Proof of Collusion
Page 15
Reviewing the Mayflower event afterward, the European bureau of Politico will write, “That Trump would choose the Center for the National Interest as the place to premier[e] his new seriousness on foreign policy has Manafort’s fingerprints all over it. For Manafort and the Center have something very important in common: both have ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin.”62 As part of a detailed analysis of the center and its attendant policy publication, the National Interest, Politico Europe writes,
[These] are two of the most Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital. . . . Center director Dmitri Simes [sic] . . . for decades has used his connections to the Kremlin—real or perceived—to cultivate a reputation in Washington as one of the few Russia hands who intimately knows that country’s politics. For years, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Russian government-funded Institute for Democracy and Cooperation . . . whose head, Andranik Migranyan, was personally appointed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to a State Department cable released by Wikileaks. In May 2014 [after the Russian annexation of Crimea], the two think tanks held a press conference defending Russia’s position in Ukraine. In 2013, Simes graced the stage alongside Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club . . . frequented almost exclusively by Putin apologists. At Valdai, Putin referred to Simes as his “American friend and colleague” and Simes stated “I fully support President Putin’s tough stance [on Syria].” This deference towards Russia extends to the National Interest, which . . . includes on its board Alexey Pushkov, . . . chairman of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee.63
After the speech, CNN will get the Russian reaction to Trump’s speech by quoting Russians on the street in Moscow as well as several prominent Russians. The most high-profile response published by CNN, taken from Russia’s TASS news agency, happens to be from Pushkov—the Center for the National Interest board member—who says, “[Trump] expresses readiness to come to terms with the Russian President instead of making conflicts with us, the way today’s administration is doing.”64 CNN notes that Russian politicians are also happy that Trump has made no mention of Ukraine or Crimea in discussing better relations with the Kremlin.65
Trump’s choice of sponsor for his first foreign policy speech is therefore a powerful statement of comity with Russia; the same speech given at a venue owned by a professional organization of American journalists, the National Press Club, would not send the same message—even putting aside who had authored and edited it.
Yet it isn’t merely the sponsor of Trump’s first foreign policy speech that is intended to send the Russians a signal: it’s the speech itself. Papadopoulos, who the Times notes was “trusted enough to edit the outline” of the speech, also “flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Mr. [Ivan] Timofeev [an agent of the Russian Foreign Ministry] that [the speech] should be taken as ‘the signal to meet.’ ”66 Given that Putin “friend” Simes had been invited to contribute to Trump’s speech and had also, within the previous three years, been an honored guest of Putin himself at the pro-Putin discussion club directed by Timofeev, what Papadopoulos is communicating to Timofeev is that Trump’s willingness to deliver a speech directly influenced by Timofeev’s associate—to the Russian ambassador, no less—can be taken as a sign that Trump is willing to surrender a portion of his foreign policy to the authorship of Kremlin allies. Olga Polonskaya, Papadopoulos’s third Russian contact after Mifsud and Timofeev, responds to Trump’s speech by saying that she is pleased Trump’s “position toward Russia is much softer” than the other Republican candidates’.67
Besides Simes and Papadopoulos, Trump’s other ghost speechwriter is Richard Burt.68 Burt had participated in an April 14 panel discussion at the Center for the National Interest entitled “Does America Need Allies?”69 That sentiment will show up less than two weeks later in Trump’s speech at the Mayflower: “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” Trump announces on April 27, later adding, “We’re rebuilding other countries while weakening our own. . . . [O]ur allies are not paying their fair share. . . . The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”70 What Trump here describes—using the words of a man, Burt, recruited by Paul Manafort to help compose Trump’s speech—is the end of the indefatigable Western alliance that won World Wars I and II and the Cold War. The prospect of America shirking its allies in April 2016 is surely music to the ears of Manafort’s old boss, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, as well as Deripaska’s friend Vladimir Putin. New York Magazine has called “splitting the Western alliance” the core component of “Russia’s dream.”71
Whatever signal it was that Papadopoulos—or Trump—intended to send at the Mayflower Hotel, less than forty-eight hours after Trump’s speech, on April 29, 2016, the DNC is attacked in a “serious way” by Russian hackers.72
Annotated History
* * *
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.
As of April 21, 2016, news outlets were planning on sending crews to the National Press Club, as evidenced by stories about the upcoming speech in the New York Times and Newsweek.73 The venue was still the NPC on April 25.74 The Hill reported that “the day before the event [April 26], the campaign announced that the venue had been changed from the National Press Club to the Mayflower Hotel due to ‘overwhelming interest’ ”—but in fact, the ballroom in which the event was held at the Mayflower holds fewer people than the NPC does.75 The change of venue, first published by the Hill at 3:45 p.m. on April 26, risked confusing prospective media attendees of the event, as it came less than twenty-four hours before what was intended to be not only Trump’s first major foreign policy address, but also a centerpiece in the redesign of his campaign and the reshaping of his image. Indeed, on the same day the Mayflower event was announced, Manafort addressed the Republican National Committee in Florida with the intention, as the New York Times wrote at the time, to inform the Republican establishment that “Trump recognized the need to reshape his persona and that his campaign would begin working with the political establishment that he has scorned to great effect.”76
Reaction to Trump’s speech was mixed. Politico wrote that “the speech was notable more for the atmospherics and presentation than for its substance.”77 In critiquing the speech’s cadence, Politico noted that “Paul Manafort, a senior Trump adviser who wrote primary night remarks for Trump’s victory in New York last Tuesday, told reporters that he did not write this one”; that Manafort had not only been promoted twice in his first two weeks with the Trump campaign but was also writing Trump’s speeches was not widely known at that point.78 Taking a contrary view on the quality of the speech was conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who tweeted after it had concluded that Trump’s address from the Mayflower was the “GREATEST FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH SINCE WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL ADDRESS.”79 If Coulter knew at the time that the speech had been shaped by Russian interests for an audience of Russian interests and to be critiqued in the press by the same Russian interests that participated in its writing, her tweet betrayed none of that knowledge.
* * *
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.
Sessions’s defense for not disclosing these contacts was that he thought he was being asked only about meetings he took—in his
own understanding and classification of matters—as a surrogate for the Trump campaign rather than as a U.S. senator. However, as the Atlantic noted, in the first two months of 2016 Sessions met with zero foreign diplomats; his meetings with foreign diplomats began as soon as he became a Trump surrogate.80
Sessions also dissembled on the subject of his contacts with Papadopoulos. Sessions’s right-hand man on the National Security Advisory Committee, J. D. Gordon, has said that—despite Sessions’ and Gordon’s being the chairman and director of the committee, respectively—neither of them ever saw any emails from Papadopoulos about Russia after March 31, 2016.81 Gordon contends that, for unknown reasons, Sam Clovis conspired with Manafort and others to keep any such emails from both Sessions and Gordon. According to Business Insider, Gordon said he was “surprised to learn” that Papadopoulos had gone outside “his direct chain of command” to try to schedule a Trump-Putin meeting.82 Gordon’s insistence that Papadopoulos and others on the Trump campaign deliberately kept the campaign’s contacts with Russian nationals a secret from both he and Sessions is complicated by the fact that Sessions and Gordon themselves had meetings and contacts with Russians that they did not disclose—both at the Republican National Convention and thereafter. Sessions and Gordon met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the convention in Cleveland; Sessions thereafter met with Kislyak in his Senate office to discuss (contrary to his initial claims) “campaign-related matters,” while Gordon was in contact with now-accused Russian spy Maria Butina in September and October 2016—and never revealed it to anyone after the Russia investigation became national news.83 That Papadopoulos sat next to Sessions at an hours-long Trump campaign dinner in the midst of his spring 2016 communications with Russian nationals—and that he revealed those communications to both an Australian diplomat, a Greek politician, and a British official during the same period—also calls into question why he would have kept the most critical information he was then holding from his boss on the National Security Advisory Committee.84
As for Papadopoulos’s ongoing importance—in the view of top Trump officials—to the Trump campaign, it was underscored by two events that occurred around the time of Trump’s “Mayflower Speech.” First, despite Papadopoulos’s ongoing contacts with Russian nationals, and his communications with Stephen Miller about those contacts, Miller became one of Papadopoulos’s chief advocates within the campaign. As the New York Times wrote, even after learning of Papadopoulos’s meetings with Mifsud, “Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign and now a top White House aide, was eager for Mr. Papadopoulos to serve as a surrogate.”85 Then, just a week after the Mayflower Speech, Papadopoulos, now back in London, spoke out of turn to the Times of London by demanding that British prime minister David Cameron apologize to Trump for calling Trump’s comments about Muslims “divisive, stupid, and wrong.”86 Papadopoulos implied that if Cameron failed to apologize it would put any chance he had of having a special relationship with Trump at risk. Clovis, who had not fired Papadopoulos after he revealed to the campaign that he was conducting ongoing negotiations with Kremlin agents, also took no action against Papadopoulos for causing an international incident with a U.S. ally besides “severely reprimand[ing]” him.87 After the incident, Papadopoulos’s back-channel outreach to Kremlin agents—and his regular notification of campaign advisers and officials on the particulars of his actions—did not abate.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BACK CHANNELS
May to June 2016
Summary
THE KREMLIN TAKES THE “MAYFLOWER Speech” as the signal it is intended to be, an invitation to move forward with a Trump-Putin meeting. George Papadopoulos now urges the Russians to move forward with back-channel negotiations, which they do. At the same time, Russian hackers and propagandists redouble their efforts with the creation, in June 2016, of the DCLeaks website, the “Guccifer 2.0” persona, and two election interference plans authored by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.
The Kremlin explores new clandestine approaches to Trump campaign aides. In May, Kremlin agent Alexander Torshin reaches out to a top Trump staffer, Rick Dearborn, through Maria Butina’s boyfriend, Paul Erickson; in June, Torshin uses Rick Clay, a conservative activist from West Virginia, to get a message to Dearborn. Papadopoulos continues his regular communications with Kremlin agents Mifsud, Timofeev, and Polonskaya; he also makes contact with Kremlin allies in Athens, Greece. Carter Page is invited by Kremlin agents to give a speech at a university in Moscow, and Donald Trump Jr. dines with Torshin at an NRA conference that the latter had attended with the intention of speaking to Trump himself. Manafort continues his communications with Kilimnik; Felix Sater invites Michael Cohen to attend a business conference in Moscow; and Emin Agalarov’s publicist emails Donald Trump Jr. with an offer that sounds almost too good to be true: the Kremlin will deliver to the Trump campaign incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. The proffered materials sound a lot like the Clinton emails Mifsud had discussed with Papadopoulos in late April.
On June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone—Emin Agalarov’s publicist, but also a frequent emailer on behalf of Emin’s father, Aras—contacts Trump’s son Don Jr. with a message from both Agalarovs: the Kremlin wants to set up a meeting. Goldstone has been authorized to send the information the Kremlin wants to share with Trump directly to the candidate himself, but he has decided to go to Trump’s son first and to make the exchange in person rather than electronically. Goldstone informs Don Jr. that the Kremlin’s interest in giving the Trump campaign incriminating information on Clinton is to actively support Trump’s candidacy and to see it through to victory. Trump Jr. eagerly agrees to the proffered support, the proffered documents, and the requested meeting, telling Goldstone via email, “I love it.” According to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, Trump Jr. tells his father of the upcoming Trump Tower meeting immediately. One of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, will later attempt to revert his claim that Cohen will testify to Trump’s prior knowledge of the June 9, 2016, meeting; Davis will now say he is “not certain” one way or another what Cohen knows. But Vox observes Davis may simply be trying to solve Cohen’s “perjury problem.”1 As the digital media outlet explains, Cohen “testified to Congress last year that he personally did not know anything about Don Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting beforehand, and that he had no idea whether Trump did. If this was in fact a lie, Cohen could be charged for lying to Congress.”2 Meanwhile, CNN, the first outlet to report on Cohen’s claim that Trump knew of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in advance, will stand by its reporting by Jim Sciutto, Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen, writing in a follow-up article after Davis’s non-retraction retraction, “We stand by our story, which had more than one source, and we are confident in our reporting of it.”3
Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort—the last of these Trump’s formally designated campaign manager as of May 19—attend the June 9 meeting with several Kremlin agents. After the meeting is discovered by the media more than a year later, in July 2017, the Trump campaign will lie about its purpose via a false public statement dictated by Trump himself. Eventually, the meeting’s Trump campaign attendees will admit to having been looking for Clinton “dirt” at the meeting and will say that they were disappointed to discover that no such dirt was forthcoming.
Their disappointment should have been short-lived, however. Two Russian hacking operations bring their websites online during the same seven-day period the Kremlin promises the Trump campaign materials that will damage Clinton, and in short order these two sites dump reams of stolen emails damaging to not just the Clinton campaign but the Democratic National Committee—a haul quite close in its scope and purpose to what at least Trump Jr. and Kushner had been expecting to get in hand on June 9. Even so, agitation on the part of the campaign that the Kremlin has not delivered on its implicit promise of supplying the campaign with Clinton’s “missing” emails leads to formulation of a plan to locate these emails i
n the short term by clandestine means.
Several days after the “Mayflower Speech,” Papadopoulos makes the first of two May 2016 trips to Greece, one of the seven European Union (EU) countries that opposes Russian sanctions and home to a host of Putin allies—particularly the Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos, who runs a think tank that is in a memorandum of understanding with the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. While Papadopoulos is in Greece for the first time in May, Greek media outlet To Vima writes about Papadopoulos’s trip and notes that he is “incognito,” having “targeted” meetings, and “trying to make contacts.” These efforts to make contact with powerful figures in Greek politics are successful, as Papadopoulos meets not only with Kammenos but also a number of other influential Greek politicians. According to To Vima, the list of Papadopoulos’s Athens meetings includes “Secretary General Dimitrios Paraskevopoulos, Political Director Petros Mavroidis, and the head of three nodal addresses: A3 dealing with Balkan affairs, A4 monitoring Greek-Turkish [relations], and A7 handling the Greek-American relations. He then went to the Defense Ministry where, according to some information, he even had a meeting with National Defense Minister Panos Kammenos.”4