House of Trump, House of Putin2

by Craig Unger

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  Meanwhile, Trump’s candidacy took off like a rocket. In a jam-packed field of seventeen Republican candidates jostling for the nomination, Trump, ever the master showman, surged to the fore, a bombastic New York tycoon pandering to tens of millions of “forgotten” Americans, promising to “make America great again.”

  Having put together a base in part by falsely claiming that President Obama had been born in Kenya and therefore was not eligible to be president, Trump derided Jeb Bush as “low-energy,” Senator Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted,” Senator Marco Rubio as “Little Marco,” and Hillary Clinton always, of course, as “Crooked Hillary.”

  By mid-July, just a few weeks after he announced his candidacy, Trump had claimed first place in two major polls.8 He called Mexicans “rapists.” He mocked war hero John McCain for getting captured. One after another, Trump trampled the widely accepted norms of American political discourse and not only got away with it, but awakened and inflamed the passions of a right-wing anti-immigrant fervor that had been the sleeping giant in American politics. He was so often compared to P. T. Barnum that a Nexis search in May 2018 found more than fifteen hundred articles in which Trump was mentioned with Barnum. He represented something larger than life, even if that reputation never held up to scrutiny.

  Opponents who underestimated the loyalty of his base did so at their peril. The more he broke the rules, the more they loved it. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump told supporters in Iowa about a week before the state’s caucuses.9 “It’s, like, incredible.”

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  The mere fact that Trump was running for president did not mean he had abandoned his dreams of building a Trump Tower in Moscow. Far from it. In fact, the relationship he had cultivated with the Agalarovs was still very much alive. On July 24, 2015, Rob Goldstone, the music promoter who worked with Emin Agalarov, invited Trump to Moscow to celebrate the birthday of Emin’s father, Aras Agalarov, the real estate oligarch.

  In an email to Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff, Goldstone proffered an inducement. “Maybe he would welcome a meeting with President Putin,” Goldstone wrote.10

  Trump didn’t take the bait, but Felix Sater was still traveling to Moscow on behalf of the illusory Trump Tower in Russia. By this time, Bayrock was so deeply entangled in litigation that it had folded its tent. Felix Sater had become a “senior adviser” to Trump and continued to work with his old pal Michael Cohen, trying to draw up deals for Trump. “We did not own real estate together, but certainly looked at a bunch of stuff together, during Trump and post-Trump,” Sater told Talking Points Memo.11 “After I left [Bayrock], I was still looking at deals for Trump, but I would think about real estate with Michael. [It] was just two real estate guys talking.”

  According to emails published by the New York Times, Sater saw the eventual realization of Trump Tower Moscow as a coup for Trump that would enhance his chances as a candidate, not conflict with them. In the emails, Sater boasted to Cohen that he had arranged financing for a Trump Tower in Moscow from VTB, a bank that was under US sanctions for undermining democracy in Ukraine.12

  On November 3, 2015, he also emailed Cohen, “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will.”13

  In one of his emails, Sater vowed to pull out all the stops and use his connections to get Putin to praise Trump’s business expertise. “If he says it we own this election,” Sater wrote. “Americas [sic] most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate.”14

  According to someone familiar with the emails, the Washington Post reported, Sater also wrote Cohen something like, “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?”15

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  Meanwhile, as the Trump campaign staffed up, Russophile policy wonks flocked to Trump’s side and began solidifying their ties to Moscow. On December 15, 2015, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Lieutenant General Michael Flynn attended a gala dinner in Moscow in honor of RT, the Russian media outlet on which Flynn appeared occasionally as an analyst, and sat next to President Putin, leading Politico to characterize him as one of the most intriguing examples of “how the Russians have recruited disaffected members” of the US political establishment.16 Flynn, who had been fired in 2014 as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Obama, was paid approximately $45,000 by the Russians for a giving a speech at a related event.17

  In early January 2016, Carter Page, who had helped open the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch, met with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at Trump Tower and became an unpaid volunteer for the foreign policy committee Trump was said to be forming.18 In March, twenty-eight-year-old George Papadopoulos was recruited to join the foreign policy team as well, and was told improved relations with Russia would be a cornerstone of Trump’s foreign policy.19

  A week later, Papadopoulos flew to Rome and met Joseph Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat based at the London Academy of Diplomacy.20 On March 24, there was a follow-up meeting at which Mifsud was accompanied by a woman Papadopoulos identified wrongly as Putin’s niece. (Putin does not have a niece.)

  After corresponding with the woman, the professor, and others, Papadopoulos met over breakfast in a London hotel with Mifsud, who told him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton: “They [the Russians] have dirt on her . . . they have thousands of emails.”21 After this Papadopoulos “continued to communicate” with the Trump campaign and his Russian government interlocutors.

  In an interview with La Repubblica, the Italian news outlet, Mifsud denied Papadopoulos’s account and said he never stated that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.22

  Trump and Manafort weren’t the only influential Americans to have questionable relations with Russians during this period. Manafort had brought with him Rick Gates, Rick Davis, and Tad Devine from his firm in DC. The lone Democrat in the operation, Devine had worked on both Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s campaigns, and later became the senior campaign strategist for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run. (Tad Devine worked for Yanukovych in the 2006 Ukraine parliamentary elections, in which Yanukovych ended up as prime minister, and the 2010 presidential election, which Yanukovych won.23 Devine did not return a phone call from the author.)*

  Similarly, in 2012, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Ukrainian nonprofit representing Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, employed the Podesta Group, run by Tony Podesta, whose brother, John Podesta, became the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton.25

  By this point, even though most Americans didn’t realize it, Putin and his allies had put money, directly and indirectly, on political consultants who were tied to campaigns for the three strongest candidates for the presidency of the United States in 2016—Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.

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  For all the millions he had made in Ukraine, Manafort had fallen on hard times. Oleg Deripaska’s net worth had plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis, which meant he wanted Manafort to liquidate a fund Manafort was overseeing and give Deripaska back his share—some $17 million, according to financial statements obtained by the New York Times.26 But Manafort had already spent a fortune on real estate, rare antique rugs, and the like. He had blown millions investing in his son-in-law’s real estate ventures and his daughter Jessica’s film. He was out of cash. Rather than pay Deripaska back, according to the indictment, Manafort simply stopped responding to him.27

  Now, with Trump’s ascent, Manafort saw a chance to get back in the
game. He had known Trump for decades, had worked for him on occasion, and kept a condo in Trump Tower, though he said their relationship was largely confined to small talk. So in mid-February, as recounted by Franklin Foer in the Atlantic, Paul Manafort reached out to real estate magnate Tom Barrack, a longtime friend who was also close to Trump.28

  For decades, Manafort had personified the Washington insider, but now he crafted a memo portraying himself as the polar opposite, saying he was a longtime foe of Karl Rove who had “avoided the political establishment in Washington since 2005.”29

  Having charged Ukrainian oligarchs exorbitant fees, Manafort switched his approach when it came to Trump. Any remuneration he might get from the campaign, he seemed to be thinking, was nothing compared to the riches that would come with his newfound influence. As a result, he offered to be Trump’s campaign manager absolutely free of charge.

  Tom Barrack added a cover letter to Trump that described Manafort in terms that were certain to be appealing to the candidate, as “the most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer.” In March, Manafort joined the campaign as an adviser, with Corey Lewandowski still in place as campaign manager.30

  Next, Manafort called Konstantin Kilimnik, the aide-de-camp he had relied on so heavily in Ukraine and who frequently served as Manafort’s go-between with Deripaska.31 Deeply in debt to Deripaska, Manafort nonetheless saw the billionaire as his savior. If he was hired as Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort was certain Deripaska would see things in a new light. Perhaps private briefings on the campaign from Trump’s campaign manager himself would put him back in favor? Manafort sent a batch of press clippings to Kilimnik celebrating his new job with Trump. “How do we use [these articles] to get whole,” Manafort emailed Kilimnik. “Has OVD [Deripaska] operation seen?”32

  Kilimnik replied that he thought that they would “get back to the original relationship” with Deripaska in time. Kilimnik, meanwhile, was a year into running a political consulting firm called Begemot Ventures International (BVI) with a Washington-based operative named Sam Patten, whose relationship with Kilimnik went back nearly two decades, to when they were colleagues at the International Republican Institute, a GOP-aligned foreign policy group.33

  In 2014, Patten had begun working with a data-mining firm called Cambridge Analytica in an effort “to introduce new technologies and methodologies to U.S. campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle.”34 Specializing in “psychographic” profiling, the company used online data to create sophisticated personality profiles for voters, who could then be targeted with specifically tailored messages that could encourage—or discourage—them from voting one way or another.35

  Not long after Manafort came on board, one of his daughters texted the other that Manafort and Trump were “literally living in the same building and . . . they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together,” according to a tweet by New York Times reporter Ken Vogel.36

  As the Republican primaries got under way in early 2016, the “beta run” of Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to microtarget voters for president was adopted by the presidential campaign for Texas senator Ted Cruz.37 But when the Cruz campaign fizzled, Cambridge Analytica persuaded Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, to try out the firm.38

  As Trump won one Republican primary after another in the spring of 2016, and increasingly looked to be the presumed nominee, so the alt-right brain trust gravitated toward his candidacy, including one of the principal owners of Cambridge Analytica, billionaire Robert Mercer, an investor in Breitbart News. In addition, former Breitbart chair Stephen Bannon, a senior adviser to Trump who was sometimes viewed as the candidate’s Svengali, served as vice president of CA’s board until the campaign.39

  Cambridge Analytica was created in 2013 as the American arm of a British company called Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), but, like so much of the Trump-Russia scandal, the story of Cambridge Analytica is shrouded in fog, with parts of its ownership hidden in an elaborate web of interlocking tangential relationships that are difficult to decipher.

  For about ten years, from 2005 to 2015, SCL’s largest shareholder was Vincent Tchenguiz, who, together with his brother Robert, is estimated to be worth about $1.1 billion.40 But according to an article in the online magazine Tablet by Ann Marlowe, an author and visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, Tchenguiz happened to be partners with none other than Dmitry Firtash through his investment in a holding company called the Zander Group, the largest shareholder of which, with 28 percent of the shares, was a Cyprus-based company called Spadi Trading. Spadi was owned by Group DF, as in “Dmitry Firtash.”41 It is unclear whether this relationship had implications for the operations of SCL, but there is no question that a Trump presidency would have been in Firtash’s interests and those of his partner, Semion Mogilevich.

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  Meanwhile, Trump’s astounding success during the primaries had left political analysts dumbfounded. By mid-March, he had dispatched would-be standard bearers of the GOP establishment—former Florida governor and presidential brother and son Jeb Bush, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and others—so that for most of the spring, it was a three-man race, with Trump going up against Texas senator Ted Cruz and Ohio governor John Kasich.

  Then, on May 3, Trump won every delegate in the Indiana primary, which meant that Senator Cruz, his leading adversary, no longer had a road to the Republican nomination. There was so much rancor between the old-guard GOP stalwarts and the Trump insurgency that there was talk about mutiny at the July convention. But the bottom line was Trump had become the presumptive nominee. And that meant he had to build a team for the general election, so he could focus on Clinton.

  To that end, on June 20, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and replaced him with Paul Manafort. Lewandowski had never run a major campaign before, and, as Trump prepared for the possible battle on the floor of the RNC, the stated reason for the personnel shift had to do with Manafort’s vast experience. In 1976, Manafort had helped manage Gerald Ford’s floor fight in his showdown with Ronald Reagan. He and Roger Stone had helped perform a similar service for Reagan in 1980 and had played key roles for George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Bob Dole in 1996. “Ultimately, Paul is in charge,” Barry Bennett, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told the New York Times. “He’s got the experience to help get Mr. Trump across the finish line.”42

  That was the official story—and it was pretty much how the mainstream press presented it. But another way to look at it was that Team Trump had continued to solidify its connections to Team Putin. In addition to having been paid tens of millions by Putin and his allies, Manafort was likely deeply in hock to Deripaska and had already proffered his services to the oligarch for private briefings—creating a back channel to Putin. And, of course, Manafort was still working with Konstantin Kilimnik, with his GRU ties. Foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had also met with his mysterious Maltese diplomat, Joseph Mifsud, about getting dirt on Hillary’s emails.

  In addition, there were Trump’s ties to the Agalarovs. During the early stages of the primaries, Aras Agalarov had conveyed his support to Trump via an email channel that went from Aras to Rob Goldstone, Emin’s publicist, to Donald Jr. On February 29, Goldstone had sent an email to Donald Jr. saying that “on the eve of Super Tuesday,” with eleven states voting in GOP primaries, Emin’s father had asked him to pass along Aras’s attached letter along with support “from many of his important Russian friends and colleagues.”43

  The attached letter offered Trump best wishes in a conventional, anodyne manner. What was more important was that the Agalarov channel was open. It was activated again on June 3, when Goldstone emailed Don Jr.:

  Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting. The Crown prosecutor* of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documen
ts and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is 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. What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly? I can also send this info to your father via Rhona,* but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.

  Best

  Rob Goldstone44

  “Very high level.” “Ultra sensitive.” Too sensitive for Rhona. “Official documents.” “Incriminate Hillary.” “Part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr. was intrigued.

  Seventeen minutes later, he responded. He was on the road and wanted to speak to Emin first, but, he added, “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”

  Rather than wait until the next week, however, suddenly things went into overdrive. In the midst of a spectacularly frenetic presidential campaign, three key people in the campaign—the newly appointed campaign manager Paul Manafort; son-in-law and crown prince Jared Kushner; and Don Jr.—wiped their schedules clean and set up a mysterious meeting with an unnamed Russian government lawyer.

  And so, they got together at four p.m. on Thursday, June 9, in Don Jr.’s twenty-fifth-floor Trump Tower office. Don had been told the Russians would bring two people to the meeting, but instead there were five.

  Leading the way was Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who was in New York representing Denis Katsyv’s Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings. Prevezon was being prosecuted by United States Attorney Preet Bharara for allegedly laundering $230 million via the tax fraud that Sergei Magnitsky had uncovered.