Dirty Rubles Read online

  Obstruction

  This group includes those who became aware of Trump/Russia and actively sought to cover it up, whether by making knowingly false media statements, failing to report illicit activity to the FBI, or otherwise abetting the initial crimes.

  In Trump’s circle, this includes: former White House communications director Hope Hicks, former bodyguard Keith Schiller, White House counsel Donald McGahn, Ivanka Trump; advisers Stephen Miller, Sam Nunberg, and Seb Gorka; former RNC chair and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus; the press secretaries Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders; former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway.

  Members of Congress and other politicians who obstructed justice by attempting to derail the various Russia investigations despite knowledge of the truth include: Devin Nunes, Jason Chaffetz, Dana Rohrabacher, Trey Gowdy, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Steve King, and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

  Media personalities who actively disseminate(d) false or misleading stories include: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Jeanine Pirro, Gregg Jarrett, Alan Dershowitz, Assange, Lara Trump, Mike Cernovich, the Fox & Friends crew, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal; Breitbart; Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Alex Jones.

  Useful Idiots

  Prominent Americans who, wittingly or not, parrot Putinist talking points: Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein; Glenn Greenwald and the other Russia skeptics at The Intercept; ideological Leftist purists like Susan Sarandon and Cornel West; Maggie Haberman and other slipshod reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere (hi, Chris Cillizza!); and—it should be noted—plenty of well-intentioned people.

  Let’s be clear about something: I was a useful idiot at one point. Most of us were, to some degree.

  All of us made mistakes and erred in our judgment regarding Trump/Russia.

  All of us were played.

  ONE OF THE COMMON ERRORS OF LOGIC in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories is the assumption that members of a conspiracy share the same motive, move in perfect tandem, and seek to achieve the same goals. The truth is never so simple. Every individual who threw in with Donald Trump had his or her own individual reason for doing so. Ivanka Trump’s decision to #MAGA is very different from, say, Stephen Miller’s.

  Another way to organize the various characters in Trump/Russia, then, is by motive. Trumpists can be organized into several categories:

  Grifters

  Flat-out thieves

  Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos, Elaine Chao, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke.

  Opportunists

  Careers advancers, here to ride Trump’s ample coattails

  Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Donald McGahn, George Papadopoulos, JD Gordon, Corey Lewandowski, Sarah Sanders, Rudy Giuliani, all three of Trump’s wives.

  Ideologues

  Advocates of far-right policies

  Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, the Mercers, the Kochs, Peter Thiel, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, the NRA and its spokespersons, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Erik Prince.

  Russian Assets

  Putin puppets

  Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Devin Nunes, Carter Page, Dana Rohrabacher, Seb Gorka, Rex Tillerson, Michael Cohen.

  Nutjobs

  God knows what these people were thinking

  Mike Flynn, Ben Carson, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and most of Trump’s celebrity following.

  There is some overlap, of course, in this venal Venn diagram, but if we start to look at the motivations of Trump’s circle, the picture becomes less of a jumbled mess.

  OTHER THAN DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF, the three most important characters in the collusion narrative, in my mind, are Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and Jared Kushner. They are the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of Trump/Russia.

  Paul Manafort is Bond-villain-level bad. He’s spent most of his adult life as a Washington-based lobbyist for unsavory foreign leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, and Viktor Yanukovych, as well as various Russian oligarchs and Pakistan’s ISI.2 He raked in a boatload of money from his recent misadventures in Ukraine. It was after he became chairman of the Trump campaign that the Russian meetings took place, so it stands to reason that he was the man who initiated the collusion, probably at the behest of his Kremlin whoremasters.

  A former general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Mike Flynn was a lobbyist for both Turkey and Russia throughout the campaign, which he failed to disclose. A Qatari financier bragged about having bribed him, and there is reason to believe that this boast is true. Trump hired him despite ample warnings from the likes of President Obama and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates that he was bad news, and named him national security adviser—granting him access to eyes-only secrets, the choicest cuts of US intelligence. Trump defends him to this day, despite the fact that Flynn has already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

  As for Jared Kushner, I read it this way: when he joined the Trump campaign in the fall of 2015, he was neither straight-up evil like Manafort or touched like Flynn. Rather, the president’s son-in-law was arrogant, opportunistic, creative…and end-of-his-rope desperate.

  This made Mr. Ivanka the perfect mark for Vladimir Putin.

  * * *

  1 Sater, it should be noted, may well turn out to be an FBI plant and a white hat.

  2 If you have some free time, Google these people. They are all scum of the earth.

  IV.

  BOY WONDER MEETS THE COUNT:

  The Turning of Jared Kushner

  THE BEST WAY TO EXPLAIN TRUMP/RUSSIA, it seems to me, is to focus on one key player (Jared Kushner) and one key time period (March-July, 2016). That was when the Faustian bargain was made between the Trump campaign and Russia—when it was decided that Donald Trump would accept help (and dirty rubles) from Vladimir Putin in order to win the White House.

  To be fair, Jared Kushner did not set out to betray his country. He didn’t grow up in Livingston, New Jersey, a ten-minute drive from my own suburban hometown, with big dreams of becoming a KGB asset. I will give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But that’s what he did, and that’s what he became.

  Kushner is notoriously private. Secretive, even. He’s had a Twitter account for nine years and has yet to post a single tweet. He rarely gives interviews. I’ve heard his voice exactly twice. He’s basically the J.D. Salinger of the Trump Administration. Most of what we know about him derives from Steven Bertoni’s excellent Forbes profile of 22 November 2016, a few weeks after the election, which tells the story of how “Boy Wonder” Jared applied Moneyball principles to the flailing, disorganized Trump campaign, and won his father-in-law the White House. That profile offers insight into Kushner’s critical role with both the campaign and its dealings with Russia, and demands a second (and third and fourth) reading in light of what we’ve discovered in the interim.

  What follows in the rest of this chapter is a dramatization of events, based on the Forbes piece and lots and lots of other reporting. I am taking a few liberties with how I tell the story, for dramatic effect. But this is basically what went down:

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, Jared Kushner was living large. He was young and fabulously wealthy. His wife was gorgeous and well known. He was a Millennial one-percenter, a rich Manhattan Democrat, enjoying his privileged lot in life. He was not interested in politics, much less politics involving Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

  Then, in November of 2015, he formally joined his father-in-law’s seat-of-the-pants campaign—and all of that changed.

  Fast-forward to the following March. Jared Kushner had been an active member of the Trump campaign for almost five months. His work with social media had been a smashing success, impressing his easily-bewildered father-in-law. After Kushner took over, “the Trump campaign went from selling $8,000 worth of hats and other items a day to $80,000,” accor
ding to the profile at Forbes, “generating revenue, expanding the number of human billboards–and proving a concept.”

  Moreover, by March 2016, Trump had sewn up enough delegates that the Republican nomination looked like a sure thing. Maybe it wasn’t 50/50 that he’d win the White House that November, but a victory was still in the realm of possibility.

  But then reports trickled out about unhappy delegates, a disgruntled GOP establishment, and the unthinkable prospect of a contested convention that July. Could Ted Cruz or John Kasich somehow pull the chair right out from under Trump’s prodigious derrière?

  So Kushner did a little research on contested conventions. He learned that the last time that had happened to the GOP was back in 1976, when President Ford managed to stave off a challenge by California governor Ronald Reagan. (This was ancient history to him; Kushner was not even born until 1981.) The man in charge of Ford’s effort back in ‘76 was a young Republican strategist and lawyer named Paul Manafort, who would later broker conventions for George H.W. Bush in ’88 and Bob Dole in ‘96.

  Not only did Manafort have truck with the GOP establishment, but given his experience with brokering conventions, he seemed uniquely qualified to lead Trump to the nomination. Too, he owned an apartment in Trump Tower, and in fact had known Trump for decades. When Tom Barrack, a billionaire real estate investor and friend of both men, suggested that Trump hire Manafort, Kushner was delighted. On 28 March 2016, with the enthusiastic blessing of the Boy Wonder, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign.

  Although Manafort had not worked on a US race in 20 years, the consensus in the media was that this was a smart hire. Here was a seasoned pro who would bring establishment bona fides to the upstart campaign. Kushner was certainly charmed by the guy. Nicknamed “The Count” during his days as a convention broker, the 67-year-old Manafort was well-educated, worldly, independently wealthy, and smart—in stark contrast to the provincial mouthbreathers comprising most of Trump’s team, especially loutish then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, whom Kushner disliked.

  What Kushner did not realize is that during those two decades spent away from convention-brokering, Paul Manafort had been spending most of his time with a host of unsavory characters: despots, mostly, from foreign dictatorships—and, more recently, a pair of shady Russian oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska and Dmytro Firtash. His most recent client, Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine, was a particularly noxious fellow. All three men were thick as thieves with Vladimir Putin.

  Kushner did not know that Manafort had been paid many millions of dollars by Yanukovych, illegally. He did not know that Manafort was in dire financial straits, and that Russian intelligence has made a cottage industry of “turning” powerful Americans with money problems. He had never heard the word kompromat. He did not know that Manafort was, in effect, an agent of the Kremlin.

  So when the charming, debonair, non-mouthbreather Paul Manafort suggested that he, Kushner, take a call with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Kushner did so. And he was glad he did! Kislyak, like Manafort, was smart and charming and funny, and seemed to have really good ideas on how they could work together.

  And when Manafort suggested that they move the big foreign policy speech scheduled for 28 April 2016 from the National Press Club to the Mayflower Hotel, so that Kislyak and some of his cronies could attend, Kushner not only agreed—he helped organize the event. That spring evening, after a cocktail party at which Kislyak hobnobbed with virtually every key campaign figure, Trump in his speech promised a “good deal” for Russia, while dutifully refraining from any criticism of Putin.

  This all seemed on the up-and-up to Kushner. He was following the lead of Manafort, after all, whom the Republican establishment still respected—and not some brash idiot like Lewandowski.

  What Kushner also may not have realized is that Kislyak was a KGB spymaster in addition to being an ambassador…and that already, he was being recruited.

  RUSSIA IS AN AUTOCRACY. Its elections are a sham, its government riddled with corruption, its human rights record deplorable. The purpose of its lousy economy, almost exclusively based on petroleum, is to enrich the despotic Vladimir Putin and his profligate cronies, who are collectively called oligarchs.

  A vast segment of Russia’s total wealth is in the hands of these oligarchs, most of it gained through corrupt and/or criminal means, much of it secreted away overseas, in quasi-Western places like Cyprus. The sanctions imposed on Russia by Barack Obama targeted the oligarchs personally, which was why they were so brutally effective—and why Putin wanted them lifted at all costs. Furthermore, for Putin to continue to stay in power, he needed a stronger economy. He also required propaganda so he could paint the West as just as weak, corrupt, and authoritarian as Russia. The sanctions hurt him badly on both fronts.

  A Donald Trump presidency, as unlikely as it seemed in early 2016, would be a godsend to Putin. Trump was a megalomaniac with the heart of an autocrat, an easily-flattered weakling who would screw up America’s standing in the world, who would bring chaos to the West, and who would, crucially, lift the sanctions. Here was a man who already openly admired Putin, who was actively trying to start a massive real estate project in Moscow...and whom Putin could easily blackmail. Kompromat had already been collected on Trump during his visit to Moscow in 2013, in the form of strange sex tapes; the campaign was sure to produce more lurid dirt.1

  To achieve his aims, Putin routinely enlisted his friends at the KGB to compromise key Americans and turn them into pawns in his own geopolitical chess game. Usually this involved money: one of his oligarchs would do a shady business deal, or help finance a campaign illegally, and boom, an American was in his thrall. One of his turned Americans, the general Mike Flynn, had already penetrated Trump’s inner circle. Another, Carter Page, had ingratiated himself into Trump’s foreign policy team.

  But on 28 March 2016, Putin could not believe his luck. The Trump campaign, more or less on its own, had taken the Yanukovych consultant Paul Manafort, one of his most compromised American assets—a man who was almost comically in Russia’s back pocket—and inserted him directly into the campaign! Spasibo, guys!

  Putin already had dirt on Trump. He already had Flynn in his pocket. He already had Page listed as a foreign affairs adviser for the campaign. He had the Green Party’s Jill Stein, whom he’d personally dined in Moscow in 2015, poised to siphon votes from Hillary Clinton on the left. He’d already hacked into both the DNC and RNC servers, and had emails of both to release through WikiLeaks, which Russia was actively supporting, at the moment of his choosing. He knew he could unleash his army of social media “bots” to manipulate the election in Trump’s favor...but he needed some help on the inside. Manafort would provide that inside help.

  All that remained, as Putin saw it, was to turn Jared Kushner. If he had Trump’s son-in-law, the presumed brains of the operation and the director of Trump’s social media operation, he was in like...well, like Flynn.

  JARED KUSHNER WAS IMPRESSED. The phone call with Sergei Kislyak had gone well, and meeting him in person at the Mayflower had been even better. The ambassador was funny, charming, insightful, and eager to help. Kislyak also seemed to know about the Kushner company’s financial pickle. See, Kushner needed another $1 billion in loans—that’s billion, with a “b”—in order to retain ownership of 666 Fifth Avenue, a white elephant of a Manhattan skyscraper, and stave off possible bankruptcy. American banks had not exactly been lining up to help, but the ambassador hinted that financial institutions in Europe might be more sympathetic to his predicament.2

  Meanwhile, Manafort was giving him excellent advice on the social media front, steering him and his tech guy Brad Parscale to a British firm, Cambridge Analytica, which in less than a week was already making massive inroads. Per Forbes:

  Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes
and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most….Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.

  Before Manafort came aboard, Kushner never really thought Trump could pull it off. But now that he was in such capable hands? The idea of President Trump was not so far-fetched. He’d come this far, staked his own reputation. Unlike most of his associates on the campaign, he liked Hillary Clinton well enough. But he had his own reasons for wanting to win this thing. The survival of his business may well hinge on it.

  So when his brother-in-law, the doltish Donald J. Trump, Jr., sent him an email about a meeting with a Russian attorney who promised incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, Kushner’s interest was piqued. If this attorney could deliver what she promised, it might be a game-changer.

  One thing made Jared Kushner nervous: the people Trump favored tended to be Chatty Cathys. Corey Lewandowski, for example. Junior. Steve Bannon. And of course Trump himself. If Kushner were to coordinate with the Russians, he needed to be able to trust that his comrades would keep their mouths shut. Loose lips, dot dot dot. He also had to make sure not to leave a paper trail, if these meetings were to continue. Sending an email, he decided, was an unwise thing for Junior to have done.

  He took these concerns to Manafort, who agreed, but assured him that the meeting would be okay to attend. How could they know what the attorney would say? What was important, however, was to keep Trump himself away from the gathering. It was bad enough that he knew about it at all. Given that the meeting was to take place at Trump Tower, and that Trump would be in the building, keeping him away was a tall order.