Dirty Rubles Read online

  “He can call in if need be,” Manafort said, “but he cannot be in the room.” Kushner agreed. Manafort further suggested that they bring Reince Priebus, the chair of the RNC, to Trump Tower to babysit the candidate while the meeting took place—to mitigate the temptation for Trump to crash the meeting. Kushner thought this was legit genius.

  The fateful meeting took place on the afternoon of 9 June 2016. In attendance were Rob Goldstone, a flamboyant British music publicist who used to write for the tabloids; Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney; two Russian representatives of Trump’s Azeri-Russian oligarch chum Aras Agalarov; and a Putin-picked translator. After some pleasantries, Veselnitskaya went on a long tirade about adoptions, which irritated Kushner: apparently some piece of legislation, the Magnitsky Act, was preventing Americans from adopting Russian children. Her arguments were passionate. Then one of the men piped up, mentioning some amazing way a Russian tech company could “weaponize” Facebook and other social media against Hillary Clinton. All they needed was more information about exactly where and how to do so—information Kushner was intimately acquainted with, thanks to his association with Cambridge Analytica.

  Were the Russians proposing some sort of quid pro quo without explicitly saying so? Kushner glanced at Manafort, who was fiddling with his phone; The Count seemed to already know what was going to be discussed. Junior was saying something with much bluster and no meaning, as he was wont to do. Kushner decided that the Russians did indeed have something worthwhile to offer, but if word of this ever leaked out, he would personally hang for it. The rest of his crew were blithe about the legal risks, because they did not really understand the stakes. But Kushner’s father Charles had gone to prison; Kushner would not make the same mistake as his old man. So he quickly excused himself.

  After the Russians left, Manafort didn’t give Donald Trump the full details. He only told him what to say next: “Hit Hillary about the missing emails. Hit her hard. Don’t stop. People don’t like her, people don’t trust her, and the email thing confirms their suspicions. That private email server of hers is going to give you the White House.”3

  Trump took to Twitter that same afternoon and tweeted a reply to an earlier Clinton tweet: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up—and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”

  This was Trump’s first mention of Hilary’s 33,000 “missing” emails.

  It would not be the last.

  Kushner, meanwhile, knew that such an operation would have to be done in secret. He set about dreaming up ways to keep the dialogue with the Russians open without the press—or, worse, the Democrats—finding out.

  THE CAPABILITIES OF THE RUSSIAN CYBER AGENTS were astonishing. Given the proper data, they could use social media to hammer home whatever narrative they wanted to promote, and make sure that the only ones who saw were the micro-targeted audience. And thanks to its shady relationship with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica had all the data. The crazy shit that people could be made to believe, if it turned up in their Facebook feed!

  It was like a turbo boost on what Kushner’s people were already doing.

  It was like fixing the 1919 World Series.

  After the meeting, Kushner was convinced he’d need the Russians to win the election. Every subsequent move he made aimed to achieve that result. On 21 June 2016, the mouthbreather Lewandowski was fired as campaign chairman—he’d manhandled a female reporter, not that Trump gave a shit, but it was a good excuse to get rid of him—and replaced by Manafort. Manafort immediately arranged a VIP meeting on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the primary purpose of which was to soften the party’s platform on Russian involvement in Ukraine—a symbolic gesture, perhaps, but the symbolism was clear: Republicans heart Russia. That this was the only substantive change made to the 60-page platform is telling. Manafort also convinced Trump to select beleaguered Indian governor Mike Pence, an evangelical darling, as his running mate; Pence had email issues of his own, but he kept his mouth shut, was as sycophantic as it was possible to be, and his loyalty was absolute.

  Kushner considered the options. Was it worth lifting some pesky sanctions in exchange for all that help with the election? Of course it was. And the beauty part was, because of the clandestine nature of the internet, it would be impossible to say for sure whether Russian hackers were involved. Oh, the intelligence agencies may say so, but this was complicated stuff. Who would the American people believe, the Washington spooks who screwed up our entrée into Iraq, or “straight shooter” Trump?

  So Boy Wonder gave his consent.

  Two months later, Manafort was gone. His ties to Ukraine, and through Ukraine to Russia, had made him a political liability. Kushner let it be known to some reporters that he was uneasy about these connections, so that the press would paint him as unaware of whatever Russia stuff might come out, but it didn’t matter. The media was not much interested in Moscow ties, Manafort’s or anyone else’s. After The Count’s departure in August, there were still debates to cover, and the horse-race of the most consequential presidential tilt in a generation. Kushner couldn’t believe how much the press flat-out missed. For one thing: the $285 million loan he was able to procure from Deutsche Bank on 8 October. It was almost like the bank somehow knew Trump was going to win the election, because without the imprimatur of the White House, how could Kushner ever hope to repay such a vast sum?

  And then, later that month, something happened that overshadowed the rest of the news…

  * * *

  1 The “pee-pee tape” is largely thought to be apocryphal, but the BBC reports that the consensus among the IC is that there are tapes, plural, of Donald Trump engaged in activities much more heinous.

  2 After an initial loan in October from Deutsche Bank, Kushner would eventually receive this ginormous loan. As of this writing, we don’t know the identity of the creditor. Crucially, it is not American.

  3 To be clear: this is my conservative version of the events. We may well learn that Trump knew all about the meeting, and even listened in by phone.

  V.

  SEXTS, LIES & VIDEOTAPE:

  October Surprises

  ON 7 OCTOBER 2016, trouble came for the Trump campaign. The Washington Post posted a video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood, in which the former could be heard saying some horrible things:

  I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily….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. She’s totally changed her look…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. You can do anything.

  Trump was already loathed by the social justice warriors, the feminists, the cuck libtard snowflakes; he’d already been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women. There was even a statutory rape case against him, brought by a then-13-year-old victim, which his fixers had somehow managed to quash. But that was allegation, many years old, easily refuted. Now there was audio. There was video. There were witnesses. How could Trump recover from this?

  The Trump/Russia defense team had a plan. Through seasoned dirty trickster Roger Stone—a lobbyist partner of Paul Manafort once upon a time, and the youngest of Nixon’s notorious “ratfuckers”—the Trump organization coordinated with WikiLeaks, the self-styled journalist organization that is actually an organ of Russian intelligence, about the release of the hacked emails in its possession. Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks—who had been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2006 to avoid sexual assault charges of his own—was forever extolling the virtues of full transparency. But to indiscriminately publish a tranche of stolen emails is not transparency, it is invasion of privacy—and it
is dangerous.1 Donald Trump, Jr. was in contact with WikiLeaks during the campaign, and Candidate Trump lauded the organization many times on the campaign trail. “I love WikiLeaks!” he proudly proclaimed.

  Within hours of the Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks began publishing emails stolen from John Podesta, the chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign, by Russian hackers. That there wound up being little of interest in the emails was irrelevant—the press felt compelled to stop covering Trump’s Access Hollywood gaffe and read through the dumped documents. That journalists had no right to publish the illegally-obtained emails did not stop most outlets from doing so. Few seemed to call this what it was: an act of political sabotage.

  But the WikiLeaks operation, while effective, paled in comparison to what Trump’s dirty tricksters pulled off next.

  In coordination with rogue agents at the FBI’s New York field office—a division so devoted to the Republican candidate that it was nicknamed “Trumplandia”—Trump’s people coerced James Comey, the director of the FBI, to not only re-open the investigation into the missing Hillary Clinton emails…but to publicly confirm that he did so.

  From the outside, it looked like this:

  On 26 October, former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani boasted on TV about an October surprise coming that would mortally wound Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She was way up in the polls at the time, so most people wrote this off as the ranting of a deranged, hateful old man. But Rudy was right.

  Two days later, Comey sent his infamous letter to Congress, explaining that more Hillary Clinton emails had been found on a laptop recovered from the home of disgraced former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, and that the Bureau was investigating the matter.2 The letter was promptly leaked by Utah’s Jason Chaffetz, a big Trump cheerleader and Benghazi enthusiast.

  OMG! The missing emails had been found! And they were scandalous!

  Republicans had a field day with this bombshell, which seemed to confirm all their worst suspicions about “Crooked Hillary”—and, it must be said, to fit in pretty nicely with the fake news that the Russian bots were promulgating on social media. The press fed on the email story like pigs in at the proverbial trough…or, if you prefer, like vampires on a virgin. Anonymous sources at the FBI (read: the “Trumplandia” New York field office) told Brett Baier of Fox News that the case against Hillary was “likely an indictment.” Baier reported this on the air on 2 November 2016—just six days before the election.

  Hillary Clinton. Missing emails. Indictment.

  By the time Comey announced that the emails were duplicates, that nothing new or incriminating had been found—and by the time Baier apologized for his mistake—the damage had been done.

  No less an authority than Nate Silver believes that absent the Comey letter, Hillary’s victory would have been “almost certain.”

  THE ACCESS HOLLYWOOD TAPE should have been the end of Donald Trump’s candidacy. And then the Comey letter snatched victory from the proverbial jaws of defeat. How had this sudden and unexpected turn of events happen?

  On 9 June 2016 a new “news” website appeared: True Pundit. At first, True Pundit presented as yet another rightwing aggregator, with links to conservative concerns like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Fox News, and InfoWars curated by a pseudonymous figure calling himself Thomas Paine, after the famed Revolutionary pamphleteer.

  After the Pulse Nightclub massacre of 12 June 2016, True Pundit revealed itself to have actual sources at the FBI—specifically, in “Trumplandia.” The site reported stuff only well-placed New York FBI would know. And its aim was as blatantly political as it was crystal clear: Hillary Clinton must be defeated at all costs.

  Early adopters of True Pundit included Donald Trump, Jr., Mike Flynn and his namesake son, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks—and Russian “bots,” who disseminated far and wide a slew of the site’s egregiously false stories about Hillary Clinton: that she tried to have Assange murdered, that she was colluding with Facebook to swing the election, that she was not being straight with the American people about her failing health, and so forth.

  On 2 October 2016, agents of the FBI’s New York field office seized a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had previously been confiscated by the NYPD in connection with his sexting-with-minors case.3 Comey wanted the laptop to be searched immediately for the alleged “missing” Hillary Clinton emails. But his order was ignored. Instead, Trumplandia agents sat on the laptop for weeks and did nothing with it. The closer it was to the election, they knew, the more explosive the laptop’s contents would be…whatever they were.

  Then, in the waning days of October, rogue elements of the Bureau’s New York field office, through their mouthpiece at True Pundit, threatened to leak the “missing” emails supposedly found on the laptop. On 24 October 2016, FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe informed Comey that in his assessment, the True Pundit sources were “heavyweight”—whether the missing emails existed, he could not say; but there really were rogue FBI agents in the know leaking to True Pundit, so it was a possibility.

  This was a bluff. In fact, the Trumplandia operators had no more idea of what was on the laptop than James Comey did. But the Director didn’t know that. Comey didn’t want to take the risk, and have legit missing emails leak. That would make it look like he was hiding something about Hillary Clinton that the American people needed to know. So he decided to get ahead of the story, to cover his ass. He wrote the letter to Congress that turned the election.

  True Pundit’s response to the Comey letter was a work of fiction masquerading as a news article with this lurid headline: “BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury.” With the help of Russian “bots”—as well as the Twitter accounts of Kremlin helpmates like Donald Trump. Jr. and Mike Flynn4—the story got major play. Kushner’s social media barracudas at Cambridge Analytica made sure the piece popped up in the Facebook feeds of anyone on the fence in key swing states.

  On 4 November, Blackwater’s Erik Prince was on Breitbart Radio, echoing the story’s ridiculous claims. “Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it,” Prince told listeners. “Through a subpoena, through a warrant, they searched his laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing. They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein,” a wealthy financier and pedophile.

  The mention of Epstein was particularly brash. It was at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lavish parties that Donald Trump was alleged to have raped his 13-year-old accuser. To summon that particular genie from the bottle took an enormous amount of chutzpah, a quality Prince would again display months later, when he perjured himself before a Congressional committee.

  On 4 November, Giuliani boasted on TV that it was his friends at the Bureau who tipped him off that this was in the works. “Did I hear about it?” he said. “You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the FBI agents.” The next day, the former mayor amended his story, claiming that his sources were former agents.

  We still don’t know the identity of those agents, or of “Thomas Paine,” who runs True Pundit. We do know that Giuliani and Prince, at a minimum, had advance warning of the operation. Donald Trump, Jr. and Mike Flynn, too, seemed to be well aware of what was happening; both retweeted True Pundit almost immediately after the fake story broke, and subsequently deleted the RTs, as if trying to create distance between themselves and the True Pundit Hoax.5

  A week later, Donald Trump would talk about the strength of his victory, the number of electoral votes he received. He would hang a map in his office, proudly displaying all that red.

  But it was C
omey’s letter that turned the election—and the Russians had helped make that happen.

  * * *

  1 It’s also Stalinist. Indeed, one of the first moves made by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution was to publish diplomatic correspondence of the Romanov government.

  2 Weiner’s estranged wife was Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most trusted aide; this is how Clinton’s emails may have appeared on a laptop in that household.

  3 How the NYPD came to find out about this is a bit of a mystery. Louise Mensch has long believed it is the work of Russian hackers, specifically one named Yvegeny Nikulin, who was arrested by INTERPOL in Prague in October 2016. Nikulin was recently extradited to the United States.

  4 True Pundit’s beefs about the FBI mirror the thinking of Mike Flynn, and there is speculation that he was somehow involved in this.

  5 “True Pundit Hoax” is the coinage of Trump/Russia researcher Seth Abramson, whose research informed the bulk of this chapter.

  VI.

  THIEVES-IN-LAW:

  The Brainy Don & The Not-So-Brainy Don

  SO WHAT IF THE RUSSIANS HELPED TRUMP GET ELECTED? Who cares? The libtards are just making a big deal about it because Hillary lost, because they cannot accept that they ran a lousy candidate. Like Trump always says: Isn’t it nice that the two former superpower rivals are now getting along?

  This reasoning is often used as a defense against the allegations of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Donald Trump himself has made this point many times. On 28 April 2016, he told since-fired Bill O’Reilly: “I’m saying that I’d possibly have a good relationship” with Vladimir Putin. “He’s been very nice to me. If we can make a great deal for our country and get along with Russia that would be a tremendous thing. I would love to try it.”