Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  Whether or not Trump can still be charged with these offenses, they are relevant to the Russia probe as crimes possibly committed to please the Russian president. Much has been made of Putin’s pride at bringing the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup to Russia, so his being the boyfriend—in reality or by reputation only—of the first-ever Miss Universe from Russia could not fail to have flattered him.177

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  A Russian émigré associated with the Russian criminal underworld, accompanied by his Soviet-born business partner Tevfik Arif, approaches Trump about a business partnership. 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.

  That Felix Sater has substantial ties to the mafia and to Russian intelligence officers is uncontested. In June 2018, Newsweek said he was “linked to the mob,” adding that in the 1990s “he had done business with a number of high-ranking former Soviet intelligence officers. He eventually came back to New York but . . . stayed in touch with some of them.”178 In September 2017, the Nation said that Sater had a “decades-long record . . . outside the law,” describing “his past record” as including “a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass” and “his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme.”179 In August 2017, New York Magazine, in addition to calling Sater “the moving force behind Trump SoHo,” said that “Sater introduced the future president to a byzantine world of oligarchs and mysterious money,” calling it “verifiably true” that Sater was “tied to organized crime.”180 In the Washington Post in May 2016, Sater was “mafia-linked”; in the Guardian in August 2017, he was the son of “a local crime boss in Brighton Beach” who had been “involved in a mob-run stock exchange scam” and had “contacts in the Russian underworld.”181 In March 2018, ABC News reported on how, in his youth, Sater discovered at a Moscow dinner party that he had “gained access to a group of high-level Russian intelligence operatives who had valuable information about Russian defense technology.”182 Such is the man Trump partnered with on some of his biggest real estate deals in the 2000s and was still working with on business deals in Russia for the first year of his presidential run in 2015 and 2016 (see chapter 4).

  Paul Wood, a BBC correspondent who has repeatedly broken news on the Trump-Russia story, wrote in August 2017 that, according to his sources, “Sater may have already flipped [begun cooperation with Mueller] and given prosecutors the evidence they need to make a case against Trump.”183 In the same story, Wood revealed the quality of his sourcing, noting that at least one source was in contact with and receiving information from a member of Robert Mueller’s team.184 That source gave Wood a key piece of corroborating information on the claim that Sater was now a “CI” (meaning, variously, a “confidential informant,” a “cooperating individual,” or a “cooperating informant”) for Mueller. According to Wood, “Sater has told family and friends he knows he and [Trump] are going to prison.”185 Wood noted in his story that he received this information at a time when he had been hearing “for weeks” “rumors that Sater is ready to rat again.”186

  Wood’s sources, he explained in the article, believed that Sater was ready to rat “again” because Sater had previously been a confidential informant in an FBI probe. But in fact we know more than this—we know that Sater is specifically willing to act as a confidential informat for Mueller in his current investigation. Sater, through his attorney, has offered to cooperate with Mueller; per his lawyer, Sater “intends to be fully cooperative with any and all government investigations in this matter.”187 Given that, at the time Sater’s attorney issued his statement, Sater was being asked to cooperate only with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, his attorney’s use of the word “fully” and the phrase “any and all” is notable.

  In the summer of 2017, as Mueller was interviewing now cooperating witness George Papadopoulos following his arrest in late July, Sater discussed becoming a confidential informant in an interview with New York Magazine. At the time, he also made a startling claim that could have been an allusion to an upcoming FBI cooperation deal. He told the magazine, “In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colorful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. . . . [But] it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”188

  * * *

  The Trump family’s candor is called into question again in 2014, when Eric Trump tells a reporter for Golf magazine, James Dodson, that the Trumps’ golf courses are all financed by Russian banks—and that the Trump Organization has “all the money we need from Russia.” Dodson will report the quote in 2017, after Trump’s election; Eric will contend that Dodson “completely fabricated” it.

  As recounted by Vanity Fair in May 2017, while speaking to Golf journalist James Dodson in 2014, Trump’s second son blurted out, apropos of nothing, that the Trump Organization had access to “$100 million” for golf courses.189 When Dodson pressed Eric to explain the comment—in light of the difficulty most developers had in finding golf course funding from banks during the Great Recession—Eric replied, “[W]e don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. . . . We’ve got some [Russian] guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.”190 Though Dodson—whose beat is golf, not politics—had no reason to lie about Trump Organization financing, Eric responded on Twitter to Dodson’s claim by saying that Dodson had “completely fabricated” the conversation. Eric later told the New York Post that Dodson’s account was “a recollection from some guy three years ago through a third person. . . . We own our courses free and clear.”191 Vanity Fair observed at the time that Dodson fabricating a conversation with Trump was unlikely, in part because the substance of the conversation, as reported by Dodson, was extremely likely: “It wouldn’t be the first time that the Trumps have been connected to Russian money,” wrote the magazine. “A number of reports have indicated the Trump Organization received substantial funding from Russia when the business was struggling in the mid-1990s and again during the Great Recession, since major U.S. banks had refused to loan money to [Trump].”192 The article added that, according to Reuters, a group of sixty-three Russian billionaires had invested nearly $100 million—an average of $1.6 million per Russian—in Trump’s Florida properties alone.193

  CHAPTER TWO

  TRUMP AND THE AGALAROVS

  2013

  Summary

  TRUMP INVITES A POWERFUL, KREMLIN-LINKED developer to go into business with him while he is dramatically increasing his political profile—and after he’s conducted exploratory polling to test a 2016 White House bid.

  During a November 2013 trip to Moscow to put on the Miss Universe pageant with his new business partner, Trump signs a letter of intent to build a “Trump Tower Moscow.” After Trump leaves Moscow, he maintains a strong relationship with his new Russian business associates—having left a clear impression on his Moscow hosts that he will not only run for the presidency but on a platform opposing all sanctions on Russia.

  Given the opportunity to be forthcoming as to his financial and personal dealings in Moscow in late 2013, Trump dissembles, telling voters false stories about his actions that suggest he has something significant to hide.

  The Facts

  IN JUNE 2013, DONALD TRUMP invites Aras and Emin Agalarov to join him at the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas.1 Aras is a billionaire developer who does building projects for the Kremlin; Emin is an aspiring pop star. Aras’s favor with the Kremlin is demonstrated in part by the Kremlin’s sending a senior official, Vladimir Kozhin, to a party at Agalarov’s Crocus City complex.2 Kozhin is the Kremlin’s “chief manager” and called “a top government official and member of Putin’s inner circle” by Mother Jones.3 />
  Aras and Emin have gotten onto Trump’s radar screen by selecting the 2012 Miss Universe, Olivia Culpo, to star in one of Emin’s music videos.4 A trip by Miss Universe pageant officials to Moscow ensues, and discussions begin about the possibility of Miss Universe going to Moscow in 2013.5 The Miss USA pageant is an opportunity for Trump to speak to the Agalarovs in person about the idea. The group that gathers in Las Vegas includes the Agalarovs, Trump, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, Emin’s publicist Rob Goldstone, Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, and Ike Kaveladze, a vice president at the Agalarovs’ company, the Crocus Group—called by the Guardian “one of the biggest corporations in Russia, carrying out government building contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Putin’s administration.”6 The Guardian will later write that Kaveladze “has in fact been an associate of some of Russia’s richest and most powerful people for the past three decades. . . . [He] was involved in the $341 m[illion] takeover of a US company by a Russian mining firm belonging to an associate of Putin, and was a business partner to two former senior officials at Russia’s central bank.”7 The transaction, overseen by Kaveladze, was “the first time a Russian company had ever taken a majority stake in a publicly traded US company. . . . Putin was reported at the time to have personally advocated for the deal’s approval by U.S. regulators.”8 In 2000, the New York Times reported that Kaveladze helped “an unknown number of Russians . . . [move] more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco. . . . Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1991. . . . set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations.”9 According to the Guardian, “U.S. authorities said [the $1.4 billion] may have been used for money laundering.”10

  On the day of the Miss USA pageant, Yulya Alferova—a popular Russian blogger, the wife of Russian billionaire Artem Klyushin, and later the organizer of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant for the Agalarovs—posts nine candid pictures of Trump, the Agalarovs, Kaveladze, and the other members of Trump’s entourage dining in Las Vegas the night before; it is unclear whether Alferova or Klyushin was in Las Vegas also.11

  Trump and the Agalarovs bond immediately. “Look who’s come to see me! It’s the richest man in Russia!” Trump bellows just minutes after meeting Aras Agalarov for the first time.12 The Guardian reports that Trump “quickly” agreed to Agalarov’s offer of $20 million to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow; Emin will later say that Paula Shugart, “Trump’s top Miss Universe executive,” confessed to him of the pageant, “We have a lot of debts.”13 Later on the night before the pageant, Trump tells Emin that he trusts him and that the Trump Organization and the Crocus Group will have an excellent business relationship going forward.14 On the day of the pageant, Trump brings Aras Agalarov onstage to announce the 2013 Miss Universe pageant will be in Moscow.15 Trump thus chooses Russia as the next pageant site approximately twenty-four hours after meeting the Agalarovs for the first time and over seventeen other nations.16 The Daily Mail will note in February 2018 that not only does Trump pick pageant sites based on business considerations, but he also uses the same measure to select the competition’s finalists, titling its report on the subject “Donald Trump hand-picked finalists for Miss Universe from countries he targeted to swing deals and hosted the contest in cities where he already had a financial stake, former contestants claim.”17 According to the Mail, it isn’t just contestants who have accused Trump of using his pageants as a front for his business interests: “preliminary judges tasked with selecting the finalists said they were shocked when their votes were tallied and some women who advanced to the final stage weren’t selected by any of the judges” (emphasis added).18 Kerrie Baylis, a former Miss Jamaica, tells the New Yorker, of the list of finalists in the year she participated in the Miss Universe pageant, “[T]he list looked like the countries Donald Trump did business with, or wanted to do business with.”19

  In Las Vegas in 2013, the Agalarovs promise Trump not only $20 million but also, more important, an opportunity to meet with Vladimir Putin and the prospect of building a Trump Tower Moscow on the site where the 2013 Miss Universe pageant will be held.20

  The day after the pageant is announced, Trump tweets, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?”21 He also, per the Washington Post, writes a personal letter to Putin—now in the hands of the special counsel—saying, among what else is as yet unknown, that he looks forward to seeing Russia’s “beautiful women” once he gets to Moscow.22 Asked by Washington Post reporters in March 2018 to give more information about Trump’s private letter to Putin in 2013, Trump’s then attorney John Dowd will respond simply, “It’s all nonsense,” and say no more on the subject.23

  In Moscow in the summer of 2013, “a meeting with Trump [is] indeed penciled into Putin’s diary by aides, but [falls] off his schedule a few days beforehand.”24

  Trump arrives in Moscow in early November 2013 with two U.S. business partners in tow, Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, whose ties to powerful Russians are substantial. He immediately begins conducting business meetings with bankers and other influential Russians who can help him and Aras Agalarov move forward with their Trump Tower Moscow project.25

  After promising that he will attend the pageant, Putin suddenly chooses not to do so. He does, however, send Trump, according to Aras Agalarov, a handwritten note—the contents are unknown—and “a traditional decorative lacquered box.”26 In March 2014, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump will tell the assembled GOP activists that “Putin even sent me a present, beautiful present, with a beautiful note. I spoke to all of his people.”27 After Trump returns from Moscow, Agalarov’s daughter will deliver a “polished black box” and a “sealed letter from the Russian president himself.” It is unclear if this is the same box and letter as Agalarov says Trump received at the pageant, but Agalarov implies it is not: in March 2018 he tells the Washington Post that Trump “was leaving [the 2013 pageant in Moscow] with very warm feelings . . . very happy,” because, Agalarov says, he had already received, at the pageant, a letter from Putin (in a “Russian lacquered box,” says Agalarov) whose contents Agalarov could confirm were “friendly.”28

  Prior to the 2013 pageant, Trump speaks by phone with “an oligarch close to Putin,” Dmitry Peskov, during which Peskov says Putin wants to invite Trump to attend the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi scheduled for February 7–23, 2014.29 According to some accounts—including Trump’s own—Trump does speak to Putin on the day of the pageant: “I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin, who could not have been nicer,” Trump will say in a May 27, 2014, appearance at the National Press Club.30 A longtime friend of Trump’s, actor Tom Arnold, bolsters Trump’s claims of having spoken to Putin “indirectly and directly,” saying he has knowledge of a speakerphone call between Trump and Putin on November 9 at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow because it was witnessed, he will say repeatedly on social media, by NBC executive Chuck LaBella and others. Per Arnold, “Putin called Trump at [the] Moscow Ritz [in] Nov[ember] 2013. Trump put [it] on speakerphone for everyone to hear. Putin congratulated Trump on Trump Tower Moscow & encouraged Trump to run for President & offered Russia’s support. It’s all on tape.”31

  According to a retrospective in the Guardian, Trump “certainly claimed” to have met “associates of Putin in lieu of the president himself,” saying, “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”32 One of those who attends the pageant and after-party in Putin’s stead is Vladimir Kozhin, who had previously attended a Crocus Group event and “from 2000 until 2014 was head of the Kremlin property department,” according to Reuters—meaning he was one of the officials in the Kreml
in with the authority to pave the way for new building projects in the city like Trump Tower Moscow.33 In their book Russian Roulette, David Corn and Michael Isikoff note that Kozhin, a “senior Putin aide,” was “a high-level emissary” sent to Trump by Putin himself.34 The message of welcome to Trump—and, more particularly, to Trump Tower Moscow—would have been, based on Trump’s experience in the Moscow real estate market, unmistakable. In a 2017 interview, then Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who was for years an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, will say of Trump Organization forays into the Russia real estate market, “Their system is different from ours. The Kremlin has to approve buildings in Moscow. That’s not undue influence. That’s just the way it is.”35 According to a 2013 Miss Universe pageant official, even beauty pageants were approved by Putin: “We all knew that the event was approved by Putin,” said the official, “[as] you can’t pull off something like this in Russia unless Putin says it’s okay.”36

  Another VIP guest at the pageant is a Russian who lives in Trump Tower in New York City named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. According to Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov is a “vor—a Russian term for a select group of the highest-level Russian crime bosses. . . . [A boss who] receives tributes from other criminals, offers protection, and adjudicates conflicts among other crooks.”37 The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, had previously indicted Tokhtakhounov in 2013 for operating an international sportsbook that laundered more than $100 million, alleging that, as the indictment was described by Mother Jones, the Russian was using “his ‘substantial influence in the criminal underworld’ to protect a high-stakes illegal gambling ring operating out of Trump Tower” in New York City.38 More significant to Trump’s desire to meet Russian oligarchs while in Moscow is that, per Bharara’s indictment, Tokhtakhounov and others ran “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.”39 As of late 2016, Tokhtakhounov was wanted by Interpol on charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bribery.40