By 2016, Paul Manafort was in financial distress. Over the previous decade he had made at least $75 million working for Viktor Yanukovych. But that ended in 2014, when Yanukovych was chased out of Ukraine and into Russia, just a few weeks before Putin’s forces invaded Crimea and the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions. Manafort was also having an affair, paying for rehab, and fighting a lawsuit from Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch for whom Manafort used to work, about a $18.9-million investment in a Ukrainian telecommunications company they had purchased together.
To raise money, Manafort began mortgaging his New York City homes. He borrowed more than double the $3-million purchase price of his four-story Brooklyn town house in “construction” loans. (All told, that year Manafort took out more than $16 million in loans on homes in Brooklyn, SoHo, and the Hamptons.) He hid money from the IRS and rented his SoHo apartment out on AirBnb, then lied to a bank, telling them it was a primary residence, so he could get a more favorable loan.
Despite all that financial pressure, Manafort wrote “I am not looking for a paid job” at the top of a two-page memo pitching himself for work in the Trump campaign.1 Offering to do a high-level strategy job for free is virtually unheard of in campaigns, and while it may be technically true that Manafort did not wish to collect a salary from the Trump campaign, he still had plans to profit from it. “Manafort intended, if Trump won the Presidency, to remain outside the Administration and monetize his relationship with the Administration,” Manafort’s business partner, Rick Gates, later told investigators.2
In his pitch memo, called “TPs for Trump Conversation,” Manafort noted, accurately, that he was the owner of Trump Tower apartment 43-G, that he’d worked on Republican political campaigns since 1976, and that his “blood enemy in politics, going back to college in the 1960s, is Karl Rove.”
The rest of the memo was full of outright lies, including: “I have not been a part of the Washington establishment since I de-registered as a lobbyist in 1998” and “I have no client relationships dealing with Washington since around 2005.”3 In fact, Manafort had been working through much of the intervening period for his Ukrainian clients as a lobbyist in Washington, a stint that included at least one client meeting he arranged inside the White House, multiple communications with congressional leaders, and a US public relations campaign that obscured his own client’s interest in the messages being disseminated, in much the same way that Donald Trump and Roger Stone had hidden Trump’s interest in the New York “anti-gambling” campaign back in 2000. Revealing the source of the money would have undermined the argument.
Though Roger Stone had been a Trump political advisor going back to the last century, early in the 2016 campaign, Trump and Stone put out that Stone would have no formal role. Yet Trump and Stone continued to speak, Stone acting like an invisible devil on Trump’s shoulder. Stone pitched Trump on Manafort,4 with whom he’d worked for fifteen years as a lobbyist in the 1980s and 1990s. Also making a pitch for Manafort: Trump’s old friend, Colony Capital’s Tom Barrack, who had met Manafort in Lebanon in the 1970s, when they were both working there.
As a spokesman for Manafort later told the New York Times, Barrack and Manafort had chatted over “coffee and snacks” at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills. Barrack “wanted his old friend to help the struggling campaign deal with potential challenges at the convention.” To move this plan forward, Barrack emailed Manafort’s “TPs for Trump Conversation” memo to Jared and Ivanka, and Ivanka printed it out for her father, along with a cover letter by Barrack, that described Manafort as “the most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer.”5
At the end of March, as Trump’s delegate lead became all but insurmountable, some Trump campaign news appeared in the New York Times. “Donald J. Trump, girding for a long battle over presidential delegates and a potential floor fight at the Cleveland convention, has enlisted the veteran Republican strategist Paul J. Manafort to lead his delegate-corralling efforts.”6 Manafort reveled in the press that described him as the adult in the room in the Trump campaign. His business partner, Rick Gates, joined the campaign, too.
Right after the announcement, Manafort asked Gates to send the news to a Russian-Ukrainian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who would later be identified by US authorities as having “ties to Russian intelligence,” but who, at this point, was understood to be “Manafort’s Manafort,” the guy in Ukraine who made everything work. Kilimnik had another important role. He was in touch with Victor Boyarkin, a deputy to Oleg Deripaska (known to associates as “OVD”)—a man to whom Manafort owed a great deal of money.
Two weeks after the splashy announcement of his new role in the Trump campaign, Manafort wrote directly to Kilimnik: “I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” The “friends” Manafort was referring to were Deripaska and his aide.
“Absolutely,” Kilimnik responded. “Every article.”
“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asked. “Has Ovd operation seen?”
“Yes, I have been sending everything to Victor”—the aide to Deripaska—“who has been forwarding the coverage directly to OVD,” Kilimnik responded. “Frankly, the coverage has been much better than Trump’s. In any case it will hugely enhance your reputation no matter what happens.”7 (Deripaska’s “official spokesperson” said, “Mr. Deripaska doesn’t know Kilimnik and has never spoken to him.” Deripaska denied receiving reports from Manafort.)
Manafort’s debt to Deripaska stemmed from the $18.9 million that Deripaska had transferred to a private equity fund to purchase a telecom company called Black Sea. In 2007, Manafort, having done business with so many oligarchs, wanted to emulate their financial strategies. He set up the private equity fund, Pericles, to acquire resources, with funding from Deripaska. But the deal went sour. In a lawsuit filed in the Cayman Islands, Deripaska alleged that Manafort and Gates, “had simply disappeared.”8 When asked about the lawsuit by the Atlantic, Manafort’s spokesman called the dispute “dormant.”9
Crossing an oligarch was dangerous. Deripaska’s lawsuit was a lingering threat, a sword of Damocles hanging over Manafort. This is the posture in which he began work for the 2016 campaign.
On May 3, Trump won the Indiana primary, and Ted Cruz, the last hope of the never-Trumpers, dropped out. Trump was going to be the GOP’s nominee.
The day after this primary victory, Sater texted Cohen: “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. . . . Obviously, the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but the 2 big guys”—Putin and Trump—were “the question.”10 Cohen responded: “My trip before Cleveland”—the site of the Republican National Convention in July—“Trump once he becomes the nominee after the convention.” Cohen later said he had raised the matter with Trump, and that Trump had told him to discuss possible dates with Corey Lewandowski, which he did.11 Sater texted Cohen: “I know this is going to turn into 1. A major win for Trump, makes you the hero who bagged the elephant and 2. Sets up a stream of business opportunities that will be mind blowing.”12
Two days after the Indiana primary, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie got a call from Lewandowski. Christie’s own presidential campaign had ended in New Hampshire, where he failed to win a single delegate. After that he became one of the first “serious” politicians to endorse Trump. He was offered the job of transition chief. (For national security reasons, campaigns are required to establish transition teams five months before the general election.) According to Christie’s book Let Me Finish, Lewandowski told him: “We’re ready to do it. We’ll launch the transition with an announcement next week. Can you come in tomorrow morning, see Donald yourself, and sign off on the press release?”13
The next day, May 6, Christie was in Trump’s office in Trump Tower, Trump calling out for his assistant Rhona Graff to put through calls, sipping Diet Coke, with his desk, his couch, and “almost every other flat surface—except for the executive chair” strewn with magazine covers featuring Donald Trump.
As Christie tells it, he was sitting in Trump’s office when Lewandowski walked in with the press release. “I’m really happy you are doing this for me,” Christie said Donald Trump told him. And then, as Christie was preparing to stand and leave, he heard a “soft voice coming from just inside the open office door.” The “soft voice” was Jared Kushner. “I don’t think we need to rush on this,” Jared said, per Christie. “Why do I have to wait on this?” Trump asked. To which Jared replied. “Because I don’t trust him to have this, and you know why I don’t trust him to have it.”
Christie’s criminal case against Jared’s father had been a vendetta, Jared said, stoked by his disgruntled uncle, working in league with Christie. “It wasn’t fair,” Jared said, in Christie’s telling of the meeting with Trump. “This was a family matter, a matter to be handled by the family or the rabbis.”
Donald Trump pushed back. “Chris was just doing his job,” he said. “And your other problem was you didn’t know me at the time. Maybe if you would have known me, maybe I could have helped.” Christie bristled with the implication that Donald Trump could have made the prosecution go away, but he held his peace. Donald Trump was overruling Jared. For now.
Then Christie turned to Jared. “You and I are both burdened with things that are difficult for the other person to understand. You’re burdened with a love for your father that I can’t possibly understand because he’s not my father. And I’m burdened with facts about your father that even you don’t know, that I can never tell you, because if I did I would break the law.”14
Charlie Kushner’s 2004 plea deal had limited the opportunity for facts about his life to enter the public domain. Christie was telling Jared he knew them still. Both Christie and Jared Kushner were from Livingston, New Jersey, and they both understood the code. “I have this on you, don’t cross me,” Christie was signaling to Jared. But Jared had something Christie didn’t have: to Trump, Jared was family. Very soon, he would wield that weapon.
On May 26, 2016, Trump won his 1,237th delegate, officially clinching the nomination for president.15 That’s when the real frenzy began, when foreign states, including Russia and the United Arab Emirates, stepped up their efforts to connect with Trump and his campaign. In messages later released by the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s old friend Tom Barrack was shown to have corresponded around this time with an Emirati businessman named Rashid al-Malik, with the aim of introducing pro-Gulf messaging into a Trump energy speech. Barrack asked al-Malik “to reblew for me quickly”—that is, to review the language of the speech. “I need a few Middle East aspects,” Barrack wrote. After Barrack received al-Malik’s comments, Trump did, indeed, include pro-Gulf messaging in his speech.16
In a second series of emails, Yousef al Otaiba—the UAE ambassador to the United States—and Barrack rekindled a business relationship from years earlier with the aim of forging a connection between Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (known as “M.B.Z.”), the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and Trump. The day Trump crossed the delegate threshold, Barrack emailed Otaiba: “Could you meet with Jared Kushner (DJT son in law and closest advisor) in DC on June 8th! You will love him and he agrees with our agenda.” Otaiba responded that he “would be delighted.”17 Otaiba was arguing for a new axis of power in the Middle East, from the Emirates to Saudi Arabia—where a rising prince named Mohammad bin Salman, M.B.S., was positioning himself to inherit the Kingdom.
On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s son, received an email of his own, this one from Rob Goldstone, who worked for the Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son Emin, the pop star—and with whom Don Jr. had negotiated a Trump Tower deal almost up until the campaign started. The email was titled “Russia - Clinton - private and confidential.”
“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin.” Goldstone offered to send this information directly to Trump, via his assistant Rhona Graff, but said “it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.”
Seventeen minutes later, Don Jr. responded: “Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”
Goldstone did indeed arrange a call, on June 6. Two days later, Don Jr. forwarded the email chain from Goldstone to Jared and Paul Manafort. It said: “Subject: FW: Russia - Clinton - private and confidential. Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices. Best, Don.”18
The meeting that took place on June 9, 2016, at Trump Tower in New York, has been subjected to tens of thousands of news stories and dozens of hours of congressional testimony, amounting to thousands of pages in transcripts, much of it contradictory. Manafort and Kushner attended, and Goldstone brought the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was closely tied to the Russian government. Goldstone also brought Ike Kaveladze, Aras Agalarov’s point person in the United States, who had, years earlier, gotten in trouble with the US Senate for setting up thousands of Delaware corporations to move $1.4 billion of Russian money into the United States.19
Donald Trump Jr. knew Kaveladze and Goldstone well. Before the campaign, the three of them had been working on a deal to build a Trump Tower Moscow.20 No one seemed to question the seamless pivot from business to politics to discussing “Russia and its government’s support” for the Trump campaign, and dirt on Hillary Clinton, which by this time, the Russian government did indeed have.
Veselnitskaya made a presentation about how some Clinton donors had allegedly profiteered by buying shares of Russian companies at a price only allowed to Russians. She spoke about the Magnitsky Act, which had imposed economic sanctions on prominent Russians after the murder of a lawyer for an American-born investment fund owner. But Don Jr. wasn’t interested in sanctions; nor could he follow Veselnitskaya’s presentation about the Hillary Clinton donors. He characterized it as “inane nonsense.” Kushner emailed his assistants asking them to call him, so he’d have an excuse to leave the meeting.
But this meeting was a highly significant moment, an inflection point, an indicator of a broad breakdown of restraints on corruption, foreign influence in elections, and the power of big money in politics. Whatever strictures were left in the wake of Citizens United were arguably breached in this meeting. Campaigns are not allowed to coordinate with independent actors. They are not allowed to use business resources, their own or others’, without declaring in-kind contributions. They are especially not allowed to accept money, or any “thing of value,” from foreign actors or governments. They’re not even allowed to accept offers of help: the law specifically bans not just actually receiving aid, but accepting from a “foreign national” any “express or implied promise to make a contribution.”21 This was, previously, a bedrock of campaign finance laws, to ensure that campaigns didn’t become tools of a foreign government’s geopolitical aims.
In this case, the Russians offered dirt, that is, opposition research, to the Trump campaign. Campaigns are usually willing to pay a great deal of money, millions of dollars, for such research. Of the people in that room from the campaign, at least one person certainly knew the value of what was on offer: the veteran of four decades of US political campaigns, Paul Manafort.
The day this Trump Tower New York meeting took place, Felix Sater, still pursuing his Trump Tower Moscow deal, wrote to Michael Cohen that he was filling out the badges for the St. Petersburg forum. “Putin is there on the 17th very strong chance you will meet him as well.” Then Sater sent a visa application form and the official invitation.22
On June 14, the Washington Post reported that “Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.”23 The day of the Post story, Sater and Cohen met in person at the snack bar in the atrium of Trump Tower. Cohen told Sater the Moscow deal was off.
The next month, Manafort was asked by CBS This Morning anchor Norah O’Donnell, “So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs?” Manafort replied “That’s what he said, uh, I uh, that’s what I said, that’s obviously what the, our position is.”24
By the Fourth of July weekend, it was time for Trump to pick a running mate. His top choices were Christie, whom he’d known for a long time; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; and Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Trump flew to Indiana to meet Pence, who looked the part—a very important consideration for Trump. Manafort, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner were pushing the candidate towards Pence. They wanted Trump to stay in Indiana. Trump intended to fly home, but there were technical problems on his plane, and he stayed overnight after all. But he still hadn’t decided.
Two days later, a story appeared in the New York Observer about David Samson, the disgraced chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and a key figure in the Bridgegate scandal. Samson had been caught demanding a special flight route from United Airlines for his personal use at a time the airline was seeking tens of millions of dollars in fee reductions. Jared’s newspaper had not been leading coverage of Samson’s conflicts of interest, but under the byline of Ken Kurson, editor in chief, the article read: “The Observer has exclusively learned that David Samson, a mentor to Chris Christie . . . will plead guilty to a single felony charge as early as the end of this week.”25 (In an email, Kurson said, “Jared had no knowledge of that story and the first he learned of it was when he read it in the Observer like everybody else.”) But the fact remained that the Observer was resurfacing Christie’s greatest political failure just as Trump was selecting a vice president. Samson’s guilty plea was set for July 14. The next day, Trump tweeted he’d chosen Pence.
These machinations were obscured by another set of machinations, far more comprehensible. Dana Schwartz, an entertainment writer for the Observer, published an article on Observer.com responding to a Trump retweet of an image of Hillary Clinton and a six-sided star, both superimposed on piles of cash. Schwartz wrote the article in the form of an open letter to her boss, Jared Kushner.
“Forgive me if I condescend in any way or explain what you already know, but I’m sure you’ve been busy lately so just a quick refresher: America First was a movement led primarily by white supremacist Charles Lindbergh advocating against American intervention during World War II,” Schwartz wrote, noting that the Anti-Defamation League had asked after Trump’s Mayflower Hotel foreign policy speech that the slogan be avoided “due to its overt anti-Semitic associations.”26
“You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” Schwartz continued. “Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a ‘gotcha’ journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval. Because maybe Donald Trump isn’t anti-Semitic. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he is. But I know many of his supporters are, and they believe for whatever reason that Trump is the candidate for them.”27
It was an argument that was to be repeated in many quarters as the anti-Semitic images and sentiment metastasized: the targeting of Jewish reporters, the use of anti-Semitic memes, a new, open embrace of Nazi symbolism and ideology.
Jared had a response. “This is not idle philosophy to me. I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors,” he wrote in his own post. “On December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor Day—the Nazis surrounded the ghetto of Novogrudok, and sorted the residents into two lines: those selected to die were put on the right; those who would live were put on the left.” He went on to describe the multiple horrors of his grandmother Rae’s early life, the mass murders of thousands, the death of her sister, mother, and brother, the horrors she’d witnessed before she made it to the forest, where “she met my grandfather, who had escaped from a labor camp called Voritz. He had lived in a hole in the woods—a literal hole that he had dug—for three years, foraging for food, staying out of sight and sleeping in that hole for the duration of the brutal Russian winter.”
Jared continued, “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”28
In the wake of these comments, Jared’s cousins for the first time joined the public fray. Marc Kushner, Murray’s son, a New York City–based architect whose gay marriage was profiled in the New York Times, posted on Facebook: “I have a different takeaway from my Grandparents’ experience in the war. It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Antisemitism or otherwise.”
Someone else spoke up: Jacob Schulder, the cousin who was one week younger than Jared, who had grown up almost like a twin brother. For the first time since his uncle Charlie, Jared’s father, entrapped his father with a prostitute and then sent a tape of the event to his mother just before his engagement party, Jacob Schulder also made a statement. He added a comment to Marc Kushner’s post: “The very first thing a responsible campaign manager should do, I’d think, and I mean the very first thing, would be to take away his father-in-law’s Twitter account. Even Joseph Kushner would’ve had the street smarts to figure that one out while living on boiled potatoes in the forest.” Jacob continued, “That my grandparents have been dragged into this is a shame. Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you’ve handled this campaign.”29
Jared had been prepared for such critiques. “I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points,” he wrote. “The difference between me and the journalists and Twitter throngs who find it so convenient to dismiss my father in law is simple. I know him and they don’t.”
It was a line that he and Ivanka would repeat over and over. He didn’t use the words yet—their coinage was yet to come—but the sentiment was firmly in place by July of 2016. It was “fake news. “
In the run-up to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Paul Manafort had been getting questions from the Kyiv Post on the Black Sea cable deal. He wrote to Konstantin Kilimnik. “Is there any movement on this issue with our friend?” Manafort asked, referring to Deripaska. “I would ignore him,” Kilimnik wrote back, speaking of the reporter. “I am carefully optimistic on the question of our biggest interest.” He then added of the Deripaska aide: “Our friend V said there is lately significantly more attention to the campaign in his boss’s mind, and he will be most likely looking for ways to reach out to you pretty soon, understanding all the time sensitivity. I am more than sure that it will be resolved and we will get back to the original relationship with V.’s boss.” Eight minutes later, Manafort wrote back. “Tell V boss that if he needs private briefings we can accommodate.”30
Two weeks later, on the fourth night of the convention, Trump was introduced by Tom Barrack, burnishing Trump’s business credentials, and Ivanka, burnishing Trump’s pro-women credentials. Then Trump spoke: “I have joined the political arena,” he said, “so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said, pausing and smiling, “which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders—he never had a chance.”31
The next day, Wikileaks released nearly twenty thousand emails the Russians had hacked. The leak was designed to highlight the ways the Democratic Party had thwarted the campaign of Bernie Sanders, “rigging” the system against him.
The leaked DNC emails—and the unflattering story they told—muddied the Democrats’ intended message of unity at their convention. The Clinton campaign blamed Russia for the release. Trump deflected, saying at a press conference “this whole thing with Russia” is “far fetched.” He repeated, five times: “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Then he added—this was startling, at the time—“Russia, if you’re listening. I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Russia may indeed have been listening. That day, “for the first time,” as Special Counsel Robert Mueller later noted, GRU officers tried to hack into Hillary Clinton’s private server.32
Two days after Trump’s public remarks, Manafort received another email from Kilimnik, this one with the subject line “Black Caviar,” deliberately written to conceal the message’s contents. “I met today with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago,” Kilimnik wrote. “We spent about 5 hours talking about his story, and I have several important messages from him to you. He asked me to go and brief you on our conversation. I said I have to run it by you first, but in principle I am prepared to do it, provided that he buys me a ticket. It has to do about the future of his country, and is quite interesting. So, if you are not absolutely against the concept, please let me know which dates/places will work, even next week, and I could come and see you.”
“The guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar,” was code for Paul Manafort’s former client, the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who, after he won election in 2010, gave Manafort a present of a large jar of black caviar worth $30,000 to $40,000.33 By 2016, Yanukovych, driven from his own country, where prosecutors had accused his government of draining $100 billion from the Ukranian treasury—for, among other things, a lavish compound with an artificial lake34—was living in Moscow. There, Yanukovych met with Kilimnik to discuss a plan to take over part of eastern Ukraine. Then Kilimnik asked if Manafort would meet with him in New York.
Manafort agreed to have dinner at the Grand Havana Room, along with his deputy, Rick Gates, the following Tuesday, August 2. “I need about 2 hours,” Kilimnik wrote to Manafort on July 31, “because it is a long caviar story to tell.” The members-only Grand Havana Room, with a menu tending to steak and martinis, is located at the top of a skyscraper at Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, where it hosts the one of the largest cigar bars in the Western Hemisphere, with sweeping views of midtown.
At their dinner on August 2, Manafort and Gates and Kilimnik discussed a supposed “peace plan,” which Manafort later acknowledged was a “backdoor” way for Russia to control Eastern Ukraine. Manafort was passing something along to Kilimnik—highly sensitive internal polling data and a briefing on four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. “Months before that meeting,” the Special Counsel’s report said, “Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.”35 This kind of data, which is expensive to procure, would typically be used to micro-target voters with social media and other messaging. Prosecutors were ultimately unable to determine what Kilimnik did with the data, but they made their suspicions known. “This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think the motive here is,” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said at a later court hearing. “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the Special Counsel’s office is investigating.”
Weissman added that this “in-person meeting [came] at an unusual time for somebody who is the campaign chairman.”36 Especially suspicious, the prosecutor noted, was that Manafort, Kilimnik and Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, all “took the precaution” of slipping out separately. As the Mueller report put it, this was “because they knew the media was tracking Manafort and wanted to avoid media reporting on his connections to Kilimnik.”37
After leaving the penthouse-level Grand Havana cigar bar, the Republican campaign manager, his deputy, and the Russian asset separately took the elevator down forty floors and exited the aluminum-clad skyscraper. On the way out to the street, each of them passed a small placard on the side of the building that identified its owner: Kushner Companies. Then they disappeared, melting into the crowds of Fifth Avenue.