In mid-August, the New York Times published a story saying Paul Manafort had been paid $12.7 million off the books by the political party of Viktor Yanukovych.1 Manafort quit the campaign and went sailing on a yacht with Barrack. He remained in touch with Trump, and with the campaign. Ivanka and Jared took their own trip to Europe, with Wendi Murdoch. When they returned, the campaign went into warp drive.
From the sidelines Roger Stone had continued the work he’d long performed for Trump: deception and dirty tricks. In a series of emails, Stone attempted to communicate via intermediaries with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in order to gather information about the timing of Wikileaks releases. Stone was later charged with lying about this to Congress, to which he pleaded not guilty.2 Gates said the campaign was already planning a press strategy around the releases. On a drive to LaGuardia airport around this time, following a phone call, Trump told Gates that “more releases of damaging information would be coming.”3 Around this time, Stone sent out a tweet. It said: “Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
On October 7, at around 3:30 p.m., the Obama administration put out an anodyne statement saying that “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”
Just after 4:00 p.m., David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post, who had been covering Trump’s charitable contributions, and lack thereof, published a story about a 2005 videotape of Donald Trump joking with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. The tape was made a few months after Donald married Melania. In the audio, Trump said: “I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down in Palm Beach. I moved on her. . . . I did try and fuck her. She was married. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. . . . You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”4
After the tape was released, the servers that measured traffic to the Washington Post’s website were so overwhelmed, they broke. Half an hour later, at 4:30 p.m., Wikileaks began releasing emails by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. An associate of a “high-ranking Trump campaign official,” as court papers described it, texted Stone the message: “well done.”5
Throughout the campaign season, when Trump was attacked for his record on women, Ivanka stepped forward. Prior to the campaign, she had adopted a hashtag, #womenwhowork. It peppered an Instagram account filled with photographs of her family—now including three beautiful children, Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore—and their neatly arranged outfits and toys, interspersed with photos of Ivanka at her desk, photos of Ivanka in hard hats, at construction sites, photos of Trump real estate and Ivanka Trump–branded jewelry, handbags, shoes, and clothing. Her personal and public brand was an embodiment of a certain view of confident modern womanhood. At crucial moments, she deployed this brand to blunt her father’s sharper edges.
In May, the New York Times had published a cover story: “Crossing the Line: Donald Trump’s Private Conduct With Women.” It documented a long history of “unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct.”6 The accounts were detailed, on the record, and disturbing. Trump’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, threatened to sue the Times. (He did not sue.)
Ivanka appeared on CBS This Morning. “Based on the facts as I know them, and obviously I very much know them, both in the capacity as a daughter and in the capacity as an executive,” she said, playing off her #womenwhowork brand, the New York Times story had “largely been discredited.” This was false. “Look he’s not a groper,” Ivanka Trump said of her father. “It’s not who he is and I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women.”7
In her convention speech introducing her father, Ivanka said: “At my father’s company, there are more female than male executives,” an assertion without backup. “Women are paid equally for the work that we do and when a woman becomes a mother, she is supported, not shut out.” The crowd stopped her to chant “Trump! Trump! Trump!” This was her biggest applause line of the night. After the speech, @IvankaTrump tweeted out “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech,” along with a link to the “Ivanka Trump Studded Sheath Dress,” a look-alike of the one Ivanka wore during her address.8 The dress sold out at both Macy’s and Nordstrom within two days.9
But Ivanka’s biggest moment to be a validator came at the debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, on October 9, 2016, hardly more than forty-eight hours after the release of the “pussy tape,” on a weekend when even Mike Pence seemed to doubt his own running mate. For the debate, Ivanka and her siblings, Don Jr., Eric, and Tiffany Trump, showed up, as did Melania, Vanessa, Lara, and Jared. Donald Trump, egged on by Stone, brought with him three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault (which he had denied). During the broadcast, Trump stalked around the debate stage glowering, lurking behind Hillary Clinton as she answered questions. He threatened at one point to send her to jail, if elected. He dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as “locker-room talk.” But still, Hillary Clinton, when asked to come up with a nice thing to say about Trump, said this: “His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald.”10 She didn’t add, but might have: especially Ivanka.
For the next weeks, Ivanka kept granting interviews. “He’s embarrassed by it,” she said of the Access Hollywood tape. “It was crude language, he was embarrassed that he had said those things, and he apologized,” adding, “I have the good fortune of knowing my father so well, not only as a parent, and he’s been an amazing parent to me, and I’m now the mother of three kids.”11
At the end of October 2016, in the wake of the battering it had taken after the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump campaign was facing what Michael Cohen thought was an existential threat. A woman named Stephanie Clifford, also known as the porn star Stormy Daniels, had been warning she’d go public about an affair she said she’d had with Donald Trump shortly after his son Barron was born. Through the final months of the campaign, one of Cohen’s jobs had been to managing incoming fire. He’d worked closely with David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc. (AMI), which published the National Enquirer, to keep stories of affairs out of the public eye. Pecker would alert Trump and Cohen that a story was circulating and then the Enquirer would “catch” the story and “kill” it, by first buying the life rights from the woman and then not running the story. In August 2016 Pecker had caught and killed the story of Karen McDougal, a model and former Playboy bunny who also said she began an affair with Trump in 2006.12
Pecker had maintained this arrangement with Trump for years. He had a safe full of stories on Trump, while at the same time the tabloid routinely ran brutal coverage of Hillary Clinton. In September 2016, after McDougal had signed her agreement with AMI, Cohen and Trump discussed whether this safe full of stories, what Cohen called, “all the stuff,” could eventually come out. “Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Trump said, of Pecker, in a conversation Cohen secretly recorded.
“Correct,” Cohen replied. “So, I’m all over that. And, I spoke to Allen Weisselberg”—Trump’s chief financial officer—“about it, when it comes time for the financing, which will be—”
“Wait a sec,” Trump interjected, “what financing?”
“We’ll have to pay him something,” Cohen replied, speaking of Pecker.
What Trump said next was unintelligible, though you can clearly hear him say the words “pay with cash,” to which Cohen replied, emphatically. “No, no, no, no, no. I got it.”
In this conversation, Cohen and Trump also discussed the payment to Stormy Daniels. “What do we got to pay for this, one fifty?” Trump asked.13
Sometime after his conversation with Trump, Cohen went to Allen Weisselberg and told him he’d do something he knew very well how to do: set up a shell company to obscure the origins of the money. But he still needed to figure out where the money would come from. “I had asked Allen to use his money,” Cohen later told the House Oversight Committee, about this conversation. “Didn’t want to use mine, and he said he couldn’t. And we then decided how else we can do it. And he asked me whether or not I know anybody who wants to have a party at one of his clubs that could pay me, instead, or somebody who may have wanted to become a member of one of the golf clubs.”14
But Cohen couldn’t find a straw man, so he set up the shell company, “Essential Consultants LLC,” funded it through a fraudulently obtained home equity line of credit, and wired money to keep Stormy Daniels quiet, all with the agreement that the Trump Organization would eventually reimburse him with a retainer of $420,000, which included “grossing up” the Stormy payment so Cohen wouldn’t suffer tax consequences, $50,000 for a doctored poll Cohen had commissioned early in the election, and a $60,000 “bonus.”15
“I don’t think anybody would dispute this belief that after the wildfire that encompassed the Billy Bush tape that a second follow up to it would have been unpleasant,” Cohen later testified, adding that Trump “was concerned with the effect that it had had on the campaign, on how women were seeing him and ultimately whether or not he would have a shot.”16 So, Trump directed Cohen to carry out the secret payments, which violated campaign finance laws, just as Federal Election Commission lawyers suspected they had done with ShouldTrumpRun.com. Thanks to Don McGahn, neither Trump nor Cohen was ever investigated in that case.
Ten days later, Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points—almost three million votes—but won the electoral college, carrying Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with a combined margin of 78,000 votes. A majority of white women, 52 percent, voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
The election was called at 2:40 in the morning. Shortly after that, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close Putin advisor, received a text message from an associate traveling to the 2016 World Chess Championship in New York.
It said, “Putin has won.”17
Three days after the election, Jared Kushner had Chris Christie fired as transition chief. For five months, Christie and his team had been vetting candidates for different positions, researching policies, learning about how the federal government worked, and compiling all their findings into large black binders. Trump barely paid attention, except, according to author Michael Lewis, to occasionally scream at Christie that he was “stealing my fucking money,” thinking, wrongly, that transition money could be spent on the campaign.18 (Christie said in an email that Trump had never berated him, and that Trump had merely “called to get clarification.”) But after the election: “the kid’s been taking an ax to your head” is what Christie said Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon told him when he was fired.19 Under the new leadership of Bannon, Pence, and Kushner, Christie wrote, the transition team threw the thirty binders of material Christie had compiled into the Trump Tower dumpsters.
As Christie wrote: “Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago, was exacting plot of revenge against me, a hit job that made no sense.”20
In Moscow, Putin was having his own reorganization. He called together a group of stupendously wealthy Russians who understood their continuing success depended on carrying out Putin’s political agenda. One of these men, Petr Aven, a Russian national who heads Alfa-Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank, explained, as the Mueller report put it, that “he is one of approximately 50 wealthy Russian businessmen who regularly meet with Putin in the Kremlin; these 50 men are often referred to as ‘oligarchs’.” Their meetings, as Aven described them, were quarterly: Aven’s fourth-quarter meetings with Putin took place after the US elections.
At their meeting, Putin conveyed to Aven that he wanted to develop a channel of communications into the incoming administration. As with Trump, Putin’s directives were sometimes indirect, coded. But Aven caught their meaning. He “understood that any suggestions or critiques that Putin made during these meetings were implicit directives, and that there would be consequences for Aven if he did not follow through.” Aven added that Putin “did not expressly direct him to reach out to the Trump Transition Team,” but that he “expected him to try.”
A few weeks after his Q4 one-on-one meeting, in December 2016, Aven “attended what he described as a separate ‘all-hands’ oligarch meeting between Putin and Russia’s most prominent businessmen.” The “main topic of discussion” was the prospect of additional US economic sanctions, which Putin feared would be imposed for his election interference.
With Putin’s wishes in mind, Aven tried to set up a back channel to Jared Kushner via Dimitri Simes, the think tank president who helped organize the 2016 Trump foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel. Aven told an intermediary that “he had spoken to someone high in the Russian government” (that is, Putin) who was interested in “establishing a communications channel between the Kremlin and the Trump Transition Team.” Simes told investigators that he rebuffed the approach, saying that it “was not a good idea in light of the media attention surrounding Russian influence in the U.S. presidential election.”21
Then Putin opened another channel of communication, through Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, or RDIF. The Russian super-rich understood that they could amass wealth, but only if they kicked some of it back to the Kremlin. Their assumption was that wealthy Americans close to the incoming president, like Jared Kushner, would understand how this system worked.
Through an associate of Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, Dmitriev was introduced to Rick Gerson, who ran a hedge fund in New York, Falcon Edge Capital. Gerson, who during this period was informally advising the Trump transition team, was described in the Mueller report as “a friend of Jared Kushner.”
Even though, at the time, RDIF was operating under US sanctions, Gerson and Dmitriev met in New York, where “they principally discussed potential joint ventures between Gerson’s hedge fund and RDIF,” according to Gerson’s later testimony and communications reviewed by the Special Counsel’s Office. Dmitriev told Gerson he was “interested in improved economic cooperation between the United States and Russia and asked Gerson who he should meet with in the incoming Administration who would be helpful towards this goal.” Gerson said he would ask Kushner. But, Gerson cautioned, “confidentiality would be required because of the sensitivity of holding such meetings before the new Administration took power.”
Dmitriev prepared a two-page memo on Russia-US relations, and gave it to Gerson, who gave it to Kushner, who shared it with Steve Bannon and the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. Following up with Gerson, Dmitriev said his “boss”—Putin—“was asking if there had been any feedback on the proposal.” He told Gerson that Putin and Trump would be speaking by phone that Saturday. This latter piece of information was “very confidential.”22
At this time, it wasn’t even clear to many Americans that Jared Kushner would be joining the administration, but the Russians had figured out that Jared had rare influence over his father-in-law. Putin kept opening fronts in his maneuvers to reach Jared: in addition to Aven and Dmitriev, he sent his ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, to create a third channel. Kushner agreed to meet, even though after the election, he said he couldn’t remember Kislyak’s name. Kushner has offered this as evidence he couldn’t have colluded with Russia during the campaign.
On November 30, Kislyak, Kushner, and Michael Flynn, the incoming national security advisor, met at Trump Tower.23 (Flynn, it later emerged, had secretly accepted $600,000 from a firm linked to the Turkish government for lobbying work that coincided with the campaign.) “I asked Ambassador Kislyak if he would identify the best person (whether the Ambassador or someone else) with whom to have direct discussions and who had contact with his President,” Kushner later said.24
Kislyak did have someone he wanted to speak with Kushner: “his ‘generals.’ ” He asked Kushner if there was a secure communications line they could use.25 Kushner came up with a suggestion: how about if they used the communications equipment at the Russian embassy? This was a shocking suggestion to Kislyak: that the incoming American administration, albeit a friendly one, could get access to Russia’s most secret methods of communications, its inner sanctum. Alarmed, Kislyak said no. He transmitted his alarm to Moscow. These communications were monitored and recorded by US intelligence agencies. That’s how they found out about the president-elect’s son-in-law’s talks with the Russian ambassador.
Kislyak pushed Jared for yet another meeting. Jared was by now impatient; he’d decided that Kislyak didn’t really have enough juice with Moscow. But Kislyak was persistent, and set up a meeting with Jared’s assistant. At that meeting, Kislyak asked for yet another appointment with Jared: this time, as Kushner put it, with “a person named Sergey Gorkov who he said was a banker”—the head of Vnesheconombank, or VEB, the Russian state-owned development bank. Gorkov, Kushner was told, had a “direct line to the Russian President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new administration and best ways to work together.”
So they met. “I agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov,” Jared later wrote, “because the Ambassador has been so insistent, said he had a direct relationship with the President, and because Mr. Gorkov was only in New York for a couple days. I made room on my schedule for the meeting that occurred the next day, on December 13.”26 Kushner saw no conflict for the son-in-law of the incoming American president, a real estate developer with a billion-dollar debt coming due, to meet with a banker for the Russian State to talk about foreign policy.
The meeting took place not in Trump Tower, but at Tom Barrack’s Colony Capital building in Manhattan.27 At the time of the meeting VEB was (and remained) the subject of US sanctions imposed in the wake of the Crimea invasion.
Gorkov told Kushner a little about his bank and the Russian economy. “He said that he was friendly with President Putin,” Kushner said, and “expressed disappointment with U.S.-Russia relations under President Obama and hopes for a better relationship in the future.” There were no discussions about sanctions, Kushner said, or “about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements or any private business of any kind.”28
VEB disputed this characterization, telling the Washington Post that “the session 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.”29
When questioned by Mueller’s investigators, Jared Kushner wanted to make sure they understood how little he thought of this meeting, to advance his argument that he couldn’t have been conspiring with Russian state actors. He said that he “did not engage in any preparation for the meeting and that no one on the Transition Team even did a Google search for Gorkov’s name.”30
But Gorkov, another of Putin’s wealthy and powerful emissaries, had done his research. Gorkov carried with him two gifts, gifts that showed a careful and deliberate investigation into the person he was meeting with. “One was a piece of art from Nvgorod, the village where my grandparents were from in Belarus, and the other was a bag of dirt from that same village,” as Jared Kushner later explained.31
During the campaign, “dirt” on Hillary Clinton had been the currency Russians had tried to trade. Now, the Russians were giving Jared Kushner a literal bag of dirt, reminiscent of the bags of dirt that Rae Kushner and her family had dug from the earth and hidden in the walls of the Novogrudok ghetto so the Nazis wouldn’t know they had dug a tunnel to safety.
Had it not been for those bags of dirt, Rae would never have made it out of the ghetto, to the forest, to the refugee camp, or to New York, where she had four children, including one named after her brother who had died during the escape.
And whose own son, Jared Corey Kushner, was now one of the most powerful people in a new and uncertain world, slinking again towards darkness.