Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  Dear Michael,

  Attached is the signed LOI (Letter of Intent) by Andrey Rozov. Please have Mr. Trump counter-sign, signed and sent back. Lets make this happen and build a Trump Moscow. And possibly fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. That should be Putins message as well, and we will help him agree on that message. Help world peace and make a lot of money, I would say thats a great lifetime goal for us to go after.

  Sincerely,

  Felix Sater88

  Trump signed the letter of intent almost immediately, according to Cohen’s statement to ABC News.89 By signing a document already signed by a Russian investor, Trump thereby agreed in principle to “make [Trump World Tower Moscow] happen” by commingling business and politics. Building the tower, said Sater, would “fix relations between [Russia and the United States],” implying, moreover, that politics was improved, rather than compromised, when overlaid with “commerce & business”—which Sater called “better and more practical” than politics on its own. Trump’s signature authorized Sater to begin trying to (as he had said in his note) convince Vladimir Putin to “agree on” a political message that would gloss over the quid pro quo implicit in the Trump-Rozov deal. As Trump had for months been advocating better relations with Putin, Sater’s proposal that Trump simultaneously “help world peace and make a lot of money” was consistent with the juxtaposition of ambitions the businessman had long ago embraced. The “peace” Sater proposed was to be won by Trump capitulating to the Kremlin on foreign policy as a political candidate and—if he won—president of the United States. What would follow was “mak[ing] a lot of money.”

  * * *

  On November 3, Sater writes Cohen to say, “I know how to play it, and we will get this done. Buddy, our boy can become President of the United States of America and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”

  As reported by Natasha Bertrand for Business Insider on September 8, 2017, “Trump World Tower Moscow” was to be built in “Moscow City,” the Russian capital’s nominal financial district.90

  Sater’s November 3 email is notable in several respects: first, in it a Trump business partner claimed ready access to the president of Russia and his top aides; second, Sater connected, for reasons unclear at the time, Putin’s patronage of Trump and the probability of Trump being able to win the presidency; and third, Sater committed to paper that a single real estate deal—with Trump on one end and, it appears, “Putin’s team” on the other—would allow a presidential election’s outcome to be “engineered.”

  In an August 2017 interview with the Huffington Post, Cohen claimed to have spoken with Trump about the Trump World Tower Moscow deal only three times, despite the fact that his friend Sater had, by then, been working on such a deal, with Trump’s knowledge, for twelve years.91 More puzzlingly, Cohen told the Huffington Post that Trump was “barely aware” of the details of the project from its inception to its termination, a period of time we now know, from a May 2018 Yahoo News report, was nine months—from the fourth month of Trump’s presidential run to the month he clinched the Republican nomination.92 As Yahoo News noted at the time, Cohen had previously said, in a statement to Congress, that he’d given up on the project in January 2016; only once prosecutors and congressional investigators acquired Cohen’s text messages and emails did they discover that he’d made false statements on that score. Sater confirmed to Yahoo News that he had provided all of his texts and emails to and from Cohen to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, as well as to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate’s Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.93 But perhaps the most unlikely fact Cohen fed to the Huffington Post in his August 30, 2017, interview was that, in the many months he’d been working on the Trump World Tower Moscow project for Trump, he’d spoken with Trump about it for a total of only “four minutes”—and that in the first and third of the three conversations the businessman had said a total of four words, all monosyllabic.94 Investigators are unlikely to find either claim plausible, particularly in light of Cohen’s widely professed loyalty to Trump during the period the statements were made and the confirmation, by 2018, that Cohen had provided inaccurate testimony to Congress on the same subject.

  * * *

  By November, Sater has lined up financing for the Trump-Rozov tower with VTB—a then sanctioned Kremlin-owned bank. The next month, however, new sanctions are leveled against VTB, meaning that unless Trump wins the presidency and removes Russian sanctions, he will not be able to get the money that Sater has secured for him.

  Sater’s use of VTB for the funding of Trump World Tower Moscow brings an entirely new perspective to NBC News’s reporting, in June 2017, that “[t]he Trump administration was gearing up to lift sanctions on Russia when the president took office,” and that, having been given no prior warning of Trump’s intentions, the unilateral ending of sanctions on Russia was only avoided by “career diplomats [at the State Department] ginn[ing] up pressure in Congress to block the move.”95 Had Trump’s long-secret plans on Russian sanctions been successful—and while voters knew Trump opposed such sanctions, they didn’t know he was prepared to unilaterally lift them upon taking office—VTB would eventually have been freed to release its promised funding for Trump World Tower Moscow. While perhaps Donald Trump Jr. would have managed the project instead of his father, the fact remains that the tower would have been financially feasible and that any returns from the deal would have—in due time, following his presidency—gone to Trump himself.

  * * *

  By late 2015, Torshin is hosting two dinners in Moscow for a high-level NRA delegation that includes NRA president David Keene, top NRA donor Joe Gregory, NRA board member Pete Brownell, and Sheriff David A. Clarke, a Trump supporter who will later become a key Trump surrogate. They are joined at one of their dinners by Dmitry Rogozin, a “hardline deputy to Putin” who is at the time (and still is) under U.S. sanctions. During the delegation’s visit, members are also introduced, according to reporting by McClatchy, to other “influential Russian government and business figures.”

  It wasn’t just the NRA that the Kremlin wanted to invite to Moscow in 2015. Yulya Alferova, the organizer of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant and an agent of the Agalarovs—themselves Kremlin agents—tweeted at Trump on November 12, 2015, “Donald Trump, are you going to visit Moscow? Many thing [sic] to discuss!”96 Alferova did not follow up her tweet with another, and Trump did not reply to her via Twitter, so what needed to be discussed between Trump and the Agalarovs is unclear. The picture Alferova posted with her tweet, however, was the same one she had posted two years earlier, on November 11, 2013: a picture of herself, Trump, Keith Schiller, Emin Agalarov, Phil Ruffin, and another man looking with great interest at something on a computer screen.97 “Waiting for your business to start in Russia, Mr. Trump,” she’d tweeted to Trump at the time, with the hashtags “Russia” and “Moscow,” and tagging Emin Agalarov.98 The implication was that she wanted Trump to come to Russia in 2015 to discuss the very same “business” he’d been reviewing with Emin Agalarov in 2013: the Trump-Agalarov deal for a Trump Tower Moscow in the Crocus City complex in Russia’s capital. Just a few weeks after Alferova’s tweet to Trump, Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser, went to Moscow and met with Vladimir Putin.99

  That Flynn is now cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller following a guilty plea for having made false statements in December 2017 may help explain why Trump suddenly knows Flynn far less well than he once did.100 In a May 2017 interview with NBC News, Trump said, “I don’t know that I knew [Flynn] in 2015.”101 Yet Flynn told the Washington Post in 2016 that it was Trump who had requested their August 2015 meeting and who instructed his staff to arrange it.102 And a New Yorker article notes that the two men connected almost immediately: “In August 2015, Flynn went to New York to meet Trump for the first time. They were scheduled to talk for thirty min
utes; the conversation lasted ninety. Flynn was deeply impressed.”103 Indeed, Flynn said to his interviewer, of Trump, “I knew [in August 2015] he was going to be President of the United States.”104 But in fact Flynn had more than just one 2015 conversation with Trump. He told the Washington Post in August 2016 that well prior to his official hire by the Trump campaign in February 2016, he “consciously made a decision once I felt the country was at such risk” to begin “advising five of the [GOP] candidates running for president. They all reached out to me . . . [including] Donald Trump. . . . They would ask me about national security, what’s happening in the world, my thoughts on particular issues. I met with all of them. Some of them I met with more often.”105

  Flynn’s advice to the GOP candidates, especially on the subject of Russia, is unknown. However, Flynn had a long history of exhibiting a special affinity for Russia. As the New Yorker outlined in its February 2017 feature on the retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, in 2013, while still the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director, Flynn received permission to meet in Moscow with a group of officers from Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, the GRU.106 Despite forces within the U.S. government pressuring him not to go to Moscow, Flynn not only insisted on making the trip but asked to go to Moscow a second time upon his return.107 His request was denied.108 According to Steven Hall, the chief of Russia operations at the CIA at the time, “[Flynn] wanted to build a relationship with his counterparts in the G.R.U., which seemed, at best, quaint and naïve. Every time we have tried to have some sort of meaningful cooperation with the Russians, it’s almost always been manipulated and turned back against us.”109

  If indeed Trump reached out to Flynn because of his reputation for seeking cooperation with the Russians—including Russian intelligence—Hall’s concern was prescient in this instance as well. Per a March 31, 2017, Guardian article, Flynn went to work for the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet, RT, as soon as he left the DIA in 2014. As if that were insufficient to underscore Flynn’s unusual affinity for Russia, the lieutenant general had, while still with the DIA in 2014, been in secret communication—a communication the DIA required him to report—with a Russian-British graduate student, Svetlana Lokhova, whom he met in February 2014.110 While no links between Lokhova and Russian intelligence have yet been found, the young woman is nevertheless considered a “leading expert” on Soviet espionage and was one of “two or three” non-GRU personnel in the world granted special access to the military intelligence unit’s archives.111 She would therefore have appealed to Flynn on the basis of his seeming obsession with the GRU, whether or not Lokhova was a Russian asset seeking to seduce or recruit him. The two were close enough that in one 2014 email he signed off as “General Misha”—Russian for “Michael.”112 All this had occurred by the time Trump asked his staff to contact Flynn and set up a meeting in August 2015, after which Trump asked Flynn to advise him on national security issues and foreign policy.

  As the Guardian detailed, Flynn’s intersections with Russia were highly unusual for an American general; in 2015 alone he was paid for two speaking engagements in D.C. sponsored by Russian entities, one of them Kaspersky Lab—a cybersecurity company linked to the Kremlin.113

  Just days after Flynn returned from his dinner with Putin, Putin issued what a May 2017 documentary by Dutch television program Zembla termed “almost an endorsement” of Trump: at a December 17, 2015, news conference, Putin volunteered that “Donald Trump is a talented person” and “the absolute leader of the presidential race. He wants to move to a different level of relations—to more solid, deeper relations with Russia—and how can Russia not welcome that? We welcome that.”114 Trump responded immediately, telling ABC News in a statement, “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond. I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”115

  Publicly available Trump-Russia documents and reporting do not tell us whether Flynn being seated next to Putin at the RT gala was the work of Felix Sater’s outreach to “Putin’s team” or a by-product of Flynn’s known association with Trump—or both. But we do know that American politics was very much on the Russian president’s mind during this period: he also invited and sat with at the gala a fringe American politician, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who would be in a position to spoil a Hillary Clinton victory in a very close 2016 election.116

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

  January to March 2016

  Summary

  IN THE FIRST THREE MONTHS of 2016, Trump assembles a National Security Advisory Committee whose members surprise experts with their absence of qualifications. Several have no relevant national security experience; others do but are unknown to professionals in the field; and at least one Trump national security adviser expected to be named to the committee—retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn—is not named at all. A number of Trump’s national security advisers are the subject of puzzling contacts with the Russians: one was recruited to be a Russian spy by the SVR RF (Russia’s foreign intelligence service) in 2013; another had been part of a secret plot to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels in 2013; another worked as an analyst for Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet RT in 2015; another will be approached by a Kremlin agent in Italy just two weeks after his engagement on the committee and be asked to serve as an intermediary between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, an offer to which the Trump adviser will immediately agree; and yet another Trump national security adviser, Erik Prince—who, like Flynn, is a “shadow” adviser never formally recognized by Trump—will secretly meet with a source close to the Kremlin in the Seychelles in 2017. At the first meeting of the committee, one of its members intimates to campaign officials that he is “acting as an intermediary” for the Kremlin, and he will thereafter be promoted to Trump’s speech-writing team.1 The committee’s chairman will be accused of giving false and misleading statements about secret meetings with the Russians, while its director will be accused of giving false statements about changes he made to the GOP platform to benefit the Kremlin.2

  As the committee’s director, J. D. Gordon, will tell CNN in 2017, at the first meeting of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee on March 31, 2016, at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., Trump orders the committee to change the GOP platform at the July Republican National Convention in Cleveland in a way that, per the Washington Post, “guts [its] anti-Russia stance on Ukraine”; after Gordon successfully changes the party’s Ukraine plank at the convention he will say to CNN’s Jim Acosta that “this was the language Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March [at the Trump International Hotel].”3 At the same meeting, the Kremlin’s new “intermediary,” George Papadopoulos, reveals to the group—including Trump—that he is working with the Russians to effectuate a Kremlin-Trump back channel.4 Reports of what happens next vary wildly, but three attendees at the meeting will later tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees that neither Sessions nor Trump offered any objections to Papadopoulos’s continuing to conduct back-channel negotiations with the Kremlin.5 When asked in 2017 about the March 31, 2016, meeting and his response to Papadopoulos identifying himself as an agent for the Kremlin, Trump, “who recently boasted of having ‘one of the great memories of all time,’ ” according to the Washington Post, will say, “I don’t remember much about that meeting.”6

  The Facts

  IN THE THREE MOST CRITICAL months of the Republican primary season—after which all Republican presidential contenders except Donald Trump, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and Ohio governor John Kasich are eliminated—Trump puts together a national security team he calls his National Security Advisory Committee.7 The overwhelming majority of pre-election back-channel contacts between th
e Trump campaign and the Kremlin will involve at least one member of the National Security Advisory Committee, Paul Manafort, or both. The pressure on Trump to build a national security advisory apparatus had increased exponentially once he won ten of the first seventeen GOP primaries and caucuses—coming in second in four of the remaining seven, and in two of those (Alaska and Iowa) missing the top spot by only 3 percent.8

  In mid-February, however, at a time when only two states have voted—Iowa, won by Ted Cruz, and New Hampshire, won by Trump—billionaire Thomas Barrack, a good friend of Donald Trump and of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, has lunch with an old friend of his, Paul Manafort.9 Manafort has spent years making millions “working for a corrupt pro-Russian political party” and “promot[ing] Russian interests” in former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.10 Manafort tells Barrack that “I really need to get to [Trump]” and makes an unusual offer to convince Barrack to help him: he says he will work for Trump for free, and even though Trump has no particular reason to believe then that he will become the nominee, Manafort offers to become Trump’s convention manager for the Republican National Convention, which is still four months away.11 In October 2017, the New York Times will publish the “talking points” Manafort used in convincing Trump to hire him. They include: “I am not looking for a paid job,” “Position me as coming into the Trump campaign as ‘your [Trump’s] guy,’ ” “I live in Trump Tower,” and “When Black Manafort and Stone [Manafort’s old lobbying firm] worked for Trump, I managed the Mar a Largo [sic] FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] problem Trump had.”12