In a criminal investigation, even a single significant lie can signal a witness’s or suspect’s guilty conscience; in the Trump-Russia investigation, the combined half-truths and outright falsehoods spread by ten to twenty “Team Trump” coconspirators now number in the dozens. Right now, the inaction of congressional Republicans—a failure to prosecute those who have lied to Congress or to subpoena those who won’t speak to Congress at all—enables these lies to continue.
Proof of Collusion aims to provide a careful, comprehensive, and compelling presentation of the evidence supporting the only theory of the case that answers the question of what’s happening in America right now and how we can stop it.
CHAPTER ONE
RUSSIA AND THE TRUMPS
1987–2012
Summary
AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF FINANCIAL failures in Russia—failures born not of a lack of desire to succeed but a lack of access to the people in Russia who make wealth creation possible—the Trumps discover that the key to making a fortune in real estate in Russia is greasing the skids with influential Russian officials.1 When the Trumps finally learn this lesson in the early 2000s, the result is the Russian riches that the family, particularly its patriarch, Donald Trump Sr., has long sought. The family gains, too, a new set of Russian, Russian-American, and Soviet-born allies who will in time rescue the family from its business struggles in the recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s, when many U.S. banks are declining to lend to the Trump Organization.2 Many of these new allies have criminal histories, dubious business practices, close ties to the Kremlin, or all three.
But the Trumps’ many years of candor about their fondness for Russia, as well as their boasts of the money their many business ties to that nation have brought them over the years, will dissipate instantly once Donald Trump decides to run for president of the United States not long after the 2012 presidential election.3
The Facts
UP UNTIL 1987, DONALD TRUMP is not regarded as a particularly political public figure. However, in 1987 he publishes The Art of the Deal and takes a trip to Moscow—one or both of which send him in the direction of a political career.4
Trump’s trip to Moscow in 1987 comes at the invitation of Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin. In Moscow, Trump stays in the Lenin Suite of the Hotel National, which, as Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine notes, “certainly would have been bugged” in 1987.5 Trump holds meetings on the possible construction of a Trump hotel with Soviet officials, coming away from the meetings certain that the officials are “eager” to do business with him.6
On returning to the United States, Trump spends nearly $100,000 on politically charged newspaper ads, attacking American allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia for spending too little on their own defense.7 He urges America to “tax these wealthy nations” and shortly thereafter makes a high-profile trip to New Hampshire—the sort of trip that is often considered a prelude to a presidential bid.8
Trump’s 1987 bid for a Trump hotel in Moscow falls through, according to the Washington Post, only because Trump was “preoccupied with other business projects.”9
Once Trump’s companies recover from a string of bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992, he returns his attention to the Russian market.10 In 1996, he returns to Moscow with Howard Lorber, “one of his two closest friends,” according to the Post.11 Together they scout locations for an office tower and eventually find both a location for the tower and a prospective Russian partner for the project. Trump announces plans for a Trump International–branded building in November 1996; the deal will see him investing $250 million and licensing his name to two buildings.12 “We have an understanding we will be doing it,” Trump says.13 At the press conference promoting the deal, he says he doesn’t think he’s ever been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow.”14
However, Trump has a problem: American banks will no longer lend to him, citing his track record for paying back only “pennies on the dollar”—what the banks call “the Donald risk.”15
By 1997, though no construction has begun on Trump’s hoped-for Moscow projects, the New Yorker is writing of “the breadth of Trump’s hopes for Moscow investment and business connections.”16 Trump’s plans for the expansion of his real estate portfolio into Russia go well beyond a single Trump International Hotel; Trump envisions a much larger series of investments. He tells the New Yorker, “[I]t would be skyscrapers and hotels. . . . [W]e’re working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow, and the mayor’s people. So far, they’ve been very responsive.”17
As Trump’s 1996 plans finally fall through for good, Russia begins a period of political upheaval that sees the nation led by five successive prime ministers appointed by Boris Yeltsin over a fifteen-month period in 1998 and 1999. The last of these prime ministers is a man by the name of Vladimir Putin.18
Putin, the former first deputy chairman (the equivalent of a deputy mayor) of St. Petersburg, develops a fondness for Miss St. Petersburg, Oxana Fedorova, sometime before she is crowned Miss Russia in 2001.19 It is widely known that he has a picture of her in his office.20 After Fedorova wins the 2001 Miss Russia pageant, rumors abound—spurred in part by the presence of Putin’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, acting as security at the competition—that the pageant has been rigged so that Fedorova will win.21 Local media say that either the pageant was corrupt or its organizers knew instinctively it would be unwise—not “politically correct,” according to the Telegraph—to let anyone but Fedorova win.22
In winning the Miss Russia pageant, Fedorova becomes Russia’s entrant to the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, an international competition owned by Donald Trump. Though the 2002 pageant is scheduled to take place in Puerto Rico, anticipation for the event is high in Russia because of Putin’s admiration for Fedorova and because no Russian woman has ever won the Miss Universe pageant in its then half century of continuous operation.23
At the time of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, Fedorova’s publicly acknowledged boyfriend is Vladimir Golubev, a St. Petersburg crime boss heavily involved in the construction industry.24 But the scuttlebutt in Moscow is that Fedorova is actually with a different Vladimir; a May 2002 article published immediately after the 2002 Miss Universe pageant calls Fedorova “Putin’s girl.”25 There is substantial press attention on the pageant in Moscow as Fedorova wins the competition and makes pageant history as the first Miss Universe from Russia.
On November 2, 2017, an eyewitness to the judging process at the 2002 Miss Universe contest will contact this author to say that the contest was “rigged.”26 After the eyewitness’s identity has been verified, the eyewitness recounts the following: after there are only ten contestants left in the 2002 Miss Universe pageant—an elimination process that Trump directly participates in at this point in the pageant’s history—Trump addresses the pageant’s celebrity judges and indicates that he wants Miss Russia crowned Miss Universe.27 The source reports Trump saying, “There’s definitely, clearly one woman out there who’s head and shoulders above the rest. She’s the one I’d vote for.”28 Given the context of the statement—Trump issuing his formal instructions to the judges as they prepared for the conclusion of the pageant—as well as his demeanor while speaking, the eyewitness asserts that Trump “told the judges who to vote for,” adding that a subsequent conversation among the celebrity judges revealed that several had had the same impression.29
The judges vote for Miss Russia, who thereby becomes Miss Universe until her dethroning 120 days later for failure to faithfully execute the duties of her office.30 The contest’s celebrity judges are later told by parties affiliated with the pageant that Fedorova has been dethroned because of unspecified criminal conduct by her boyfriend, Vladimir Golubev.31
In the forty-eight months following the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, Trump’s fortunes in Russia change dramatically. After fifteen years of failed attempts to break into the Russian market—the Moscow market specifically—Tru
mp finds that Russia is suddenly a critical component of the Trump Organization’s investment portfolio, as Donald Trump Jr. will explain in a 2008 speech to investors at a Manhattan conference.32 While this is partly attributable to the fact that “the push to sell units in Trump World Tower to Russians expand[s] in 2002”—when Sotheby’s International Realty begins partnering with Kirsanova Realty, a Russian company—another reason is that a matter of months after the Miss Universe pageant, a Russian émigré associated with the Russian criminal underworld, accompanied by his Soviet-born business partner Tevfik Arif, approaches Trump about a business partnership.33 The émigré, Felix Sater, will for the next few years deliver a large number of Russian clients to Trump and be instrumental in finding Russia-born partners for the biggest Trump construction project of the 2000s, Trump SoHo.34
Sater’s access to the highest levels of the Russian government is made evident when, in 2006, he arranges for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s office chair during a tour of the Kremlin.35 According to Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA and an expert on Russian politics, anyone able to get a visitor to the Kremlin into Putin’s chair would have to have “the highest [Russian] security clearances and [be] personally trusted by Putin.”36
The same year, Paul Manafort moves into a forty-third-floor apartment in Trump Tower, paying $3.6 million for it at a time when he is making millions working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.37 Just a year earlier, “Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan . . . that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.”38 Manafort’s proposal is eventually accepted, and he is paid $10 million in 2006 by “close Putin ally” Oleg Deripaska—the same year he buys his apartment in Trump Tower.39
Down on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower, Sater and his company, the Bayrock Group, have become critical to Trump’s business success—especially with Russian investors and business partners.40 Yet when asked at a civil deposition in November 2013 whether he knows who Felix Sater is, Trump, under oath, says he has seen Sater only a “couple of times” and that he “wouldn’t know what [Sater] look[s] like.”41 At a deposition six years earlier, in 2007, Bloomberg reported that Trump had testified under oath that Sater’s Bayrock “brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow . . . and he [Trump] was pondering investing there.”42 “It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump says at the time. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”43 Indeed, Trump had signed a one-year development deal with Bayrock for a Trump Tower Moscow in 2005; though the deal fell through, a site had been selected.44
In 2006, Trump’s partners on a real estate project in Panama go on an investor-recruiting trip to Moscow.45 In 2007, Trump again, through Bayrock, “line[s] up with Russian investors . . . a deal for a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow.”46 According to Trump, “[i]t would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me.”47 After this deal falls through as well, Trump says—in the same 2007 deposition in which he speaks glowingly of Sater’s real estate development company—“We’re going to do [another Moscow deal] fairly soon. [Moscow] will be one of the cities where we will be.”48
That year, Trump attends the Moscow Millionaire Fair, at which he unveils Trump Vodka for the Russian market.49 He also partners with Russian Alex Shnaider to salvage an ailing project, Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower.50 In 2005, Forbes had written a profile on Shnaider referencing his participation in the “shadowy,” “murky,” violent Ukrainian steel business, where to get along with other steel traders and avoid death (“at least seven steel executives were assassinated in Ukraine in the 1990s”) you had to “hire their relatives, give them gifts—whatever could be done.”51 Trump would “[claim] to have a financial stake [in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto], only later to admit that it was a licensing deal. . . . Trump family members [also] presented inflated sales figures when the towers, in reality, stood nearly empty.”52
In 2010, when the Toronto project falters yet again, it is rescued with nearly a billion dollars in new investment by the Kremlin-owned development bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB.53 In December 2016, during the presidential transition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will meet secretly at Trump Tower with VEB’s chairman, Sergei Gorkov, who graduated from the academy of Russia’s chief intelligence agency, the FSB.54 Observing that VEB is “known for advancing the strategic interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Washington Post will report that VEB called the meeting with Kushner “part of a new business strategy” and that its chairman met with Kushner “in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business.”55 Hope Hicks, a White House spokesperson, will insist instead that it was merely a “diplomatic” meeting.56
In 2008, Trump strikes a deal with Russian heavyweight mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko—who Rolling Stone will note in May 2018 “has very close ties to Vladimir Putin”—for a reality show in Russia that never materializes.57 Trump even forms a company with Emelianenko, Affliction Entertainment, to manage and promote their joint venture; he makes his attorney Michael Cohen Affliction’s COO.58
All of this helps to explain how, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr., speaking to a group of investors on the topic of emerging overseas markets, could boast that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our [Trump Organization] assets.”59 He adds that the Trump Organization “primarily” looks for new real estate in Russia.60
Trump Jr.’s comments are striking for both their clarity and boldness. eTurboNews (eTN), the global travel industry news website that reports on Trump Jr.’s address, writes that, per Trump Jr., “[i]f he were to choose his top A-list for investments in the emerging world . . . his firm [the Trump Organization] would choose China and Russia.”61 eTN quotes the eldest Trump son as saying, “Given what I’ve seen in Russia’s real estate market as of late relative to some of the emerging markets, [Russia] seems to have a lot more natural strength [than China], especially in the high-end sector where people focus on price per square-meter. In Russia, I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world.”62
Trump Jr. reveals to the investors that he has made “half a dozen trips to Russia” in the preceding eighteen months—one trip every ninety days—and that on these trips he brings clients to the Trump Organization’s “projects” in Moscow; his travel partners are, he says, “buyers [who] have been attracted to our projects there.”63 In September 2017, Trump Jr. will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and say that he has been to Russia only “four or five” times in his life.64
Trump Jr. does, however, note to investors in 2008 some potential obstacles for those who want to invest heavily in Russia. He explains that, based on his significant experience seeking investments in Russia, investor concerns about the Russian market are “not an issue of [not] being able to find a deal—but . . . ‘can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with?’ ”65 He explains that success in the Russian market is finally attributable to “who knows who” and “whose brother is paying off who.”66
eTN describes Trump Jr.’s depiction of Trump Organization activities in Moscow this way: “Despite a current [Russian] government that projects a ramrod posture, to Trump the current leaders [of Russia] make the scene more scary. Holding back his grin, he said, ‘It’s so transparent—everything’s so interconnected that it really does not matter what is supposed to happen as what it is they want to happen is ultimately what happens’ ” (emphasis added).67 It is unclear from eTN’s coverage of the Trump Jr. speech who the “they” is that the young Trump Organization executive is referring to.
Trump Jr. also discusses the Trump Organization’s reliance on Russian investors investing in the United States. “We see a lot of
money pouring in from Russia,” he says, adding that the soon-to-be-completed Trump SoHo is also specifically targeting investors in the United Arab Emirates.68 Trump Jr.’s boast is not an empty one; from sixty-five Russians buying units in a single Trump building in the late 1990s to a Bloomberg report finding that by 2004 fully one-third of units on floors seventy-six through eighty-three in Trump World Tower involved “people or companies connected to Russia or neighboring states,” the Trump Organization has for years counted Russian clients among its most enthusiastic customers.69 The New Republic describes how Trump International Beach Resort in Florida was so popular among Trump’s Russian clientele that the area, Sunny Isles Beach, came to be known as “Little Moscow.”70
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