November 2016 to January 2017
The presidential transition period is a time of secret meetings involving Trump agents, Emiratis, Russians, Israelis, and Saudis. These secret meetings occur at Trump Tower, in the Seychelles, at Trump inaugural events, and elsewhere. During the transition there are substantial revelations about ties between the Trump campaign and Israeli, Russian, and Saudi entities, including former Israeli intelligence officers, businessmen from Russia, and Saudi and Emirati death squad leaders. A clandestine Trump-Putin back channel—one focused on sealing a “grand bargain” in the Middle East—is conclusively established.
In 2016 and 2017—both before Donald Trump is elected president and after—anti-money-laundering specialists at his longtime bank, Germany’s Deutsche Bank, “recommend[] that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.”1 According to a May 2019 investigative report in the New York Times, the transactions by Trump and Kushner “set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity” and result in the internal production at Deutsche Bank of “suspicious activity reports” that the bank’s money-laundering experts believe need to be sent to the U.S. Treasury Department immediately.2 The financial transactions Deutsche Bank flags are of the sort that might threaten Trump’s candidacy for president if disclosed in the middle of an election cycle in which it is known, by June 2016, that Russian nationals are systematically attacking America’s election infrastructure in a way intended to benefit Trump—and in which Trump has repeatedly declared that neither he nor, to the best of his knowledge, anyone in his campaign has financial ties to Russia.3
What Deutsche Bank has discovered in Trump’s and Kushner’s financial dealings are “transactions … involv[ing] money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious … [and] a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner … [in which] money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.”4
The money-laundering specialist who flags the Trump and Kushner transactions for her superiors at Deutsche Bank, Tammy McFadden, will be terminated in 2018 after “rais[ing] concerns about the bank’s practices” with respect to potential acts of money laundering. McFadden will raise her concerns at a time when “Deutsche Bank … had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians” and federal regulators had ordered it “to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.”5 In 2016, however, when McFadden provides the first “suspicious activity report” to her superiors regarding Trump and Kushner—two men Deutsche Bank has, over the years, lent “billions of dollars to,” according to the New York Times—bank executives bury the report. The suspicious transactions, potentially indicative of money laundering, thereafter continue into 2017.
On April 15, 2019, just days before the release of the redacted Mueller Report, congressional Democrats issue a subpoena to Deutsche Bank demanding Trump’s banking records.6 Trump and his legal team move quickly to try to block the subpoena, though initial indications are that this effort is unlikely to be successful—with Trump failing to block the subpoena at the case’s first hearing, before U.S. District Court Judge Edgardo Ramos in late May 2019.7
At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of November 9, 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton calls Republican Donald Trump to concede the 2016 presidential election.8 Within twenty minutes, Vladimir Putin has had an emissary contact Trump to set up a phone call with the Kremlin.9 Putin’s emissary is Sergey Kuznetsov, an official from the Russian embassy in Washington.10 The message from Putin that Kuznetsov sends to Trump via email, after Kuznetsov’s phone connection—according to Hope Hicks—is too faint for the White House to make out what the Kremlin agent is saying when he calls at 3:00 a.m., is that Putin “look[s] forward to working with [Trump] on leading Russian-American relations out of crisis.”11 Hicks forwards the message from Putin to Kushner, who immediately contacts his longtime adviser on all matters Russia-related, Putin “friend” Dimitri Simes.12 According to Kushner, his main purpose in writing Simes is to find out the name of the Russian ambassador, though this information is readily available by typing “Russian ambassador” into a Google search.13
A few hours later, in the late morning of November 9, Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) director Kirill Dmitriev—who, according to the Mueller Report, has been “kept abreast” throughout the general election of George Nader’s “efforts” to “develop[] contacts” with the Trump campaign—contacts Nader and asks him to “introduce him to Trump transition officials.”14 Robert Mueller will find, during the course of his investigation into Trump-Russia ties, that Dmitriev “report[s] directly to Putin and frequently refer[s] to Putin as his ‘boss,’” a revelation that means George Nader has been in touch with a top Putin lieutenant during the same span of time pre-election that he is regularly meeting with top Trump campaign officials (see chapter 5).15 Indeed, Mueller finds that Dmitriev told Nader pre-election, as the Lebanese American businessman was having regular contacts with the Trump campaign, of “his and the government of Russia’s preference … for candidate Trump to win.”16 Nevertheless, in his written responses to the special counsel’s office, President Trump will state that he has “no recollection of being told during the campaign that Vladimir Putin or the Russian government ‘supported’ my candidacy.”17
Someone—possibly Nader, as the redacted Mueller Report implies but does not say—writes to Dmitriev on November 9, the day after Election Day, to observe that “Putin has won.”18 One indication that this declaration of a Kremlin victory following America’s 2016 presidential election came from Nader is Mueller’s description of the closeness of the Nader-Dmitriev relationship: “RDIF has co-invested in various projects with UAE sovereign wealth funds,” the Mueller Report finds. “Dmitriev regularly interacted with Nader, a senior adviser to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, in connection with RDIF’s dealings with the UAE. Putin wanted Dmitriev to be in charge of both the financial and political relationship between Russia and the Gulf states.”19 Indeed, the report observes that “Nader considered Dmitriev to be Putin’s interlocutor in the Gulf region, and would relay Dmitriev’s views directly to [MBZ] … [and] Dmitriev and Nader had previously [pre-election] discussed Nader introducing him to the contacts he had made within the Trump Campaign.”20 Dmitriev’s specific task, in making these contacts with Trump officials, is likewise revealed by the special counsel’s report: “Dmitriev told [Kushner friend Rick] Gerson that he had been tasked by Putin to develop and execute a reconciliation plan between the United States and Russia.”21
Dmitriev’s task is of sufficient importance that only hours after Trump becomes America’s president-elect, Dmitriev is asking Nader to set up a meeting between him and “the ‘key people’ in the incoming Administration,” whom Dmitriev says he must speak to “as soon as possible” to “start rebuilding the [U.S.-Russia] relationship.”22 Dmitriev thereafter asks for, and receives almost immediately, Putin’s personal permission to travel to the United States for the purpose he has just laid out to Nader. According to the Mueller Report, Dmitriev is, upon landing in New York City late in the day on November 9, “particularly focused [on meeting with] Kushner and Trump Jr.”—perhaps because of Nader’s past interactions with the two men.23
Seventy-two hours after Trump’s victory, Kremlin operative Maria Butina contacts her handler, Alexander Torshin, regarding the presidential transition team’s plans for a secretary of state nominee.24 Butina has had repeated contacts during the presidential campaign with Dimitri Simes and J. D. Gordon—the latter the day-to-day director of the national security advisory committee that was Simes’s brainchild—while Torshin has had repeated contacts with Simes and at least one substantive contact with Donald Trump Jr. at a National Rifle Association event, and he says he “know[s]” Trump Sr. through the NRA.25 Butina contacts Torshin because the Trump campaign has already revealed to her whom it is considering picking for secretary of state—one of the most important cabinet decisions President-elect Trump will make—and Butina tells Torshin that “our [the Kremlin’s] opinion will be taken into consideration” when it comes time to make a final selection. Torshin has by this time repeatedly been called “President Putin’s emissary” in the United States by both American and British media.26 It is unclear whether Butina is told of the Trump campaign’s plans for the State Department before or after Election Day, and whether it is Dimitri Simes, Butina’s boyfriend, Paul Erickson, or someone else who passes this intelligence to her; Trump has long been planning to unilaterally drop sanctions on Russia via his secretary of state, though he keeps this plan secret pre-election—notwithstanding telling Butina herself, at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July 2015, that he’d like to see the sanctions removed.27 Federal prosecutors, after convicting Butina of being an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation, will tell a federal judge in April 2019 that her work in the United States, including substantial contacts with top Republican officials and operatives and even Trump himself, “provided the Russian Federation with information that skilled intelligence officers can exploit for years and that may cause significant damage to the United States.”28
Six days after Trump’s election victory, he speaks with Putin by telephone. During the call Trump “agree[s] to work to improve [U.S.-Russia] ties,” according to the Associated Press.29
A week after Election Day, Kislyak emails Kushner about setting up a meeting with him, and Kushner immediately checks in with Dimitri Simes to make sure that Kislyak is the “right guy” in the Kremlin’s administrative superstructure for him to be taking a meeting with post-election.30 On November 30, Kushner and Flynn meet with Kislyak at Trump Tower to express to the Kremlin agent “a desire on the part of the incoming Administration to start afresh with U.S.-Russian relations”—a fresh start that could occur only if the incoming administration drops all sanctions on the Russian Federation, as all three men are aware from past interactions between the Trump campaign and Kislyak.31 Kushner and Flynn also discuss with Putin’s designated representative “U.S. policy toward Syria” and the possibility of the Russian military communicating directly with the Presidential Transition Team (PTT) via a secure line untraceable by U.S. intelligence. When Kushner suggests that the PTT could secretly communicate with Russian generals via a secure facility at the Russian embassy, Kislyak adjudges the idea a step too far—and indeed, former CIA director John McLaughlin will tell MSNBC in May 2017 that Kushner’s plan would have constituted espionage under federal law.32
As the transition wears on, the PTT will diversify its cadre of Russia advisers beyond Simes, adding to it Robert Foresman, the banker who in March 2016 had acted as a Kremlin conduit to the campaign (see chapter 3).33 In December 2016, Flynn and his deputy K. T. McFarland ask Foresman for his advice on whether Kislyak is the right conduit for the PTT to use to communicate with the Kremlin during the transition period; Foresman retrieves an answer for Flynn and McFarland by checking with “a source he [Foresman] believed to be close to Putin,” an act of interlocution that occurs without Flynn’s direct request but nevertheless underscores the ease with which Trump’s national security team is able to access the Kremlin post-election.34
By December 6, a week after Kushner and Flynn’s meeting with Kislyak, Kislyak has set up for Kushner a meeting with a man who has a “direct line to Putin”—Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), who was a senior manager at another state-owned Russian bank, Sberbank, at the time (November 2013) it agreed to finance the Trump Tower Moscow project Trump and Aras Agalarov negotiated in Moscow.35 Gorkov, according to the Washington Post, is also “a graduate of the Federal Counter-Intelligence Academy, which prepares students for service in [Russian] foreign intelligence or the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB.”36 According to the Mueller Report, Gorkov had talked to Foresman “just before Gorkov left for New York to meet Kushner … [and] told him [he] was traveling [with others] to New York to discuss post-election issues with U.S. financial institutions, that their trip was sanctioned by Putin, and that they would be reporting back to Putin upon their return.”37 For his part, Kushner will claim to the special counsel’s office that he didn’t even Google Gorkov before meeting him, despite Kislyak having indicated that Gorkov would be Kushner’s direct line to Putin.38
Kushner’s honesty on the subject of his meeting with Gorkov will be further placed in doubt by his readout of the event. While Kushner will tell federal investigators that the meeting was purely “diplomatic”—Kislyak having ostensibly set up the meeting in response to Kushner saying he wanted a conduit to Putin—Gorkov will say his meeting with Kushner occurred, as summarized by the Mueller Report, “in Kushner’s capacity as CEO of Kushner Companies, for the purpose of discussing business, rather than as part of a diplomatic effort.”39
A potential second meeting between Kushner and Gorkov in February 2017 will be scuttled by the unfolding Flynn scandal.40
With U.S. media coverage of Russian election interference steadily increasing in December 2016, the Kremlin changes tack midmonth and switches its strategy for securing new clandestine meetings with the PTT from using known Kremlin agents to using individuals already working as Trump advisers. After Putin has intimated to oligarch Petr Aven that he wants Aven to use his Alfa Bank contacts to set up a conduit to the Trump transition, especially on the “prospect of forthcoming U.S. economic sanctions,” Aven “instruct[s] [Trump adviser] Richard Burt to make contact with the incoming Trump Administration.”41 Even as Aven is pursuing Putin’s desires in this regard, Dimitri Simes is turning to Burt for the same purpose.42 Simes’s and Putin’s lines of engagement with the PTT in late December 2016 and early January 2017 are so synchronous that, according to the Mueller Report, Burt “decide[s] to approach CNI president Dimitri Simes for help facilitating Aven’s request” even as Simes is “lobbying the Trump Transition Team, on Burt’s behalf, to appoint Burt U.S. ambassador to Russia.”43 Simes appears to dissemble with the special counsel’s office regarding his contacts with Burt, however. Whereas Burt tells Mueller’s team that Simes “agreed to discuss [using Burt as a Trump-Kremlin conduit] again after the New Year [January 1, 2017],” Simes says that “he did not want CNI to have any involvement or apparent involvement in facilitating any [Trump-Kremlin] connection.”44 Burt underscores Simes’s attentiveness to the idea of a Trump-Kremlin conduit when he reveals to the special counsel that Simes had already done the necessary work in his interactions with the Trump campaign to determine that there was a clear “interest” in establishing such a “communications channel.”45
The day after Trump’s election victory, a Saudi journalist living in the United States, Jamal Khashoggi, criticizes Trump’s Middle East policy at a think tank event in Washington. Within days, MBS has “banned [Khashoggi] from writing in newspapers, making television appearances, and attending conferences” in Saudi Arabia, forcing the journalist to seek work abroad.46
Khashoggi’s criticism of Trump—calling his agenda for the Middle East “contradictory”—is relatively mild, and yet it touches on a major paradox at the heart of MBS’s plan for cooperation with Trump: inasmuch as the Red Sea Conspiracy requires that America please Russia by various means, and inasmuch as the United States withdrawing troops from Syria would have that effect but also strengthen Iran’s hand, Trump will be granting a major victory to both Russia and its ally Iran if he effectuates MBS’s grand plan for the destruction of Iranian power by changing U.S. policy in Syria.47 In calling this plan—Trump’s and, in effect, MBS’s—“contradictory,” Khashoggi gives the lie to the broader Trump-MBS agenda. As the article that gets Khashoggi banned from practicing journalism in Saudi Arabia argues, “Mr. Trump has been vocally anti-Iran, [but] he has hinted he will support President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war, a move which will ultimately bolster Iran.”48 The observation is true as a matter of geopolitics, but is also potentially damning for MBS, as it is he who idiosyncratically believes that appeasing Russia—and therefore risking, concurrently, the aiding of Iran—is a wise course for his nation. Khashoggi’s argument at the think tank event in D.C. that it would be exceedingly difficult for Trump to “ally more closely with Russia” while supporting Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia in their efforts to stabilize the Middle East is self-evidently true, based simply on the present status of in- and out-of-region military alliances. It is only the counterintuitive and still-secret tenets of the Red Sea Conspiracy that alter the equation. MBS cannot allow Khashoggi’s narrative to discredit, explicitly or implicitly, the counternarrative that he, MBZ, and el-Sisi are planning to pursue. And so it is that MBS ends, in an instant, the long journalistic career of Jamal Khashoggi, a man who had previously been a columnist for Al Hayat for five years and an editor in chief at several Saudi newspapers, including the Arab Times and Al-Watan.49
As Khashoggi’s journalistic career in Saudi Arabia ends, a new organization arises in the kingdom: a paramilitary unit that U.S. officials will come to call the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group (RIG), which functions as an intensification of the secret military unit already constituted within MBS’s Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Royal Court (CSMARC). The CSMARC unit, run by MBS aide Saud al-Qahtani, was founded in 2015, at MBS’s direction, to kidnap Saudi citizens abroad and bring them back to Riyadh for detention (see chapter 9).50 Whereas the CSMARC unit’s efforts have focused on kidnapping and extraction, the RIG mandate is broader, and includes the “surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture” of Saudis around the world.51 American intelligence believes there to be personnel overlap between RIG and CSMARC, as Saud al-Qahtani runs both and uses Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb as his deputy for both. Another top RIG operative named by the New York Times is Thaar Ghaleb al-Harbi, “a member of the royal guard who was promoted in 2017 for valor during an attack on a palace of [MBS’s].”52
What is unclear is whether there is also personnel or operational overlap between RIG, CSMARC, and the “Islamic military coalition of tens of thousands of troops” that would be available to Trump “when the president-elect wishes to deploy them”—a third ostensibly “counterterrorist” force, which the Saudis promise to Kushner in New York City in November 2016 (see chapter 5).53
From 2017 onward, RIG will be involved in at least a dozen operations around the world.54 In one instance reported by the New York Times, a RIG detainee and torture victim, Eman al-Nafjan, a “university lecturer in linguistics who wrote a blog about women in Saudi Arabia,” tries to kill herself after prolonged “psychological torture” at RIG’s hands.55 Torture is illegal under Saudi law, notes the Times, but U.S. intelligence has information suggesting that women detained by MBS, including al-Nafjan, “were frequently … [subjected to] interrogation, which included beatings, electric shocks, waterboarding and threats of rape and murder.”56 One victim’s sister writes in an op-ed for the Times that al-Qahtani “threatened to kill her [sister] and throw her body into the sewage system.”57 Illegal RIG kidnappings and extractions are known to have occurred in, at a minimum, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, UAE, and Turkey.58
As MBS increases the Saudi government’s illegal renditions around the world, and also its chargeless detentions at home, so too does he increase the kingdom’s financial investments abroad—particularly in the United States, with an emphasis on the administration of Donald Trump.59 In 2016, Saudi Arabia spent $10 million lobbying the Obama administration; in 2017, it spends $27 million lobbying Trump.60 According to Time, “The Saudi government saw an opening for improved relations with Trump’s presidency, and immediately began investing—both monetarily and diplomatically.”61 Ben Freeman, founder and director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, says that “with Trump I think [the Saudis] saw the opportunity for a … reset in U.S-Saudi relations, and really for Trump they had someone who was already pretty biased to their point of view. He had these personal business connections that I think the Saudis were pretty prepared to capitalize on.”62 Evidence in support of Freeman’s conclusion includes Saudi-funded lobbyists reserving five hundred rooms at Trump’s D.C. hotel, at a cost of well over a quarter of a million dollars, in the weeks before and after Trump’s inauguration.63
Shortly after Trump’s election, George Nader pays Joel Zamel $2 million. According to the New York Times, there are “conflicting accounts” of the reason for the payment.64 The special counsel’s office is concerned enough that the $2 million may be a foreign payment for services illegally rendered for the Trump campaign during the election that Mueller subpoenas Zamel’s Cyprus banking records and begins interviewing Psy-Group employees.65 Bloomberg reports that almost immediately thereafter, in February 2018, “Psy-Group CEO Royi Burstien informed employees in Tel Aviv that the company was closing down. Burstien is a former commander of an Israeli psychological warfare unit.”66
Nader’s claim that he paid Zamel for a presentation on how Trump scored an electoral victory is, in a narrow way, true: according to the New Yorker, “Shortly after the election Zamel bragged to Nader that he had conducted a secret campaign that had been influential in Trump’s victory. Zamel agreed to brief Nader on how the operation had worked.”67 What is unknown is whether Nader, as an agent of the UAE, was asking to see evidence of actions he had no forewarning of or was entitled to a detailed presentation by Zamel because it was MBZ who had paid for Zamel’s work product in the first instance. The New Yorker describes the December 2016 Nader-Zamel meeting—followed hard upon by meetings between Nader, Zamel, Flynn, Bannon, and the Saudis’ spy chief (see chapter 8)—as “Zamel show[ing] Nader several analytical reports, including one that described the role of avatars, bots, fake news, and unattributed websites in assisting Trump. Zamel told Nader, ‘Here’s the work that we did to help get Trump elected,’ according to [a] Nader representative. Nader paid Zamel more than two million dollars, but never received copies of the reports, that person said.”68 If indeed Zamel did the work for the Trump campaign that he claimed, it would have violated U.S. law, which prohibits campaign donations from foreign nationals; federal law therefore offers a compelling reason for Zamel to have resisted distributing documentary evidence of his illicit efforts.
A Psy-Group employee who speaks to the New Yorker appears to confirm that the company did work for Trump, saying of Psy-Group’s disinformation techniques and the post-election “increase” in “interest in Psy-Group’s services”—as expressed by what the company was hearing from prospective clients in 2017—“The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?”69 This increased interest in Psy-Group sees its founder, Burstien, giving presentations on Psy-Group’s capabilities all around Washington. Per the New Yorker, “As part of [his] presentation, Burstien point[s] out that Russian operatives had been caught meddling in the United States; Psy-Group, he [tells] clients, was ‘more careful.’”70
The Washington Post reports that by the first day of the transition period, Trump and his team have already outlined “a very specific policy position” on how to approach the Russia-Iran axis—and their position is identical to that of MBZ and his Red Sea co-conspirators.71 As the Post reports, the Trump transition and presidential administration “and the UAE appear to share a similar preoccupation with Iran.… Trump advisers were focused throughout the transition period on exploring ways to get Moscow to break ranks with Tehran.”72 According to a former intelligence official who met with Trump transition officials, “Separating Russia from Iran was a common theme [in their conversations]. It didn’t seem very well thought out. It seemed a little premature.… [T]hey hadn’t even taken the reins and explored with experts in the U.S. government the pros and cons of that approach.”73
The second day after Trump’s election finds multiple Russian officials communicating to the media that “the Russian government … maintained contacts with Trump’s ‘immediate entourage’ during the campaign.”74 Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaks at slightly more length on the issue, telling a journalist, “I cannot say that all [of Trump’s entourage], but a number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives.… I don’t say that all of them, but a whole array of them supported contacts with Russian representatives.”75
The Trump transition team responds to the Kremlin’s confession with a grave misstatement that at once misleads the media and the public on the existence of Trump-Russia, Trump-Saudi, and Trump-Emirati contacts: the transition team’s press secretary, Hope Hicks, tells U.S. media, “We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday [November 9], when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders.”76 Hicks would later reveal to the special counsel’s office that she spoke to none of Trump’s foreign policy advisers or national security advisers before representing that no one on Trump’s campaign communicated with foreign nationals; instead, she spoke only to domestic policy advisers, including Kellyanne Conway, Jason Miller, and Stephen Miller—the last of whom, despite being a domestic policy adviser, was in fact present at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. met with Joel Zamel, an Israeli citizen.77 Hicks will tell the special counsel that she may have spoken to Bannon and Kushner as well—two men whose campaign briefs spanned both domestic and foreign policy—but she could not be sure.78
That Trump and his transition team immediately evince a policy agenda with respect to Russia and Iran identical to that of the UAE without consulting domestic foreign policy experts is telling. Former U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul, who speaks to the Trump transition team during the transition period, comes away with the impression that the team doesn’t realize how much Putin will have to be offered to curtail his support for Iran. “When I would hear [their plans],” McFaul will say in spring 2017, “I would think, ‘Yeah, that’s great for you guys, but why would Putin ever do that?’ There is no interest in Russia ever doing that. They have a long relationship with Iran. They’re allied with Iran in fighting in Syria. They sell weapons to Iran. Iran is an important strategic partner for Russia in the Middle East.”79 It is unclear if the transition team reveals to McFaul its pre-election plan to eliminate all U.S. sanctions on Russia in compensation for its abandonment of Iran, a move that would end a punishing regime of financial restrictions on the country that has “shaved off,” per the Council on Foreign Relations, 1 percent to 1.5 percent of Russia’s economic output and could, in the long term, have an even more significant impact—as it is keeping the Kremlin from fully exploring the Arctic for oil.80 Just a single potential drilling partnership that the Kremlin has had to forgo because of sanctions, an agreement with Exxon, could alone have brought in revenues of up to $500 billion, according to a Kremlin estimate.81
Whether it is revealed to McFaul or not, according to a June 2017 Newsweek article Trump and his team have, in fact, developed a secret plan to end all sanctions on Russia immediately upon entering office—a plot foiled only when career civil servants in the State Department successfully move to block it.82 Dan Fried, the State Department’s coordinator for sanctions policy through February 2017, will tell Yahoo News that in the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency “he got several ‘panicky’ calls from U.S. officials. They asked: ‘Please, my God, can’t you stop this?’”83
Career government officials are right to be panicked. According to Newsweek, Trump’s plan calls for ending all sanctions on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea, ending all sanctions on Russia over its interference with the 2016 presidential election, and returning Russian diplomatic compounds in the United States that were seized following the election.84 According to Tom Malinowski, the assistant secretary of state for democracy through Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s plan—per those who spoke with his transition team—“would have been a win-win for Moscow.”85 Malinowski further will say, in speaking with Yahoo News, “that he heard the administration was working on a ‘grand bargain’ with Russia.”86 Certainly, if the Russians had caught wind, at any time before Election Day in 2016, of Trump’s plan to trade sanctions relief for Russia’s abandonment of Iran in Syria—for instance, during any of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak, Kushner’s contacts with Simes or Barrack’s contacts with al-Otaiba—it would have supplied a strong motive for the Kremlin to illicitly support Trump’s candidacy for president.
Among those hired for the presidential transition team is Iranian American businessman Bijan Kian, the longtime business partner of Trump’s top national security advisor, Mike Flynn. The two men co-founded the Flynn Intel Group in 2014.87 In December 2018, Kian will be indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for secretly being an agent of the Turkish government at the time he joined the presidential transition team’s national security staff.88
In June 2017, three months after Kian and Flynn have finally registered as 2016 Turkish agents—but long before Kian’s 2018 indictment—a Trump administration official will insist, as summarized by the Washington Times, that “Kian’s records did not show his foreign work for Flynn Intel or that he planned to file with the government as an agent for his work for a foreign interest. ‘He did not indicate that to us in his transition documents. We would have no reason to know.’”89 These mid-2017 claims will be cast into doubt, however, by a May 2017 New York Times story revealing that “Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the [January 2017] inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the [2016] campaign.”90 Given that Flynn engaged in this work with his business partner Kian, as part of a company that he and Kian jointly operated, and that in fact Kian had been the one who introduced Flynn to the Turkish client they worked for, the chances Flynn revealed his foreign lobbying for Turkey to Trump transition officials while keeping them in the dark about—and avoiding questions about—Kian, his fellow transition team member, would appear to be small.91
The identity of Flynn and Kian’s Turkish client helps to explain how Kian, and thereafter Flynn, first encountered Israeli business intelligence expert Joel Zamel—which perhaps explains, in turn, why it is so important for the Trump administration to deny knowledge of Flynn’s dealings with Kian. In 2016, Flynn and Kian were working secretly on behalf of Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman who not only hired the Flynn Intel Group in 2016 but actually employed Kian at “one of his Turkish companies at the same time [Kian] was working for Flynn Intel.”92 Flynn and Kian had apparently known Alptekin for some time, as they both “attended galas put on by the Nowruz Commission, a nonprofit run by Kian … [for which] Alptekin was named a board director” in 2011; moreover, “Kian and Alptekin had an existing business relationship when Flynn Intel began its foreign work … [as] Kian had been vice chairman of [Alptekin’s] Istanbul-based aviation company, EA Havacilik, since November 2011 … [and] Alptekin said he and Kian regularly strategized” on business matters.93 Evidently, a key part of Alptekin and Kian’s strategy was ensuring that no one knew they were working with the Flynn Intel Group: Kian told a journalist whom he’d asked to produce a pro-Turkey documentary, “We don’t want anyone to know the Flynn Intel Group has anything to do with this.”94
Despite the Trump transition team’s later claims that it didn’t know about Kian’s foreign lobbying—but was, per reports, aware of Flynn’s lobbying efforts by January 4, 2017, at the very latest—Alptekin will say that Kian was the “main one” he dealt with when he was closely working with the Flynn Intel Group in the final ninety days of the 2016 general election. The date Flynn and Kian began working with Alptekin matches, almost to the day, the date Joel Zamel offered his services to the Trump campaign.95 Meanwhile, the Trump transition team’s claims that it didn’t know Flynn was working for the Turks until January 2017 will be severely undercut with the revelation that Congress informed transition chief and Vice President–elect Mike Pence of this critical national security information, and did so in writing, on November 18, 2016.96 No action was taken by the Trump transition with respect to Flynn’s security clearance in November 2016, December 2016, or January 2017, however.
As of 2016, Alptekin is, legally speaking, an agent of the Turkish government, as he is “a member of a foreign trade board managed by the country’s economic ministry.”97 His longtime employee, consultant, and business associate Kian had, during his years of work for the Export-Import Bank pre-2011, spent much of his time “meeting officials in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other nations, according to State Department cables.”98 The $530,000 Kian and Flynn received for working for Alptekin from August through November 2016 was paid by two entities: the Alptekin-owned Inovo BV, a Dutch consulting company, and (curiously, given that all the work Flynn and Kian did for Alptekin was ostensibly on behalf of the Turkish government) Ratio Oil Exploration, an Israeli natural gas company.99 About half ($270,000) of the $530,000 Alptekin paid Flynn and Kian is unaccounted for in Flynn’s transition-period federal paperwork seeking a security clearance, and Alptekin now says “he does not know where the money went.”100 In December 2018, Alptekin is indicted alongside Kian for illegally lobbying on Turkey’s behalf, with Flynn scheduled to testify for the federal government as its star witness.101
An addendum to Flynn’s security clearance paperwork will subsequently reveal that Alptekin’s Inovo was in fact, in working with Flynn and Kian, “represent[ing] a private sector company in Israel that sought to export natural gas to Turkey.”102 In 2017 Alptekin will sometimes deny ever working for Ratio while at other times admitting it, even as Ratio denies having any relationship with him.103 Ratio’s denials will eventually be proven, in late 2017, to be a lie, as BuzzFeed News will acquire “numerous documents, emails, photographs and bank statements showing a business relationship [between the Israeli company and Alptekin].”104
The documents BuzzFeed News uncovers reveal that the secretive Alptekin-Ratio relationship—which eventually becomes a Flynn-Kian-Alptekin-Ratio relationship—began on April 13, 2016, just nine days after Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos appeared with Alptekin on a panel at a conference in Israel.105 Papadopoulos had been sent to Israel by the Trump campaign twenty-four hours after revealing to Trump, Sessions, and the rest of Trump’s national security advisory committee that he was acting as an “intermediary” for the Kremlin.106 Papadopoulos’s trip to Israel to be on a panel with Alptekin also occurred just three weeks after he met Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, a Kremlin agent, in Italy; Mifsud and Alptekin were both, during that period of time, members of a relatively small international organization called the European Council on Foreign Relations.107
Papadopoulos’s wife will “unequivocally” tell National Public Radio in early 2018 that “everything [her husband] did during the campaign was authorized by the top levels of the campaign,” including his foreign trips.108 It remains unclear why Alptekin originally represented his work with Flynn and Kian as involving only the building of a public case against exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, rather than any oil-and-gas analyses for the Israeli company Ratio Oil, and why Alptekin subsequently lied to media about whether any Israeli monies had been used to pay the co-founders of the Flynn Intel Group.109 While it is known that Papadopoulos communicated with Flynn during the period both men worked as national security advisers on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it is unknown how closely they interacted while both working as national security advisers on Ben Carson’s relatively small campaign—or whether Flynn had any role in Trump’s mysterious hiring of Papadopoulos in March 2016, just weeks before Papadopoulos met Flynn’s future client Alptekin.110
One clue about the missing $270,000 from the contract Flynn signed in August 2016 with Alptekin and an Israeli oil company—a contract signed at the same time Israeli Joel Zamel made a pitch at Trump Tower to create a social media manipulation campaign for Donald Trump for the final ninety days of the 2016 election—may come in the form of work Flynn business associate Jon Iadonisi did for Flynn during the same period Zamel was pitching to the Trump campaign. Iadonisi’s work for Flynn ostensibly related to Flynn’s efforts on behalf of the Turkish government; at the same time, however, Iadonisi was running an “under-the-radar project” for the Trump campaign now described as a “social-media project that involved video-content creative and ‘millennial engagement.’”111
The Trump campaign didn’t pay Iadonisi for his work at the time he did it, or even disclose the work Iadonisi was doing in campaign finance reports, as required by law (this despite Trump boasting in 1999 that “nobody knows more than me about campaign finance”). Instead, a month after the election the Trump campaign paid $200,000 to “Colt Ventures, a Dallas-based venture-capital firm that is an investor in VizSense, a social-media company co-founded by Iadonisi.”112 Michael Glassner, executive director of the Trump campaign committee, “declined to comment on why the payment went to a venture-capital firm and whether campaign officials were aware of the firm’s connection to VizSense and Iadonisi.”113 In May 2017, the Washington Post will report that the founder of Colt Ventures, Dallas investor Darren Blanton, “served as an adviser to Trump’s transition … [and] met frequently with Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon at Trump Tower during the campaign.… Colt also sent a report to Bannon about work done for the campaign.”114
As the co-founder of VizSense, Iadonisi—a former Navy SEAL who has done work with the CIA—was offering VizSense clients, in 2016, the means to “weaponize your brand’s influence” through “military-grade influencer marketing and intelligence services.”115 In a 2015 interview, Iadonisi said that VizSense “helps clients track online video performance and identify which social-media users drive the most traffic.” He compared VizSense’s technology with the capacity of Al Qaeda fighters who “were really good at making viral videos” that “catalyze” the opinions of those who see them.116
Throughout the 2016 campaign, the Flynn Intel Group and Iadonisi’s VizSense shared an office in Alexandria, Virginia. Flynn’s rental agreement for the space was with White Canvas Group, another Iadonisi-founded and -owned operation.117 According to the Justice Department, Iadonisi’s White Canvas was working with the Flynn Intel Group on the Gulen project while Iadonisi’s VizSense was working with the Trump campaign on its “under-the-radar” social media manipulation operation.118 The chief executive of White Canvas, Tim Newberry, was simultaneously the chief executive of Flynn Intel Group Cyber (FIG Cyber), a subsidiary of Flynn’s company.119 Missing Israeli monies paid to the Flynn Intel Group were therefore well positioned to end up in a VizSense social media manipulation campaign seemingly identical in its contours to the project being proposed (at the very same time) by Israeli social media guru Joel Zamel.120
That Iadonisi served in Iraq with Michael Flynn and shared an office with him, and that Zamel had previously sought to recruit Iadonisi’s officemate Flynn to work with Psy-Group, increases substantially the odds of an Iadonisi-Zamel connection or even partnership—especially given their common military experience and common interest in social media disinformation campaigns.121 Indeed, in describing itself as “deliver[ing] military-grade influencer marketing and intelligence services,” Iadonisi’s company VizSense offers up a corporate description also answered to by Psy-Group.122 According to the Washington Post, Flynn’s contract with Inovo describes Iadonisi, without name attribution, as “the head of Flynn Intel Group’s Special Operations Cyber Force” and a “former top security and intelligence official”—a description that may just as easily be applied to Zamel.123
In December 2016, during the presidential transition, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, calls Jared Kushner. One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s former speechwriters had introduced Kushner to Dermer nine months earlier, in March 2016. During the December Dermer-Kushner call, Dermer tries to induce Kushner to violate the federal Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953) by asking to negotiate U.S. foreign policy with President-elect Trump—who is still a month from taking office—through his son-in-law.124 Specifically, Dermer asks Kushner “for the transition team’s help in blunting the work [at the United Nations] of the sitting President.”125 “Work” here refers to the Obama administration’s open-minded stance toward an Egyptian resolution at the United Nations criticizing Israel for its aggressive settlement policy under Netanyahu. Underscoring the comity between the Trump campaign and both the Israelis and the Egyptians, as well as Israel’s surprisingly strong influence on decision-makers in Cairo, Egypt quickly withdraws its resolution “under pressure from Netanyahu and Trump”—despite the fact that it is illegal for either the president-elect or any member of his transition team to seek to negotiate U.S. foreign policy with a foreign power.126 When four other United Nations Security Council members revive Egypt’s resolution, Trump’s team again, despite the clear prohibitions of the federal Logan Act, directly negotiates foreign policy before the administration of which they’re a part has assumed power in Washington. Kushner orders Mike Flynn to contact the Russians for their help in defeating the resolution, which Flynn immediately does.127 He will later be charged with a federal crime for lying about this and other phone calls to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the last ten days of December.128
As Netanyahu’s agent is apparently orchestrating violations of 18 U.S.C. § 953, Netanyahu takes yet another step considered by American intelligence veterans to be a “breach of protocol”: he sends Yossi Cohen, the head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, to meet with Trump’s top national security advisor, Flynn, about the threat Iran poses in the Middle East. Cohen’s charge is to “insure that the two governments [are] closely aligned in their approach [to Iran].”129
Meanwhile, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who has in prior publications strongly advocated for America to more robustly align its military with those of Israel and Greece, is in Piraeus, a city near Athens, meeting with Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos.130 Papadopoulos had previously met with Kammenos during a late May 2016 trip to Athens—the same weekend that Kammenos met with Vladimir Putin in the Greek capital.131 The May Kammenos-Papadopoulos meeting occurred just three weeks after Papadopoulos learned from his Kremlin-agent contact, Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, that the Kremlin had stolen thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.132
Kammenos is a “Putin ally” whose defense department is deemed by NATO intelligence to be “compromised by Russian intelligence,” and whose Athens-based Institute for Geopolitical Studies is in an active “memorandum of understanding” with the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a unit of the office of Vladimir Putin that is a “think tank managed by Russia’s foreign intelligence services.”133
After his December 2016 dinner with Kammenos, Papadopoulos emails Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn a report on the meeting, suggesting that not only does the meeting have implications for the campaign’s national security agenda, but also that it requires a briefing directly to a shadow national security shop (Flynn’s) residing outside the campaign committee on which Papadopoulos had served.134 In his email to Bannon and Flynn, Papadopoulos informs the two men that Greece wants to sign a “government-to-government agreement with the United States for all rights to all energy fields offshore, [offering a] strategic foothold in the Mediterranean and Balkans.”135 European Union security officials will regard the Papadopoulos-Kammenos meeting as “alarming,” deeming it a mistake for the Trump transition to “allow[] a representative to meet with him”; Kammenos’s “close ties to the Russians,” in the words of one Greek official, likely explain this alarm inside the European intelligence community.136 One central European counterintelligence official will tell BuzzFeed News that if, as Papadopoulos has claimed, the Trump transition knew in advance of the itinerary for Papadopoulos’s trip to Greece, “they knew [Trump] officials were meeting with a [ministry of defense] in Athens that has a big black mark next to it due to Russian infiltration.”137 “Kammenos has never been shy about his affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin,” writes BuzzFeed News, “often bragging to associates and even the public of his close connections to Putin.”138 Since becoming the Greek defense minister in 2015, Kammenos has not only advocated for Greek-Russian military partnerships but announced that Greece is “prepared to act as a go-between” between Russia and Western countries, suggesting a possible explanation for the Trump campaign’s eagerness to have Papadopoulos meet with him.139
Between December 2015 and July 2016—a period of time that encompasses Papadopoulos’s April 2016 trip to Israel, two May 2016 trips to Greece, and several March and April 2016 meetings in London with Joseph Mifsud—seven intelligence agencies in countries allied with the United States (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, and Poland) had contacted the United States intelligence community to report “suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents,” as well as intercepted “conversations in which Russians were discussing contacts with Trump associates … [including] people close to Trump meeting with Russians in Britain, the Netherlands and in other countries.”140 It is unknown whether Papadopoulos’s early 2016 meetings in Israel, Greece, and England are among the interactions reported to American intelligence agencies between late 2015 and summer 2016, but the level of counterintelligence chatter provoked by Papadopoulos’s December 2016 trip to Athens suggests it is likely.
As the Washington Post will write in April 2017, November and December 2016 are marked, for Trump’s presidential transition team, by “separate private discussions in New York involving high-ranking representatives of Trump with both Moscow and the [United Arab] Emirates.”141 These meetings include Flynn and Kushner meeting with Kislyak on November 30; Kushner meeting with Gorkov on December 13; and Flynn, Kushner, and Bannon meeting with an officially incognito MBZ in mid- to late December.142 Of the last meeting, during which MBZ expresses the view that “Iran [is] the problem, not Israel,” Bannon will later say to Emirati ambassador al-Otaiba, “That was one of the most eye-opening meetings I’ve ever had.”143 Of what he calls Kushner’s “Middle East Initiative,” Bannon will say, “Jared and I were at war on a number of other topics, but not this.”144
It is on December 21, 2016, just days after MBZ meets with senior members of the PTT, that MBZ’s Red Sea co-conspirator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the autocratic president of Egypt, submits his UN resolution demanding that Israel “cease settlement activities in Palestinian territory.”145 The alacrity with which Kushner, Flynn, and “multiple members of the Transition Team” join Trump himself in “communicat[ing] with foreign government officials” to “rally support to delay the vote or defeat the resolution” is telling.146 That Flynn is tasked with calling Kislyak, with whom he has had numerous prior communications, is unsurprising; it is the speed with which Trump is able to convince Red Sea conspirator el-Sisi to postpone a vote on his resolution that is particularly revealing—and, even now, mysterious.147
On December 29, new sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration as punishment for Russian election interference go into effect.148 Once again, senior transition officials—including Flynn, Bannon, Priebus, and McFarland—immediately become involved in clandestine negotiations with a foreign power, this time with the Kremlin over refraining from any retaliatory actions against the United States. Flynn, who had received a text from Kislyak on December 28, ultimately calls the Russian ambassador on December 29 after McFarland “exchang[es] emails with multiple PTT members and advisors about the impact the sanctions would have on the incoming Administration.”149 McFarland discusses the issue directly with Bannon and Priebus, telling each that Flynn shortly plans on speaking to Kislyak about the sanctions issue—even as all four Trump advisers, per their subsequent claims to the special counsel’s office, inexplicably keep any information about their plans to negotiate sanctions with the Kremlin from the president-elect.150
Before contacting Kislyak, Flynn speaks with McFarland about the upcoming call, and receives advice on what he should say, through McFarland, from other unnamed PTT members. He also has a twenty-minute conversation with Trump national security adviser and former Bud McFarlane associate Michael Ledeen—the husband of Barbara Ledeen, the Flynn friend who spent late fall of 2015 and all of 2016 trying to secure stolen Clinton emails from Russian hackers.151 It is unclear if Michael Ledeen, like his wife, made contact with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign.
After speaking with Ledeen and McFarland, Flynn calls the Russian ambassador to “discuss[] multiple topics … including the sanctions, scheduling a video teleconference between President-Elect Trump and Putin, an upcoming terrorism conference, and Russia’s views about the Middle East.”152 After discussing all these matters—including, Flynn’s topic selection suggests, the “grand bargain”—with Kislyak, and after Kislyak has taken the PTT’s request to forgo retaliation over new sanctions back to the Kremlin, the Russian Federation agrees not to retaliate against the United States.153 The Mueller Report will, in April 2019, confirm that “multiple Transition Team members were aware that Flynn was speaking with Kislyak that day,” adding that on the day of the Flynn-Kislyak call McFarland also gave a briefing to Trump himself—during which Trump expressed a clear preference for no new sanctions being put on the Kremlin, as he was, he said, using sanctions as “leverage” with Putin for an unspecified purpose.154
While he is absent from Mar-a-Lago during the late December 2016 Flynn-Kislyak sanctions negotiations, Jared Kushner has had plenty of contacts with the Russians over the course of the month. Kushner’s December 13 meeting with Vnesheconombank chief executive Gorkov—a bank known for “advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin and for its role in a past U.S. espionage case,” according to the Washington Post—raises red flags for the special counsel’s office due to the parties’ divergent explanations for its purpose and content.155 Gorkov, who speaks Arabic, contends the meeting “was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business,” while the White House says “the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters” Kushner was holding ahead of the inauguration.”156
Sometime in December, George Nader, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and MBZ—and possibly others—meet secretly at Trump Tower.157 As with every other pre-election and transition meeting at Trump Tower between members of the Trump campaign or PTT and foreign nationals, the participants will give no indication of whether Trump had knowledge of the meeting before, during, or after its occurrence—despite it happening in the building in which he works and lives.158
On January 3, 2017, Nader meets twice with Erik Prince to discuss Putin’s emissary Dmitriev, with whom Nader has been in touch throughout the general election campaign.159 Based on his years of familiarity with Prince and his months of pre-election contacts with the Trump campaign, Nader considers Prince to be in Trump’s “inner circle,” and moreover someone who “wield[s] influence,” is “trusted,” and is “well connected” within that circle. Therefore, Nader decides, Prince is a good person for Dmitriev to meet as the latter man tries to execute Putin’s plan to negotiate sanctions relief with members of the PTT.160 On January 4, Nader sends Prince a series of documents regarding Dmitriev that Prince opens almost immediately from a location inside Trump Tower. During the same three-hour period Prince is at Trump Tower reading the documents Nader has sent him about Putin’s emissary, Prince speaks with former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, future Trump commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, future Trump treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, and Bannon, the former Trump campaign CEO.161 Within seventy-two hours—even before Nader has informed Dmitriev that Prince has agreed to meet with him—Prince has booked a ticket to the Seychelles for a January 11 meeting with the RDIF director.162 According to Nader, the decision to have Prince meet Dmitriev was made by Bannon; Prince, however, will tell the special counsel’s office that he cannot recall if Bannon knew of his trip to the Seychelles in advance—one of dozens of Prince statements to Congress and the special counsel that contradicts statements made by other witnesses, including witnesses under cooperation agreements with federal law enforcement that guarantee swift legal punishment for any deceit.163 Notwithstanding Prince’s repeated misstatements, he will eventually concede to the special counsel’s office that “it was fair for Nader to think that [he] would pass information on to the Transition Team.”164 Bannon, however, will make no such concession to the special counsel, claiming that he had no knowledge of Prince’s trip in advance despite Mueller’s cooperating witness Nader saying otherwise.165
On January 11, Prince meets with Dmitriev twice in the Seychelles: once for thirty to forty-five minutes with Nader in Nader’s villa on the island, and once for a briefer meeting with Nader and the Russian at a restaurant inside the Four Seasons Hotel.166 During the first meeting, Dmitriev seeks to “outlin[e] a strategic roadmap for both countries [the United States and Russia] to follow” in restarting their relationship. During the second meeting, Prince, despite the clear restrictions imposed upon the negotiation of U.S. foreign policy by private citizens, negotiates U.S. foreign policy toward Libya with the Kremlin agent, informing him that Libya is “off the table” for Russian intervention because “the United States”—an entity for whom Prince does not speak—“could not accept any Russian involvement in Libya because it would make the situation there much worse.”167 It will later be revealed by the Washington Post that Trump ally MBS has been secretly involving himself in Libya, “egg[ing] on and materially support[ing]” a Libyan warlord (and accused war criminal) named Khalifa Hifter; this may explain why Trump’s emissary in the Seychelles, Prince, does not want either Russia or any of its allies, particularly Iran, becoming involved in the troubled North African nation.168 As Libya was originally envisioned as the sixth member of the Red Sea Conspiracy (along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and Jordan), it is also possible MBS’s designs on the war-torn country significantly precede Hifter’s rise to prominence.169
Upon his return from the Seychelles, Prince gives Bannon a full briefing on his meetings with Dmitriev—though here again, Bannon will subsequently contradict both Nader and Prince, telling the special counsel that he “never discussed with Prince anything regarding Dmitriev, RDIF, or any meetings with Russian individuals or people associated with Putin.”170 The special counsel is unable to confirm Bannon’s account, or Prince’s, because they have apparently erased all their text messages from prior to March 2017. Both men will claim to the special counsel that their phones automatically deleted the messages—in both their cases, from the exact same time frame—against their wishes.171 The Mueller Report will note, however, that “provider records indicate that [Prince] and Bannon exchanged dozens of messages” prior to March 2017.172
That two top Trump campaign national security advisers both delete their text messages to avoid having them discovered by federal law enforcement raises the specter that other national security advisers—including those, such as George Papadopoulos, accused of lying to investigators—may likewise have deleted critical messages from their phones or email accounts in an effort to prevent or forestall their discovery. Indeed, as noted earlier, the Mueller Report will opine about the deletion of “relevant communications” preventing the special counsel from being able to “corroborate witness statements … or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.”173 This caveat from the special counsel’s office calls to mind Papadopoulos’s oddly stilted statement to CNN about the spring 2016 email Trump policy director John Mashburn claimed Papadopoulos had sent him revealing the Kremlin’s theft of Hillary Clinton’s emails: “I don’t think that proof has been provided.”174
Both the Emiratis and Israeli-government-linked Israelis are heavily engaged with the PTT in December 2016 and January 2017. The Emiratis’ national security adviser introduces Dmitriev to a friend of Jared Kushner’s, Rick Gerson, though whether this particular connection was known at the time to Kushner or Emirati ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba, who were in contact throughout the general election, is unclear.175 However, Gerson, like al-Otaiba, has been in touch with Kushner throughout the campaign, and is indeed the man partially responsible for MBZ’s diplomacy-busting secret trip to New York City to meet with the PTT.176 Gerson meets with Dmitriev in early December 2016, during the same period that Kushner is meeting with Kislyak and Gorkov, and promises Putin’s agent that he will “ask Kushner and Michael Flynn who the ‘key person or people’ [are] on the topics of [U.S.] reconciliation with Russia, joint security concerns, and economic matters”—the last of these a probable euphemism for sanctions, the subject of the “task” Putin has personally assigned Dmitriev.177 On the same day that Dmitriev is deciding whether to meet Prince in the Seychelles—January 9, 2017—Dmitriev speaks with Gerson about Kushner, raising the possibility that Gerson communicates to Dmitriev on this date that Kushner is aware of and supports Nader’s proposed Seychelles (Dmitriev-Prince) summit.178
An even more telling indication that Kushner is aware, through Gerson, of the Dmitriev-Prince meeting scheduled for January 11 in the Seychelles is that when Dmitriev arrives in the Seychelles, Gerson is also there. Gerson, whom Vanity Fair describes as Kushner’s best friend, therefore not only sets up the secret December 2016 summit between the Trump PTT and MBZ in New York City that Nader attends, and not only meets with Dmitriev in December, but also appears at the series of Seychelles meetings with MBZ and Dmitriev that Nader schedules following MBZ’s highly irregular appearance at Trump Tower.179 While Prince and Dmitriev are in the Seychelles, Gerson meets with not just MBZ—who in turn meets with Nader, Prince, and Dmitriev—but also with Nader.180 As for Nader, he not only meets in the Seychelles with Prince, Dmitriev, Gerson, and MBZ, but also with Emirates-dwelling assassination squad coordinator Mohammad Dahlan and the chief of Emirati intelligence (the latter of whom is likely the same person—though the Mueller Report is not clear on this point—as the “Emirati national security adviser” who introduced Gerson to Dmitriev).181
Given that Dmitriev’s RDIF has, on its advisory board, a Kushner friend named Leon Black, whose Apollo Global Management will be one of two entities (with Brookfield Property Partners) to bail out Kushner’s ailing business just a few months into the Trump presidency (see chapters 9 and 10), it can be said that during two days in mid-January 2017 the Seychelles is teeming with Russians, Emiratis, and Trump advisers who can both connect Kushner to a leading Red Sea conspirator (MBZ) and also assist him in saving his floundering real estate company. Nevertheless, Kushner will tell federal law enforcement that when Gerson returns from the Seychelles and gives him a detailed multipage plan for U.S.-Russian reconciliation that he has negotiated with Dmitriev, Kushner had at that point “not heard of Dmitriev” at all.182
The Gerson-Dmitriev plan presented to Kushner on January 18, just two days before Trump’s inauguration, calls for a five-point détente between the United States and Russia: (1) the two countries will jointly fight terrorism in the Middle East; (2) the two countries will jointly battle the spread of weapons of mass destruction; (3) the two countries will jointly develop “win-win” economic and investment initiatives, likely a euphemism for immediate sanctions relief for Russia; (4) the two countries will “maintain[] an honest, open, and continual dialogue regarding issues of disagreement,” likely a euphemism for the establishment and maintenance of a permanent White House–Kremlin back channel of the sort Kushner had been searching for since Election Day; and (5) the two countries will “ensur[e] proper communication and trust from ‘key people’ from each country”—a likely reference to the creation of a back channel that cannot be overseen or interfered with by the U.S. intelligence community, a problem discussed by Kushner and Kislyak face-to-face in late November 2016.183
A Gerson spokesman will say in May 2018 that Gerson was in the Seychelles at the same time as Prince, Nader, Dmitriev, and MBZ—and meeting with at least the latter three of these people, just as they were all meeting with one another—as part of a “vacation” he was taking unrelated to Prince or Prince’s meetings on the island, which Gerson’s spokesman will say Gerson “knew nothing about.”184 Two U.S. officials briefed about the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s subsequent investigative interest in Gerson will tell NBC News through an intermediary, however, that members of the select committee have by mid-2018 “inferred that Gerson was there [the Seychelles] because of his connection to Kushner” and that “UAE officials [in the Seychelles] considered Gerson to be ‘Kushner’s guy.’”185 Gerson’s spokesman, while denying that Gerson is under federal investigation, will decline to say whether Gerson has ever been “personally contacted by Mueller.”186
Joel Zamel will, like his longtime acquaintance George Nader, repeatedly make contact with members of Trump’s transition team. According to the Daily Beast, in January 2017 “Zamel … led conversations with Trump transition officials about his company helping [to] assist other Middle Eastern players, such as Saudi Arabia, with regime change in Iran.”187 These Zamel-led conversations occur just before Prince leaves for the Seychelles, and involve not only Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and George Nader but also a Saudi general dispatched from Riyadh by MBS.188 The general, Ahmed al-Assiri, is the chief of Saudi intelligence—and will be accused, in twenty-one months, of helping to orchestrate the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.189 The topic the five men discuss is the very topic Trump had been talking about regularly on campaign stops in the fall of 2015, when Mike Flynn began acting as his chief foreign policy adviser: countering America’s adversaries in the Middle East.190 According to the Daily Beast, Flynn’s meetings with Saudi intelligence in January 2017 are “attended and brokered” by Nader.191 Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin will tell the Daily Beast in October 2018 that meetings like the transition-period Flynn-Bannon-Nader-Zamel-Assiri meeting would be considered “very unusual” in the intelligence community. “It’s concerning to me as a former intelligence official,” McLaughlin will say, “because of the fact that it smacks of covert action planning, which is the most sensitive thing the U.S. government does and is so uniquely the province of the sitting president.”192
Flynn meets with al-Assiri more than a year after the Saudi intelligence chief, working in conjunction with MBS’s “right-hand man” Saud al-Qahtani, has developed a military unit within CSMARC whose job is to “engage[] in the kidnapping—sometimes overseas—and detention and harsh interrogation of Saudis whom the monarchy perceives as a threat. The interrogations [lead] to repeated physical harm to the detainees,” according to the Wall Street Journal.193 In 2018 a CIA assessment will conclude that, since 2015, CSMARC’s military arm has been used by MBS “to target his opponents domestically and abroad, sometimes violently.”194 The New York Times reports that “numerous Washington lobbying and public affairs firms … assist [CSMARC]” in “promoting a positive story about the [Saudi-]Yemen war in Washington,” suggesting that the center’s public-facing civilian activities are not wholly outside Beltway political discourse.195
While it is unknown whether al-Assiri and Flynn discuss CSMARC during the presidential transition, their discussion of counterterrorism operations in the Middle East dovetails with CSMARC’s ostensible charge, and both MBS and the Trump administration will identify Qatar as a state sponsor of terrorism—an about-face in U.S. policy—within a few months of Trump being inaugurated. When MBS orders a Washington Post journalist kidnapped and assassinated by CSMARC in 2018 (see chapter 9), his explanation to Trump’s son-in-law will be that it was a “counterterrorism” operation. MBS’s use of “counterterrorism” as a euphemism for illegal rendition increases the likelihood that Flynn was introduced to CSMARC, at least conceptually, during the presidential transition period.
At the January 2017 transition meeting between Zamel, Nader, Flynn, Bannon, and al-Assiri, the five men also discuss regime change in Iran. Communications relating to the meeting since leaked to the media “show that participants in the meetings discussed a multi-pronged strategy for eroding, and eventually ending, the current Iranian regime—including economic, information, and military tactics for weakening the Tehran government.”196 MBS adviser al-Assiri “hobnobs in New York with Michael Flynn and other members of the transition team” not long after these same Trump advisers have done so with MBZ. Given that Zamel, Nader, Flynn, Bannon, and al-Assiri discuss not just “economic … and military tactics for weakening the Tehran government” but also “information tactics,” Zamel’s presence at the meetings make sense, as such tactics are his specialty—and what he had offered to the Trump campaign at Trump Tower in August 2016.197 The Daily Beast notes that Zamel’s presence at such a high-level meeting underscores that he “remained close to the Trump team throughout the election and into the transition,” observing that he was able to do so because of an “easy in”: “he had been introduced to Nader”—whom the digital media outlet calls “closely connected with the Trump campaign”—“years earlier by John Hannah, a former aide to Dick Cheney now working as a senior counsel at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a right-leaning think tank known for its anti-Iran work.”198 Hannah later ended up on the advisory council of Wikistrat, one of Zamel’s two “business intelligence companies.”199 It is as the former head of Wikistrat and current head of Psy-Group that Zamel presents, at his January 2017 meetings with members of the Trump transition, a plan the Daily Beast calls as “audacious” as his August 2016 plan to win the presidential election for Trump: a “bound presentation full of tactics to undercut [Iran’s] government.”200 If indeed Nader and the Israeli Zamel have known one another for “years,” it means the men were associates in fall 2015, when Nader convened a meeting of Sunni Arab leaders on a yacht in the Red Sea to discuss a conspiracy in which Israel was to play a part.
Nader’s role at the January 2017 meetings with Flynn, Bannon, Zamel, and al-Assiri, according to the Daily Beast, is possibly linked to the “economic sabotage against Iran” that he will pitch directly not just to members of the administration over the first weeks and months of the Trump presidency but also to “Saudi [and] UAE officials.”201 The outlet notes that these meetings cover the same topic as the Kushner-Flynn-Bannon-MBZ New York City meeting of just a few weeks earlier: Iran policy.202 By meeting with al-Assiri, Trump transition team members Bannon and Flynn are as good as meeting with MBS himself, as the Daily Beast reports that “sources familiar with the Saudi footprint in Washington describe[] Assiri as one of MBS’s closest allies and most trusted confidants.”203
In the first week of January 2017, several American intelligence agencies issue a joint report “accusing Russia of intervening clandestinely during the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House.”204 Meanwhile, the FBI is already investigating Flynn’s December phone calls to Kislyak; these communications become public knowledge on January 12, the second day of meetings in the Seychelles—meetings whose scheduling and conduct are apparently unaffected by a public report accusing Russia of secretly aiding Trump’s election chances.205
That George Nader “uses his connections to Russia” to set up and attend the meetings in the Seychelles underscores that when he gathered together MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, and others on a yacht in the Red Sea in fall 2015 he may well have been doing so mindful of his ability to access and to some degree represent the interests of top Kremlin officials. It also suggests that he may have played this same role in meeting with Trump Jr. and Stephen Miller at Trump Tower in August 2016 alongside Joel Zamel, who had previously worked for Kremlin-linked oligarchs—and that in the Seychelles Nader may once again have been acting in the interests of the Kremlin.206 According to the Washington Post, Nader will tell Robert Mueller that the purpose of the Seychelles meetings was to have “a representative of the Trump transition … meet with an emissary from Moscow to discuss future relations between the countries … [and] establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming administration.”207 Prince will under oath contradict Nader, telling the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as detailed by CNN, that the meetings in the Seychelles were “not part of an effort to set up a Russian backchannel with the Trump administration.”208 Prince will further contradict the Seychelles meetings’ organizer by saying that he was not acting as a Trump representative in attending any of the events on the island.209 Prince will tell Congress that he didn’t know who Dmitriev was before meeting him, and that he only Googled him seconds before he met him so he would be able to recognize his face. He will also tell Congress that he would have done more research on the RDIF director and Kremlin agent before meeting him to discuss geopolitics—including urgent matters touching on U.S.-Russia relations—but “data roaming is expensive when you’re overseas.”210 According to publicly available information, Prince is a billionaire worth a reported $2.4 billion.211
When the Mueller Report is released in April 2019, it will confirm Nader’s narrative, rather than Prince’s, in all particulars. Contemporaneous reporting from media in the United States will reach the same conclusion. According to The Intercept, when Prince arrived in the Seychelles his longtime friend and business partner MBZ told the Emiratis gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel that Erik was “his guy” and that the UAE “owed Erik a favor.”212 The digital media outlet adds that, from MBZ’s perspective, “Trump’s public infatuation with Putin and his apparent eagerness to improve relations with Russia gave the UAE a chance to play dealmaker [between Trump and Russia] and diminish Iran’s position in the Middle East, starting with the war in Syria.”213 MBZ putting a Trump adviser, Prince, together with one of Putin’s top lieutenants, Dmitriev, was therefore both making good on a favor owed to Prince and robustly advancing the interests of the UAE. As The Intercept summarizes, the Mueller Report establishes “that the meeting was a pre-arranged attempt to establish a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration and has led House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury [by Erik Prince].”214
The order of events in the Seychelles is first a meeting between Nader, Prince, and MBZ—a meeting that is also attended by Hamad al Mazrouei, the head of the Emirates’ chief intelligence service, and Mohammad Dahlan, who is “fluent in Russian and … a conduit from the UAE to Putin’s Kremlin”—and then the first of two meetings between Prince, Nader, and Dmitriev, the last of whom has “close ties to Putin” that have put him atop the RDIF.215 The RDIF has, within the preceding nine months, become wholly Kremlin-owned, after previously being controlled by VEB, the Kremlin-owned bank whose CEO Jared Kushner had just met privately with a few weeks earlier.216 As Vox notes, such “off-the-grid” meetings are “a key focal point for the Trump-Russia investigation … [and] could offer answers about any potential deals or informal understandings between Trump and Russia right before [Trump] took office.”217 MBZ is represented at those Seychelles meetings he does not personally attend by Nader, who according to the New York Times is in the second meeting, between himself, Prince, and Dmitriev, “represent[ing] the crown prince in the three-way conversation.”218 The Washington Post will go further, reporting in April 2017 that MBZ, rather than Nader, was in fact the original animating force behind the U.S.-Russia meetings in the Seychelles: “The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January [2017] between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.”219 The Post adds that “Emirati officials believed Mr. Prince was speaking for the Trump transition team” and “Dmitriev represented Mr. Putin, according to several people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Nader, who grew close later to several advisers in the Trump White House, had once worked as a consultant to [Prince’s former company] Blackwater, a private security firm now known as Academi. Mr. Nader introduced his former employer [Prince] to the Russian [Dmitriev].”220
In fully disentangling the complex web of alliances, courses of representation, and prior histories of the many players in the Seychelles meetings, the Post concludes that the purpose of the meetings, finally, was the furtherance of a bargain in which Trump would drop sanctions on Russia in exchange for the Kremlin limiting its assistance to Iran in the Middle East. As described by the Post, “UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.”221 The meeting thus casts Erik Prince in the same role he had served in for the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign: at once an adviser to Donald Trump and to the UAE on counterterrorism issues in the Middle East. In pursuit of this dual role at the fulcrum of the Red Sea Conspiracy, reports the Post, Prince “presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his [January 2017] meeting with the Putin confidant [Dmitriev].”222
Reporting from the New Yorker underscores that the idea of a multinational bargain in the Middle East was not a mere post-election trial balloon. According to the magazine, “shortly before the November, 2016, election, Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, floated 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.”223 The New Yorker adds that “three countries that enjoyed unparalleled influence with the incoming Administration—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—privately embraced the goal.”224 Two of these nations (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) will have already begun their détente with Russia by 2017, “making billions of dollars in investments in Russia and convening high-level meetings in Moscow, Abu Dhabi, [and] Riyadh” prior to the meetings in the Seychelles.225
What this timeline suggests is that the Kremlin may have always intended to bargain with the United States on sanctions, via Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, even as it was attacking America’s electoral infrastructure. It may not have been, in fact, a latecomer to the notion of a grand bargain in the Middle East, but rather a major player in the conspiracy from the start. Indeed, the New Yorker notes that MBZ’s pre-election proposal for a grand bargain as easily could have come “from Putin himself or one of his confidants” as the Emirati crown prince, given the depth of the Emiratis’ contacts with the Russians, in many instances through George Nader, prior to Election Day in 2016.226
While the Israeli government’s pre-election stance toward a Trump-Russia bargain was more opaque, especially given Psy-Group’s status as a plausibly deniable cutout for Netanyahu’s office, as soon as Trump’s election victory is announced, per the New Yorker, “the Israeli government [is] encouraging the incoming Trump Administration to cooperate more closely with Putin”; by May 2019, Netanyahu has publicly announced that he “proposed to Trump and Putin to form a U.S.-Russia-Israel trilateral committee that will meet in Jerusalem to discuss the security situation in the Middle East,” a proposal he notes is “unprecedented” and which, he adds, both Trump and Putin have already accepted.227 It is unknown whether the deal Netanyahu hopes to broker in 2019 is the same one that, per the New Yorker, he’d been seeking immediately after Trump’s election; that deal, as described to a former U.S. official by an “Israeli cabinet minister with close ties to Netanyahu,” involved Trump “trading Ukraine [U.S.-Russia sanctions] for Syria.”228
That Erik Prince got his pre-Seychelles marching orders from participants in the highly unusual December 2016 meeting at Trump Tower—the meeting between Bannon, Kushner, Flynn, Nader, and MBZ—is underscored by an April 2017 Washington Post report revealing that “following the New York meeting between the Emiratis and Trump aides, [MBZ] was approached by Prince, who said he was authorized to act as an unofficial surrogate for the president-elect.… He wanted [MBZ] to set up a meeting with a Putin associate.”229 This may explain why Prince bought his ticket to the Seychelles before Nader had even asked Dmitriev to meet him there: Prince, on authority granted to him by someone in Trump’s inner circle, had already spoken to MBZ about a secret Trump-Russia summit in the Seychelles and was, like Nader, thereafter acting as an agent for both MBZ and the PTT. As the Washington Post will report, “Current and former U.S. officials who have worked closely with [MBZ] … say it would be out of character for him to arrange the January 11 [Prince-Dmitriev] meeting without getting a green light in advance from top aides to Trump and Putin, if not the leaders themselves.”230 MBZ’s contacts with Putin are well established; less clearly understood is whether, as posited by the Post, MBZ may have gotten his green light from Kushner or even Trump himself when he visited Trump Tower in December 2016—with the latter possibility seeming to presuppose a protocol-busting meeting with the president-elect that would perhaps have required, in MBZ’s view, that he enter the United States in secret. In this telling of events, the two days of Seychelles meetings were nothing less than a Trump-Putin summit, arranged by the principals themselves and conducted by their most trusted agents.231 Of Prince the Post will write, “Prince would probably have been seen as too controversial to serve in any official capacity in the Trump transition or administration. But his ties to Trump advisers, experience with clandestine work and relationship with the royal leaders of the Emirates—where he moved in 2010 amid mounting legal problems for his American business—would have positioned him as an ideal go-between.”232 MBZ therefore had every reason to believe, the Post observes, that Prince “had the blessing of the new administration to act as its unofficial representative.”233
Speaking on behalf of the Trump administration in April 2017, White House press secretary Sean Spicer will say that “we are not aware of any meetings [in the Seychelles].”234
When Prince testifies under oath before Congress about his meetings in the Seychelles, he fails to mention the presence on the island of either al Mazrouei or Dahlan, stating only that MBZ had “some of his brothers” and an “entourage” with him; he will also claim that he and Dmitriev only met one-on-one at a hotel bar as a fortuitous encounter suggested by an Emirati whose name Prince could not recall.235 Lying to Congress is a federal crime chargeable as perjury (18 U.S.C. § 1621) or making false statements (18 U.S.C. § 1001) depending upon whether the witness was placed under oath pre-testimony; each count of perjury or making false statements carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.236
The Daily Mail calls al Mazrouei “one of the Arab world’s top spies” and Dahlan “a shadowy conduit [from MBZ] to Putin’s Kremlin.”237 That Prince lives in the UAE underscores that there was no need for MBZ, the de facto ruler of that country, to summon him to the Seychelles—unless it was to keep any meeting that occurred under MBZ’s direction a secret. Just so, MBZ’s meeting with Bannon, Kushner, and Nader in Trump Tower a month earlier had been a secret when it easily could have been arranged as part of an official state visit or, at a minimum, a declared visit with prior notification to the U.S. State Department. MBZ’s secrecy in the Seychelles is in keeping with that of the company he keeps there, however; according to a “source close to bin Zayed … Hamad [al Mazrouei] supervises all these things. Those guys supervise major secret operations.”238 The Daily Mail notes that al Mazrouei is not just the Emiratis’ chief intelligence officer but “bin Zayed’s right-hand man … giving him access to the country’s advanced surveillance technology. Sources say he is at the center of an Emirati plan to exert influence on both western democracies and [the UAE’s] neighboring Gulf states.”239 Al Mazrouei has allegedly, in the past, “threaten[ed] to release naked photos of Kuwaiti politicians in an attempt to influence the country’s parliamentary elections” and “threatened to release fabricated sex tapes of [a Qatari] news anchor.”240 Dahlan, a “security adviser” to MBZ, began working for bin Zayed in 2011 as “an informal UAE emissary to the Kremlin, helping coordinate the UAE’s military action to cooperate with Russian interests … [and] going on secret missions [and] meeting at the Kremlin on behalf of MBZ.”241
According to an Emirati source close to MBZ, after the Prince-Dmitriev meeting in the Seychelles “Dahlan [meets] with Erik Prince and the Russians several times in the Maldives,” a separate island archipelago off the eastern coast of Africa.242 Prince says nothing of any such meeting to Congress when he testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in late 2017. The Washington Post reports that, whether or not there were in fact follow-up meetings after the first set of Trump-Russia meetings in the Seychelles, “the Seychelles meeting [between Prince and Dmitriev] was deemed productive by the UAE and Russia.”243 That the principals—including Putin—who appear to have orchestrated the Seychelles summit should be pleased over its outcome when the description of it provided by its participants is relatively anodyne should be cause for some concern. Indeed, it is clear the American public has little of the information it needs to have about what really happened on the island, from an answer on whether Rick Gerson was really there on “vacation” to an explanation for Prince having done his utmost to avoid discussing Mohammed Dahlan and Hamad al Mazrouei.
As NBC News notes, “Mueller’s interest in Gerson is another sign that he is examining connections between the UAE and Trump associates. Counterintelligence investigators have been scrutinizing UAE influence in the Trump campaign since before Mueller was appointed as special counsel, and the probe has continued in coordination with Mueller’s team.”244 That the findings of this counterintelligence probe are not included in the Mueller Report means that they remain, as of summer 2019, known only to certain members of the U.S. intelligence community.
On January 11, BuzzFeed News publishes the so-called Steele dossier, a thirty-five-page collation of raw intelligence compiled by Christopher Steele, the former Moscow desk chief for the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service (MI6).245 The headline for the article containing a link to the dossier declares that Trump has “deep ties” to Russia; Trump responds to the report and the dossier with what will later be revealed as five substantial lies: (1) “I have no dealings with Russia”; (2) “I have no deals that could happen in Russia”; (3) “we [the Trump Organization] have stayed away [from deals in Russia]; (4) “I … don’t want to [do deals in Russia]”; and (5) “I think that [deals in Russia] would be a conflict.”246
On January 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration, Jared Kushner submits his SF-86 security clearance form to the FBI.247 Kushner’s initial submission is later found to have well over a hundred errors and omissions, including at least a hundred foreign contacts that Kushner failed to declare, contrary to law. Submitting false information on an SF-86 is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.248 Kushner is forced to update his SF-86 form three times to fix his many errors and omissions—and even after his third resubmission, he leaves off key meetings with foreign nationals, including the highly controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which he meets with Kremlin agents alongside Trump Jr. and Manafort.249 Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau, a division of the Office of Personnel Management, will later tell Congress that in his entire professional career he has never seen as many errors and omissions on an SF-86 form as he saw on Kushner’s.250 Kushner will submit the fourth update of his SF-86 five months into the Trump presidency, on June 21, 2017, this time including the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting—which is by then just two and a half weeks from being revealed in a New York Times article.251
Career national security officials ultimately deny Kushner’s application for a permanent security clearance over fears that he is, at the time of the denial, susceptible to “foreign influence,” as well as due to unanswered concerns relating to his “personal conduct and … business interests.”252 Kushner’s security clearance application is one of at least twenty-five Trump administration applications denied by career national security officials over concerns about “foreign influence”—all of which denials will be overruled by a Trump political appointee.253 Some Trump staffers will even receive access to classified information in the face of articulable, documented concerns about “drug use and criminal conduct.”254
Despite all the problems with his permanent security clearance application, Kushner will request to see classified materials “more … than almost every other White House official” once a Trump political appointee has—at Trump’s direction—overruled the denial of his application.255
On January 20, Trump is inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States.
As chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee, Thomas Barrack raises a record $106.7 million.256 His employees at Colony Capital notice, simultaneously, “a pickup in Israeli interest” in Barrack’s business ventures.257 Special counsel Robert Mueller will in 2018 investigate donations to the committee Barrack ran, indicting Paul Manafort associate Sam Patten for “helping a Ukrainian oligarch disguise a $50,000 contribution” to the committee. The oligarch is described as a “pro-Russian” figure by the New York Times.258 Despite the amount of money Barrack raises for Trump’s inauguration being double the previous record for a presidential inauguration, Trump ultimately puts on one-quarter the number of inaugural events as George W. Bush’s second inaugural committee.259
Trump’s inaugural week is overseen by WIS Media Partners, a company run by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a member of Melania Trump’s “inner circle” who is also known to be a “diligent enforcer” for the First Lady.260 According to Vanity Fair, in the lead-up to Trump’s inaugural week Wolkoff works “in close proximity to the Trump family and inaugural chair Tom Barrack.”261 Nearly a quarter of the $107 million raised by Barrack ($26 million) goes to Wolkoff’s company, even as a much larger sum—$40 million—ultimately can’t be accounted for at all.262
Nearly $24 million of the $26 million paid to Wolkoff’s WIS Media Partners goes not to Wolkoff but to an entity tied to another person close to the Trumps, television producer Mark Burnett. Per Vanity Fair, the bulk of the WIS Media Partners payment ended up in the coffers of Inaugural Productions, “an independent organization run by individuals formerly associated with television producer Mark Burnett, which was responsible for staging several [inaugural] events.”263 The magazine writes that “Burnett … wanted to keep his involvement [in the inaugural events] private,” a fact made troubling not only by the size of the payments made to entities connected to him but by allegations in the month before Election Day 2016 that Burnett was in possession of—and was protecting from release—hours of audiotapes of NBC’s The Apprentice in which Trump makes comments about women and African Americans that would have spelled doom for his candidacy for president.264
During the transition, Burnett asks Barrack to sit down with Robert Foresman, the American banker with, as ABC News reports, “established ties inside the Kremlin.”265 If hired for the job he is seeking with the Trump administration, Foresman would be in a position to act as an interlocutor between Trump and the Kremlin.266 Barrack is scheduled to meet with Foresman on a day during the transition period when he is also set to meet with Trump and Kushner; the meeting never occurs, and it is unknown whether Barrack discusses Foresman—who “lived for years in Moscow, where he led a $3 billion Russian investment fund” and maintained “connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle”—in his meetings with Trump and Kushner.267 Shortly thereafter, however, Foresman is granted an audience with Michael Flynn.268 Foresman also meets with Sergey Gorkov, the Russian banker and Putin ally, around the same time that Kushner does.269 Foresman now refuses to answer questions from congressional investigators about his contact with Gorkov.270 In a civil deposition, however, Foresman has admitted to knowing Igor Sechin extremely well; Sechin is the Putin aide and “former” Russian intelligence officer who was running Rosneft, the Kremlin-owned oil company, in December 2016, at which point it sold off a large stake to the Qatar Investment Authority (a deal discussed in Steele’s dossier).271
In February 2018, when the White House unceremoniously terminates Wolkoff’s ongoing work for the First Lady, the administration will put out to the press that the basis for the termination is “displeasure from the Trumps” over the payment of $26 million to Wolkoff’s firm—a payment both Melania and Donald Trump will claim no knowledge of, with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that “the president was focused on the transition during that time [pre-inauguration], and not on any of the planning for the inauguration.”272 Subsequent reporting will show exactly the opposite, however, with Bloomberg revealing that Trump was so “actively” involved in even intimate details of various inaugural events that he “fussed over tablecloths” and the booking of individual entertainers, with Barrack “frequently” calling Trump so he could voice his opinion on such matters.273 According to statements Barrack makes to his aides during the transition, Trump specifically “wanted to know everything about the inauguration’s finances.”274 By 2019, the inaugural finances Trump was so minutely tracking will be under federal investigation by the Southern District of New York, the New Jersey attorney general’s office, the D.C. attorney general’s office, and the House Judiciary Committee—the last of which will seek, as part of its inquiry, “campaign and transition … communications ‘regarding Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia.’”275
Congressional interest in intersections between the inaugural committee and the presidential transition is understandable, given that, as Bloomberg notes, “Barrack planned much of the inauguration … [but] was also a key player in the transition effort taking place … at Trump Tower. His dual role allowed him to keep Trump apprised of the inaugural committee’s efforts, according to people familiar with their conversations.”276 A link between the campaign and the inaugural committee is likewise established when Barrack selects Rick Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign manager and later RNC liaison, as the inaugural committee’s deputy.277 Interestingly—given Gates’s pre-RNC solicitation of a proposal by Joel Zamel for a general election marketing campaign—Bloomberg will note that Trump’s relationship with Gates had taken a turn for the worse after Trump got upset about “how more than $700,000 for a direct mail contract had been allocated [by Gates] … while [Paul] Manafort and Gates were overseeing plans for the Republican convention.”278 Whatever Gates had done with a $700,000 set-aside for campaign marketing at a time he was secretly soliciting marketing proposals from an Israeli business intelligence firm, Trump is allegedly concerned enough about it that he tells Barrack to fire Gates shortly after Election Day, an order Barrack declines to execute.279 In fact, Barrack, who by 2018 is himself being investigated by the Southern District of New York—after Gates becomes a cooperating federal witness—does the opposite of firing Gates: not only does he keep Gates on as his deputy, but he pays him $100,000 for just seventy days of work, the equivalent of a $525,000 annual salary.280 If Trump is indeed paying close attention to his inaugural budget during the transition period, Barrack’s significant payment to Gates after Trump had ordered his firing is one that Trump might have been expected to notice.
One of the most high-profile events of Barrack’s tenure as inaugural chair is his Chairman’s Dinner, an event he orchestrates with Gates that is held the week of the inauguration and features attendance by Trump himself and a “swarm” of “foreign diplomats.”281 According to Bloomberg, Barrack will make use of the “network of connections” he and Gates establish between Trump and representatives of “foreign governments” to “pursue deals arising from Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure push.”282 While the identities of the foreign nationals Barrack and Gates target for involvement in their sub rosa lobbying of the president are unknown, Bloomberg notes that this kind of lobbying effort “was considered viable within Colony [Barrack’s firm] until at least April 2017, according to two people familiar with the plans. That month, Gates dined at an upscale Washington restaurant with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Barrack and seven Middle Eastern ambassadors.”283 The guest list at that April 14 dinner in a private room at Fiola Mare in Georgetown included, along with Barrack, Gates, and Mnuchin—the last of whom met with Colony executives at least three times in the 120 days post-inauguration—the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar.284
According to an eight-page document Gates writes that summarizes Colony’s plans to capitalize on connections made between Trump and associates of Barrack during the Chairman’s Dinner, the dinner put Gates and Barrack in a position to “build a bridge to where government and business intersect globally … to strategically cultivate domestic and international relationships while avoiding any appearance of lobbying.”285 Bloomberg notes that by the time of the Chairman’s Dinner, Barrack has “develop[ed] extensive ties with Trump and investors across the globe. He [has] nurtured special relationships with the Qatari sovereign wealth fund [the Qatar Investment Authority] and other Middle Eastern investors.”286
Events such as the Chairman’s Dinner—and missing funds such as the $40 million unaccounted for in a budget Trump was closely monitoring—will eventually lead to questions not just about the business opportunities Barrack and Gates sought to spin out of their inaugural roles but about donations made to the inaugural fund itself. Federal prosecutors will investigate how it came to pass that “several wealthy Russians and Ukrainians attended the inauguration,” given “questions about how they gained access [to the events].”287 In August 2018, Sam Patten, an associate of Gates’s former boss, Paul Manafort, will plead guilty to using a straw buyer to help a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarch, Serhiy Lyovochkin, attend the inauguration, a plan Patten executed through a firm he jointly ran with Konstantin Kilimnik.288 According to the New York Times, Lyovochkin “was one of a clutch of oligarchs who paid Mr. Manafort more than $60 million [between 2007 and 2014] to promote pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine.”289 In his own future federal criminal proceedings, Gates will acknowledge the “possibility” that he on multiple occasions used “sham invoices” to the inauguration committee to receive reimbursement for unapproved expenses, including “personal expenses.”290 Vanity Fair adds that during the inaugural planning “Gates approached a couple individuals working on the inauguration and asked if they would be willing to be paid directly for their work by a donor, rather than by the inaugural committee”—a highly irregular arrangement that would in theory have allowed Gates to submit sham invoices for these services to hide donations from parties not eligible to give to the inaugural fund.291
Even as numerous media outlets will note the utility of Manafort to federal prosecutors as a cooperating witness, the same will be said of Patten, who in addition to his business relationship with Kilimnik has counted among his business associates Rinat Akhmetshin, “a Russian-born Washington lobbyist who attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting at which Kremlin-linked insiders had promised to provide the Trump campaign with damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.” Patten is also connected to Trump’s data firm Cambridge Analytica, a company with which he had a “yearslong business relationship” that saw him acting as a “consultant for election campaigns.”292 Patten’s involvement in aiding foreign contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund will come into even greater relief when it is revealed in February 2019 that his business partner Kilimnik not only came to D.C. for Trump’s inauguration but met secretly with Patten’s former business associate Paul Manafort while there—specifically to discuss a Russia-Ukraine “peace plan” that would lead to the end of sanctions on Russia.293
In June 2018, ABC News will report that “several billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities … and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.”294 ABC will add that “at least one oligarch was ushered into Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Day luncheon,” an event so exclusive it is typically “out of reach to donors and even most rank-and-file members of Congress.”295 Event attendees include the Russian Viktor Vekselberg, who sat with Michael Cohen at a candlelight dinner for inaugural donors of $1 million or more; the Soviet-born Leonard Blavatnik, the majority shareholder of Amedia, the largest television production company in Russia; the Russian-born entrepreneur Alexander Shustorovich, who has “a background in nuclear energy” and previously had a donation of his returned by the Republican National Committee “because of his past ties to the Russian government”; the Soviet-born Alexander Mashkevitch, a mining magnate whose Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation has done significant business with the Oleg Deripaska–controlled Russian aluminum company Rusal; and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.296
ABC News will also note one significant British and one significant American guest on the list of attendees to the inauguration’s most exclusive events. The Brit is Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who will, fourteen months after Trump’s inauguration, resign his position after an undercover investigation catches him bragging about engaging in illicit election-tampering schemes; the American is Steve Wynn, who will in short order be named the Republican National Committee’s finance chair by Trump—along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy as deputy co-chairs—a position Wynn later must abdicate amid a “swarm of sexual misconduct allegations.”297 Broidy will also step down from his position, in his case due to revelations that he has been making secret “hush” payments to a Playboy Playmate. Cohen, likewise, will step down from his RNC finance position once he begins facing investigations of his own finances.298
The ABC News list of notable attendees of major Trump inaugural events adds to a list compiled by the Washington Post that includes Alexey Repik, a Russian pharmaceutical executive who has in the past been asked by Russian media about “rumors that he had ties to the FSB” (the successor to the KGB); Natalia Veselnitskaya, the self-described Kremlin “informant” who, at Donald Trump Jr.’s invitation, peddled dirt on Hillary Clinton at Trump Tower in June 2016; Rinat Akhmetshin, linked by his own colleagues to Soviet intelligence, who likewise attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting; Maria Butina, later convicted of being an unregistered Kremlin agent; Alexander Torshin, believed to be Butina’s handler, and an unindicted co-conspirator in her federal charging documents; and Boris Titov, a politician “running for president of Russia with the Kremlin’s blessing.299 Veselnitskaya will later be indicted for obstruction of justice by the Southern District of New York, in part for lying about her relationship to the Kremlin.300
According to the Post, the full guest list for Trump’s most selective inaugural events “caught the attention of counterintelligence officials at the FBI, according to former U.S. officials … because some of the figures had surfaced in the agency’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.”301 ABC News will subsequently report that federal law enforcement is also investigating “inaugural donations tied to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.”302 In 2019, NBC News will report that fourteen “major contributors” to Trump’s inaugural fund—donating more than $350,000 on average—received nominations to be U.S. ambassadors.303
On the payout side of the inaugural ledger, Vanity Fair will reveal that $1.5 million was paid to Trump’s International Hotel in D.C. to house Gates and more than a dozen inaugural staffers, and that the hotel provided the inaugural committee with a surprisingly high cost estimate for pre-inaugural events.304 More troublingly, the magazine reports that—despite claims that Trump and Gates had had a falling-out and that Trump wanted Barrack to fire Gates—Gates’s position in fact gave him a “high access level … security pass within Trump Tower” and that his “closeness with the Trump family” was readily apparent.305 Gates was, in particular, in “constant communication” with Trump’s adult children, “frequently work[ing] out of Donald Trump Jr.’s office [in Trump Tower]” despite the offices for the inaugural committee being across the street from the Trump-owned building.306 Per Vanity Fair, as the presidential transition period wore on, Wolkoff increasingly was “left out of meetings” she was supposed to be invited to regarding the inaugural committee’s finances, and found that time and time again she “could not justify the [budget] numbers coming in,” as it seemed the inaugural committee was repeatedly being suspiciously overcharged by certain vendors.307
According to Vanity Fair, Wolkoff’s gravest concern regarding inauguration spending focuses on Barrack’s Chairman’s Dinner, which received an inordinate amount of money and attention, according to the chief inaugural planner.308 Perhaps most telling is the revelation of a draft guest list for the event, which includes a number of named individuals—among them Michael Flynn, Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Steve Mnuchin, K. T. McFarland, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Franklin Haney (see chapter 9), and the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba—but also seven unnamed Saudi “foreign ministers,” one unnamed foreign minister from Qatar, and one unnamed foreign minister from the United Arab Emirates.309 Vanity Fair notes that the Saudis, the Qatari, and the Emirati were the only dinner guests whose names were not revealed.310
Now that the inaugural committee is the subject of, as described by ProPublica, a “wide-ranging federal criminal investigation,” assessments of the players involved—and the laws potentially broken—are becoming public. ProPublica observes that inaugural money being paid to Trump’s D.C. hotel, and Ivanka Trump being involved in the negotiations for those payments, could violate federal tax laws; it notes, too, that the Trumps’ inaugural planners were so set on using Trump’s hotel for inaugural events that they pushed the hotel’s management to cancel a prayer breakfast to make space for an event Trump then billed to the inaugural fund.311 In February 2019, the Southern District of New York will announce that it is investigating possible mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, election fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States in conjunction with Trump’s inauguration, issuing subpoenas seeking “all information related to inaugural donors, vendors, contractors, bank accounts of the inaugural committee and any information related to foreign contributors to the committee,” according to the Washington Post, which further notes that “only U.S. citizens and legal residents can legally donate to a committee established to finance presidential inaugural festivities.”312 According to the New York Times, the subpoenas are intended not just to determine if “any foreigners illegally donated to the committee” but also to discover “whether committee staff members knew that such donations were illegal, asking for documents laying out legal requirements for donations.”313
Two recipients of inauguration-related subpoenas are Los Angeles venture capitalist Imaad Zuberi and Avenue Ventures, a firm Zuberi is affiliated with; by January 13, 2019, Avenue Ventures had donated a total of $1 million to the inaugural committee and the host committee for the 2016 Republican National Convention.314 Over the same period, Zuberi himself gave nearly $500,000 to Trump’s reelection committee and to the Republican National Committee.315 At issue in the ongoing investigation of Zuberi is likely one of two possibilities: that Zuberi was used as a straw donor for illegal foreign donations to Trump by Qataris, Emiratis, or Saudis, or that the Trump transition team guided new business in the Middle East to Zuberi’s operation in exchange for his donations to inaugural, 2020 Trump campaign, Republican National Convention, and Republican National Committee funds.
Zuberi went to Trump Tower in December 2016 in the company of Michael Flynn, on the same day Flynn was meeting with the Qatari foreign minister and Steve Bannon. While Zuberi also met with the Qatari foreign minister that day, he claims now that his discussions with Flynn and the Qatari all came during a walk to Trump Tower from another location—and then in an elevator at Trump Tower—but not in Trump’s transition offices.316 The next day, however, following a meeting between the Qatari foreign minister and transition officials, Zuberi meets with him again, almost immediately thereafter flying to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on unknown business.317 Zuberi’s attorney will tell the Times that Zuberi merely “bumped into Mr. Flynn at Trump Tower and asked to take a selfie,” and that while he did also have discussions about possibly doing business with both Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy, these discussions were “brief.”318 The Times notes that Zuberi was at a “dinner for foreign diplomats in Washington” associated with the inauguration—a dinner that matches the description of Thomas Barrack’s Chairman’s Dinner—where he sat with, among others, Howard Lorber, the man whom Donald Trump Jr. called as soon as he found out in June 2016 that the Kremlin would be delivering opposition research on Hillary Clinton to Trump Tower. Zuberi and Lorber also sat with a diplomat from Bahrain. According to the Times, “executives who do business in the Persian Gulf and a person close to Mr. Zuberi said his firm had done business or sought investments in several gulf kingdoms, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.”319
Another entity subjected to a subpoena relating to inaugural giving is Stripe, a tech firm among whose backers is Thrive, an investment company run by Jared Kushner’s brother, Josh Kushner.320
In December 2018, the New York Times will reveal that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (Manhattan) and Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn) investigating Trump’s inaugural fund and a pro-Trump super PAC are focusing “on whether people from Middle Eastern nations—including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—used straw donors to disguise their donations to the two funds.” According to the newspaper, the federal investigation “underscores the growing scope of criminal inquiries that pose a threat to Mr. Trump’s presidency.”321 The super PAC under investigation is Rebuilding America Now, the fund for which Thomas Barrack began raising money in mid-2016—when, according to the Times, “Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign was short of cash” in substantial part because, “while Mr. Trump insisted that he could finance his own campaign, he refused to dig too deeply into his own pockets.”322 Barrack tells federal investigators in December 2017 that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in mid-2016 and the man who encouraged him to create Rebuilding America Now, “seemed to view the political committee as an arm of the campaign, despite laws meant to prevent such coordination,” creating the possibility that Trump’s broken promise to self-finance his presidential campaign directly led to fundraising efforts that ran afoul of federal law.323 Moreover, given that the super PAC was created less than three weeks after the Saudis and Emiratis told Trump Jr. that they wanted to aid the Trump campaign, any donations to Rebuilding America Now by Saudis or Emiratis, or straw donors representing Saudis or Emiratis, could constitute illicit pre-election collusion between Trump’s campaign and a foreign power—especially if the campaign treated the super PAC as an adjunct, not an independent entity.
Rebuilding America Now ultimately raises $23 million, “making it one of the important sources of funds for advertisements, polls and other political expenditures on Trump’s behalf.”324 The Times notes that shortly after Manafort was fired from the Trump campaign in August 2016, he and Barrack took a cruise during which the two men met with Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who until 2013 had been the director of the Qatar Investment Authority (see chapter 4); the cruise is reportedly of interest to the investigators probing Rebuilding America Now.325
Per an accounting conducted by the Times, there are now at least a dozen federal investigations into “President Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates” that did not end when Robert Mueller’s investigation ended in March 2019, though these investigations “grew out of his work, all but ensuring that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency” even after the April 2019 publication of a redacted version of the Mueller Report.326 The Times describes these dozen investigations as far broader in scope than the special counsel’s work, and notes that Trump is so concerned about the course of these probes that in late 2018 he “privately asked the former acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, if someone he [Trump] viewed as loyal could be put in charge of the investigations.”327 According to John S. Martin Jr., a retired federal judge and the former United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, “The important thing to remember is that almost everything Donald Trump did was in the Southern District of New York. He ran his business in the Southern District. He ran his campaign from the Southern District. He came home to New York every night.”328 In addition to the numerous Southern District investigations produced by Mueller’s work, the Times notes that Mueller-related investigations continue, at a minimum, in the Eastern District of New York, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., the Eastern District of Virginia, Main Justice (“which continues to investigate the business and political dealings of Elliott Broidy”), and the Central District of California.329
In January 2019, Robert Mueller announces that, nearly a year after former Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates began cooperating with federal prosecutors, he is still cooperating on “several ongoing investigations” other than the special counsel’s investigation.330 In March 2019, the Guardian reports that “Donald Trump’s inauguration received tens of thousands of dollars from shell companies that masked the involvement of a foreign contributor or others with foreign ties,” with $25,000 of these payments attributable to Elon Lebouvich, an Israeli businessman active in New York City real estate who bought inauguration tickets for himself and a companion he would not name when contacted by the British media outlet.331 In May 2019, Gates’s sentencing hearing will be delayed for the sixth time, in part, the Daily Beast reports, because he is participating in an ongoing probe of “possible Middle Eastern election influence.”332
As officials at the State Department are successfully preventing Trump from executing his plan to drop all sanctions on Russia as one of his first acts as president, he moves forward on a second proposal that delights two other countries with whom his campaign has had highly suspicious interactions pre-election: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.333 On January 27, Trump issues a ban on all travel to the United States from three nations with substantial blocs of citizens then hostile to the Saudis and Emiratis—Iran, Syria, and Yemen—with an additional ban on travel from Sudan, whose government is in 2017 in conflict with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi but will, by 2018, have reached a détente with each.334 Libya, which was originally expected to be part of the Red Sea Conspiracy in late 2015 but did not send a representative to the landmark meeting with MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, and George Nader, also makes Trump’s list.335
The travel ban is written by Stephen Miller, who had met with Nader and the president’s son Don Jr. at Trump Tower in August 2016 to discuss MBS’s and MBZ’s support for the Trump campaign and their desire to assist it—regardless of the legality of doing so—prior to Election Day.336 While many will criticize the Trump-Miller travel ban, claiming that it is targeting Muslims rather than terrorists, in fact the relatively small number of Muslim countries selected by Trump and Miller, and the lack of any connection between these countries and domestic terrorism in the United States, underscores that the intent of the order is something else entirely.337 As the Atlantic notes, “nationals of the seven countries that Trump banned killed exactly zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015”; meanwhile, Trump “ignored the country that produced the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi Arabians, yet Saudi Arabia was not on Trump’s list.”338 Three of the four remaining 9/11 hijackers were from either the United Arab Emirates or Egypt—two other nations involved in the Red Sea Conspiracy and not on the travel ban list.339
Among those hired for the presidential transition team is Iranian American businessman Bijan Kian, the longtime business partner of Trump’s top national security advisor, Mike Flynn.
Though an Iranian American, Kian shares Flynn’s animus for the Iranian regime. Moreover, in addition to “shar[ing] Flynn’s strong public opposition to Iran’s theocratic government,” Kian, the Washington Times writes in June 2017, has “a common interest [with Flynn] in the development of secure communications systems.”340 Throughout the 2016 campaign, Flynn and Kian are both on the board of GreenZone Systems Inc., a technology firm that Kian runs until April 2017.341 GreenZone Systems, before being acquired by SAIFE, was a “leading supplier of secure mobile voice and data communications solutions,” providing organizations with software that ensures their devices are “cloaked and hidden from discovery.”342 GreenZone’s software also allows organizations to “create secure communities of interest that … [could] securely share data over the Internet to reduce third party [detection].”343 The press release for SAIFE’s acquisition of GreenZone Systems notes that the latter’s products are largely used by militaries.344
Despite being—in a manner foreseeable to the Trump transition team—a foreign agent whose specialization is encrypted communications for military operations, Kian joins Trump’s transition as deputy lead to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in which role he offers “policy input, strategic guidance and operational counsel to prepare candidates for the director of national intelligence, the CIA and other top officials.”345
According to the Washington Times, Kian helps with the job search that results in Mike Pompeo being tapped by Trump as his CIA director.346 Pompeo will later become Trump’s secretary of state, a position from which, alongside Trump national security advisor John Bolton, he will, according to USA Today, “pick[] a fight with Iran that could lead America into war”; Pompeo replaces Rex Tillerson, who, according to an August 2018 article in The Intercept, was not just fired at the insistence of the Emiratis and Saudis but specifically because his actions had prevented—in the summer of 2017—a full-scale ground invasion of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.347
Kammenos is a “Putin ally” whose defense department is deemed by NATO intelligence to be “compromised by Russian intelligence,” and whose Athens-based Institute for Geopolitical Studies is in an active “memorandum of understanding” with the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a unit of the office of Vladimir Putin that is a “think tank managed by Russia’s foreign intelligence services.”
Kammenos met a very different response from the Obama administration when he traveled to Washington in 2015. Both Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work canceled their meetings with Kammenos at the last minute. According to BuzzFeed News, “Greek media tied the snub to Kammenos’s very public support of a military-to-military relationship between his country and Russia.”348 Kammenos was permitted to meet, instead, with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth, but according to a former Pentagon official, “the sit-down soon became a testy back-and-forth.”349 The reason for the hostility was quite possibly the reason, too, for Papadopoulos’s visit, the following year, to Kammenos: Russian sanctions. According to BuzzFeed News, “Wormuth tried to convince Kammenos to back another round of sanctions on Russia, and he refused, calling Russia ‘an ally and friend, with whom we are related to with indissoluble bonds.’”350 In an interview with Greek journalists upon his return to Athens, Kammenos reported that he was “asked to support the prolongation of the [Russian] sanctions, particularly in connection with Crimea. I explained the Ukrainian issue was very sensitive for Greece, as some 300,000 Greeks live in Mariupol [a city in southeastern Ukraine] and its neighborhood, and they feel safe next to the [Russian] Orthodox Church.”351