On a cloud-flecked winter afternoon in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the day before the first contest of the 2016 election campaign, I attended a campaign rally for Donald J. Trump. The candidate was still a curiosity in those days, a television celebrity running for president, drawing a snaking line of Iowans hours before his scheduled appearance. This was before Trump began to roll up victories, before his rallies were marred by violence, often egged on by the candidate himself. Before he began selectively banning media outlets from campaign events, before neo-Nazis began threatening his opponents, before evidence of Russian influence began to seep into the presidential race, before allegations emerged that he’d been a sexual predator.
Wearing a hot pink tie and a goofy flat-mouthed smile, Trump took the stage at the Gerald W. Kirn middle school gym and bantered in a pseudo-talk-show style with Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the conservative televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority. Seated in matching leather chairs, one red, one blue, the two chatted about Middle East policy, the economy, the polls. Trump vowed that if any refugees came to the United States, he would send them back. The crowd hooted. Trump sat up straighter. He invited the families up on to the platform.
Then he paused, stood on the low stage in front of a bank of flags. “I have somebody that nobody knows,” Trump said, pausing for dramatic effect. “Ivanka!” There was high-pitched, sustained yelling and applause. If the crowd was tickled at being in the presence of the host of The Apprentice, it was awed by his tall daughter. Ivanka, seven months pregnant with her third child, rewarded the crowd with a relaxed wave and smile, right hand fleetingly cradling her belly. That very month, Ivanka had graced the cover of Town & Country magazine next to the cover-line “VOTE IVANKA! The Trump In Charge of a Growing American Dynasty.”1 Her belly, photographed months earlier, had been enhanced to appear larger. Trump talked about what a political benefit it would be to have a grandchild born in Iowa.
“And her husband, Jared, come on up Jared!” Jared Kushner, even taller than Ivanka, thirty-five, but looking a decade younger, stepped on stage, dimples flashing across his cheeks. Trump went on, “Jared is a great young man, went to Harvard, very smart, great, doing a fantastic job in business. He’s in the real estate business, done an amazing job, in his own right, just incredible.”
Standing at the back in the media pen, I looked up from my digital recorder. It caught my attention that the publisher of the New York Observer—a known person in New York society, but by no means a famous person—was stepping forward into the national arena.
In the coming years, he would hold this same pose: planted firmly at center stage, largely silent, beside the favorite daughter of the American president—unexpectedly one of the most powerful people in the world.
The crowds in Iowa, the gathering polls, the crash of inevitability surrounding the Trump campaign; all of it had started years earlier, in plain sight. He showed up in Iowa and New Hampshire and at the obligatory events for Republican candidates, like the Conservative Political Action Conference. Speaking at that conference in 2014, shortly after the invasion of Crimea, Trump praised Putin, who, he said, “even sent me a present, a beautiful present.”2 Audiences loved Trump, loved that he said he wasn’t “politically correct.” On the air, he was derided. “Nobody’s going to mistake Donald Trump for a presidential candidate, I don’t think, other than Donald Trump,” NBC News Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said during this period.3
What no one knew then was that while Trump was preparing a public run, a secret shadow campaign was also forming, seven time zones away. The “Internet Research Agency” was putting together an operation to inject Russian propaganda and disinformation into US social media platforms. It was funded by an oligarch named Yevgeny Viktorovych Prigozhin—who ran a private army of soldiers for hire, as well as a high-end restaurant group and catering company. This latter affiliation won him the nickname “Putin’s Chef.”
In June 2014, three months after the invasion of Crimea and the ensuing US and EU sanctions, two Russian women, carrying cameras, drop phones, and SIM cards, traveled through Nevada, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Texas, and Michigan, pretending to be tourists. They would later be charged with being Russian spies, reporting back to the Internet Research Agency. Their goal, prosecutors said, was “to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government . . . for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”4
In early March 2015, the US Treasury Department imposed a $10-million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, “for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.”5 It was, at that point, the highest fine in US history against a casino for failing to enforce anti-money-laundering measures, the second time the Trump Taj Mahal had received the highest fine in US history. Trump was no longer the casino’s majority owner by this point, though he was still making money from the Taj Mahal by selling the right to use his name. That same month, Trump signaled that he was filing paperwork for an exploratory committee for his presidential campaign.
In June, Ivanka Trump stood at a podium in the atrium of Trump Tower, and said of her father, “His legend has been built and his accomplishments are too many to name. . . . My father is the opposite of politically correct,” Ivanka said to cheers. “Throughout his career, my father has been repeatedly called upon by local and federal government to step in and save long-stalled, grossly over-budget public projects.” Then, Ivanka looked up, to watch Donald and Melania Trump descend a marble-sided escalator as loudspeakers played Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Minutes after Ivanka’s warm introduction, Trump indeed veered from the “politically correct,” saying of Mexicans crossing the border: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The speech was three-quarters of an hour of deeply nursed grievances, how the United States “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He put his total net worth at “well over $10 billion.” He promised to build a “great wall,” before signing off “we will make America great again.” The strains of Neil Young rose as Ivanka, Jared, and their children Arabella and Joseph; Don Jr. and Eric and their wives; Melania, Barron, and Tiffany joined Trump on stage, stamping the nativist, anti-immigrant speech with the family seal of approval.6
That day, Donald Trump was polling at 3.6 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average.7 He was ninth in the field. By mid-July 2015, he was leading in the Republican primary polls, and his lead grew and grew, until he was the winner. For many Americans, especially those on the coasts, a Trump victory was an inconceivable outcome. Their imaginations failed them. But if one looked at the numbers from a distance—for example, from Moscow—it was easy to see that Trump was running away with the Republican primary.
The crowds, the excitement, the glitz, the winning poll numbers, the near-constant television coverage: all of this offered untold opportunity for leveraging the Trump name. He’d spent millions on political contributions in the past to help his business, and was now willing to spend many tens of millions more of his own money on his bid; it would ultimately redound to his business’s benefit. That was in fact the plan, according to Donald Trump’s executive vice president and special counsel, Michael Cohen. “Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” Cohen said in come-clean sworn public testimony years later. “He had no desire or intention to lead this nation—only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ ” Cohen added: “He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign—for him—was always a marketing opportunity.”8
Almost everyone around him saw business opportunities for themselves, too: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Trump’s money man Tom Barrack; strategist and lobbyist Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates; Trump’s secret political advisor Roger Stone; Trump’s secret business partner Felix Sater; and Michael Cohen. It was equally an opportunity for Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs to make money, by persuading Hillary Clinton’s opponent to lift the economic sanctions.
The attempts to use the campaign to unleash a cash bonanza started immediately, across the globe.
By September 2015, Trump was leading his nearest competitor by more than ten points. Felix Sater, Trump’s on-again, off-again business associate, was reading the polls and thinking about business in Moscow. He began communicating with an old buddy from his high school days in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, an area known as “Little Odessa.”9
Cohen and Sater met there when they were about seventeen. Sater was living in Brighton Beach and attending yeshiva and Cohen was a high-school kid from just across the city’s border in the Five Towns, Long Island.10 After high school, the two fell out of touch while Cohen was working in the taxi industry and Sater was involved in illicit stock-selling schemes and informing to the government on the Russian and Italian mob.
They met again twenty years later at the Trump SoHo: Sater had put together Bayrock, Trump’s partners on the SoHo project, and Cohen had gone to work as Trump’s fixer and special counsel. After the SoHo project, despite Sater’s past, Donald Trump made Sater a “senior advisor” at the Trump Organization. Sater took an office, rent-free, on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, near Donald Trump, and one floor above Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr.11 There was tension. “The kids weren’t too happy with him,” Cohen later testified, about Sater. Negative publicity around him “ended up having them decide that he needs to leave the 26th floor, to leave the building altogether.” When Sater left, Cohen took over this office.12
Over the years, Trump minimized his connection to Sater. In 2013, Trump walked out on a BBC interviewer who pressed him over their partnership in a failed Florida deal. “Why didn’t you go to Felix Sater and say, ‘you’re connected with the mafia, you’re fired?’ ” Trump was asked. “You’re telling me things that I don’t even know about,” Trump said of Sater. After being pressed further, Trump stood and walked out, saying he had people to meet, the reporter and camera following him to the door.13
Despite his public discomfort, Trump was privately pleased with Sater’s scouting a licensing deal in Moscow, and signed off when Sater and Cohen developed a plan: they would use the publicity around Trump’s campaign to launch an audacious new Trump Tower Moscow, which they envisioned as the tallest building in Europe. The Agalarov deal hadn’t gone anywhere—it died, Don Jr. said, “of deal fatigue.”14 This was a new chance to brand a building in the capital of the old Soviet empire.
By the fall of 2015 both Sater and Cohen were seeking financial success and redemption, of a sort. Within the Trump Organization, Cohen hadn’t presided over a splashy announcement of a foreign deal since the press conference for the Batumi, Georgia, project in 2012. He had not flown to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. And he was personally coming under financial stress, as ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft drove down the value of his taxi medallions. His net worth was slipping precipitously from its 2014 peak of almost $80 million down into negative territory.15
By late September 2015, Sater had a well-developed vision for a Trump Tower Moscow. He had already commissioned renderings, which he sent to Cohen: a faceted glass tower that would thrust above the Moscow skyline with a top shaped like a kite, emblazoned with the word “TRUMP.”16 And Sater had found a developer: Andrey Rozov. Rozov sent Cohen a letter, pointing to his experience with real estate in Moscow, Manhattan, and North Dakota.
Rozov’s Manhattan building was a nondescript twelve-story structure in the garment district that he and Sater had bought and flipped in a little over a year. The North Dakota project was a $500-million mall, hotel, and indoor water park in a town of less than 30,000 that got zoning approval but was never built. The Russia project—a suburban housing complex—was beset with delays.17
But neither Donald Trump nor anyone else at the Trump Organization seemed to care that their development partner in Moscow had limited and troubled experience. By early October, Sater and Cohen were putting the final touches on a letter of intent—a term sheet, essentially, containing the outlines of what could have been Donald Trump’s most profitable licensing deal ever. He’d get a million dollars for signing it, another million dollars once he approved the building site, and two million dollars more within two years, whether or not the project was finished.18 More than that: with Trump’s cut of the sales, leases, and hotel revenue, he could make over a hundred million dollars if the project were completed.
While Cohen was negotiating the letter of intent, Trump tweeted a link to a Washington Examiner story with the headline “Putin Loves Donald Trump.”19 Then, on October 28, 2015, the letter of intent arrived at the Trump Organization. When Donald Trump took out a sharpie and scrawled his familiar signature at the end of the letter of intent, he made it official: he planned to go ahead with a business deal in Moscow while also running for president of the United States of America.
October 28, 2015, was the same date as the third Republican primary debate, one where Trump was asked, by moderator John Harwood, “Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?”
“No,” Trump replied. “It’s not a comic book, and it’s not a very nicely asked question the way you say that.” Trump was also asked, for the first time in a debate, about the ways his own wealth derived from depriving other people of theirs: about his failed casinos and all the bondholders and creditors and vendors and employees and residents of Atlantic City who’d been hurt when they had to pay for his failures. Trump had used the bankruptcy laws, he said “to my advantage as a businessman, for my family, for myself,” adding, “I used the laws of the country to my benefit, I’m sorry.”20 Voters accepted this.
While this was playing out publicly, Felix Sater quietly took the next step on Trump Tower Moscow: he sought financing. Sater emailed Cohen that Andrey Kostin of VTB Bank “is Putins top finance guy and CEO of the 2nd largest bank in Russia”—which at the time, was under US Treasury financial sanctions as a result of the Crimea invasion. (In his book Collusion, Guardian journalist Luke Harding wrote that intelligence sources believed Kostin to have been a KGB spy.21)
Kostin, Sater asserted, “is on board and has indicated he would finance Trump Moscow. This is major for us, not only the financing aspect but Kostin’s position in Russia, extremely powerful and respected. Now all we need is Putin on board and we are golden . . . buddy I can not only get Ivanka to spin in Putins Kremlin office chair on 30 minutes notice, I can also get a full meeting.”
After Trump signed the letter of intent, Sater enthused: “Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” he wrote to Cohen. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. There is no one on this planet who wants Donald elected more than I do a) for selfish reasons, pretty cool to get a USA President elected and b) because he will be a great president. C) after that I can tell all that negative nasty gangster bullshit press to kiss my ass.” Sater laid out his vision: “Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination.”22
Over the months that followed, Cohen kept Donald Trump apprised of their progress. “Michael, come walk with me,” Trump would say, as he was heading to a rally or to his car. And as Cohen would walk him to the elevator, Donald Trump would ask Cohen questions about the Moscow deal.23
On at least ten occasions, Michael Cohen said, he also briefed Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump on the Trump Tower Moscow.24 “The Moscow Project was discussed multiple times within the Company,” the Special Counsel’s Office wrote in its charging documents in Cohen’s case, a few years later. The approvals that were needed from local politicians and the Kremlin, the necessity of a financing package: these were tasks Donald Trump and his family understood well. They’d been using the same strategies to put together deals for forty years.
In mid-November 2015, just over two-and-a-half months before the first primary contests, Ivanka received an email from a woman named Lana Erchova. In the email, Erchova offered the assistance of her husband Dmitry Klokov to the Trump campaign. Ivanka then forwarded to Cohen this offer of assistance, which was about politics, not a business deal.
In subsequent communications with Cohen, Klokov expanded on this theme. He described himself to Cohen as a “trusted person” who could offer the campaign “political synergy” and “synergy on a government level.” He invited Cohen to Russia, offering to facilitate an “informal” meeting between Trump and “our person of interest”—Vladimir Putin. Cohen pushed for an official Trump-Putin meeting that could be used to advance the Trump Tower Moscow. The politics would be used in service of the business. Klokov said sure. A meeting with Putin could have “phenomenal ‘impact’ in a business dimension.”25
But Cohen did not pursue the relationship with Klokov. He already had a conduit to the Kremlin: Felix Sater.
Ivanka Trump sent a second email to Cohen, suggesting an architect for the Moscow tower project. The letter of intent also specifically mentioned Ivanka: she would have ultimate authority over design decisions for the fitness facilities and the spa for the tower in Moscow; it would be called “Spa by Ivanka Trump,” as it was at other Trump properties. (Later, Ivanka Trump’s lawyer issued a statement: “Ms. Trump did not know and never spoke to Dmitry Klokov. She received an unsolicited email from his wife (who she also did not know) and passed it on to Michael Cohen who she understood was working on any possible projects in Russia.”)
Another businessman approached Michael Cohen in this period: his “dear friend” from the Georgia deal back in 2011, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, who had yet another proposal for a meeting “in New York at the highest level of the Russian Government and Mr. Trump.” In an email to Cohen, Rtskhiladze noted that the “Mayor of Moscow (second guy in Russia)” would pledge his support. Cohen did not pursue Rtskhiladze’s suggestions; he was committed to the Sater proposal. This was the third vector through which Russians had approached Cohen, suggesting a meeting between Trump and Putin.26 All of them linked, seamlessly, as if it weren’t even a question, Trump’s business with his political campaign.
In mid-December, Trump was polling two times higher than his nearest competitor. That month, Putin praised Trump, calling him “talented.” Cohen took this as a signal, emailing Sater: “Now is the time.” Sater seemed to think so, too. He texted Cohen, asking for scans of his and “Donald’s” passports. They were planning a meeting with Putin in Moscow, and, according to Cohen, the Trumps all knew about it.27
The same month, the Associated Press ran a story about Felix Sater’s criminal past and his longtime connection to Donald Trump. And so, while Sater was negotiating what was, potentially, Trump’s most profitable licensing deal ever, Trump told the AP: “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not that familiar with him.”28
At the moment the story ran, Sater was trying to set up a trip to Moscow for Cohen. But in order to do so, Cohen needed an invitation from a bank. Though he had initially promised VTB, Sater started talking about another bank: Genbank. This bank had set up shop in Crimea after the invasion, was operating under US sanctions, and was owned in part by a man named Yevgeny Dvoskin who, like Sater, had spent his childhood in the 1970s and 1980s in Brighton Beach. Dvoskin had served time in US prison for his role in a massive Mafia-led gasoline-tax-evasion scheme—the same hustle that allowed David Bogatin to buy five apartments in Trump Tower—after which Dvoskin had been deported to Russia. In Russia, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found, Dvoskin once again became linked to criminal networks.29
Dvoskin’s bank, GenBank, issued an invitation for Cohen to travel to Moscow, but the trip was postponed. Cohen had never heard of this bank. “Not you or anyone you know will embarrass me in front of Mr. T when he asks me what is happening,” Cohen texted Sater.30
In January—right around the time Jared joined Ivanka on stage in Council Bluffs—Michael Cohen called the Kremlin and asked for help on Trump Tower Moscow. Such requests had been part of the Trump business model since the days of the Commodore Hotel. Cohen spoke with an assistant to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, for twenty minutes. Cohen outlined the project, including the Russian development partner. Then he asked for help in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the proposed tower and financing the construction.31 Peskov’s assistant asked detailed questions, and said she’d look into it.32 The next day, Sater wrote to Cohen, telling him to call. He wrote, “It’s about Putin they called today.”33
Not long after Trump, via Cohen and Sater, asked for help from a hostile foreign power, Russia’s military intelligence, known as the GRU, opened a new front in Russia’s attack on the 2016 elections, far more tangible than the Internet Research Agency’s trolling efforts. Vladimir Putin’s top military intelligence officers were authorizing a massive theft of emails and documents from Democrats and Hillary Clinton.34
In November 2015, Jared Kushner accompanied his father-in-law to Springfield, Illinois. “People really saw hope in his message,” Jared later told Forbes, of a speech where Trump mused about sending Hillary Clinton to jail. “We don’t have any victories any more,” Trump said in this speech, adding, “we’re stupid, we have stupid people leading us.” The crowd roared its approval. That night in Illinois, Kushner realized, “They wanted the things that wouldn’t have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side or at Robin Hood [Foundation] dinners.”35
The next month, speaking from a podium in front of a “Make America Great Again” sign in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump read aloud, using the third person: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Some Jewish leaders reacted with revulsion: Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of Interfaith Alliance, issued a statement saying, “Rooting our nation’s immigration policy in religious bigotry and discrimination will not make America great again.”36
Jared Kushner did not react with revulsion. Instead, he spent more and more time a few blocks up Fifth Avenue from the Kushner Companies headquarters—at Trump Tower, where there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. To call the Trump campaign staff “lean” was like calling Trump Tower “gaudy.” For much of the time, the campaign was on the unfinished fifth floor of Trump Tower, with concrete walls and electric wires and plumbing pipes draping down from the ceiling. In early January, the only staff with any kind of authority were campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and spokesperson Hope Hicks, who had done brand PR for Ivanka Trump and Trump resorts. Lewandowski had been recommended by Citizens United’s David Bossie.37
For Jared, the campaign was a beckoning invitation, a place where his power and control could settle and grow. Through the turbulent terms of three campaign chiefs, Jared was the constant. “As the campaign progressed,” Jared later wrote in a statement to Congress, “I was called on to assist with various tasks and aspects of the campaign, and took on more and more responsibility. Over the course of the primaries and general election campaign, my role continued to evolve. I ultimately worked with the finance, scheduling, communications, speechwriting, polling, data and digital teams, as well as becoming a point of contact for foreign government officials.”38
On March 12, Trump held a rally at a large hangar-like hall, the I-X Center, off the interstate near the airport in Cleveland. It was packed, maybe not with as many people as Trump said were there (“thirty thousand”), but it was crowded. This Trump rally was set up differently from other political rallies; usually, the media riser, situated somewhere in the middle of the hall, is more or less at the level of the candidate’s riser. But Trump’s platform had been elevated; only he had a view of the whole crowd. He punctuated his speech about “us” and “them,” with, periodically, a shout of “Get-em-out!” referring to protesters whom only he could see. And when he did that, the crowd turned on that person: yelling, threatening, shaking fists. Watching these rallies on television, it appeared these interruptions were random, but up close, it was clear that Trump strategically drew attention to the protesters to punctuate his speech; they underlined his message of us and them, in a visceral way. I had covered hundreds of campaign rallies before this. I had seen candidates whip up sentiment against an opponent, against bogeymen real and imagined—George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, the ultra-rich, “welfare queens.” But until Cleveland, I had never attended a political rally where people turned on their fellow rally-goers, the very real threat of violence hanging in the air.
The next Tuesday, Trump continued to sweep up primary victories. By mid-March he had more than half the delegates he needed to secure the nomination, and only two opponents left.
As Trump’s lead grew, Jared Kushner expanded his role in Trump’s foreign policy. There was, first, a speech on a subject Jared cared deeply about: Israel. Jared oversaw Trump’s address to the American Israel Political Action Committee, AIPAC. The talk got mixed reviews; Trump read from a teleprompter and therefore sounded mostly cogent, though he slashed away at Barack Obama for his peace deal with Iran. This was considered outré for this crowd, though many in attendance agreed with Trump. There was another reason this speech drew negative attention: Ken Kurson, editor in chief of the New York Observer, acknowledged he’d played a role in crafting the address. Inside the Observer newsroom, this was seen as a breach. Kurson said he wouldn’t do it again.
Jared also took an interest in Russia-US relations. In mid-March, he attended a luncheon at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, given by the Center for the National Interest, an organization that, among other things, promotes “strategic realism in U.S. foreign policy.” After the luncheon, Jared introduced himself to Henry Kissinger and the center’s president, the Soviet-born Dimitri Simes. Kushner and Simes began planning a major foreign policy address for Trump the next month, to be held at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.39
As the primary season thrummed along, a pressing deadline occupied Jared Kushner’s mind: the February 2019 due date for more than a billion dollars in debt on his family’s trophy skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue. In the spring of 2016, when Jared met Henry Kissinger at the CNI luncheon, the Kushners were promoting an audacious plan: to rip down the 1957 aluminum-clad skyscraper built for the era of Mad Men and replace it with an eighty-story tower designed by Zaha Hadid, complete with luxe retail shops, condos, and a hotel, all topped with a skydeck that looked like a high-end airport lounge. The company prepared a shimmering vision book, renaming the property “660 Fifth Avenue” and revealing a design that looked like an enormous rocket thrusting out of an opera house. An image of the building’s exterior displayed the proposed tower in yellow, sunset light; there was a nighttime view of its interior, looking down on the Empire State Building. The drawings were seductive. There were no financials attached. This was a plan for people who sought status and influence—people like the Kushners.40
Jared began making calls to finance this reconstruction plan. “Jared reached out,” one financier said, who remembered Jared calling shortly after architect Zaha Hadid had died. “He thought we’d be a good partner who could bring in international capital.” Another banker observed that Jared, who at the time still thought there was little chance of winning the general election, was “utilizing his position.” Trump’s momentum gave Jared new opportunities to seek capital. With each Trump victory, this person said, “Jared felt more power.”
At his first major foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington that April, Donald Trump put forward an idea—“America First”—that had been championed in the 1940s by pilot turned politician Charles Lindbergh, who opposed the United States fighting the Nazis. “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” Trump said in his Mayflower speech, while also signaling a willingness to work with Russia, still an unusual stance for a Republican candidate. “Russia, for instance,” Trump said, “has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible.”41
At this speech, the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, sat near the front. Afterwards, Jared was introduced, shook Kislyak’s hand, met some other ambassadors. They then “exchanged brief pleasantries,” Jared later said, “and I thanked them for attending the event and said I hoped they would like candidate Trump’s speech and his ideas for a fresh approach to America’s foreign policy. The ambassadors also expressed interest in creating a positive relationship should we win the election.”42
By the day of this speech, Russian military intelligence had already hacked the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, accounts belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the personal emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, according to the Special Counsel’s Office. Russian agents had spied on the computers of dozens of Democratic campaign workers, implanted malware, stolen thousands of emails, and begun to plan how to release them.43 One member of Trump’s campaign advisory team, George Papadopoulos, had been tipped off that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails.” The Russians kept asking him, too, about a meeting with Putin. He kept conveying what he knew to campaign officials.44
Right around this time, another American with Russian ties was assuming power in the campaign: Paul Manafort.