CHAPTER SIX
THE MAYFLOWER HOTEL
April 2016
Summary
WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF SEEING his role in the Trump campaign expanded, Paul Manafort announces that Trump will be giving his first foreign policy speech at the National Press Club, a traditional venue for big political launches. Less than forty-eight hours before the speech is scheduled to occur, Manafort cancels it and moves it to a new location in Washington, D.C.: the Mayflower Hotel. Prior to the speech at the Mayflower, the event’s hosts, the pro-Kremlin Center for the National Interest, sponsor a twenty-four-person VIP cocktail hour.1 The event includes Trump’s top aides, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and ambassadors from Italy and Singapore, two nations that are major players in the upcoming sale of a stake in Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft.2 Trump and his aides do not disclose the presence of the Russian ambassador at the event or the names of any of the VIP attendees, which include Robert “Bud” McFarlane, an Iran-Contra figure convicted of four counts of withholding information from Congress.3 McFarlane is an advocate for strengthened U.S.-Russia cooperation on energy issues, having called Russia an “integral partner [of the United States] in ensuring the energy security of the Western world.”4 Trump meets the Russian ambassador at the pre-speech reception.
In his speech, with Kislyak and McFarlane sitting in front-row VIP seats, Trump says, “We must only be generous to those that prove that they are indeed our friends. We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia. . . . [W]e are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests.”5 He further calls for an “easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia . . . [which] is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon.”6 He expresses his intention of seeking a “good deal” for Russia that is “great” for the United States.7
One of the men who helps edit the speech, George Papadopoulos, is in regular contact with Kremlin agents for the four weeks leading up to the Mayflower event.8 Two of the speech’s authors are longtime Kremlin allies.
The Facts
ON MARCH 14, 2016, TRUMP’S son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is invited to discuss a détente with Russia by a think tank called the Center for the National Interest.9 Kushner meets the center’s president, Russian-born Dimitri Simes, who was raised in Moscow and is now publisher of the center’s magazine, the National Interest. In June 2015, the month Trump announced his presidential candidacy, Simes published an article by Maria Butina (now an accused Russian spy) that began with this sentence: “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States.”10 In 2015, Simes had introduced Butina and her alleged intelligence handler, Alexander Torshin—called by Bloomberg “an ally of Vladimir Putin”—to the then Federal Reserve vice chairman; Butina felt comfortable enough with the center’s staff that she also asked the center’s then chairman, Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, to invest in a struggling Russian bank.11
In the weeks following his first meeting with Simes, Kushner agrees to coordinate with the Center for the National Interest on a Trump campaign event that will feature Trump’s first big foreign policy speech.12 The think tank is “more pro-Russia than most in Washington.”13 The Trump campaign tells Simes he will have “writing input” on Trump’s April 27, 2016, speech, as well as the opportunity to provide the campaign with an invite list for the event.14 Simes is assisted in writing Trump’s speech by Richard Burt, one of the center’s directors and an important figure at two major Russian institutions.15 Burt is on the advisory board of Alfa Capital Partners, a private equity fund in which Russia’s Alfa Bank is an investor, and is a lobbyist, like Carter Page, for Russian gas company Gazprom.16 One of the editors of the speech is George Papadopoulos; Trump has known for over a month that Papadopoulos is in secret negotiations with the Kremlin over a Trump-Putin summit in Moscow or D.C.17
By April 21, just twenty-four days from his date of hire as a delegate counter, Manafort is not only Trump’s de facto campaign manager but is addressing one hundred members of the Republican National Committee in Florida about what they can expect from the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, going forward.18 The campaign will never explain how Manafort rises from being an outsider seeking to “get to” Trump—and willing to work for free—on February 14, 2016, to getting hired in late March and taking over the entirety of Trump’s political operation almost immediately. What is clear is that one of Manafort’s first acts in the “expanded role” he is given on April 6 is to begin detailed preparations for Trump’s first foreign policy speech.
On April 11, several days after Manafort’s power increases, the longtime lobbyist for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine emails his old Russian-Ukrainian protégé, Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been called by Politico a “Kiev-based operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence.”19 Kilimnik will “[consult] regularly with Manafort . . . while Manafort [is] running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.”20 In his April 11 email to Kilimnik, Manafort asks if Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska (“among the two or three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis,” according to a 2006 U.S. diplomatic cable) is aware that Manafort has joined the Trump campaign. He further asks Kilimnik for advice on how he can “use” being Trump’s new de facto campaign manager to “get whole” with Deripaska.21 Manafort and Deripaska have business dealings that amount to as much as $60 million.22 Manafort and Kilimnik meet in person shortly thereafter, just before Trump’s “Mayflower Speech.”23 Over the ensuing weeks and months Manafort “discusses an array of subjects related to the presidential campaign [with Kilimnik], including the hacking of the DNC’s emails.”24 In August 2016, a private jet belonging to Deripaska will land in New York City shortly after a known meeting there between Manafort and Kilimnik.25
The same week Manafort contacts Kilimnik to make sure Kremlin agents are aware of his newfound ability to “get whole” with them through his work with Trump, Sergey Kislyak invites longtime Kremlin ally Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to visit Moscow to meet with a friend of Vladimir Putin’s, Vladimir Yakunin.26 The California congressman also meets with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who will in two months participate in the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016.27 Rohrabacher is so popular with the Russian government, and considered such a valuable intelligence source by the Kremlin, that it has even given him his own code name; CNN, along with many other media outlets, calls Rohrabacher “Putin’s favorite congressman.”28 While in Moscow, Rohrabacher and his aide Paul Behrends meet multiple times with Yakunin and Veselnitskaya to discuss the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia.29 One of Rohrabacher’s former congressional aides is Erik Prince, a “shadow” national security adviser to Trump.30 Prince regularly sends national security white papers to Trump during the campaign and is “confident” they are taken seriously—as they are delivered (in at least one instance by Prince personally) to Steve Bannon.31 It is unknown whether Rohrabacher or Behrends uses Prince or another intermediary to communicate Putin’s sanctions-relief demands to the Trump campaign prior to Trump’s speech at the Mayflower Hotel.
In May 2017, seven current and former U.S. officials will tell Reuters that Kushner spoke to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on the phone in April; despite the substantial sourcing on the claim, Kushner will say through his attorney that he has no memory of any such call.32 Reuters concludes, by virtue of the April call and another undisclosed Kushner-Kislyak call from November 2016, that “[Kushner’s] contacts with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak were more extensive than the White House has acknowledged.”33 In his July 2017 statement to Congress, Kushner will imply that the first time he ever spoke to Kislyak was at the Mayflower Hotel, when the two men were introduced by Simes.34
In the days leading up to Kislyak attending the VIP cocktail hour with Trump and getting a front-row seat for the c
andidate’s first foreign policy address, Papadopoulos communicates frequently with Kremlin agents—having been given no indication by Trump on March 31 that he should stop and every indication by Trump’s national cochair Sam Clovis that he should continue. Per the Washington Post, during the first week of April 2016 Papadopoulos emails the National Security Advisory Committee “to update them about ongoing discussions with the professor [Joseph Mifsud] and Putin’s ‘niece’ [Olga Polonskaya, née Vinogradova] . . . [and to detail] his ‘outreach to Russia.’ ”35 During this same period, Russian hackers attack and access the Democratic National Committee’s servers for the first time since mid-2015. During the second week of April, Papadopoulos—now part of the editing team for Trump’s first major address on foreign policy, including Russia policy—emails back and forth with Polonskaya “trying to set up a ‘potential foreign policy trip to Russia,’ ” to which Mifsud eventually replies that such a trip “has already been agreed [to]” on the Russian end, as is confirmed by Polonskaya when she, too, replies to Papadopoulos, writing, “I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request. . . . [W]e are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature [as the confirmed GOP nominee] . . . [is] officially announced.”36 In the third week of April, Papadopoulos has a lengthy email conversation with Ivan Timofeev, a man Mifsud had described to Papadopoulos as a deputy with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but who is, more important, the director of programs for the Russian International Affairs Council, which describes itself as a “partner” of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. The Institute is busy planning the Russian election interference operation for Putin.37 At the beginning of the fourth week of April, Manafort announces that Trump will be giving a foreign policy speech at an event hosted by the Center for the National Interest; the same day, Papadopoulos speaks to Timofeev about Trump going to Moscow to meet with Putin, or else having the two men meet in London.38 Papadopoulos ultimately spends the fourth week of April 2016 “hav[ing] multiple conversations over Skype and email” with his “MFA [Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs] connection” about a meeting between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials.39
The day before Trump’s big speech at the Mayflower, Mifsud tells Papadopoulos at an in-person meeting in London that he has just learned, at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow the week before, that the Kremlin has “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of [her] emails”—referred to by Mifsud as “emails of Clinton.”40 The day of the speech, Papadopoulos emails campaign senior policy adviser Stephen Miller to say that he has “some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a [Trump] trip [to Moscow] when the time is right”; he also emails Trump’s then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to confirm that Putin still wishes to host Trump in Moscow.41
Just seventy-two hours after Trump’s speech, Papadopoulos emails Mifsud to thank him for his help in connecting the Kremlin to Trump and notes that a Putin-Trump summit would be “history making.”42 The same week, Papadopoulos emails Timofeev to tell him that Trump’s “Mayflower Speech” was intended as “the signal to meet”—meaning the Trump campaign’s indication that the time is right for Putin and Trump to hold a summit in D.C. or Moscow.43 Timofeev responds to Papadopoulos on May 4, writing, “I have just talked to my colleagues from the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. The[y] are open for cooperation. One of the options is to make a meeting for you at the North America Desk, if you are in Moscow.”44 Papadopoulos forwards the email to Lewandowski, who by now has lost his authority to Manafort; Papadopoulos also sends the Timofeev email to Clovis, who replies that the campaign will have to figure out how to mitigate the “legal issues” inherent in private citizens meeting with foreign officials.45
Trump’s “Mayflower Speech” was originally slated for the National Press Club (NPC), a venue often used for maiden political speeches; just forty-eight hours before the event, however, Manafort switches the venue from the NPC, which seats seven hundred people. He asserts that the room in the Mayflower Hotel he has booked offers more seating, which it does not. The hotel’s main ballroom seats six hundred people. The room where Trump is scheduled to speak seats 280.46 Moving the event to the Mayflower allows, however, for a private, VIP-only cocktail hour to be held prior to the speech, at which time Trump aides hobnob with the four invited ambassadors, three of whom are from nations (Russia, Italy, and Singapore) that will shortly be involved in Russia’s mysterious and largest-ever oil-stock sale.47
The Steele dossier alleges Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page met with the president of Rosneft about trade sanctions on Russia. The Rosneft president, reports Steele, “was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return.”48 And indeed, consistent with the dossier, in December 2016 Rosneft will announce an estimated $11 billion private purchase of 19.5 percent of the state-owned oil giant—the 19 percent previously anticipated by Steele, plus an unexplained 0.5 percent that could well be a “brokerage” fee for Trump—by Glencore, a Swiss multinational trading and mining company, and by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Glencore’s largest shareholder.”49
Bloomberg will later write that the Trump campaign wanted the event to be held at the Mayflower so it could be televised.50 Years earlier, Trump had implied to MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts that Putin watches Trump whenever he’s at a televised event: “He’s probably very interested in what you and I are saying today,” Trump said to Roberts at the time, “and I’m sure he’s going to be seeing it in some form. . . .”51
When asked by Congress, in the spring of 2017, about his contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign, Jeff Sessions will fail to mention the Mayflower event—even after he has updated his originally inaccurate testimony to note two other meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he failed to disclose under congressional questioning.52 In June 2017, former FBI director James Comey will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, in classified session, that Russia-to-Russia intercepts indicate that Kislyak and Sessions met privately on the sidelines of the Mayflower Hotel event.53 Comey will explain to the Intelligence Committee that he hadn’t publicly testified about the third 2016 meeting between the chairman of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee and the Russian ambassador because he thought the information was too sensitive to be aired in open session.54
Sessions’s position on what he did or did not do at the Mayflower has changed over time. In his opening statement before his June 2017 testimony, he says, “I did not have any private meetings nor do I recall any conversations with any Russian officials at the Mayflower Hotel. I did not attend any meetings at that event.”55 Moments later, he implies there might have been an exchange: “If any brief interaction occurred in passing with the Russian Ambassador during that reception, I do not remember it.”56 Not long after that, under questioning by Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO), he changes his position yet again: “I didn’t have any formal meeting with him. I’m confident of that. But I may have had an encounter during the reception.”57 None of these answers explains, however, why Sessions, when asked under oath on January 10, 2017, by Senator Al Franken (D-MN) if he had “communicated with the Russian government” in 2016, had answered, “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” and “I did not have communications with the Russians.”58 A day after the Washington Post reveals, in March 2017, the inaccuracy of that response, Sessions recuses himself from the Russia investigation.59
At the VIP cocktail hour before Trump’s April 2016 speech, Kushner meets Kislyak in person for the first time—a fact he leaves off his disclosure forms when he applies for his job in the Trump administration seven months later.60
In his speech, Trump discusses finding a “good deal” for Russia that also works for the United States. T
hough he doesn’t mention the subject of the “deal” he imagines making with Russia, his prior statements on Putin, Russia, and U.S. policy strongly imply he is talking about revisiting the United States’ sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is unknown whether Papadopoulos has communicated to Trump by the time his speech begins—or whether Stephen Miller or Sam Clovis, both of whom have recently been in contact with Papadopoulos about his Russian contacts, communicates to Trump—Putin’s most recent entreaty to Trump to meet face-to-face in Moscow, or the fact that there has been recent “interesting news” on this front. Also unclear is whether and when Papadopoulos communicates to the rest of the campaign Mifsud’s revelation that Russia has incriminating Clinton emails. In the sentencing memo for his September 2018 sentencing hearing, Papadopoulos will claim that while he told the Greek Foreign Minister in May 2016 about the Russians’ being in possession of stolen Clinton emails, he does not believe he ever told anyone from the presidential campaign he was then working for—though he later tells Jake Tapper of CNN that he “can’t guarantee” his memory on this latter point is accurate and that he “might have” told someone on the campaign about Mifsud’s April 2016 statements. In late March 2018, Trump campaign policy director John Mashburn will testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee that “he had received an email in the first half of 2016 alerting the Trump campaign that Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. . . . [and] he remembered the email coming from George Papadopoulos.”61
Proof of Collusion Page 14