W. Smith, had begun in June 2016 and involved searching the “dark web” for Clinton’s emails.90
In late July, his public comments on the matter notwithstanding, Trump had privately broached the sort of effort Smith had been involved in for weeks, “ask[ing] individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” according to the Mueller Report.91 The report indicates that in July and August 2016 Trump issued this order to his staff “repeatedly,” and that the order led directly to his chief national security advisor, Flynn, contacting at least three individuals outside the campaign who had already started looking for the emails—including Smith.92 Smith had by then been periodically in contact with a former Senate staffer, Barbara Ledeen—wife of Michael Ledeen, another shadow Trump national security adviser—who had written to Smith of eagerly seeking “classified” emails “purloined by our enemies,” even if doing so meant dealing, through intermediaries, with “various foreign services.”93 Barbara Ledeen believed the effort to acquire stolen Clinton emails would be worth the risk of unsavory contacts with America’s enemies if the intelligence services of (among others) the Russians had “reassemble[d] the [Clinton] server’s email content” after stealing it and would be willing to provide even one stolen email to either her or Smith—a development that, notwithstanding it constituting the receipt of stolen classified material from a foreign intelligence service, would be “catastrophic to the Clinton campaign,” in Ledeen’s view.94
Smith had ultimately declined to work with Ledeen, but only because, in his estimation, her “initiative was not viable at th[e] time.”95 After Trump’s order to Flynn, however, Smith changes his mind; just as Trump’s July 27 request for additional Russian hacks against U.S. targets leads immediately to additional Russian hacks against U.S. targets, Trump’s order that his staffers seek Clinton’s stolen emails leads, through Flynn, to Smith intensifying his effort to find Clinton’s emails. Beginning in July 2016, Smith takes all the necessary steps to do so: he establishes a limited-liability corporation, KLS Research LLC, for the purposes of funding a massive, monthslong hunt for the emails; he raises tens of thousands of dollars from Republican donors to fund his work, including assisting in directing money from Trump adviser Erik Prince toward Ledeen’s ongoing efforts; he tells friends and associates his efforts are “coordinated” with the Trump campaign; and he ultimately reveals to those assisting him, and to those seeking to fund his work, that he is planning to meet with, as summarized by the Mueller Report, “hackers with ‘ties and affiliations to Russia’ who ha[ve] access to the [Clinton] emails.”96
During the weekend of August 27, 2016, Smith meets with “several groups of hackers” at a suburban Washington hotel, only two of which (out of five) he identifies as Russian; he is just eleven days from producing documentation claiming that his efforts to find Clinton’s emails are known to top Trump advisers Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and Kellyanne Conway—all of whom, per Smith, he is “coordinat[ing] [with] to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure.”97 According to the Wall Street Journal, Smith’s Washington meetings occur at a time when he “and his associates” say they are “in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia” who they believe are “tied to the Moscow government.”98 The Journal notes also that during this period “reports from intelligence agencies … tell of Russian hackers discussing how to get emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.”99 Whether Smith was meant by the Kremlin or its agents to be the Russian Federation’s chosen intermediary with Flynn is unknown, though it is clear, according to the Journal, that by the tail end of his monthslong, Trump-campaign-“coordinated” search for Clinton’s emails, Smith had raised $100,000 from Republican donors for his illicit efforts.100
Smith, called by the Wall Street Journal “a veteran political operative with access to wealthy donors and deep connections in Republican politics,” spends months on his “single-minded quest to find incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton,” continuing “even after government officials warn[] of Russian involvement in U.S. politics.”101 After he meets with two groups of Russian hackers on August 28, he sends Trump campaign national co-chair Sam Clovis and others an encrypted email that says he is “just finishing two days of sensitive meetings here in DC with involved groups to poke and probe” on “Secretary Clinton’s unsecured private email server.”102 He tells Trump’s national co-chair that he has determined Clinton’s home email server was “hacked with ease by both State-related players … and private mercenaries,” and that the stolen emails will be released by one or more of several “parties with varying interests … ahead of the election.”103 While it is unknown who else besides Clovis receives Smith’s August 28 email—or who, more broadly, Smith is in contact with about his efforts besides Flynn and Clovis—Smith has, by late August, already represented to donors that his “coordination” with the Trump campaign also involves not just Bannon (the Trump campaign CEO) and Conway (Trump’s post-Manafort campaign manager), but also Jerome Corsi, a friend of Trump adviser Roger Stone who will ultimately enter into a joint defense agreement with Trump.104 The special counsel’s office confirms that Smith’s efforts to find Clinton’s emails had begun before Trump ordered Flynn to find them, and that Smith, while in contact with multiple members of the Trump campaign, came up with his own game plan for achieving the results Trump wanted—meaning that, in the view of the Mueller Report, technically the campaign had neither “initiated” nor “directed” Smith’s efforts, even if the evidence suggests that Trump’s repeated directives to his staff materially encouraged and advanced those efforts.105
Smith does receive direct assistance in his efforts from Trump adviser Erik Prince, however, as Prince “provide[s] funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of … emails” Barbara Ledeen brings to Smith’s attention in September 2016.106 Prince’s expert determines that the emails are fakes, but this does not deter Prince from falsely telling an interviewer from Steve Bannon’s Breitbart media outlet two months later that local law enforcement in New York City has found “those 650,000 emails” from Clinton’s email server, and that the emails contain, per Prince’s false account, “State Department emails … [and] a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein … [and] Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times … [while] Hillary Clinton went there at least six times. The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments.’”107 Everything Prince says to his interviewer is untrue; what is unknown is whether Prince has taken his information from the fake emails provided to him by Russian hackers through Ledeen and Smith. An investigative report by Rolling Stone in November 2017 will reveal that Russian sources were indeed behind much of the disinformation Prince spread on Breitbart pre-election.108 Nor is Prince’s pre-election promotion of Russian disinformation exclusive to him within the Trump campaign and Trump’s circle of advisers; Prince’s Russian disinformation-laced interview with Breitbart will be retweeted on Twitter by Michael Flynn, and its substance tweeted out by Donald Trump Jr.109
Throughout Smith’s search for Clinton’s emails, the veteran GOP operative acts with great secrecy, suggesting that he is aware his endeavors run the risk of violating federal law. He uses a fake name (“Robert Tyler”); raises money under the false pretense that it is going toward a scholarship fund for Russian students; uses “draft” emails to communicate with his co-conspirators over a shared server; and utilizes both encrypted email and multiple telephone numbers.110 A longtime friend and confidant of Smith’s, Thomas Lipscomb, says that across several phone calls with Smith the octogenarian political operative dropped “big names” whom he said he was “calling for help”—a roster of significant personalities that Lipscomb confirms included Michael Flynn, who had by then been ordered by Trump to pursue the issue.111 Smith’s claim to have spoken with Flynn by telephone will be partially substantiated by later reporting noting that Flynn and Smith had “established” a “working relationship” apart from the Clinton email issue by November 2015 at the latest, with the Journal quoting a friend of Smith’s as saying that the relationship was a “business relationship.”112 Smith even “told associates … that he was using the retired general’s connections to help him on the email project.”113 More troublingly, a friend of Smith’s, John Szobocsan, will claim that he and Smith spoke to Flynn “the day he [Flynn] left for his [December 2015] trip to Moscow.”114 In a July 2017 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Smith will imply that Flynn was indeed “aware of his efforts.”115
Emails and documents associated with Smith’s research—an encompassing and sophisticated effort that swept into its net “technical experts, lawyers, and a private investigator in Europe who spoke Russian,” as well as “two controversial alt-right activists … journalist-turned-entrepreneur Charles Johnson and his former business partner Pax Dickinson”—identify Flynn Intel Group and Michael Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr. as “allies in the operation.”116 Whatever the Trump campaign may have believed about Smith’s efforts, the Mueller Report casts some doubt on whether Smith indeed met with Russian hackers, though it does not issue the same caveat with respect to Barbara Ledeen, with whom Smith coordinated and whose connection to Trump’s national security advisory corps, via her husband, is far more direct than Smith’s. The Guardian describes Ledeen as a “friend” of Flynn’s and her husband, Michael—a Trump national security adviser alongside Flynn during the transition, and like Flynn associate Bud McFarlane, an infamous figure from the Iran-Contra scandal—as a “confidant” of the retired general who also co-authored a book with him in 2016. These connections suggest that Flynn may have been aware of Barbara Ledeen’s outreach to foreign hackers (whether Russian state actors or, as Peter W. Smith would later discuss, non-Russian “private mercenaries”) as early as the beginning of her efforts in 2015—prior to Flynn and Flynn Jr.’s trip to see Sergey Kislyak in Washington and Flynn’s dinner in Moscow with Putin, and as Flynn was being recruited by the Israeli cyberespionage mercenaries of Psy-Group.117
As for Smith’s representations that he had contact with Clovis, Conway, and Bannon, Politico will report that Jonathan Safron, a former Smith assistant, said that Smith “spoke to him of knowing Clovis, who was a well-known conservative activist … before becoming co-chairman of Trump’s campaign, and that he had seen Smith email Clovis about matters unrelated to Clinton’s emails.”118 Smith’s connection to Bannon, if any, is unknown, though one of his key partners in searching for Clinton’s emails, Charles Johnson, was a former reporter for Breitbart, and Smith’s emails reveal that he had previously been in touch with Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for the digital media outlet (for which Bannon was executive chairman until leaving to be CEO of the Trump campaign).119 Johnson’s statement to Politico on whether Smith knew Bannon, a man Johnson concedes Smith very much wanted to meet, is oddly equivocal: “I sort of demurred on some of that,” he says when asked if he facilitated contacts between the two men.120 Johnson does put out a call to a “hidden oppo network” of right-wing researchers to help Smith, and later notes that “the magnitude of what [Smith] was trying to do was kind of impressive. He had people running around Europe, people talking to Guccifer [2.0, a digital persona operated by Russian military intelligence].”121 As for Conway, Trump’s fall 2016 campaign manager will tell the Journal that she had indeed spoken to Smith at certain points in the past but did not do so during the presidential campaign.122 (In January 2017, Conway will infamously coin the phrase “alternative facts” in explaining the Trump administration’s statements on the size of the new president’s inaugural crowd; Dictionary.com defines “alternative facts” as “falsehoods, untruths, [or] delusions,” while USA Today explains Conway’s coinage as meaning “arguments used to support claims that do not conform to objective reality. Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies.”)123
In May 2017, Peter W. Smith dies under suspicious circumstances, just days after disclosing his clandestine, “coordinated” efforts to acquire Clinton’s emails to the Wall Street Journal.124 The note Smith leaves behind in a Minnesota hotel room, reading in part “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER,” will cause consternation to journalists because of statements made thereafter by retired Wall Street financier Charles Ortel, a friend of Smith’s who says “he spoke with Mr. Smith on the phone in the hours before his death about a new project to brief the Obama Foundation on and warn its leaders against the mistakes they believed were made by the Clinton Foundation. According to Mr. Ortel, Mr. Smith sounded excited, and he began brainstorming who to contact and how to proceed.”125 Hours later, Smith was dead by what was officially ruled a “suicide.”126 The ruling, which hinges in part on supposed evidence of Smith having long planned his own death—for instance, the fact that he “left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a statement … in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring”—will be contradicted by Ortel’s insistence that just hours before his death Smith was “excited” about an upcoming project.127
In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal will report that not only was Smith excited and optimistic about a new venture mere hours before his “suicide,” but that he had also, just weeks earlier, according to statements he made to multiple friends, “finally obtained the missing [Clinton] emails”—an “all-consuming” mission, his friends said, which, by the time of his death in July 2017, he had been working on for over a year.128 Just ten days before his death Smith detailed his efforts for the Journal, seemingly willing to endure the inevitable publicity that would follow.129 Indeed, Smith was so energized by his hunt for Clinton’s emails that even well after the presidential election, in December 2016, he was emailing Ortel an update on what he called the “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative,” revealing that his “team” had come across “multiple individuals” who had stolen Clinton emails in the fall of 2016.130 He told these friends that he had advised such individuals to send the emails to WikiLeaks for release; Smith had, in the past, “claimed ties with” Julian Assange’s organization.131 Asked whether it had ever had any contact with Smith, WikiLeaks, “citing a policy of not disclosing its sources,” “decline[s] to say,” per Politico.132 Smith’s optimism about future opportunities extended far enough into 2017 that following Trump’s inauguration the veteran GOP operative was in contact not only with Flynn but also with defense secretary Jim Mattis, looking for “a possible way into [the] cybersecurity [industry] to involve Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.”133 The Journal notes that “other emails that Mr. Flynn is copied on”—the newspaper does not note their dates but says it has seen them—“show Mr. Smith either communicating directly with high-level Trump administration officials and allies or discussing such connections.”134
Longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone also spends the period from June 2016 through Election Day trying to get access to Clinton’s stolen emails through clandestine means—or, failing that, to get sufficient information about when the Kremlin will leak the emails that he can pass this information on to the GOP candidate himself. Trump and Stone have known each other for decades, with Stone intermittently doing consulting work for Trump. During these courses of consultation, the terms of their association are clear: Trump is the boss and Stone the subordinate. In 2000, for instance, Stone assisted Trump in preventing Native American casinos from coming to New York, as Trump believed the new gambling facilities would threaten his own gambling operations in Atlantic City. Trump’s campaign required Stone to engage in a bevy of the former Nixon aide’s self-described “dirty tricks”; when Stone was later deposed in the perhaps inevitable civil lawsuit, he “admitted under oath that everything he did with this [anti-casino] campaign was approved by Trump.”135 As Stone’s longtime business partner Paul Manafort will put it in the documentary film Get Me Roger Stone, “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald.”136 In his answers to questions from the special counsel’s office, Trump will state, under penalty of a federal indictment for making false statements to law enforcement, “I spoke by telephone to Roger Stone from time to time during the [2016 presidential] campaign. I have no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1, 2016 and November 8, 2016.”137
The part of Trump’s statement to the special counsel’s office on Roger Stone that is readily confirmable is that during the 2016 primary and general election campaigns, Stone and Trump were indeed in regular contact—even after Stone ceased holding any official position in the Trump campaign in August 2015.138 In a 2018 court document, Robert Mueller will refer to Stone, as summarized by the Washington Post, as “someone understood to be in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials [in 2016], ‘including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump.’”139 The Post recounts that “the calls [to Stone from Trump] almost always came deep into the night. Caller ID labeled them ‘unknown,’ but Roger Stone said he knew to pick up quickly during those harried months of the 2016 presidential campaign. There would be a good chance that the voice on the other end of the line would belong to his decades-long friend—the restless, insomniac candidate Donald Trump—dialing from a blocked phone number.”140 Stone’s candor in acknowledging that Trump uses a blocked phone number contrasts with that of Trump’s son Don, who will tell the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, under penalty (like his father months hence) of a federal indictment for lying to Congress, that though he speaks to his father often, he has no idea if Trump Sr.’s calls show up on his phone as originating from a blocked number.141 The issue of whether candidate Trump used a blocked number during the 2016 campaign will become significant during the course of the special counsel’s investigation, given that, in the midst of Trump Jr.’s telephone discussions with Emin Agalarov about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower—a meeting that involved multiple Kremlin agents—Trump’s son on at least two occasions makes calls to or receives calls from blocked numbers.142
Stone’s account of speaking regularly to Trump Sr. during his presidential run is supported by phone and contact logs given to Mueller by the Trump Organization, which show “multiple calls between the then-candidate and Stone in 2016,” though the newspaper adds that “the records are not a complete log of their contacts—Stone [says] … Trump at times called him from other people’s homes.”143 In November 2016, Stone reveals that the two men have been speaking once a week for some time; according to the incomplete records turned over by Trump to the special counsel, “they spoke from ‘time to time’ during 2016.… A handful of calls were lengthy.”144 Since entering the White House, Trump has often lied to his advisers about whether he speaks to Stone, telling many of them that “he no longer talks to Stone” even though “people close to [him]” tell the Post that he does, in fact, “occasionally talk[] to him.”145 Why Trump wants or needs his staff to believe he does not speak to his close friend and adviser is unclear; while investigators do not know what was said in any Trump-Stone phone calls, Trump has supplied written answers to federal investigators claiming that he never spoke with Stone about WikiLeaks releasing harmful information on Clinton or the Democrats.146
What is clear is that in the final months of the presidential campaign, Stone does in fact have information related to WikiLeaks to relay to Trump if he so chooses. On August 2, 2016, a friend of Stone’s, Jerome Corsi, calls him to tell him that “WikiLeaks [is] planning a major release of ‘very damaging’ material [to Clinton].”147 Less than twenty-four hours later, Stone calls Trump; he has since claimed that not only did he not tell Trump that “very damaging” information about Clinton was about to be released, but he never broached the subject of WikiLeaks with his longtime friend at all—despite Trump having just days earlier told his staff that he wanted as much information about any stolen Clinton emails as possible.148
The backstory to the August 2 Stone-Corsi call is a telling one. On July 25, 2016, Stone heard from a Fox News reporter that WikiLeaks was planning “a massive dump of Clinton emails relating to the Clinton Foundation in September.”149 Stone immediately wrote Corsi to issue an order to him: “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadoran Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails … they deal with the [Clinton] Foundation, allegedly.”150 While Corsi will subsequently tell federal investigators that he did nothing with Stone’s request, it will ultimately be found, and Corsi will eventually admit, that he forwarded Stone’s urgent request—which may or may not have been a by-product of Trump’s contemporaneous and equally urgent request on the same subject—to a Trump adviser in London, Ted Malloch.151 Corsi demanded that Malloch “put [him] in touch with Assange,” simultaneously “suggest[ing] that individuals in the ‘orbit’ of U.K. politician Nigel Farage might be able to contact Assange” and asking Malloch “if [he] knew” those individuals.152
It is eight days after Corsi writes Malloch that he writes Stone back to inform him that “WikiLeaks possesse[s] information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and plan[s] to release it in October.”153 He will later tell the special counsel’s office that he is “convinced that his efforts had caused WikiLeaks to release the emails [of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] when they did.”154 Whether or not this is correct, Mueller will in fact subsequently investigate Malloch over his “frequent appearances on RT, which U.S. intelligence authorities have called Russia’s principal propaganda arm”; per the Guardian, the “Special Counsel’s alleged focus on RT is important because the Russian news channel also has a close relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”155 The British media outlet reports that court filings in the United States, as well as visitor logs at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where Assange lived for years until his arrest in April 2019, “show that RT staff met and interviewed Assange on the same day—August 2, 2016—that Roger Stone, the self-described ‘dirty trickster’ and longtime Trump associate who had previously bragged about having special access to WikiLeaks, was passed information about Assange’s plans.”156
While the Guardian calls Malloch an “unpaid adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, Malloch himself will write, in a January 2017 book, that he has known Trump for decades and has given to several charities to which Trump is linked.157 As for whether Malloch indeed knows Assange, the evidence suggests that he had previously told Stone and Corsi that he knew the WikiLeaks founder, with Malloch making the claim during a late February or early March 2016 dinner with the two men in New York City.158 The Guardian notes that Malloch was, during the campaign, a vocal advocate on RT and elsewhere for “friendlier U.S.-Russia relations” and predicted that Trump would, if elected, “soften U.S. economic restrictions on Moscow.”159 During a February 2017 RT appearance—even as Stone’s business associate Manafort was working on getting sanctions lifted through a Russia-Ukraine “peace deal”—Malloch said, “If those sanctions were removed, would not the world be a better place?”160
On October 7, 2016, the day the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape of Trump confessing to being a serial sexual assailant was released, WikiLeaks released the first of thirty-three tranches of emails authored by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—an action that had the effect of bumping the Access Hollywood tape from the top of certain newscasts in the days ahead.161 But for the partial distraction of the WikiLeaks release, the Trump campaign might have ended on October 10, with then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) telling congressional Republicans in a “rare” all-members conference call that “they could abandon Trump” and no longer needed to “remain loyal to the party’s [presidential] candidate due to the deeply disturbing tape of Trump’s 2005 comments.”162
Six days before the October 7 WikiLeaks release, comedian and radio host Randy Credico had written Roger Stone a text message that read, “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”163 Indeed, despite the Access Hollywood tape, NBC News will note that it was the WikiLeaks releases in October 2016 that “alter[ed] the trajectory of the presidential race.”164 Between October 7 and November 7, WikiLeaks will release all thirty-three tranches of Podesta emails, and the organization’s work will be cited by Trump in campaign speeches at least 137 times.165
Nevertheless, the revelation of the sexually explicit Access Hollywood tape will augment the already significant anxiety within the Trump campaign about the potential for information regarding Trump’s personal conduct to be released pre-election.166 Ten days before the election, on October 30, Trump receives a significant scare in this respect. Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who is a mutual business associate of both Trump and Aras Agalarov, texts Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen to assure him that he has “stopped [the] flow of tapes from Russia.”167 Rtskhiladze will tell the special counsel that his reference to multiple Russia-produced videos of interest to the Trump campaign involves “compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with [Aras Agalarov’s] Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group,” a family and company whose last contact with Trump in Russia was in 2013 during the Crocus Group–hosted Miss Universe pageant.168 Rtskhiladze has himself been in business with Trump since 2011 on projects in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Kazakhstan.169 More recently, he has been in contact with Cohen to discuss the Trump Tower Moscow proposal Cohen was, in the fall of 2015, negotiating—with the aid of his friend Felix Sater—with both Rozov and the Kremlin. Rtskhiladze was also working with Cohen on the possibility of a Trump-Putin summit in New York City, telling another business associate via email that he wanted to help Trump land a project that “would definitely receive … worldwide attention.”170 Rtskhiladze then assisted Cohen in drafting a communication to the mayor of Moscow—whom Rtskhiladze called the “second guy in Russia [after Putin]”—whose support for the Trump-Rozov tower Rtskhiladze told Cohen was essential. In one of Rtskhiladze’s other fall 2015 emails to Cohen, the businessman seemed to echo what the Kremlin-connected Sater had been saying to Cohen for many weeks: that from the perspective of the Russian government, a Trump Tower Moscow would stand as a monument to the (in the United States, largely illegal) juxtaposition of personal profit and national policymaking, a “symbol of stronger economic, business, and cultural relationships between New York and Moscow and therefore the United States and the Russian Federation.”171
Less than ninety days after Rtskhiladze texts Cohen about compromising “videos” in the possession of Trump’s Russian business partners the Agalarovs, the BBC will report that, according to “active duty CIA officers dealing with the [Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation] case file,” the Kremlin is in possession of compromising “audio and video” tapes of Trump from both his 2013 stay at the Ritz Moscow as a guest of the Crocus Group and from another date in St. Petersburg; according to the officers, there is “more than one tape,” from “more than one date,” involving “more than one place,” and the tapes are “of a sexual nature.”172 That Trump knew the Kremlin or its cutouts were claiming to have such tapes in the days before the 2016 election—at a time he was promoting a foreign policy that greatly pleased Putin—is confirmed by Cohen, who will tell the special counsel’s office that he “spoke to Trump about the issue [before Election Day] after receiving the texts from Rtskhiladze.”173 In the months after the January 2017 BBC report on Kremlin kompromat, various British media outlets will reveal several independent witnesses, including witnesses from both the Ritz Moscow and the Trump Organization, who step forward to confirm individual elements of the BBC report and the version of the report contained in Christopher Steele’s dossier of raw intelligence on Trump’s Russian activities.174
After the November 2016 election, Jerome Corsi attempts to scrub his computer of his emails to Stone, deleting all his email correspondence from prior to October 11—a move that mirrors the apparent destruction by Steve Bannon and Erik Prince of all the texts on their phones that predate March 2017.175 During the period of time covered by Corsi’s digital expurgation, Stone contacted Corsi seeking to have him falsely state, in a public forum, that Randy Credico, not Corsi himself, was Stone’s “intermediary” with WikiLeaks.176 In addition to eventually acquiring all Corsi’s saved and deleted digital evidence, the special counsel’s office also uncovers information suggesting that Stone made private statements in the fall of 2016 about the timing of WikiLeaks releases to Steve Bannon, who was at the time the chief executive officer of Trump’s campaign.177 According to the Washington Post, federal investigators have asked Bannon about “private comments [Stone made] that matched his public declarations of having knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans.”178 It is unclear why (or if) Stone would make such comments to Bannon but not to Trump himself.
In late 2018, after Mueller shows Corsi a draft of a statement of offense (a document attendant to a federal indictment) that he intends to file against him for lying to federal investigators, Corsi will reveal he has secretly been in a “joint defense agreement” with Donald Trump’s legal team for months—for what reason is unknown—and that the deal “was intended to be kept from public view.”179 The New York Times will report that “Corsi’s dealings with Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have caused alarm among the president’s legal team … [because] prosecutors claimed [in Corsi’s draft statement of offense] that Mr. Corsi understood that Mr. Stone was ‘in regular contact with senior members of the Trump campaign, including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump’ when he asked Mr. Corsi in late July 2016 to ‘get to’ Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.”180 Despite being in a long-standing joint defense agreement with Corsi—an agreement implying that, insofar as Trump and Corsi are subjects and even targets of various lines of inquiry in the Russia investigation, the two men’s legal interests are aligned—Trump says in November 2018, “I don’t know Corsi.”181
The revelation of a secret legal arrangement between Trump and Corsi follows a pattern of covert contacts, by Trump and his legal team, with witnesses in the Russia investigation, with the New York Times revealing in November 2018 that Trump’s attorneys were also secretly in an information-sharing arrangement with Manafort’s attorneys from the moment Manafort began cooperating with federal investigators—at which point Trump surrogates began publicly musing about the possibility of pardoning Manafort, even as Trump tweeted repeatedly about the value of loyalty.182 Privately, according to the Mueller Report, the president was “ask[ing] his lawyers for advice on the possibility of a pardon for Manafort and other aides,” even as “Manafort remained in a joint defense agreement with the President following Manafort’s guilty plea and agreement to cooperate, and … Manafort’s attorneys regularly briefed the President’s lawyers on the topics discussed and the information Manafort had provided in interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office.”183 After Manafort’s bail was revoked, the report notes, “the President’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, gave a series of interviews in which he raised the possibility of a pardon for Manafort.”184 Other covert contacts with federal witnesses by Trump and his legal team include Trump contacting Michael Flynn in April 2017 and telling him to “stay strong”; a November 2017 phone call to Flynn by Trump’s attorney John Dowd, a call that, according to the special counsel’s office, “could have affected both [Flynn’s] willingness to cooperate [with federal prosecutors] and the completeness of that cooperation”; and an allegation by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that one of his successors in that role, Jay Sekulow, “reviewed, shaped, and edited” Cohen’s false testimony to Congress beforehand, an allegation Sekulow has since denied.185
As for the secret—and highly irregular—post-conviction Trump-Manafort joint defense agreement, federal prosecutors will allege that Manafort was lying to them repeatedly and systematically for the entirety of the period he was in his information-sharing arrangement with the president and his lawyers, giving federal law enforcement no information of lasting value while reporting back to Trump’s legal team the areas of inquiry the special counsel was pursuing.186 The Mueller Report will conclude of Trump’s behavior as Manafort’s cases unfolded in Virginia and D.C. that “the President and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the President did not want Manafort to ‘flip’ and cooperate with the government.”187 The report notes one particular incident in which Trump’s legal team announced that “individuals involved in the Special Counsel’s investigation could receive a pardon ‘if in fact the president and his advisors … come to the conclusion that [the individual has] been treated unfairly”—thereby using a term, “unfair,” that Trump had within the preceding forty-eight hours publicly used to describe the treatment Manafort had faced from the special counsel.188 Yet even as Trump is repeatedly tweeting about and speaking in interviews of fairness—at one point saying, “I do want to see people [like Manafort] treated fairly. That’s what it’s all about”—he is privately, according to the Mueller Report, expressing a very different concern, “discuss[ing] with aides whether and in what way Manafort might be cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation, and whether Manafort knew any information that would be harmful to [him]”; Trump attorney John Dowd’s November 2017 phone call to Flynn’s counsel expresses the very same anxiety, with Dowd telling Flynn attorney Robert Kelner in a voicemail, “If … there’s information [that Flynn has] that implicates the president, then we’ve got a national security issue … we got to deal with, not only for the president, but for the country. So … then, you know, we need some kind of heads up. Just for the sake of … protecting all our interests, if we can … remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”189 The Mueller Report also reveals that less than ninety days after Manafort and Gates were charged with federal felonies, “Manafort told Gates that he had talked to the President’s personal counsel and they were ‘going to take care of us.’ Manafort told Gates it was stupid to plead [guilty], saying that he had been in touch with the President’s personal counsel and repeating that they should ‘sit tight’ and ‘we’ll be taken care of.’”190 Implicit and explicit pardon promises from Trump and his legal team to known federal witnesses aside, the special counsel’s report will also observe that “some evidence supports a conclusion that the President sought … to influence the [Manafort] jury.”191 Jury tampering is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1504.192
The Mueller Report also reveals that, in an episode reminiscent of Trump and his legal team’s handling of Manafort’s two federal cases, Michael Cohen “understood based on … conversations with the President’s personal counsel that as long as he stayed on message” about his 2015 and 2016 contacts with Russian businessmen and government officials on Trump’s behalf, “he would be taken care of by the President, either through a pardon or through the [Russia] investigation being shut down.”193 The “message” Cohen was supposed to hold fast to—a falsity—was that his contacts with the Kremlin and its agents over a multibillion-dollar Trump real estate deal in Moscow stopped before Americans began voting, and that Trump knew little to nothing about either the Trump Tower Moscow project Cohen was working on or Cohen’s extensive contacts with Kremlin officials while seeking to secure land and financing for the project.
In late August 2016, Roger Stone, having already been in communication with Jerome Corsi about WikiLeaks, reaches out to another friend of his, Randy Credico, asking him to get “information about WikiLeaks.” For a long time thereafter, Stone will claim that Credico was “his main source of information about Assange’s plans”—a claim contradicted by subsequent revelations about Stone’s contact with Corsi.194 As for Corsi, who not only discussed WikiLeaks with Stone but, per the Mueller Report, had “multiple Face Time discussions about WikiLeaks” with Ted Malloch, beginning in 2018 he will claim that he was merely bluffing with Stone, and that all of his statements of fact to him about WikiLeaks were merely blind guesses.195 To confuse matters further, at least two witnesses before special counsel Mueller’s grand jury in D.C. will testify that “Credico acknowledged in conversations [with them] being the source of material for Stone’s [public] statements and tweets about WikiLeaks.”196
In 2018, Mueller indicts Roger Stone for three crimes: obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and making false statements to federal law enforcement.197 A subsequent court filing by Stone’s attorneys will reveal that federal law enforcement at various points strongly considered filing additional felony charges against the longtime Trump friend and adviser, including accessory after the fact, misprision of a felony (failure to report a felony), conspiracy, unauthorized access of a protected computer, wire fraud, attempt and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and illegal solicitation of foreign campaign donations.198 As for the three federal indictments ultimately brought, the special counsel office’s court filings will include allegations that Stone directly “communicated with WikiLeaks” and, moreover, with Guccifer 2.0, the digital persona constructed and run by Russian military intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign.199 The special counsel’s office will further allege that in advance of WikiLeaks’ first dump of stolen Democratic emails during the campaign—which came on July 22, 2016—Stone told “‘senior Trump campaign officials’ between June and July 2016 that WikiLeaks possessed stolen emails that could damage the Clinton candidacy.”200 According to the Stone indictment, “A senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign.”201 Because few people on the Trump campaign besides the candidate himself would have had the authority to “direct a senior Trump campaign official,” media outlets have speculated that the individual who issued such a directive during the presidential campaign was Donald Trump.202
In September 2016, an unnamed Trump campaign official schedules a meeting between George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, and Greek foreign minister Nikos Kotzias—a meeting that is, according to Papadopoulos, a surprise, given that Kotzias is the man he told in late May 2016 about the Kremlin being in possession of Clinton’s stolen emails; Kotzias had been slated to meet face-to-face with Putin the next day.203 Papadopoulos takes his invitation to join Kotzias, Flynn, and Sessions—just a few weeks after Flynn attended Trump’s first classified security briefing and was fully briefed on Russian efforts to cyber-attack the United States—as a sign that the Trump campaign has in fact been “informed of what [he] told the Greek foreign minister” in May, and that the campaign therefore knows for certain, as of September 2016, that the Kremlin says it possesses stolen Clinton emails.204
On September 20, just a few weeks after Donald Trump Jr. has, as reported in the New York Times, responded approvingly to an offer of collusive pre-election assistance from two of the Red Sea conspirators, MBS and MBZ, Trump Sr. meets the third key member of the plot, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for the first time.205 In a breach of protocol, el-Sisi appears to offer an endorsement of Trump’s candidacy for president after his meeting with him, telling CNN that he has “no doubt” Trump would make a “strong leader.”206 While el-Sisi meets with the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, the same week, the meeting with Clinton is businesslike, whereas the meeting with Trump, according to Politico, is “striking in how much praise the Republican heaped on Egypt”; moreover, whereas el-Sisi compliments Trump by adjudging him a “strong leader,” his assessment of Clinton is a backhanded compliment that actually serves as a further endorsement of the political neophyte Trump: “Political parties in the United States would not allow candidates to reach that level [of being a party’s presidential nominee] unless they are qualified to lead a country the size of the United States of America.”207 When Trump and el-Sisi meet, the Egyptian president appears confident that Trump will not, in fact, institute a temporary ban on Muslim visitors from certain nations to the United States, noting that “during election campaigns many statements are made and many things are said … governing [the United States] would be something different. And will be subject to many factors.”208 It is unclear whether el-Sisi is unconcerned about any ban on travel from certain Middle Eastern countries being instituted, or simply that he is certain that any ban Trump institutes will not affect the country he leads.
The same day as the meeting between Trump and el-Sisi, Trump Jr. begins to have “direct electronic communications with WikiLeaks,” according to the Mueller Report.209 If Trump Jr. has received any information about the Russian threat to the 2016 election from either of Trump’s first two security briefings—information held not only by Trump but also by Michael Flynn and Chris Christie—the presidential candidate’s son is required under the federal law against aiding and abetting to take no action that might induce further crimes by the Russian government’s nonstate cutout, WikiLeaks. Arguably, Trump Jr. is already in this position on the basis of public statements made by the U.S. intelligence community and a DNC-hired cybersecurity firm regarding Russia’s election-related hacking. What Trump Jr. does on September 20 and September 21, however, is agree to access a password-protected anti-Trump website with a password sent to him by WikiLeaks; confirm to the campaign via email that he follows WikiLeaks on Twitter; respond to a “direct message” from WikiLeaks on Twitter; email “a variety of senior campaign staff” information he received as a result of his direct message from WikiLeaks; and tell WikiLeaks via Twitter direct message that he will “ask around” in response to its request for “comments” on the website to which it had just directed him.210 Less than two weeks later, Trump Jr. receives and replies to another query from WikiLeaks and adds one of his own: “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?”211 Then, on October 14, two days after WikiLeaks sends Trump Jr. a private message thanking him and his father for “talking about our publications” and asking Trump to tweet out a specific link, Trump Jr. tweets the WikiLeaks-specified link himself.212
On September 30, Interfax, a Russian news agency, publishes an interview with George Papadopoulos that Trump’s youngest national security adviser was given explicit permission to participate in by Bryan Lanza, Trump’s deputy communications director.213 Though weeks earlier it had been publicly revealed that Russia was suspected of being involved with the dissemination of stolen Democratic documents through WikiLeaks, Papadopoulos forwards the Interfax interview to his Kremlin contact, Joseph Mifsud.214 In the interview, Papadopoulos had touted Trump’s “willingness to usher in a new chapter in U.S.-Russia ties” and opined that “[U.S.] sanctions [against Russia] have done little more than to turn Russia towards China as a primary market for Russian goods, services and energy. It is not in the interest of the West to align China and Russia in a geopolitical alliance that can have unpredictable consequences for U.S. interests in the South China Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and Middle East.”215 Papadopoulos’s statement to Russian media echoes his statements to Israeli researchers during his campaign-approved trip to Israel in April 2016, when he told the Israelis that Putin was “a responsible actor and potential partner.”216 Nevertheless, the campaign temporarily “dismisses” Papadopoulos after the Interfax interview is publicly reported, as it has, in the view of the campaign, “generated adverse publicity.”217
In Israel in fall 2016, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking forward to the end of the Obama presidency. Netanyahu has said to his aides that Obama has “no special feeling” for Israel and is dangerously foolish for wanting to “foster a kind of balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”218 Netanyahu’s belief is that Saudi Arabia must always hold the upper hand over Iran for the Jewish state to maintain its security. As for the Obama administration, by fall 2016 it has long since ceased to believe that Netanyahu earnestly wants a peace deal with the Palestinians; President Obama believes Netanyahu has deceived him and other U.S. politicians with an only illusory commitment to peace. As early as 2012, the mistrust between Obama’s team and Netanyahu’s had been such that Obama suspected the Israeli prime minister of secretly backing Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and hoping, moreover, to goad the United States into a military conflict with Iran.219 Obama’s fears about Netanyahu with respect to the 2012 election will appear prescient, given Netanyahu’s clandestine positioning vis-à-vis the 2016 Trump campaign and his hawkish posture toward Iran from 2017 onward (see chapter 10).
In October 2016, discussions within the Israeli government on Obama’s last days in office focus on the possibility that the outgoing U.S. president will try to “punish” Israel at the United Nations for building new settlements in contested areas at such a pace and in such a volume that it makes it appear as though Netanyahu is deliberately digging the Israeli-Palestinian peace process an early grave.220 There is confidence within the Netanyahu administration that a President Trump would take no such step, and yet no confidence at all that a President Clinton would do anything but quickly seek a UN resolution condemning new Israeli settlements. As the New Yorker will report in June 2018, prior to the 2016 presidential election Netanyahu was “confident that Trump would look out for his interests and share his opposition to Obama’s policies [in the Middle East]. Even before Trump entered the White House, Israeli officials talked about having more influence and a freer hand than ever before.”221 Netanyahu has already decided what he will do with this “freer hand,” too; during the Obama administration the Israeli prime minister has developed a “grand strategy for transforming the direction of Middle Eastern politics. His overarching ambition [is] … to form a coalition with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to combat Iran.”222 Netanyahu’s plan dovetails with the “grand bargain” imagined by Michael Flynn and Thomas Barrack, contemplated in great detail by the Red Sea conspirators, and hinted at in Trump’s public speeches.
In midsummer 2016, per Bloomberg, Dustin Stockton, a writer for Breitbart, sponsors a “10-week [media] blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul [Trump], or simply sit out the election.”223 Steve Bannon’s level of involvement in the Breitbart writer’s campaign is unknown, but in May 2018 a former employee of Trump’s data firm—Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica—will tell a Senate committee “that Bannon tried to use [Cambridge Analytica] to suppress the black vote in key states.”224 The similarity between this Bannon-led effort and Stockton’s Breitbart-led effort will prompt Bloomberg to call Stockton “an employee at Bannon’s former news site [who] worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal” as the man who had been—until quite recently—his boss.225
At former Bannon employee Stockton’s direction, a man named Bruce Carter founds Trump for Urban Communities (TUC), an organization that, according to Bloomberg, “never disclose[s] its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law.”226 Carter will say that in founding Trump for Urban Communities, “he believed he was working for the [Trump] campaign” and that the campaign was therefore reporting all spending by TUC in accordance with federal law.227
Lawrence Noble, former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for both Republican and Democratic administrations, will tell Bloomberg in 2018 that, legally speaking, there are “real problems” with TUC, if its operations were as described by Carter.228 As Bloomberg summarizes, “The operation suggest[s] possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and [Carter’s] nominally independent effort. If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as [TUC] must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate.”229 Bloomberg will note that one supporter of TUC alone “far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000” to the organization.230 Noble, now director and general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, says, “I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation.”231
Stockton will tell Bloomberg that “Trump performed particularly well in the areas [TUC] targeted,” noting that in Pennsylvania—one of the three states that determined the outcome of the 2016 election, with Trump beating Clinton by 44,000 votes out of 6.2 million cast (0.7 percent)—“Clinton won about 35,000 fewer votes [in Philadelphia] than Obama did in 2012, and that drop was primarily in majority-black wards.”232 “Those ballots alone,” Bloomberg notes, “could have cut Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania by more than half.”233 Stockton, who now admits his operation was “telling people not to vote,” says “Trump vastly outperformed the projection models [for African American voters] in the twelve areas Bruce [Carter] was targeting” in three battleground states: Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, all of which are states Trump won on Election Day in 2016.234 For his part, Carter now says that Breitbart was “aggressive” in pursuing him, a “courtship” that consisted, in substantial part, of Breitbart staffer Stockton “mak[ing] him aware of some of the research that Breitbart was pushing at the time,” which in Stockton’s case largely comprised articles detailing WikiLeaks’ October 2016 data-dumps.235
Breitbart’s recruitment of Carter occurred while Bannon was an executive there, and once Bannon became the Trump campaign’s chief executive officer on August 17, 2016, it included promises that Carter would be able to “engage with Bannon” directly.236 Emails uncovered by Bloomberg in 2018 will reveal that, following this promise by Stockton to Carter, TUC directly coordinated with Bannon and other Trump campaign officials as to funding, strategic planning, and market identification and targeting.237 A TUC staffer created a TUC Twitter account in September 2016, but thereafter it was accessed by multiple parties Carter cannot identify; it appears that some of the tweets made by these unknown parties “highlight[ed] the rolling WikiLeaks dumps of stolen Democratic campaign emails” as well as the work of “right-wing provocateurs” like Mike Cernovich—a Twitter personality who spent much of the 2016 general election tweeting about “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory later tied to Russian sources by Rolling Stone.238
By early October, Carter and TUC are requesting additional funds directly from the Trump campaign—specifically, $160,000 from Steve Bannon.239 Bannon puts Carter in touch with two men then deeply involved in a national social media manipulation campaign paid for directly by the Trump campaign: former Navy SEAL Jon Iadonisi and Dallas-based venture capitalist Darren Blanton (see chapter 6).240 Iadonisi is a business partner of Trump’s top national security advisor, Mike Flynn—indeed, the two men are, at the time, sharing an office—with Iadonisi simultaneously working with Flynn on a secret lobbying campaign for Turkey as well as a social media manipulation campaign for Trump. Blanton is a future Trump transition adviser who is paid $200,000 during the presidential transition period for social media manipulation work a company of his did during the campaign.241 According to Carter, when he meets Iadonisi and Blanton for the first time in Dallas, hoping to receive a six-figure investment in TUC from them, they are accompanied by “an Army veteran who ran a Blackwater-like company that provided paramilitary services” who remains unidentified.242 Blanton promises to help TUC raise money and proceeds to do so; Iadonisi—still Flynn’s business partner and one of the Trump campaign’s social media operatives—also offers to directly assist TUC.243 It is unclear whether it is associates of Flynn, Iadonisi, Blanton, or the unidentified veteran who later tweet out WikiLeaks- and Pizzagate-related content from TUC’s Twitter account.
While Carter’s description of the “Army veteran” matches that of Trump adviser Erik Prince, Prince can be excluded as the third participant in the Carter-Iadonisi-Blanton meeting—but only because Blanton introduced Carter to both Michael Flynn and Erik Prince on October 19, 2016, within two weeks of Carter first meeting the Dallas businessman.244 On the same day, Flynn, Prince, and Blanton introduce Carter to Rebekah Mercer, the owner of Trump’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica.245 In the ensuing week, Alexandra Preate—a spokeswoman for Bannon, Breitbart, and Mercer—drafts a press release hyping Carter and TUC.246 At the end of that weeklong period, on October 26, Trump announces, in what he calls a “major policy speech” in North Carolina, a “new deal for Black America.”247 The next day, BuzzFeed News reports that, according to a Trump campaign aide, the Trump campaign is self-admittedly running “three major voter suppression operations” in the lead-up to Election Day, and that one of these efforts is targeting black voters.248
Just days after the election, everyone associated with the Trump campaign who had been in contact with Bruce Carter cuts ties with him, with Blanton in a terse email citing, as justification for the move, a past criminal conviction that Carter had done nothing to hide and that would have shown up in any background check conducted on him by the Trump campaign pre-election.249
In late October 2016, Thomas Barrack writes an op-ed for Fortune that details what the longtime Trump adviser believes the next president—which he long ago predicted would be Trump—should do in the Middle East. In his editorial, Barrack insists that “the United States should make a radical, historic shift in its outreach towards the Arab world.… America should forge alliances with a new generation of Arab leaders.… [T]he US should take the lead in establishing a 21st century ‘Marshall Plan’ of economic aid” to the Middle East.250 While attempting to maintain his existing relationships in the region with words of praise for America’s long-standing ally Qatar, Barrack writes also of the hope he finds in “the rise of a new generation in government,” mentioning both Saudi Arabia and the UAE as countries with “brilliant young leaders … crafting forward-looking policies to effectively forge a new Middle East. American foreign policy must persuade these bold visionaries.… These leaders need and deserve active, engaged US support,” writes Barrack.251 Strikingly, Barrack writes of precisely the realignment of interests that began on a yacht in the Red Sea in late 2015, noting that the threat from Iran and Iranian militias “may create what has been a previously unthinkable alliance between our Gulf Cooperation Council partners and Israel.”252 The only error Barrack makes in his assessment, perhaps born of his historical ties to Qatar, is believing that that country will also be part of this new alliance with Israel.253 Barrack does, however, include Egypt—a Red Sea conspirator but not a GCC member—in his proposed pro-Israel alliance of GCC nations, identifying Turkey (a foe of the Red Sea conspirators but not a Gulf nation) as a prospective enemy of such an alliance.254 Barrack notes, too, the threat posed by a “renewed Russian push” in the region.255 However, he blames “the chill in US-Russia relations”—a euphemism for the Obama administration’s ongoing sanctions against Russia—for emboldening Putin in his support of Iran, implying that a U.S.-Russia détente, presumably brought about by the curtailing of sanctions, would have the opposite effect.256 This is precisely the theory behind the “grand bargain” the Red Sea conspirators have sought with Trump and the Kremlin. Moreover, much of Barrack’s lengthy editorial is a panegyric to Saudi Arabia, with the Trump friend, adviser, and confidant lauding the Saudis as “reliable defenders of the West’s diverse interests in the region … [and] America’s principal ally in the Middle East for more than seventy years.”257
All told, two obligatory references to his old business partners the Qataris notwithstanding, Barrack’s editorial is a summary of the bargain Trump’s campaign has at times implicitly and at times explicitly sought with the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, and Russians for many months. Barrack insists that “the only solution [in the Middle East] is one that works with Russia and not against them,” and even advises the very Syria policy Trump will announce two years post-inauguration—that “Bashar Assad may well be our only hope in fighting the various terrorist factions that are attempting to form an ISIS state [in Syria].”258 Barrack therefore submits that the United States should shift its Syria policy away from regime change and American “boots on the ground”—a tactic Barrack deems “impractical and ineffective”—and toward a political solution to the Syria crisis, an outcome also favored by the Kremlin.259 Given Barrack’s level of access to Trump and his regular employment as a Trump intermediary with Middle Eastern interests, as well as his ongoing behind-the-scenes dialogues with both Jared Kushner and the Emirati ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, the window Barrack’s Fortune article offers into the campaign’s thinking on the “grand bargain” in October 2016 is highly revealing.
Barrack’s insistence that the next president must “draw [up] a comprehensive solution similar to the Marshall Plan” echoes a “concept” drawn up by the very company, ACU Strategic Partners, that Michael Flynn was advising in 2016.260 Under the ACU plan endorsed by Flynn, Trump and Putin would sign a Middle East Marshall Plan whose ambition would be identical to the Marshall Plan proposed by Barrack: increased economic development in U.S.-allied Arab nations in the Middle East. Barrack’s echoing of the ACU/Flynn plan for the Middle East is no accident, however, as it will be revealed in November 2017 that throughout this period of the 2016 presidential campaign Flynn and Barrack are involved in “an intense and secretive lobbying push,” along with Rick Gates and others, to provide nuclear technology to MBS.261 Indeed, Flynn and Barrack are the two ringleaders of the effort. Because the plan the two top Trump advisers are championing requires that Trump drop sanctions on Russia, it is little surprise when, at the direction of a “senior transition official”—who communicates with Flynn through his deputy K. T. McFarland—the retired general and future Trump national security advisor tells Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016, that if Russia will hold off on retaliating for the sanctions just imposed upon it by President Obama (sanctions imposed for the Kremlin’s pro-Trump interference during the 2016 election), Trump will review the entire U.S.-Russia sanctions regime post-inauguration.262 Kislyak eventually agrees, informing Flynn in a subsequent phone call that the Kremlin will stand down and not retaliate for the new sanctions.263
The next day, December 30, Trump tweets to the nation, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”264 Trump makes no mention of any negotiations between his transition team and the Kremlin urging such a “delay,” though the Mueller Report will intimate that Trump was told, just after the new sanctions were announced, that his top national security advisor, Flynn, would imminently be speaking with the Russian ambassador.265
Minutes after Trump’s tweet praising Putin, the Russian embassy in D.C. retweets it.266 The Kremlin’s positive response to Trump’s tweet is apparently both well informed and well warranted, as at the time, it will later be reported, Trump either is developing or has already developed a plan to drop all sanctions against Russia—a move that would make possible the Barrack-Flynn nuclear reactor deal as well as obviate the need for any sanctions retaliation by the Kremlin.267 Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official, will tell Business Insider—crucially, at a time when he does not know that Trump’s intended dropping of sanctions on Russia would have paved the way for a clandestine “nuclear deal” with Russia and Saudi Arabia—that if indeed Trump had dropped sanctions on Russia at the beginning of his presidency, it would have given the Russians “exactly what they wanted in exchange for absolutely nothing.”268 Malinowski is one of several State Department officials whose actions in early February 2017 block Trump’s secret sanctions plan from being enacted.269
Just eleven minutes after Trump takes the oath of office in D.C. on January 20, his new national security advisor, Mike Flynn, texts Alex Copson, the managing partner of ACU Strategic Partners, to tell him that ACU’s “nuclear reactor project” is “good to go.”270 That night, Copson will tell someone with whom he’s attending an inaugural event that he is having “the best day of [his] life” because “his company’s effort to create a U.S.-Russia energy partnership in the Middle East … includ[ing] more than two dozen nuclear plants in the region, [is] moving forward.”271 Copson tells this individual—who will eventually become a government whistleblower working with federal law enforcement—that Trump is going to “rip up” all the sanctions against Russia that the Obama administration had imposed.272 In so doing, Copson confirms that the Saudi, Emirati, and Egyptian nuclear deals Trump’s top advisers have been working on are, in fact, one and the same with Trump’s plan to drop all sanctions on Russia—the very plan that forms the impetus for the Russians’ election interference on Trump’s behalf. Moreover, these two plans are both key to the larger and more ambitious geopolitical plot developed by the Red Sea conspirators, which can most easily be executed if Iran remains the Middle East’s chief bogeyman. Rejecting Obama’s Iran nuclear deal is, as is evident by the time of Trump’s inauguration, the clearest path to ensuring that Iran remains a clear and present danger to U.S. allies in the region.
According to the Washington Post, Copson’s boast about Trump “ripping up” U.S. sanctions against Russia comes directly from Michael Flynn, who has told Copson that removing all sanctions on Russia is exactly what Trump will do post-inauguration. Copson explains to the future whistleblower with whom he is speaking at Trump’s inauguration that “this is the start of something I have been working on for years.… Mike [Flynn] has been putting everything in place for us”—a comment that suggests Flynn’s course of foreign policy advising on the Trump campaign may well have been part of “putting everything in place” for a grand bargain on nuclear materials and technology involving Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Arab allies of the Saudis and Emiratis.273 Indeed, when the whistleblower speaking with Copson informs Congress of the ACU-Copson-Flynn plot regarding Russian sanctions, Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will say of the account that it constitutes a “credible allegation … [that] Michael Flynn sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the financial gain of his former business partners.”274 That Flynn and those partners planned on enriching and otherwise benefiting Trump’s most reliable foreign allies through a redirection of U.S. foreign policy—including allies who had offered Trump collusive assistance pre-election—closes the circle on a broader multinational bargain. As Copson tells the whistleblower at Trump’s inauguration, “This is going to make a lot of very wealthy people.”275
One of the Russian companies necessary to Copson’s and Flynn’s plan is OMZ OAO, which is at the time under sanctions by the United States.276 This explains, in part, why Copson says to the whistleblower that the sanctions placed on Russia for its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the further sanctions placed on Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election to assist Trump in gaining the Oval Office, “fucked everything up in my nuclear deal.”277
That the “nuclear deal” Copson references is synchronous with the Red Sea Conspiracy in its essential elements will be underscored by a September 2017 letter Rep. Cummings sends to Robert Mueller as well as to Flynn and Copson, decrying, as summarized by Business Insider, Flynn’s failure to “disclose a trip he took to Egypt and Israel in 2015 to pursue ‘a joint U.S.-Russian, Saudi-financed program to build nuclear reactors in the Arab world,” including the UAE.278 Cummings’s letter about Flynn’s activities in 2015 thereby cites, explicitly or implicitly, six of the seven countries (all but Bahrain) intimately involved in George Nader’s 2015 scheme for the remaking of the Middle East: the United States, Russia, Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Reuters describes ACU’s “ready-to-go” nuclear consortium as including Israeli interests as well as Russian ones, and mentions, too, a Ukrainian interest that ACU planned to convince on the matter of dropping Russian sanctions by giving it “a $45 billion contract to provide turbine generators for reactors to be built in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations.”279 The Ukrainian money—effectively a bribe to facilitate sanctions relief for Russia—is therefore scheduled to come, Copson writes in a November 2016 email, from “Gulf Arab states.”280 That Thomas Barrack is one of the people who stands to become wealthy from the “grand bargain,” and is a substantial creditor of at least one member of the Trump family as of Trump’s inauguration, explains, too, one of the many ways the Trumps might have expected to benefit financially from Flynn’s Middle East Marshall Plan. That other members of the consortium standing to benefit from the plan include Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates and Bud McFarlane—K. T. McFarland’s mentor, a close associate of Trump national security adviser Michael Ledeen during the Iran-Contra scandal, a VIP attendee at Trump’s April 2016 Mayflower speech, and a visitor to Trump Tower during the presidential transition period—underscores just how long work on this multinational deal has been ongoing.281
On January 28, 2017, two days after acting attorney general Sally Yates warns White House counsel Don McGahn that the nation’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, is susceptible to Russian blackmail and is therefore compromised—and one day after Yates gives that warning to McGahn a second time, face-to-face—Flynn receives an email from Bud McFarlane, who is at the time a member of the U.S. Energy Security Council.282 The email, which is sent also to McFarlane’s protégé (and Flynn’s deputy) K. T. McFarland, includes two documents: first, a “cover memo,” to be given to the president of the United States, intended to “launch the Marshall Plan for the Middle East” by formally outlining the “origins, geopolitical necessity, benefits—to the United States and host countries—[and] structure” of the plan and by naming Thomas Barrack chief executor of the plan on Trump’s behalf; and second, a memo “for the president to sign” ordering cabinet members to give Barrack any resources he needs.283 McFarlane notes that both Barrack and “our team”—meaning the team at post-ACU/post-IP3 entities SCP Partners, Iron Bridge Cybersecurity, and Iron Net Cybersecurity, all of whom are copied on the email—are on board with the content of the memos.284
Flynn, now a government employee, continues work on this private-company-proposed plan by “instructing his staff to rework [the] memo” sent to him by Copson “into policy for Trump to sign.”285 Flynn manifests no doubt that once the document is formatted correctly Trump will sign it. In the process of transitioning McFarlane’s work product into a policy agenda, Flynn and his staff strip any mention of ACU from the proposal and focus primarily on how the plan will see the United States “working with Russia on a nuclear reactor project.”286 Less than a month earlier, one of the people now working on turning the memo into a policy Trump and the Russians can agree to, K. T. McFarland, had highlighted in an email to a fellow Trump transition team official that Trump must avoid a “tit-for-tat escalation” on Russia sanctions.287 The same email underscored that the Russians had “just thrown [the] U.S.A. election to [Trump]”—a phrasing that summarizes McFarland’s view of the debt owed to the Kremlin by the new president.288
McFarland’s advisory role in Flynn’s late December contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak over the question of U.S. sanctions is believed to have been directed by someone higher up in the transition; as Business Insider will note, quoting a former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, “incoming Deputy National Security Advisors don’t order their incoming boss [Flynn] what to do … unless they were instructed to do so by someone higher in the chain of command.”289 A former National Security Council spokesman who speaks to Business Insider will agree, telling the digital media outlet that McFarland “wasn’t calling the shots, and certainly not giving her own orders to her putative boss.”290 The list of those who outranked Flynn on national security issues during the presidential transition period was short indeed; similarly, the circle of those within the PTT who understood the interconnected nature of the Middle East Marshall Plan and the Russian sanctions issue was small, though McFarland was herself a member. At one point during the transition she writes future Trump homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert to remind him that “Russia is key that unlocks door [sic].”291 Bossert forwards McFarland’s email to four people, one of whom is Mike Flynn and another of whom is Steve Bannon.292 In the days following Flynn’s ouster, Trump will be so concerned about alienating McFarland that when his first pick to replace Flynn as national security advisor, Vice Admiral Robert Harward, says that he will only take the job if he can replace McFarland, Trump withdraws the job offer.293
According to the New Yorker, just days before the 2016 presidential election, MBZ, “during a private meeting … float[s] to a longtime American interlocutor what sounded, at the time, like an unlikely grand bargain. The Emirati leader told the American that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, might be interested in resolving the conflict in Syria in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.”294 The magazine notes that not only the UAE but Israel and Saudi Arabia backed the plan, and at various points they had “encouraged their American counterparts to consider ending the Ukraine-related sanctions in return for Putin’s help in removing Iranian forces from Syria.”295
Almost immediately after Trump’s election, “a delegation of Saudis close to [MBS] visits the United States … and [brings] back a report [to MBS] identifying Jared Kushner as a crucial focal point in the courtship of the new administration.”296 The Saudis’ secret report on Kushner notes his “scant knowledge about [the Middle East], a transactional mindset and an intense focus on reaching a deal with the Palestinians that [meets] Israel’s demands.”297 Almost immediately, even though Trump is still only the president-elect and cannot legally negotiate U.S. foreign policy, MBS reacts to this report on Kushner by “offering [to Trump] to help resolve the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians … and offer[ing] hundreds of billions of dollars in deals to buy American weapons and invest in American infrastructure.”298 Moreover, MBS has his agents in D.C. invite Trump to come to Riyadh for his first foreign trip as president.299 The Saudi delegation to Kushner is extremely high-level, including Musaad al-Aiban, “a cabinet minister involved in economic planning and national security,” and Khaled al-Falih, “minister of energy and chairman of the state oil company.”300
In a portion of its notes on Kushner leaked to the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, MBS’s November 2016 delegation to the president-elect and Kushner reports that “[Trump’s] inner circle is predominantly deal makers who lack familiarity with political customs and deep institutions, and they support Jared Kushner.”301 According to the New York Times, another section of the Saudi delegates’ report makes “special note of what it characterized as Mr. Kushner’s ignorance of Saudi Arabia.”302 MBS’s team underscores Kushner’s unfamiliarity with the history of Saudi terrorism—for instance, the fact that nearly all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. MBS’s agents plan to remedy this knowledge deficit to Kushner’s “satisfaction” by “explain[ing]” to him what they describe as “their international leadership in fighting Islamist extremism.”303 The Saudis also propose an “intelligence and data [exchange] to help the [incoming] American administration carry out its strategy of investigating those requesting residency” in the United States—a proposal relevant to what will become Trump’s travel ban two months later (a ban that will, in the event, be crafted to leave Saudi travel to the United States unaffected).304
Two additional November 2016 Saudi proposals to Kushner will end up becoming active agenda items early on in the Trump presidency: the first, “a joint center to fight the ideology of extremism and terrorism,” will be inaugurated when Trump travels to Riyadh in May 2017 as part of his first foreign trip, and the second, “an Arab NATO” (see chapter 9), is presented to Kushner as “an Islamic military coalition of tens of thousands of troops” effectively under Trump’s command—available for mobilization, the Saudis tell Kushner, “when the president-elect wishes to deploy them.”305 The idea of the Saudis deploying their coalition forces (including the Emiratis) under circumstances and in locations of Trump and Kushner’s choosing emerges around the same time the Saudis join Trump and Egyptian president el-Sisi in inaugurating the Global Center for Combatting Extremist Ideology in Riyadh in May 2017, with the Saudis leading a coalition of Arab nations to blockade Qatar shortly thereafter.306 The Saudis also promise Kushner $350 billion or more in new orders of American military equipment and other investments in the American economy over the next ten years.307 These promises, favorably received in U.S. media at the time, will turn out to be hollow: by the end of 2018—nearly two years into Trump’s presidency—the Saudis will have produced none of the $350 billion promised, and will have announced only $70 billion in future deals and investments. As for Saudi support for Kushner’s Middle East peace push, the Times will report in December 2018 that King Salman “has appeared to resist Mr. Kushner’s Middle East peace plans as well.”308 Yet despite this lack of investment in America or accordance with Kushner’s policy agenda, the Trump-Saudi and Kushner-Saudi relationships will only grow over time, suggesting that the Saudis are pleasing their new allies in D.C. in other, perhaps less public ways.
MBS uses the notes his team brings back to Riyadh in November 2016 almost immediately, as just a few weeks later his close Emirati ally MBZ travels secretly to the United States—without informing the Obama administration of his travel, as required by international protocol—to meet with Kushner, George Nader, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, and Yousef al-Otaiba in Trump Tower, ostensibly, the New York Times reports, to talk about “the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.” In fact, a good deal of MBZ’s discussion with Kushner is about how “promising [a] young leader” MBS is—a course of persuasion that will help define Kushner’s actions in the months to come.309 As with almost every other high-level meeting that occurs in Trump’s home during either the presidential campaign or the presidential transition period, there will be no public indication afterward of Trump having attended the meeting or even having any knowledge of it. In answering questions from the special counsel’s office in 2018, Trump will deny having any knowledge of any pre-election meetings his advisers may have had with foreign nationals at which any form of assistance to him or his campaign was offered, telling the special counsel, “I have no recollection of being told during the campaign that any foreign government or foreign leader had provided, wished to provide, or offered to provide tangible support to my campaign.”310
The December transition team meeting with MBZ at Trump Tower, set up in part by hedge fund manager Rick Gerson—a man Vanity Fair will call Jared Kushner’s “BFF” (best friend forever)—is followed by a text message from Gerson to MBZ saying, “I promise you this will be the start of a special and historic relationship.”311 On January 19, the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Gerson will again write MBZ, detailing a conversation he had with Kushner in New York City before the president-elect’s son-in-law left for Washington for good and telling MBZ, “You have a true friend in the White House.”312
Kilimnik, per Gates “a former Russian intelligence officer with the GRU,” had just days earlier met with Russian oligarch (and his, Manafort’s, and Gates’s former boss) Oleg Deripaska.
It is not only Gates who says this about Kilimnik. According to Ken Vogel of the New York Times, the FBI has assessed that Kilimnik has “a relationship with Russian intelligence.” This assessment is first revealed during a court hearing involving the special counsel’s team in February 2019.313 At the time, Andrew Weissmann, an attorney for the special counsel’s office, says that the team’s “larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think the motive here is [for Manafort coordinating with Kilimnik]”—something that goes “very much to the heart of what the Special Counsel is investigating”—is closely connected to the August 2, 2016, Manafort-Gates-Kilimnik meeting.314
The New York Times will underscore the significance of the August 2, 2016, meeting as well, in addition to its many follow-up meetings, by noting in a January 2019 article that “for Russia, trying to influence the incoming Trump administration’s policy on Ukraine was of paramount importance. The economic sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea damaged the Russian economy, and various emissaries have tried to convince [Trump] administration officials to broker a resolution to a long-running guerrilla war between Russia and Ukraine.”315
Sometime after his hire by Trump but before mid-June 2016, Manafort—along with Rick Gates—had begun electronically transferring internal campaign polling data to Kilimnik, data that had been, according to the New York Times, “developed by a private polling firm” whose work product was nonpublic.
In the first ten months of his presidential campaign, not only does Trump decry pollsters, but indeed he has no polling operation of his own. By Election Day, Trump will have five polling firms on staff, all of which were engaged after Trump hired Manafort in late March 2016.316
On August 19, Paul Manafort resigns as Trump’s campaign manager, though the move is a cosmetic one only.
Once Manafort becomes a target of the special counsel office’s investigation, Trump and his aides move to obscure the importance of Trump’s former campaign manager to the president’s 2016 campaign. In 2017, Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, falsely describes Manafort as a man “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”317 An unnamed former Trump campaign worker falsely tells Politico, “We didn’t really have that much interaction with Paul. He wasn’t part of the core campaign team.”318 The same anonymous campaign worker will also falsely say that Manafort “didn’t have a relationship” with Trump before March 2016.319 In fact, as Politico will note in May 2017, “Manafort’s lobbying firm worked for Trump in the 1980s and 1990s fighting the expansion of Indian casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling business, and trying to change the flight path of planes that Trump said disturbed guests at his newly purchased Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.”320 Trump is Manafort’s first-ever client as a political consultant with Black, Manafort & Stone, the consultancy Manafort founded in 1980 with Roger Stone and Charles R. Black Jr.321
Politico reports that after his March 2016 hire by Trump, Manafort “quickly exerted his influence over the entire campaign, which was headquartered at Manhattan’s Trump Tower.” Manafort had owned an apartment there since 2006, the first full year in which Felix Sater worked under an exclusive deal with the Trump Organization to help Trump build a tower in Moscow.322 Bloomberg and Washington Monthly have noted that 2006 was also the year Sater and his Bayrock Group assisted Trump in signing one of the biggest deals of his career, Trump SoHo, several of whose funders “hailed from the former Soviet Union” and had “reported ties to the Kremlin;” many had also “faced allegations of corrupt and criminal behavior, ranging from money laundering to smuggling to involvement in a prostitution ring.”323
As to the extent of Manafort’s engagement with Trump following his late March 2016 hire, in early April 2016 Manafort’s daughter texts her sister that “Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together.”324 She adds that her father and Trump are “perfect allies.”325 While Manafort will not officially gain “complete control” over Trump’s campaign until June 2016, by mid-April 2016 he has so sidelined Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as the authority behind Trump’s operation that NBC News reports that Manafort is Trump’s “de facto campaign manager” and Lewandowski no more than a “body man and scheduler.”326
In January 2018, Trump will tell friends privately that he believes he can escape legal liability in the special counsel’s Russia investigation because “he’s decided that a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”
The NBC News report in which these private conversations are disclosed contains another, equally shocking revelation: that “Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team.”327 The report doesn’t indicate what charges Trump wants the Department of Justice to bring against the man investigating him and his aides, allies, and associates, but it confirms, with a Trump adviser as a source, that Trump’s aim in such a prosecution would be to make it impossible for Mueller to “run the federal grand jury” in the Russia investigation because he would be busy defending himself against criminal allegations.328
In midsummer 2016, per Bloomberg, Dustin Stockton, a writer for Breitbart, sponsors a “10-week [media] blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul [Trump], or simply sit out the election.”
Stockton spends October 2016 as Breitbart’s primary interlocutor for WikiLeaks, at least six times writing stories for the formerly Bannon-led digital media outlet that are simply vehicles for the dissemination of DNC and other documents the Kremlin has stolen.329