Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Cohen quickly agreed to come to St. Petersburg. But on June 14, just two days before the forum, he abruptly told Sater he was pulling out.

  This timing, along with Cohen’s gruff manner in aborting the trip to Russia for a potential meeting with Putin, is fascinating. On June 14, Cohen met with Sater “in the lobby” of Trump Tower—i.e., he wouldn’t even bring Sater up to the office. Succinctly, Cohen told his friend that he would not be making the trip to Russia “at that time.” Notably, the brush-off had actually started on June 9. That’s when Sater began sending “numerous messages to Cohen about the trip, including travel forms for Cohen to complete.” But beginning June 9, Cohen cut Sater off, wanting nothing to do with Russia.

  So what was going on that so abruptly suspended Trump Tower Moscow? I suspect it had a lot to do with what was going on in Trump Tower Manhattan.

  The Trump Tower Meeting

  June 9, 2016, was the day the hurtling Trump campaign’s amateurish ways caught up with it, the day its top officials allowed Donald Trump to be had by Vladimir Putin. The campaign was duped into participating in a Russian lobbying session—with the potential that Donald Trump could be compromised if Putin decided to publicize the meeting and spin it as he saw fit.

  The Trumps were neither political people nor old intel hands schooled in the wiles of Russian influence operations. They were winging this. The New York real estate world from which they come is cut-throat and mobbed up, but it is a world where personal relationships count. Donald Trump supposed that he had struck up such a relationship with Aras Agalarov, a Russian real-estate tycoon sometimes referred to as the “Trump of Russia” because he self-brands his buildings. In 2013, he was Trump’s partner and host when the New York magnate brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. Back then, Agalarov was already being quoted in state-run media about his Crocus Group conglomerate’s negotiations to become Trump’s partner in developing a Trump Tower in the Russian capital.6

  You’ll not be surprised to hear that Agalarov has close ties to Putin and the regime—having such ties being how you get to become and remain a billionaire in the industries of a ruthless dictatorship that poses as a free-market democracy. Russia’s oligarchs no doubt have some close personal relationships with colleagues and peers, but they never forget where their loyalties lie.

  Agalarov has a pop star son, Emin, whose British publicist, Rob Goldstone, was also friendly with the Trump family. On June 3, 2016, Goldstone emailed Donald Trump’s oldest son with a proposition from the Agalarovs. Don Jr., then thirty-eight, had been groomed to lead the family business; now he was trying his hand at politics in a national presidential campaign—a feat akin to promoting your high school’s second-line starter to triple-A so he can get ready to pitch for the Yankees next week. Goldstone claimed that Russia’s chief prosecutor had just met with Aras Agalarov and “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.” Goldstone stressed that this was “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.”

  Minutes later, Don Jr. emailed back, telling Goldstone, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” By the late summer, of course, the campaign stretch run would be on. An explosive revelation against Mrs. Clinton at that point could tilt the race in Trump’s favor. Don Jr. agreed to speak directly with Emin Agalarov to work out the logistics of transferring the information.

  It turns out that this information was not actually a file from the chief Russian prosecutor. We might think of it, instead, as the second Fusion GPS dossier.7

  As we’ve already observed, while Glenn Simpson, Chris Steele and the Fusion gang were (as they’d have you believe) heroically working against the Putin regime’s plot to install a Kremlin stooge in the White House, they were also not so heroically working for Putin’s regime by scheming to undermine whistleblowers who were risking their lives to expose Moscow’s corruption. Naturally, Simpson wouldn’t want to look at it that way. He’d tell you Fusion was merely doing litigation research for a law-firm that was defending a client. But that client was Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based investment company controlled by Denis Katsyv, the son of Pyotr Katsyv, a powerful Putin crony who runs the regime’s national railroad system.

  In 2013, Prevezon was sued by the Justice Department in an asset-forfeiture action focused on breathtaking Kremlin fraud and brutality.8 It arose out of a $230 million swindle orchestrated by the Putin regime, which later involved the detention, torture, and murder of Sergey Magnitsky, who exposed the scheme. The Justice Department’s lawsuit dealt specifically with the regime’s fleecing of an investment fund called Hermitage. Years earlier, Hermitage’s chief executive officer, Bill Browder, retained Magnitsky, an auditor at a Moscow law firm, to investigate the Russian government’s role in the fraud. It was this investigative accounting that led to Magnitsky’s brutal killing. Outrage over that atrocity induced Congress to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act—reluctantly signed by President Obama, after his administration tried to derail its passage, which threatened to complicate the Russia Reset then being steered by Secretary of State Clinton.9 The act enables the federal government to seize and forfeit fraud proceeds. That hits Putin’s kleptocracy where it lives, and thus has provoked a furious Kremlin campaign to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. A key component of that campaign is the smearing of Bill Browder.

  The repeal effort has been spearheaded by the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, with Glenn Simpson and Fusion providing valuable assistance on the Browder front.

  It was the Magnitsky Act that the Justice Department used to sue Prevezon. Veselnitskaya is Prevezon’s lawyer in Moscow, and she helped the company retain American counsel to defend them in the suit—a lawyer ironically named John Moscow and his firm, Baker Hostetler. These lawyers, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to do research on Browder and Hermitage for litigation purposes. Veselnitskaya was ultimately indicted for obstructing justice in the case, based on her collaboration with the Russian government in providing the court an official document purporting to exonerate Putin regime operatives and Prevezon.10

  As became painfully evident during Simpson’s congressional testimony, while he poses as the gold-standard of objectivity, his outrage is selective and powerfully influenced by whoever happens to be paying him. He made it his business, in the Prevezon case and various other forums, to abominate Browder. But what about the Kremlin that has a target on Browder’s back?11 What about Putin’s pals the Katsyvs? What about the shady regime-tied lawyer Veselnitskaya? All Simpson could say in his testimony was that he assumed his paying clients were good upstanding people since they were being represented by a respected U.S. law-firm, and that Veselnitskaya seemed like a smart, ambitious lawyer. But, gee whiz, Simpson wouldn’t be able to tell you more than that because she only speaks Russian, and Simpson doesn’t—the Russia expert helping represent a Russian business says he has no idea what the Russian lawyer might have been jabbering about at their meetings.12

  Fusion was doing the anti-Browder research for Putin’s cronies at the same time it was doing the Trump–Putin research for the Clinton campaign.13 Unfortunately, such projects have a way of crashing into each other. The Browder examination turned up the nugget that the billionaire Ziff family invests with Browder. Ziff Brothers Investments also backs the Clinton Global Initiative (a project of the Clinton Foundation), the Democratic party, and various Democratic candidates. Because of their ties to Browder (and the low bar for accusing those who cross the regime), Russia decided that the Ziff brothers’ income involves Russian tax and fraud violations.14

  Laughably, this was the “very high level and sensitive information” that was hyped to Don Trump Jr. as certain to “incriminate Hillary Clinton.”

  Even as Putin’s regime steers its country into steep decline, we tend to imagine
the Russians are both ten feet tall and ten moves ahead on the chessboard. They’re not. It is surely possible that, with no experience in the electoral politics of a free society, the Russians did not grasp American campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by donors, even if the allegation were colorable, would not damage a candidate as long as the candidate was not complicit. Maybe someone in the regime really believed this Ziff–Browder stuff was dynamite campaign dirt.

  Far more likely, though, was that the offer of information to Don Trump Jr. was a pretext and a lure. The Kremlin is fixated on Browder and on reversing the Magnitsky Act. By conning Don Jr. into taking a meeting, the Russians could kill two birds with one stone. First, they could lobby the Trump campaign’s top echelon against the Magnitsky Act (just as they have been lobbying anyone in Washington who would listen). Second, Putin would gain leverage over Trump: by agreeing to meet a Kremlin emissary on the promise of receiving damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign made its principal vulnerable—at a time advantageous to Russia, Putin could threaten to expose the meeting, which would damage Trump politically. (Indeed, the exposure of the meeting—not by Putin but by The New York Times’s impressive investigative journalism—has done exactly that.15)

  ‘Waste of Time’

  Veselnitskaya was chosen to be the regime’s emissary to meet with Don Jr. on June 9. She was coming to the United States from Moscow for a hearing in the Prevezon case that morning, in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan. And wouldn’t you know it: she met with Glenn Simpson both before and after the Trump Tower meeting—which meetings, Simpson is certain, had absolutely nothing to do with the Trump Tower session at which Veselnitskaya used Fusion’s anti-Browder research … although Simpson did concede that he understood from Denis Katsyv’s U.S. lawyers that the information he’d unearthed would be provided to Veselnitskaya if “it was useful and interesting to her.”16

  For its part, the Russian side seems to have understood that the Browder–Ziff information (i.e., the Hillary dirt) was useless. Despite the signals sent to Don Jr. about the purpose of the meeting, Aras Agalarov called his United States–based Crocus employee, Ike Kavaladze, on June 6, instructing him to attend a meeting with the Trump organization that would concern the Magnitsky Act. Kavaladze was to act as Veselnitskaya’s translator. To prepare him, Agalarov quizzed him about the Magnitsky Act and sent him a short synopsis for the meeting, as well as Veselnitskaya’s business card.17

  After the Second Circuit hearing on the morning of June 9, Veselnitskaya convened a lunch in Manhattan to get ready for the Trump Tower meeting that afternoon. She invited Rinat Akhmetshin, a slick, Soviet-born American biochemist and lobbyist with longstanding ties to the Russian military and intelligence services. Akhmetshin had worked on behalf of Putin cronies; in fact, he was working for the Katsyvs in the Prevezon case, just like Veselnitskaya and Simpson. He had also helped Veselnitskaya with anti–Magnitsky Act lobbying initiatives.18 There has also been plausible hypothesizing (mainly by Lee Smith) that Akhmetshin is one of Christopher Steele’s sources, but this is no more confirmed than most anything else about the Steele dossier.19 In any event, Veselnitskaya also invited Kavaladze to the lunch, as well as Anatoli Samochornov, another Russian translator who worked on both the Prevezon case and the anti-Magnitsky lobbying. At the lunch, Veselnitskaya showed Akhmetshin a document alleging that Browder and the Ziff brothers had engaged in financial misconduct and later made donations to the DNC.20

  From lunch, this group of four Russians (Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, Kavaladze, and Samochornov), along with Rob Goldstone, made their way to Trump Tower. There, they met in the Trump offices with Don Trump Jr., Jared Kushner (the now-president’s son-in-law and adviser), and Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager. The meeting was a dud. After Don Jr. invited Veselnitskaya to begin her presentation, she alleged that the Ziff brothers had violated Russian law, earning profits which had then been donated to the DNC or the Clinton campaign, suggesting they could be convicted of tax evasion and money laundering under American and Russian law. But when Don Jr. asked a few basic questions, such as how any of these funds could be traced to the Clinton campaign, Veselnitskaya replied that she had no idea, since she could not say what became of the money once it entered the United States.

  Kushner became visibly irritated, asking, “What are we doing here?” He texted Manafort that the meeting was a “waste of time” and emailed his Kushner Companies subordinates to ring him so he’d have an excuse to leave—which he did on cue. Meantime, Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya pivoted to their opposition to Russia’s Magnitsky Act, which had prompted Putin, in retaliation, to ban U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Apparently realizing that the promise of campaign dirt had just been a way for Russian lobbyists to get in the door, Trump Jr. curtly explained that his father, as a private citizen, was in no position to address the Magnitsky issue; perhaps, they could revisit it if Trump were elected. The meeting broke up after just twenty minutes, with Goldstone apologizing to Don Jr. for its futility.21

  Again, it was on the date of this failed confab that then-Trump organization lawyer Michael Cohen began blowing off Felix Sater’s requests that Cohen complete the final preparations for the Russia trip. Despite Cohen’s patent enthusiasm for it just a few days earlier, the trip was canceled. Surely, it had dawned on the campaign that the Kremlin could be working to compromise Donald Trump.

  As Special Counsel Mueller concluded, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Donald Trump was informed about the Trump Tower meeting.22 To my mind, this is largely beside the point; it would be ridiculous to suggest that Don Jr. would have gone forward with plan to get campaign dirt on Clinton from Russia unless he believed his father would approve. Like many things in electoral politics, this was icky but there was nothing illegal about it. The hysteria over the fact that Trump would take oppo from foreign sources, including adversary governments, is especially rich given that, at that very moment, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was paying for a foreign former spy to obtain oppo on Trump from Kremlin sources—while simultaneously tapping Ukrainian government sources for oppo, which was deployed to rock the Trump campaign and force Manafort’s ouster.

  By the late spring of 2016, Trump’s favorable comments about Putin and his selection of Russia sympathizer Carter Page as a foreign policy adviser were already turning Russia into a campaign issue, exploited by Hillary Clinton and fretted over by Trump skeptics and opponents in Republican circles. Obviously, it would have been politically damaging had it been publicly revealed that the Trump campaign, at its top level, met with a Kremlin-tied lawyer in hopes of scoring campaign dirt. Moreover, it would have been politically damaging had it been revealed that Trump’s organization was in serious negotiations to build Trump Tower Moscow. Not only would that have put the lie to the candidate’s insistence that he had no business of consequence in Russia; it would have suggested that Trump expected to lose the election and was laying the groundwork to dive back into his real estate business.

  Ironically, these episodes were unknown to the FBI when they occurred. The Bureau, busy scouring Britain for Trump–Russia evidence, missed what was happening under its nose in New York City—even though Veselnitskaya was deeply involved in a Justice Department lawsuit, was working for the Putin regime and meeting with likely regime operatives, and needed the federal government’s permission to travel to the United States. Nevertheless, Trump Tower Moscow and the Trump Tower meeting in Manhattan would become major staples of the collusion narrative. They dogged Trump for two years of his presidency and gave the special counsel a rationale to continue the investigation—despite the dearth of evidence that Trump was in an espionage conspiracy with Putin—because Trump and his subordinates made matters incalculably worse by lying about them.

  Michael Cohen perjured himself before Congress, telling lawmakers the Trump Tower Moscow deal had petered out in January 2016, when in fact negotiations continued throughout that year,
while Trump ran for the presidency.

  When The New York Times discovered the Trump Tower meeting, President Trump directed the release of a statement, attributed to Don Jr., which created the false impression that the meeting had been about an issue concerning “the adoption of Russian children”—i.e., the fallout of the Magnitsky Act. The president overruled his advisers, particularly Hope Hicks, who had implored him to permit the release of the emails and get out in front of the potential eruption. Only when Don Jr. learned that the Times had and was about to publish his emails, showing that he took the meeting on the expectation of getting damaging information against Mrs. Clinton, did he admit that this was a purpose of his sit-down with Veselnitskaya.23 At that point, the president changed his tune, rationalizing that there was nothing wrong with a campaign’s accepting opposition research (which was true, but a little late in the day). The president, his lawyers, and his advisers also hemmed and hawed about whether he had dictated the misleading statement that had been put out in his son’s name—until the president waived off the question as “irrelevant” because lying to the media (and, by extension, to the public) is not a crime. As he put it, “It’s a statement to The New York Times.… That’s not a statement to a high tribunal of judges.”24 In the interim, some Trump apologists veered between claiming that Veselnitskaya was not a Kremlin emissary and claiming that she had been steered to Trump Tower by the Obama Justice Department—both absurd contentions.25

  These missteps were part of a larger pattern. Donald Trump was the main target of the fraudulent collusion narrative, but his instinct to issue false denials was reliable fuel for the collusion fire. Not for nothing is he often called his own worst enemy—which, for a guy with lots of enemies, is saying something.