Dirty Rubles Read online

  But this was different. This wasn’t about the size of his bank account, his good cholesterol levels, or his penis. This was about national security, about cozying up to an enemy. And yet still, Trump and his minions went on TV, took to Twitter, stood behind the podium in the White House Press Room, and lied egregiously to the American people, over and over and over and over.

  In July of 2017, when the press got wind of the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian attorney that took place the previous June, the Big Lie became impossible for any thinking person to believe. Yet even with this bombshell, the denials continued. Junior put out a statement on 8 July 2017—one his father the president helped him craft, with help from his communications director Hope Hicks and others: At the Trump Tower meeting, Junior explained, “[w]e primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

  Three days after Trump’s namesake son issued that statement, the New York Times was set to publish the emails proving that Junior had in fact met with Russians, and damned well knew what was going to be on the agenda. How could he not have known? The subject line of the emails was this: “RE: RUSSIA - CLINTON - PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.”

  That’s not a joke. That’s not me being cute. That was the actual email subject line. And it appeared in the inbox of Junior, and also of Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. (Trump, a Luddite, famously does not use email). Astute readers will observe that the word “adoption” is nowhere to be found in the subject line. Nor was it in the email exchange itself, which Junior published himself on Twitter, to “get ahead of the story” and scoop the Times.

  Again, this happened in July of 2017—more than a year after that Trump Tower meeting. Until then, for months and months, it was a string of denials, the Big Lie repeated ad infinitum. It took a major newspaper threatening to publish emails proving Russian contact to finally get the Trumps to cop to the truth.

  Maybe this could be forgiven if the Trump Tower meeting were unique—if that rendezvous had been the only time Donald & Co. powwowed with the Russians. But this was not the case. Contrary to their vehement denials—their reiterations of the Big Lie—there were many meetings between associates of Donald Trump and agents of Vladimir Putin. Not two or three. Not a few. Many.

  This is an accounting of the most significant of those meetings, listed here in chronological order:

  Mayflower Hotel

  27 April 2016: Mayflower Hotel, Washington

  At a VIP-only foreign policy speech attended by most of his inner circle, Donald Trump promised a “good deal” for Russia. Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak attended, in breach of protocol. Also present: Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, who arranged the event at the last minute; then-Senator Jeff Sessions; foreign policy advisers JD Gordon and Walid Phares; adviser Stephen Miller; the oil lobbyists Bud McFarlane and Richard Burt, who helped craft the speech; Donald Trump, Jr.; Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks; the ambassadors to Singapore, Italy, and the Philippines; Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, the event’s host, and Jacob Heilbrunn, also of CNI, who planned the event. Implicit in Trump’s speech was a promise to play ball with Putin if elected. Notably, the venue for this event was changed at the last minute to allow Kislyak to come.

  Trump Tower

  9 June 2016: Trump Tower, New York

  Donald Trump, Jr. met with the Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskya, who’d promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Also in attendance were Manafort and Kushner, representing the Trump campaign, and on the Russian side, Russian-American businessman Rinat Akhmetshin, money laundering enthusiast Ike Kaveladze, the KGB-approved translator Anatoly Samochornov, 1 and “useful idiot” publicist Rob Goldstone, who helped arrange the meeting. Candidate Trump was also at Trump Tower that day, but claimed not to have attended—or to have been told about it afterward. Yet that very afternoon, within an hour of the Russians leaving, Trump began tweeting about Hillary’s “missing” emails for the first time.

  Moscow School

  1–5 July 2016: New Economic School, Moscow, Russia

  Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page2 traveled to Moscow, with his expenses paid for by Russians. While there, he met with top Russian government officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Arcadiy Dvorkovich and Igor Sechin, CEO of the oil company Rosneft (of which more shortly). Page had requested permission to take the trip from his presumed boss, JD Gordon, who told him no; he then went to Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, who gave him the green light. When Page returned, he explained that he got “some incredible insights” from his Moscow meetings. No doubt.

  RNC

  18–21 July 2016: Republican National Convention, Cleveland

  Russian Ambassador Kislyak was again in attendance, meeting with Jeff Sessions after a 18 July Heritage Foundation soirée, and with Trump advisers JD Gordon and Carter Page after a convention-related Global Partners in Diplomacy event at Case Western Reserve University on 20 July. As for the convention itself, exactly one change was made to the long Republican platform, aligning the GOP’s official position on Ukraine/Crimea with Vladimir Putin’s. Gordon later revealed that this was in accordance with Trump’s direct personal wishes.

  Prague

  Late August 2016: [undisclosed], Prague, Czech Republic (?)

  Trump personal attorney and self-proclaimed Russian mobster Michael Cohen met in the Czech Republic with Russian officials, Russian crime figures, or both. He denied traveling to Prague, and this meeting, outlined in the Steele dossier, of which more later, remains unconfirmed as of this writing. Tellingly, Cohen vehemently denied having been to Prague that August; his denials of meeting with Russians in Europe were markedly less vehement.

  Capitol Hill

  8 September 2016: Capitol Hill, Washington

  Jeff Sessions and two undisclosed aides met in the Alabama Senator’s offices with Ambassador Kislyak. Testifying before Congress months later, Sessions lied under oath about this meeting, omitting its mention. This was particularly unusual, because Sessions would have had little reason to meet with the Russian ambassador in his role as Senator.

  Backchannel

  1–2 December 2016: Trump Tower, New York

  Jared Kushner and Mike Flynn met with Ambassador Kislyak, who was “snuck” into Trump Tower, suggesting a secret entrance, perhaps through the offices of Carter Page, which are next door. At the meeting, Kushner proposed a Russian embassy backchannel to avoid having to disclose communication between the camps going forward. Whatever went on at this sit-down, Kushner and Flynn went to great lengths to avoid discovery.

  Rosneft

  8 December 2016: Rosneft offices, Moscow, Russia

  Carter Page met with Rosneft senior executives in Moscow. Some background: In 2012, Rosneft, one of the world’s largest publicly-traded oil companies, entered into a $500 billion joint venture with ExxonMobil, which at the time was run by Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State; it was this mammoth joint venture, apparently, that inspired Putin to award Tillerson the Medal of Friendship in 2013. The oil reserves in the Arctic, the reason for the venture, are estimated to contain 85 billion barrels. At a conservative price of $50 a barrel, that amounts to a staggering $4.25 trillion in potential gross revenue. These are dizzying numbers — but Putin will not see a kopek as long as the US continues to impose sanctions on Russia. In his intelligence report of 18 October 2016, Christopher Steele wrote that there was a plan in place to sell a 19% ownership stake in Rosneft; Trump was reportedly offered the commission on the sale, which by my calculations would be about $270 million, for his part in Trump/Russia. (This detail is often misreported, with Trump said to have been promised the entirety of the 19% stake—a preposterous figure). The sale did in fact take place in January of 2017, with 19.5% of ownership share purchased by string of shell
companies, one of them a Qatari concern whose chief financier met with Trump, Mike Flynn, and Michael Cohen at Trump Tower on 12 December 2016. Whether or not Trump received any of the commission, perhaps in the form of debt forgiveness, is not yet known. Page continues to insist that he is innocent, and refers to Steele’s intelligence reports as “the dodgy dossier.”

  Newark Airport

  13–14 December 2016: [undisclosed], Newark Airport (?) (“VEB”)

  Kushner ventured out to Newark Airport to meet Sergei Gorkov, one-time KGB agent and president of Vnesheconombank (VEB), the Russian state bank that was, and remains, on the US sanctions list for its close ties to Putin. VEB later claimed that the meeting “was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business,” according to the Washington Post. The White House, meanwhile, will describe it as a “diplomatic meeting,” whatever that means. Immediately after the rendezvous, Gorkov flew directly to see Putin, halfway around the world, ostensibly to report back in person. Wherefore the urgency, if all they had discussed was real estate?

  Seychelles

  11 January 2017: Four Seasons (?), Seychelles

  Trump surrogates Erik Prince (head of the mercenary outfit Blackwater) and Elliott Broidy (a big GOP donor) voyaged to this remote tropical island resort to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, at a clandestine “backchannel” meeting arranged by the government of the United Arab Emirates, where Prince lived. Prince is a Trump supporter suspected of being a shadow adviser, and was involved with the events that produced the Comey memo just before the election (more on this later). He is the founder of Blackwater, literally a company of mercenaries; he had ties to the Trump campaign via the adviser Steve Bannon, and is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary. Later, he lied under oath to Congress about the nature and purpose of the Seychelles meeting.

  Sanctions Negotiations

  Late January, 2017: [undisclosed hotel, maybe Loews Regency], New York

  Michael Cohen and former Trump business partner Felix Sater met with Andrii V. Artemenko, a Putin-aligned Ukrainian politician, to negotiate sanctions—or, perhaps, to receive sanction orders from Moscow. Both Cohen and Sater, who are childhood friends, have extensive ties to the Russian mob. An enigmatic figure, Felix Sater served time in prison for a bar fight in which he attacked someone with the broken stem of a martini glass. His father was allegedly a capo in the Russian mob, as was the Kazakh real estate developer Tevfik Arif, founder of the Blackrock Group, for which Sater served as managing director. Trump has tried to walk back his relationship with Sater, once storming out of a BBC interview when the subject was pressed. He testified under oath that he would not recognize him if he was sitting next to him, and yet Trump Org issued business cards to Sater, naming him a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.” At the meeting, Sater gave Cohen a written proposal in a sealed envelope that Cohen delivered to then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn in early February. Notably, Cohen changed his story of what happened that day four times.

  Oval Office

  9 May 2017: The White House, Washington

  One day after firing FBI Director James Comey, Trump held a closed-door meeting with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office. To the corpulent Russians, Trump expressed relief that Comey’s Russia investigation wouldn’t be bothering him anymore. Details were not released. Also at this meeting, Trump gave the Russians a piece of highly classified intelligence provided to us by an ally, reportedly Israel. US photographers were not allowed in, so the images released of the meeting are the work of Russian photographers. In fact, we only know about this meeting because it was covered in the Russian press.

  AGAIN: THESE ARE JUST THE MAJOR MEETINGS, and just the ones we know about. Even so, that’s a lot of meetings, especially given the vehement denials of Trump and his surrogates.

  In case you were wondering if it’s standard operating procedure for presidential candidates to meet with Russians: it isn’t.

  Hillary Clinton did not meet with the Russians during the campaign.

  Barack Obama did not meet with the Russians during the campaign.

  Obama’s foreign policy adviser and eventual ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, did not meet with the Russians during the campaign.

  Why did Trump? And why did he lie about it? Why is he still lying about it?

  Colloquially, the word for the covert coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin is collusion. In the court of law, however, there is a different and more poetical term: Conspiracy Against the United States.

  * * *

  1 The KGB is now called the FSB, and has been for years. However, I’m going to use KGB because it’s more familiar to American readers…and also because it sounds cooler.

  2 Page is one of the more inscrutable characters in Trump/Russia. He was one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers until he suddenly wasn’t, and after the election was said to be in the running for ambassador to Russia (by the Moscow Times, no less!). He’s also a key figure in the Steele dossier; his sudden ouster from Trump’s inner circle is thought to be because of his questionable ties to Rosneft, the oil company. But Page was in the know enough to announce, at a December lecture in Moscow, that Rex Tillerson would be named Secretary of State…before Trump had informed the American people. The contents of that lecture made it very clear where his sympathies lie (hint: with Moscow).

  III.

  CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES:

  A Plot Summary

  CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES sounds dramatic, like something from a Tom Clancy novel, or a spec script of Scandal. But it is real—one of the actual charges on which former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted. And Manafort is almost certainly guilty.

  Read the last paragraph again, because it’s important to keep that in mind: Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign from May through August 2016—an interval that included the hiring of Cambridge Analytica, the changing of the party platform at the Republican National Convention to soften its stance on Russian incursion in Ukraine, and Junior’s notorious Trump Tower meeting; peak treason season—stands accused of conspiring against his country.

  This is not Pizzagate-style conspiracy theory. This is not uninformed speculation. This is not something posted anonymously on Reddit. This is an actual charge, filed by the Special Counsel of the US Department of Justice investigating Trump/Russia. And the individual accused of this heinous crime was the chairman of the Trump campaign. Not an intern. Not a coffee boy. The guy in charge.

  Manafort’s “Conspiracy Against the United States” is multi-pronged. In subsequent chapters, we will go into more detail, but for now, let’s confine ourselves with a plot summary:

  Big Picture

  Donald Trump and associates inside and outside his campaign conspired with Vladimir Putin and other Russian oligarchs, Russian intelligence, and Russian organized crime to steal the election.

  For his efforts, Putin was to receive a blind eye toward his conquest of Crimea, a weakened NATO, veto power over key appointments, and, crucially, the lifting of sanctions against his oligarchs.

  Trump and his family would receive the aid of Russian hackers in turning the election, as well as other to-be-determined financial considerations, probably debt forgiveness. In addition, kompromat gathered on him during his ill-fated trip to Russia for the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013 and earlier—and the hacked RNC emails that the Kremlin possessed but declined to release—would not be deployed.

  Negotiations

  The quid pro quo between Trump and Putin did not emerge out of thin air. A number of intermediaries was utilized during the period of negotiations that began in earnest when Manafort joined the campaign in the spring of 2016, and remain ongoing as of this writing.

  The Trump negotiation team consisted of: Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates; Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner, the president’s son and
son-in-law; Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen and his former business partner Felix Sater,1 childhood friends who both have deep ties to the Russian mob; then-Senator Jeff Sessions; Mike Flynn and his son and aide Mike Flynn, Jr.; foreign policy advisers George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, JD Gordon, Sam Clovis, and KT McFarland; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; RNC bagman and GOP donor Elliott Broidy; and Indiana governor and transition chair Mike Pence.

  Anyone who met with, and failed to disclose, meetings with the multi-chinned Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—who was both Moscow’s diplomat and spy-runner—was part of the “negotiation” team.

  Technology

  Russian cyber operatives 1) hacked the DNC and RNC servers; 2) weaponized American social media in critical swing states especially, using illicitly-acquired data gathered by Facebook and other companies; 3) released hacked information at key moments during campaign. They did this in coordination with Trump’s people.

  The Trumpist tech team included: Kushner, who helmed the Trump campaign’s social media operation; Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Robert & Rebekkah Mercer, each with ties to the Orwellian data company Cambridge Analytica; web guy and Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale; dirty trickster Roger Stone, an old partner of Manafort’s, who coordinated with the Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0; Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who has been a Russian asset since at least the Edward Snowden affair; and various Kremlin-affiliated hackers (e.g., the “13 Russians” indicted by Robert Mueller).

  Also involved was Peter W. Smith, a longtime GOP operative, who on 12 May 2017 committed suicide two weeks after admitting in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he had actively pursued acquiring Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers.

  Fat Cats

  Trump was not the only beneficiary of the deal with Putin. His Cabinet is honeycombed with wealthy men and women who gained from dealings with Putin and the oligarchs, or who stood to profit from the lifting of sanctions and/or Trump’s tax policies. Wilbur Ross and Rex Tillerson are the most obvious names here. Both have long ties to Putin and the Russian oligarchs. One-percenters Steven Mnuchin and Betsy DeVos have also personally benefited from their positions.