Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  Twenty days after the June 9, 2016, meeting between the Trump campaign and several Russian nationals, Rob Goldstone again sends an email to Trump’s secretary Rhona Graff. Also on the email recipient list are Dan Scavino, the Trump campaign’s director of social media, and Konstantin Sidorkov, the director of partnership marketing for a website the New York Times calls “Russia’s equivalent to Facebook.”57 Goldstone’s email references the content of the June 9 Trump Tower meeting:

  I am following up . . . [on] something I had mentioned to Don [Jr.] and Paul Manafort during a meet recently. There are believed to be around 2 million Russian-American voters living in the USA and more than 1.6 million of these use the Russian “Facebook”. . . . As I mentioned to you guys . . . they want to create a Vote Trump 2016 promotion aired directly at these users, people who will be voting in November. At the time [of the June 9 meeting] Paul had said he would welcome it. So I had the VK folks mock up a basic sample page which I am resending for your approval now.58

  Don Jr. will claim to have no recollection of either he or Manafort discussing this subject with Goldstone on June 9.59

  Contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals are legion in May and June 2016. Just forty-eight hours after Manafort is formally named Trump’s campaign manager on May 19, Papadopoulos emails him about a Putin-Trump meeting and alerts him to his ongoing contacts with the Russians.60 Papadopoulos’s email to Manafort is bookended, on May 14 and May 21, by additional correspondence between the young national security adviser and Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud.61 By May 25, Papadopoulos has returned to where he first met Mifsud—Italy—and indeed is pictured on a visit to Link Campus University, where Mifsud not only works but also is “part of the management.”62 Less than two days after traveling to Mifsud’s workplace, Papadopoulos is in Athens, Greece, as Vladimir Putin’s plane touches down there.63

  The same month, accused spy Maria Butina’s boyfriend, GOP operative and NRA member Paul Erickson, writes the following in an email titled “Kremlin Connection” to top Trump campaign staffer Rick Dearborn:

  I’m now writing to you and Sen. Sessions in your roles as Trump foreign policy experts/advisors. . . . Happenstance and the (sometimes) international reach of the NRA placed me in a position a couple of years ago to slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin. Russia is quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S. that isn’t forthcoming under the current administration. And for reasons that we can discuss in person or on the phone, the Kremlin believes that the only possibility of a true re-set in this relationship would be with a new Republican White House.64

  Erickson’s email, when published in full by Rolling Stone in April 2018, will be significant in several ways: it will confirm that Jeff Sessions gave inaccurate testimony in January 2017 about his receipt of communications from the Russians, even considering his defense of never having been so approached in his role as a Trump adviser; it will confirm that the NRA was not just instrumental but essential to the establishment of a clandestine back channel between the Kremlin and top Republican leaders, as will be alleged in the indictments against Erickson’s girlfriend; it will put in writing something long implicit, namely, that Trump-Russia communications are largely being conducted “in person or on the phone” so as not to leave a paper or digital trail; it will gravely undercut claims by the chairman (Sessions) and director (Gordon) of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee that they were unaware of Russian attempts to communicate with the committee after Sessions allegedly “shut down” Papadopoulos’s proposal to converse with Russian agents on March 31, 2016; and it will confirm for Sessions, one of the top officials in the Trump campaign—well before June’s revelation of massive Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee—that the Russian government not only supports Trump’s campaign but deems it mission critical that Trump be elected instead of Clinton.

  The Trump campaign will later report that Dearborn forwarded Erickson’s email to Jared Kushner, who thereafter nixed the idea of responding to Erickson’s outreach on behalf of Torshin.65 Yet within five days, Trump’s son Don Jr. will be dining with Torshin at the NRA conference in Kentucky.66 Torshin expresses his hope that he can renew his “old acquaintance” with Trump at an offsite event for wounded veterans, where he also plans to bring a gift for Melania.67 It is unknown whether that meeting ultimately occurs, but Trump Jr. will later issue a statement through his attorney that nothing passed between him and Torshin but “gun-related small talk.”68

  In early June, Trump National Security Advisory Committee member Carter Page will “[stun] a gathering of high-powered Washington foreign policy experts . . . [by] going off topic with effusive praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump. . . . hail[ing] Putin as stronger and more reliable than President Obama . . . and then tout[ing] the positive effect a Trump presidency would have on U.S.-Russia relations.”69 The Washington Post will further report that, as had been boasted about by secretly recorded Kremlin agents in 2013, “many [foreign policy experts] . . . say that Page’s views may be compromised by his investment in Russian energy giant Gazprom.”70 It is during this period that Page receives an invitation to speak in Moscow; according to his congressional testimony, he informs Jeff Sessions, J. D. Gordon, Corey Lewandowski, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s personal assistant, about his planned trip, and none of them offers any objection.71 Indeed, Page recounts that Lewandowski said, of the trip, “that’s fine,” though he told Page that the trip would have to be “unaffiliated with the campaign.”72 Page says he informed Sessions of his upcoming trip to Moscow at a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club; this was the same dinner at which Papadopoulos, who had been wanting to take a trip to Moscow to continue his clandestine negotiations with the Kremlin, sat beside Sessions the entire night.73 This dinner also appears to be one of those to which Sessions invited Alfa Bank advisory board member and Gazprom lobbyist Richard Burt; according to Politico, it was at these dinners the Russian agent “was invited to discuss issues of national security and foreign policy [and] white papers” that he then gave to Sessions.74 Asked about contact between Burt and Sessions and the other members of the National Security Advisory Committee, such as Papadopoulos and fellow Gazprom lobbyist Carter Page, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks will say, “I don’t believe Mr. Trump or our policy staff has ever met Mr. Burt.”75

  Annotated History

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  In June, Kushner contracts with British firm Cambridge Analytica to institute a domestic “microtargeting” scheme for Trump’s general election campaign; the data compiled will be left open by Cambridge Analytica for Russian actors to steal and weaponize.

  Kushner’s hiring of Brad Parscale was what led to the Trump campaign contracting with British firm Cambridge Analytica, which “microtargeted” U.S. voters by creating “psychographic” profiles to predict whom any individual voter would be most likely to vote for.76 Cambridge Analytica now stands accused of having helped the Trump campaign spread automated news in the United States in the lead-up to the 2016 election. As Vox wrote, by the time of Election Day 2016, “Trump’s bots . . . outnumbered Clinton’s five to one. Pro-Trump programmers carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day.”77 Vox quoted Martin Moore, the director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College in London, as observing that “[Trump’s campaign] was using 40,000 to 50,000 variants of ads every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response.”78

  While unconventional, Cambridge Analytica’s methods may have remained uncontroversial had not four things been discovered after the election: that Michael Flynn was secretly consulting for SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, during the campaign and had failed to disclose this on his financial disclosure forms; that Russia’s propaganda an
d fake-news campaigns prior to the 2016 election were so carefully targeted to locales where Trump needed assistance that, according to Sean Illing at Vox, “congressional and DOJ investigators believe that Trump’s campaign might have helped guide Russia’s voter targeting scheme,” perhaps with Flynn’s help; that Facebook user data quietly compiled by Cambridge Analytica employee Aleksandr Kogan—a professor associated with a Russian university who made multiple trips to Russia between 2014 and Election Day 2016—was (at best) negligently left accessible to remote users, with the result that Cambridge Analytica’s microtargeting data was “accessed from Russia” during the election; and that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, in an undercover video, said that not only had he met personally with Trump many times, but in fact Cambridge Analytica was responsible for “all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, . . . all the digital campaign, the television campaign and . . . all the strategy” of Trump’s presidential run.79 Nix’s claims were alarming because, in the same undercover video in which he all but took credit for Trump’s victory, he also revealed that Cambridge Analytica was willing to “encourage[e] sting operations involving bribes and paid sex in an effort to swing a campaign,” and that the firm’s opposition research was often leaked to “proxy organizations,” of which Nix (who admitted to reaching out directly to WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign) said, “[You] feed them the material, and they do the work. . . . And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding—so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”80

  The Washington Post reported that the original impetus behind the campaign’s use of Cambridge Analytica was to secure the unlimited financial support, through an independent pro-Trump group called “Make America Number 1 PAC,” of mysterious billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer.81 Robert Mercer not only created Cambridge Analytica, but he and his daughter Rebekah have been longtime backers of Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, which was often used by the Trump team to spread misinformation during the presidential campaign (see chapter 10). Bannon was the cofounder of Cambridge Analytica.82

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  By late June, the “Brexit” vote is occurring in the United Kingdom—a Kremlin-backed push for the citizens of that nation to vote to leave the EU in a nationwide referendum. It is in part a trial run for the sort of election meddling the Kremlin is planning in the United States. With the assistance of “Leave” backer and Trump ally Nigel Farage, the Kremlin strikes a significant blow against the future of Western democracy when the United Kingdom narrowly votes to leave the EU.

  The parallels between the Brexit vote and the Trump-Russia scandal are uncanny. While not connected to the official “Leave” campaign, one of the primary proponents of the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU—a man who committed significant funds to that aim—was millionaire businessman Arron Banks, and in June 2018, the Guardian reported that Banks “met Russian officials multiple times before the Brexit vote” and that these officials were “high-ranking.”83 Moreover, just as the Russians, according to the Steele dossier, dangled not just real estate deals but oil and gas opportunities before Trump, Banks was reportedly offered a “multibillion dollar opportunity to buy Russian goldmines.”84 The Washington Post reported that the Russians also “dangled a diamond mine” as a possible prize for the top “Leave” bankrollers and organizers.85 And just as Putin’s support for Trump’s “America First” agenda suggests a hostility to NATO’s continued ascendance in Europe, the Guardian reported that the Kremlin sought to coordinate with the “Leave” campaign because “Putin has long seen the eastward expansion of European Union influence as a threat.”86 As with the Trump campaign, Russian outreach to the leaders of the “Leave” campaign involved invitations to meetings and events, as well as the persistent involvement of Russia’s ambassador (in this case its ambassador to the United Kingdom).

  One of the “Leave” figureheads, Nigel Farage, met and campaigned with Trump and was accused of acting as a back channel to both Putin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who for years has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London as an asylum seeker.87 The Farage-Assange allegation, leveled by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, has Farage meeting several times with Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy and at least once bringing him a USB memory stick filled with data; Farage is known to have visited Assange at least once, in March 2017.88 When asked by a reporter who saw him leaving the embassy why he was there, Farage replied that he “couldn’t remember.”89

  The Farage-Putin allegation comes from Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian politician and member of the European Parliament (EP) who acted as the chief representative for the EP in the Brexit negotiations. Verhofstadt considers Farage, according to the Independent, “[a] pro-Putin ‘fifth [columnist]’ who want[s] to destroy Europe from within. . . . ‘They’re doing only one thing: they take Kremlin money, they take Kremlin intelligence.’ ”90

  Trump has been described as “friends” with the now-controversial Farage, taking the unusual step of publicly calling for him to be named Britain’s ambassador to the United States.91 During his July 2018 visit to England, the British government had to explicitly forbid Trump from meeting with Farage.92

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  Almost immediately after he receives Sam Clovis’s email mentioning potential “legal issues” with a private citizen meeting with foreign officials, Papadopoulos gets on a plane and goes on a campaign-approved trip to Athens, Greece—just the sort of “neutral city” his Russian contacts had previously told him the Russians prefer to meet in.

  On March 24, 2016, Papadopoulos had emailed “Trump campaign officials, including the Campaign Supervisor [Clovis] and several members of the campaign’s foreign policy team,” saying that his Russian contacts wanted “to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump. . . . in a ‘neutral’ city, or directly in Moscow.”93 Two days before the “Mayflower Speech,” Papadopoulos returned to the idea of meeting the Russians in a “neutral” city, writing to Stephen Miller, “The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready. . . . [T]hese governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral’ cities.”94

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  Despite the secret nature of his early May trip to Greece, Papadopoulos nevertheless gives interviews with local media, and will do so again both when he returns to Athens in late May and when he travels to Greece for a third time in 2016 during the presidential transition.

  Papadopoulos’s behavior in late May 2016 mirrored his behavior in Athens earlier in the month. As reported by Athens newspaper Kathimerini, during Papadopoulos’s first trip “he would lower his voice so as not to be overheard or drop hints of major contacts. . . . It was obvious that he didn’t know a lot of people in Athens at the time, but was eager to make important acquaintances.”95 The same reporter who interviewed Papadopoulos in early May interviewed the Trump adviser again when he returned to Athens in late May. “He came back to Athens a few weeks later,” wrote Alexis Papachelas for Kathimerini. “By then he had met everyone he needed to know and spoke very comfortably about the Greek president, the ministers of foreign affairs and defense, and the head of the main opposition and important businessmen. He ‘revealed’ that [the campaign] had been secretly planning a pre-election trip by Trump to Greece and Israel, which he saw taking place that July. His contacts with the Greek government, he claimed, were quite advanced and he appeared confident the visit would happen. . . .”96

  That the campaign was aware of Papadopoulos’s trip is confirmed in part by an event that happened a week after Papadopoulos arrived in Athens for the second time in May. On June 3, Papadopoulos forwarded to Papachelas of Kathimerini an email from Trump’s personal assistant, Hope Hicks, agreeing to an interview with the Greek newspaper—though she noted to Papachelas, through Papadopoulos, that she “needed a bit of time.”97 In late September, Papadopoulos contacted Papachelas to direct his attent
ion to his recent interview with Russia media outlet Interfax, in which he decried sanctions on Russia.98 Greek media reported that same month that Papadopoulos met in New York with an adviser to Greek foreign minister Nikos Kotzias, George Tzitzikos.99 The Papadopoulos-Tzitzikos meeting is the third time that Papadopoulos met with either the Greek foreign minister or one of his aides prior to the 2016 election—a significant number, given that, in September 2018, Papadopoulos confessed to having told the Greek foreign minister in May 2016 of the Kremlin possessing stolen Clinton emails.100

  Papachelas’s assessment of Papadopoulos’s status in Greece during the Trump adviser’s December 2016 trip to Greece is telling. “He had acquired a new status in Athens and was widely regarded as being the key to having Trump’s ear. He was bestowed with awards, wined and dined by prominent Athenians and even appointed to the judging committee of a beauty pageant on a Greek island. I had expected him to get a job at the State Department,” wrote the Kathimerini reporter in 2017.101 Papadopoulos told another Kathimerini reporter that he was “actively involved” in the presidential transition. It is unclear whether the “Greek island” the beauty pageant was held on was Mykonos, where Simona Mangiante will say that Papadopoulos was contacted under “highly suspicious” circumstances by an Israeli who thereafter offered him “much money” to discuss Cyprus- and Israel-related “business” in Tel Aviv. Cyprus is another one of the seven EU nations that opposes Russian sanctions.102 In August 2018, the special counsel’s office reported that at some point in the months or years before his arrest in mid-2017 Papadopoulos received money from someone “he believed was likely an intelligence officer of a foreign country (other than Russia).”103

  In June 2017, Vassilis Kikilias, the shadow minister for defense of the Greek political party New Democracy—then in the midst of an investigation into whether Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos broke the law with a military procurement agreement with Saudi Arabia—said that “he [Kikilias] will also be seeking answers regarding reports in foreign media that in 2016 Kammenos had secretly acted as a mediator to arrange a meeting between Trump’s foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.”104