Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  Though Trump has known Manafort for many years, and knows him to be a well-paid lobbyist and consultant with clients around the world, Trump accepts Manafort’s unusual offer to work for free on a delegate-counting operation still months in the future—at a political convention his campaign may never reach. Trump’s comfort with Manafort, along with his friend Barrack’s recommendation, may have carried the day: the New York Times reports that Trump and Manafort “had some business in the 1980s” and since then “had brushed shoulders over the years,” with Manafort not only being one of Trump’s tenants but at one point doing work for Trump “clear[ing] noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.”13 The Times also notes that Manafort “touted his overseas work”—work he did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine—in convincing Trump to bring him aboard the campaign.14

  After joining Trump’s team on March 28, 2016, Manafort becomes the de facto campaign manager for the entire Trump operation in well under three weeks.15 By April 6, CNN is reporting that “Trump met . . . with GOP strategist Paul Manafort, a huddle that suggests campaign changes could be in the works. . . . Two knowledgeable sources say Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump to lead his delegate operation, is taking on an expanded role.”16 By April 16, Manafort is already “[laying] out a vision for the Trump campaign” at a campaign meeting.17 By April 18, just three weeks after Manafort’s hire, the campaign’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been reduced to a “body man and scheduler,” according to NBC News.18 How and why Manafort’s takeover of Trump’s presidential campaign happened as quickly as it did has never been fully explained, but Politico will report that Lewandowski was the victim of a “whisper” campaign by Manafort’s former lobbying partner Roger Stone.19

  Manafort’s initial entreaties to Trump arrive at Trump Tower around February 29, 2016, the same day Trump receives an email from Rob Goldstone, Emin Agalarov’s publicist, on behalf of Aras Agalarov—as well as a letter from Agalarov himself.20 Goldstone’s note on behalf of Agalarov wishes Trump luck on Super Tuesday and lets him know that his campaign has not only the elder Agalarov’s “support” but also “that of many of his important Russian friends and colleagues—especially with reference to U.S./Russian relations.”21 The letter from Aras says, in part, “many people in this country who appreciated your statement that U.S. and Russia should work together more closely . . . follow with great interest your bright electoral campaign. . . . [And] we would like to wish you success in winning this major ballot and further reinforcing your undisputed status as the front-runner for the Republican nomination for [the] U.S. Presidential Election.”22

  In March 2017, five months before Manafort is indicted on “charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer will say that Manafort played a “very limited role for a very limited amount of time” before walking back his comments two days later.23 In August 2017, Trump himself will say of Manafort that he was with the campaign for a “very short period of time, relatively short period of time.”24 By August 2018, as the jury is deliberating after the close of evidence in the first of Manafort’s two federal trials, Trump will eliminate the word “relatively” and say Manafort “worked for me for a very short period of time.”25 In Spicer’s 2018 book, The Briefing, he will contradict Trump on Manafort’s role:

  Paul brought a much-needed maturity to the Trump campaign when it needed an experienced political professional operative. . . . [Before Manafort] there was no semblance of a campaign structure. . . . Paul immediately set up and staffed the political and communications operations necessary to take on the Clinton machine. The Manafort message was clear: Trump will be our nominee and our next president, and anyone who didn’t want to work to that end could spend the next four years in political Siberia.26

  The period between Manafort’s hire by Trump and the day he quits the campaign over his ties to pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine—August 19, 2016—lasts nearly five months; after Manafort leaves the campaign, he has multiple additional conversations with Trump by telephone and continues to advise the White House on the Russia investigation as late as January 2017.27

  Trump will repeatedly say that Manafort’s charges have nothing to do with his work as an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign and then its chairman. But at Manafort’s August 2018 federal trial in Virginia, “[a] Chicago bank CEO who thought he was being considered for positions in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet” will testify under oath that he “helped facilitate $16 million in loans to Manafort during and after the campaign.”28 The Washington Post will call Manafort’s trial “the prequel to the story of the Trump campaign’s multiple contacts with Russia,” given that Manafort worked somewhat suspiciously for “free” after years of working for millions on behalf of pro-Russian interests and given that the bulk of the campaign’s contacts with Russian nationals came after his March 2016 hire.29 It will later be revealed that Manafort was, at the time of his hire by Trump, “in debt to pro-Russia interests” by as much as $17 million, which may explain why in July 2016 he writes his old client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, through an intermediary to find out how he can use his work for Trump to “get whole.”30

  Around the time Trump begins discussions with Manafort about hiring him, he decides on March 3, 2016, to make Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, an early supporter, the chairman of his National Security Advisory Committee.31 The committee already has one member, Carter Page, who in March 2016, unbeknownst to him or to anyone on the campaign, is being monitored by the FBI under a FISA warrant stemming from his 2013 interactions with Kremlin agents.32

  Page, who at the time works in a building connected to Trump Tower by an atrium (and is consequently a “regular presence in Trump Tower,” per CBS News), “volunteers” to work for Trump in December 2015—the same month Trump’s unofficial or “shadow” national security adviser Michael Flynn dines with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.33 In early January 2016, Page meets with Sam Clovis, who hires him after a simple Google search—which, presumably, fails to reveal that Page was under suspicion of being a Russian spy in 2013 as part of a highly publicized 2015 case involving Putin’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR RF.34 Page thereby becomes the first member of Trump’s national security team and is soon joined by Flynn, acting as an informal adviser to the national security team, in February 2016.35

  Page’s brush with the FBI in 2013 involved suspicions that he was an unwitting or even witting Russian agent, having been identified by Russian intelligence agents in the United States as ripe for recruitment by the Kremlin.36 In a 2015 court filing, a transcribed recording of a spy in Putin’s SVR intelligence unit included discussions of Page: “[Page] got hooked on Gazprom [the Russian natural gas giant] thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up . . .” the spy said. “I also promised him a lot. . . . This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.” Court documents allege that Page agreed to and did provide documents about the U.S. energy business to the SVR.37 In August 2013, Page would boast in a letter to a publisher, “I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin”—despite having already been informed by the FBI that the Kremlin was actually seeking to recruit him as a spy.38

  Page will testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that he was a volunteer with an “unpaid informal [Trump] committee” from his January interview with Clovis until his late March announcement as a member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, making him the senior member of the latter committee by tenure—over the committee’s chairman, Jeff Sessions—by nearly two months.39 According to the Washington Post, “As part of its broader investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the FBI continues to examine how Page joined the campaign and what conversations he ma
y have had with Russian officials about the effort to interfere with the election—with or without the knowledge of Trump and his team—according to people familiar with the matter.”40 Investigators are asking, given that the SVR-linked Page appeared at Trump Tower asking for a job shortly after Flynn went to Moscow and dined with Putin, “Were Trump’s connections to multiple Russia-friendly advisers mere coincidence, or evidence of a coordinated attempt to collude with a foreign government?”41

  By late February 2016, as Manafort is preparing his pitch to Trump, and Sessions is days from being hired, Flynn has joined Trump’s national security team—with a focus on U.S.-Russia relations. Reuters writes in February that “Donald Trump is receiving foreign policy advice from a former U.S. military intelligence chief who wants the United States to work more closely with Russia to resolve global security issues, according to three sources.”42 Almost immediately after the Sessions hire, Trump national cochair Sam Clovis hires a young and inexperienced George Papadopoulos to be the third official member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee. According to Papadopoulos’s October 2017 plea documents, on March 6, 2016, Clovis told Papadopoulos that “a principal foreign policy focus of the Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia”—echoing Flynn’s position on that question.43 Papadopoulos will stay with the campaign through the 2017 inauguration, working directly with Flynn during the presidential transition period.44

  Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, tells CNN that after his March 6, 2016, hire Papadopoulos “didn’t take any initiative on his own without campaign approval.”45 If so, it is likely that Papadopoulos’s mid-March trip to Italy, while ostensibly taken as part of his work with the London Center of International Law Practice (LCILP), was campaign-approved.46 This is the trip he will later lie about to the FBI when questioned about it in January 2017, according to his October 2017 plea.47 On his Italy trip, Papadopoulos is approached by Joseph Mifsud—a Kremlin agent who is affiliated, like Papadopoulos, with the LCILP—on March 14, 2016.48 Papadopoulos thereafter meets, on March 24, with Mifsud; a deputy from the Russian Foreign Ministry, Ivan Timofeev; and a woman introduced to him—falsely—as “Putin’s niece,” Olga Polonskaya, née Vinogradova.49 He emails Clovis immediately after this meeting to say that “Russian leadership [wants] to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump. They are keen to host us in a ‘neutral’ city, or directly in Moscow. They said the leadership, including Putin, is ready to meet with us and Mr. Trump. . . . Waiting for everyone’s thoughts on moving forward with this very important issue.”50 Clovis emails him back, “Great work.”51

  Papadopoulos’s Russian contact, Joseph Mifsud, is a Maltese professor who had become interested in Papadopoulos when he “discovered” Papadopoulos was working for the Trump campaign. Mifsud “did not exhibit any special interest or expertise in Russia until 2014,” the New York Times has noted.52 That year he hired a twenty-four-year-old Russian intern, Natalia Kutepova-Jamrom, who “introduced Mr. Mifsud to senior Russian officials, diplomats and scholars. Despite Mr. Mifsud’s lack of qualifications, she managed to arrange an invitation for him to join the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, an elite gathering of Western and Russian academics that meets each year with Mr. Putin.”53 Within a short time, Mifsud had become a regular pundit on state-run Russian television and was publicly arguing against Russian sanctions. The Times quotes him as saying to the Valdai Discussion Club in 2014, “Global security and economy needs partners, and who is better in this than the Russian Federation.”54

  Papadopoulos says that after he was hired by the campaign on March 6—but before his trip to Italy—he had a one-on-one phone call with Trump that neither Trump nor the campaign has ever disclosed.55 Papadopoulos later meets with Trump one-on-one on March 21, 2016—between his first meeting with Mifsud and his second—another contact between Trump and Papadopoulos that Trump and the campaign have never disclosed.56 At this March 21, 2016, meeting, Papadopoulos tells Trump about “his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin,” per Newsweek.57 After the meeting, Trump announces Papadopoulos as part of his National Security Advisory Committee, calling him an “excellent guy”—the only compliment he affords any of his five new picks for the committee that day.58

  Also named to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 21, 2016, is former Department of Defense inspector general Joseph Schmitz, who in 2013 had participated in an illicit, extra-governmental scheme to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels.59 Trump also names to the committee Walid Phares, a man who claims the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the Obama administration, lectures on the danger of “Sharia law” spreading across the United States, and is connected to the Center for Security Policy—which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its anti-Islamic positions.60 The final member of the team’s first wave of appointees is retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, who at the time is best known for being the chief operating officer of the failed Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. When Michael Flynn is fired as National Security Advisor nearly a year later, Kellogg will take his place temporarily until H. R. McMaster is appointed to the post.61

  Two men who have been advising Trump on national security behind the scenes, Flynn and Erik Prince—the latter the former head of infamous private security company Blackwater—are not named to the first iteration of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, nor will they be named to any iteration of it until Flynn is named National Security Advisor during the presidential transition.62 Trump’s first-ever appointment of Flynn to an official position, nearly sixteen months after the retired general began advising the New York businessman, is an event made possible by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s involvement in the firing of transition chief Chris Christie—who had warned Trump about hiring Flynn and had refused to do so himself.63 Both Flynn and Prince will later be accused of secretly and illegally negotiating U.S. foreign policy with agents of the Russian government.64

  On March 31, 2016, Trump convenes what he will later call a “very unimportant” meeting: the first-ever meeting of his National Security Advisory Committee.65 A picture of the gathering reveals twelve attendees besides Trump, with several new members of the committee who had not previously been announced.66 With the exception of retired major general Bert Mizusawa and retired Navy rear admiral Charles Kubic, none of the new members will thereafter be reported as having significantly contributed to, or even actively participated in, the committee. Carter Page is absent from the meeting because, he says, he “had a previously scheduled meeting with some of the top U.S. military commanders many thousands of miles away from Washington”; a photograph from that day suggests that Page was at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Hawaii.67

  At the Trump International Hotel meeting, Papadopoulos tells Trump and his fellow committee members what he previously told Trump directly: that he is a Kremlin intermediary, and that he has been in contact with the Russians to try to create a Trump-Putin back channel and set up a Trump-Putin summit.68 There are at least five different stories of what happens next. Committee director J. D. Gordon will say that Sessions shut down Papadopoulos immediately and told him never to raise the issue again.69 Committee chairman Sessions will say he “pushed back” on the suggestion and then the conversation moved on.70 Another attendee will say that Sessions said “Okay, interesting,” and then moved on.71 Two other attendees will largely concur with that attendee, though instead of “Okay, interesting,” they will report hearing something along the lines of “Well, thank you. And let’s move on to the next person.”72 Gordon gives an alternate version of the meeting in which not only did Papadopoulos get to speak for a “few minutes” about his Russian contacts, but there was then a wide-ranging discussion involving multiple members of the committee about the wisdom of Papadopoulos’s plan.73 The Daily Caller reports a slightly different version of the same events, with the wide-ranging discussion resultin
g in the unanimous decision of “attendees . . . not to revisit Papadopoulos’ suggestion.”74 What is certain is that at least three witnesses insist Papadopoulos was never reprimanded, silenced, or rebuked by either Sessions or Trump.75 Trump’s exact reaction is also disputed, however: one attendee says the now president had “no reaction,” while another says he “seemed flattered”; Gordon’s description of his reaction suggests simply—as CNN will later describe it—that Trump “did not dismiss the idea”; and the New York Times will report that not only did Trump “not say ‘yes,’ and . . . not say ‘no,’ ” but he actually “listened with interest” to Papadopoulos and “asked questions.”76 Papadopoulos himself will say that Trump “nodded his approval.”77

  What all agree on is that no one at the table contacts the FBI to inform the Bureau that the Russians may be trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign. And neither does Trump, even after he is warned, in his first national security briefing as a candidate in August 2016, that the Russians are trying to do just that. Athough Trump had information on Russian efforts to infiltrate his campaign to offer his CIA and FBI briefers on that date, and may well have been asked by his briefers if he had any relevant information to report, there is no evidence Trump volunteered any such knowledge or truthfully answered any queries on the subject he may have faced.78 Nor is Papadopoulos fired by Trump on March 31; rather, Trump promotes him by giving him new responsibilities. First, Trump grants Papadopoulos the authority to act as a Russia policy adviser and spokesperson, despite Papadopoulos’s having expertise only in Middle Eastern energy markets; second, Trump gives Papadopoulos the opportunity to help edit Trump’s first-ever foreign policy speech, with the date of that speech just four weeks away.79