by Craig Unger
Like other Russian companies, Prevezon had made a point of hiring lawyers who had lots of clout. Earlier, it had been represented by former FBI director Louis Freeh. Another Prevezon attorney, Scott Balber, also had represented Donald Trump in 2013, when Trump sued comedian Bill Maher because the comedian failed to honor a promise to pay $5 million if Trump could prove he wasn’t “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.”45
As for Sergei Magnitsky, his death, in 2009, had led Congress to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which became emblematic of the intensely volatile relations between the Obama administration and Putin. The bipartisan bill, which passed the Senate by an overwhelming ninety-two–to–four margin, was intended to punish Russians who were allegedly responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, by prohibiting them from entering the United States and its banking system, and by allowing American officials to seize assets belonging to Russians who had been implicated in human rights cases.46
By sanctioning individuals close to Putin, the Obama administration was saying, in effect, that Russia was a Mafia state, and that it made sense not to strike at the Russian people with punishing economic measures, but instead to target the select group of individuals—mobsters, oligarchs, public officials—responsible and to penalize them.
It was a weapon that struck at the core of the pact Putin had with his oligarchs. After all, if he could no longer provide krysha—if Putin could no longer protect his oligarchs—how much longer would they pay fealty to him?
Bill Browder, who was Magnitsky’s boss and who had crusaded to get the eponymous bill passed by Congress, explained the calculus to the American Interest. “[Putin] allows people to get rich off the proceeds of government service,” Browder said, “and then he asks them to do services he’s interested in for the state. . . . He asks [his subordinates] to do very terrible things—to torture people, to kill people, to kidnap people, in order for the government to seize people’s properties. And in return he offers them impunity. If all of a sudden . . . he can’t promise them foreign impunity, that messes up everything for him.”47
In response to the Magnitsky Act, Russia passed the Dima Yakovlev Bill, sometimes known as the anti-Magnitsky law, part of which bans citizens of the United States from adopting Russian children, thereby reframing the Magnitsky conflict issue as a human rights issue in which the United States was undermining the welfare of abandoned Russian orphans.
To promote the cause, Veselnitskaya founded the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation in Washington to lobby for restoring American adoption of Russian children. Which sounded like a cause no one could disagree with, but since the Kremlin promised to rescind the anti-Magnitsky law if the sanctions were lifted, the word “adoption” had become a code word that really meant lifting sanctions. This was the genius of K Street lobbying that Paul Manafort had taught the Russians. In fact, they were lobbying to provide relief to oligarchs and gangsters who had allegedly been behind the $230 million tax scam and who tortured and killed Sergei Magnitsky. But they could promote their cause under the banner of human rights with pictures of cute little orphans who were in desperate need of an American home.
Of the people in the room, Don Jr. was most interested in the so-called highly sensitive information referred to in the Goldstone emails that would supposedly incriminate Hillary. Before the meeting, Veselnitskaya had sent a four-page memo to the Trump team asserting that the Ziff brothers, a trio of billionaire Democratic donors, had allegedly evaded paying US taxes on Russian investments.48 The Ziffs had been donors to Obama and it was possible they were donors to Hillary Clinton as well.* 49 That’s what Don Jr. was interested in—if it could be tied to Hillary.
But instead Veselnitskaya launched into a spiel about Bill Browder and Hermitage Capital Management, arguing that Browder was the real architect of a massive tax fraud scheme against the Russian state—which was of little interest to Don Jr.
Then, she asked whether a Trump presidency would lift the Magnitsky sanctions.
“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Don Jr. said, as she recalled.50
Finally Don Jr. asked her the crucial question on his mind. “This money the Ziffs got from Russia, do you have any financial documents showing that this money went to Clinton’s campaign?” he asked, according to Veselnitskaya.51
The answer, alas, was no.
And with that, the air suddenly went out of the room. Team Trump wanted dirt on Hillary, but the Russians hadn’t delivered. Don Jr. thought it was a complete waste of time. Jared Kushner had stood by vaguely throughout. He was so bored he texted his assistant, “Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”52
But if the meeting was a waste of time for the Americans, it was a triumph for the Russians. Trump Jr. may have been upset that the Russians had not come through with the promised incriminating evidence about Hillary. But to the Russians, this was not about a single transaction. Instead, it was about structuring an ongoing relationship.
Former CIA acting director Michael Morell described the email exchange between Rob Goldstone and the Trumps as “huge” given that it “shows that a senior member of the Trump team” knew in early summer of 2016 that “the Russians were working on behalf of Trump.”53 In the midst of an insanely hectic campaign, three key members of Donald Trump’s inner circle had cleared the decks for Veselnitskaya and her entourage seemingly without even really understanding what the agenda was, or, for that matter, whom they were really meeting with.
For her part, Veselnitskaya later insisted that in meeting with the Trump team, she was in no way working for the Russian government, but there was more to the story than she let on. First, far from being just a private lawyer, since 2013 Veselnitskaya has also been an informant for Yuri Chaika,54 the prosecutor general of Russia, who is close to Agalarov and has been a strong Putin loyalist.55 Chaika, quite likely, is the man Rob Goldstone meant when he referred to the crown prosecutor.
Moreover, according to the New York Times, emails obtained and released by Dossier, an organization founded by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky—the oligarch who was stripped of his holdings, put in jail, and then exiled from Russia—indicate that Veselnitskaya worked closely with a senior prosecutor on Chaika’s staff to write the Russian government response to a US Justice Department request in 2014 for help with its civil fraud case against Prevezon and its owner, Denis Katsyv.56 In other words, she was deeply connected within the Kremlin, and the case she made reflected its talking points.
Much as Don Jr. evinced a lack of interest in her sanctions presentation, it may well have met a more welcome reception by another member of the Trump team. While Don was miffed at the unfulfilled promise of dirt on Hillary, Paul Manafort was quietly taking notes on his cell phone.57
In full, they read:
Bill Browder
Offshore—Cyprus
133m shares
Companies
Not invest—loan
Value in Cyprus as inter
Illici
Active sponsors of RNC
Browder hired Joanna Glover*
Tied into Cheney
Russian adoption by American families
These, then, were Veselnitskaya’s talking points, crafted from a memo she’d written with the staff of the Russian prosecutor general, and Donald Trump Jr.’s indifference aside, Manafort knew this was no joke. There was money on the table. All of this went back to Putin. This was the Kremlin speaking, and given the content of the meeting it seemed to be taking them seriously.
Then there was the fact that, in addition to Goldstone and an unnamed translator, Veselnitskaya had brought along two additional men. Who were they?
One was Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet-born American citizen from Tatarstan in his early fifties, who had become that truly Washington creature—a self-proclaimed K Street lobbyist, “spending other people’s money to achieve other p
eople’s goals,” as he put it.58
Akhmetshin happened to be earning his money by lobbying to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, and by his account, he ended up at Trump Tower that day by . . . sheer happenstance. As the Financial Times reported it, Akhmetshin says he had taken the train from DC to New York that day in order to see a Russian play that evening when Veselnitskaya called.59
That’s why, he claims, he was dressed so casually. Regardless of his wearing jeans and a T-shirt instead of his usual suit, Akhmetshin, with his long history of ties to Russian intelligence, won instant entrée to the inner sanctum of the Trump campaign.
When the Magnitsky Act was being debated on Capitol Hill, according to two observers, Akhmetshin could be seen walking with former congressman Ron Dellums, whom he had recruited, and Paul Behrends, senior aide to Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, to meet with top Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel and Gregory Meeks.60
Widely known as Putin’s favorite congressman, Rohrabacher traveled to Moscow on an official congressional trip in April 2016, Politico reported, and met privately with Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant who was sanctioned in 2014 after the Russians invaded Ukraine. (Yakunin has been close to Putin for more than two decades, dating to the early nineties, when he helped Putin set up the Ozero co-op dachas on the shore of Lake Komsomolskoye.)61
Kyle Parker, a House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer who was a driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, noticed Akhmetshin making the rounds of Congress and immediately sent out an email blast to his colleagues alerting them that Akhmetshin used to spy for the Soviets and “specialized in active measures campaigns,” according to an email reviewed by Politico.
For his part, Akhmetshin insists he is not a spy, although he makes it clear he is more than familiar with that world. Others, however, are not so sure. “He is a former GRU person for sure,” an attorney who worked with Akhmetshin told the Guardian. Then he added, “[H]e once said there is no such thing as ‘former.’”62
* * *
—
If Akhmetshin’s appearance didn’t raise questions, there was the final member of Veselnitskaya’s group. She had brought with her Irakly Kaveladze, who had worked for the Agalarovs for years and had been in Vegas with Trump and the Agalarovs in 2013.
A longtime Agalarov loyalist, Kaveladze was there to monitor the situation on behalf of his patron, but he was also a man who had moved more than a billion dollars through two thousand US corporations he created, a man whom former Democratic senator Carl Levin called a “poster child” of money laundering.63
Kaveladze’s attorney’s explanation for his client’s presence was that he was attending the meeting as “a translator.” But that made no sense; Veselnitskaya already had arranged for an unnamed professional translator.
Between Kaveladze and Akhmetshin, with his past in military intelligence; Veselnitskaya, with her ties to Chaika; and the content of the meeting, it’s hard to believe the Russians were there in their stated role as lobbyists. As former acting director of the CIA John McLaughlin put it to the Cipher Brief, “it looks to me like an elaborate operation carried out through intermediaries to probe the receptivity of the Trump campaign to assistance from the Russian government during the campaign.”64
“It is not unusual for it to be carried out through such a long chain of intermediaries, because the tradecraft objective here is to separate the original ambition as far as possible from the ultimate result so it becomes very hard to trace back, as it is in this case, exactly what happened and who did what,” McLaughlin said.65
And what did the Russians learn? They learned that Jared, distracted as he was, didn’t seem to mind participating in such dirty tricks. They had seen that Don Jr. was eager to play ball, writing back, “I love it.” And how security-conscious was the scion of the future president? Don Jr. waited a mere seventeen minutes before responding to Goldstone. Then he wrote back, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was creating a paper trail directly between himself and the Russians.
All the various threads were coming together. The Russians had, in effect, activated a channel from the Trumps through the Agalarovs to the Kremlin, from Don Jr. to Emin to Emin’s father to Putin, with Rob Goldstone forwarding messages as necessary. Manafort was still in touch with Kilimnik and was offering private briefings to Deripaska. Even though Bayrock was no longer operational, its presence had opened ongoing relations to the Kremlin through Chabad and through Felix Sater, who had continued to develop Russian contacts and go to Moscow on behalf of Trump. Moreover, according to a report in Christopher Steele’s dossier, “a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship was being played by the Republican candidate’s personal lawyer Michael COHEN.”66
The Republican National Convention was getting under way in Cleveland in July. Never before had Russia had someone in its grasp who was so deeply compromised as Trump, with his vast array of ties to the Russian Mafia and oligarchs. Never before had Russia had someone in its grasp who was so close to power as Donald Trump, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Something big was bound to happen.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ENDGAME
On June 15, 2016, six days after the Trump Tower meeting, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives got together to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Two of them, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a representative from Wisconsin, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, from California, had just met the new Ukrainian prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, who had come into power saying he was committed to stamping out corruption and strengthening ties to the European Union.1
Ryan seemed to like Groysman. “This guy’s a pretty good guy,” he said, according to a transcript of the conversation published by the Washington Post.2 “This guy’s like the anti-corruption guy . . . and he’s passing all these anti-corruption laws.”
The conversation piqued the interest of Representative Cathy Rodgers, the Republican Conference chairman from Washington. “How are things going in Ukraine?” she asked.
“Well, the Russians are bombing them 30–40 shells a day,” Ryan said. “Crimea is gone. And they’re trying to clean up their government to show that they want to be western . . . He has this really interesting riff about . . . what Russia is doing to us, financing our populists, financing people in our governments to undo our governments, you know, messing with our oil and gas energy, all the things Russia does to basically blow up our country, they’re going to roll right through us and go to the Baltics and everyone else.”
“Yes!” said Rodgers. She added that she had been astounded by the sophistication of Russian propaganda.
“This isn’t just about Ukraine,” said Ryan.
“. . . It’s a propaganda war,” said Rodgers.
“Maniacal.”
“Yes,” said Rodgers.
“And guess . . . guess who’s the only one taking a strong stand up against it?” said Ryan. “We are.”
What? Rodgers was agog. She didn’t buy it for a second. “We’re not . . . we’re not . . . but we’re not.”
All the while, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had been listening and decided to join in. The second-ranking Republican after Ryan, McCarthy had a nasty habit of blurting out inconvenient truths every once in a while. In 2015, on Fox News no less, McCarthy had said that a principal reason behind the costly and interminable congressional investigations into the Benghazi tragedy had been to drive down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” he said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”3
McCarthy had appalled fellow Republicans because he had just corroborated Democratic allegations that the Benghazi probe was not about getting to the bottom of a real scandal so much as turning Congress’s investigative powers in
to a political weapon against Hillary.
This time, the majority leader had an opportunity to make an even bigger gaffe. The day before, a hacker using the name Guccifer 2.0 had gone public in claiming credit for breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers, and a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike had attributed the operation to Russian intelligence.4
Now came McCarthy’s eureka moment. “I’ll GUARANTEE you that’s what it is,” he said. “[Unintelligible] . . . The Russians hacked the DNC and got the opp research that they had on Trump.”
“And delivered it to . . . to who?” asks Ryan.
[Unintelligible.]
“There’s two people, I think Putin pays—Rohrabacher and Trump . . . [laughter] . . . swear to God.”
Ryan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Kevin McCarthy, the second most powerful Republican in the House, had said Trump and Rohrabacher were on the Kremlin payroll! How else to explain Russia’s generosity to the Republicans when it came to Democratic emails?
As Speaker of the House, Ryan tried to gain control. He could not allow this to become public. “This is an off the record . . . [laughter] . . . NO LEAKS . . . [laughter] . . . Alright? . . . This is how we know we are a real family here. What’s said in the family stays in the family.”
When asked to comment on the exchange, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, told the Washington Post that it “never happened.”
Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said, “The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.” After being told that there was a recording, Sparks characterized the conversation as “a failed attempt at humor.”5