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.”

  The European bureau of Politico wrote an article titled “Need to reach Trump? Call Rhona,” noting, “When longtime friends and associates of President Donald Trump want to reach him, they don’t go directly to the White House. Instead, they call the woman who’s been the gatekeeper at Trump Tower for a quarter century: Rhona Graff.”105 The news outlet called Graff “a conduit for those who want to quietly offer advice [to Trump], make personnel suggestions [to Trump] or get on the president’s calendar” when Trump is in Florida instead of Washington.106 Under questioning by Congress in September 2017, Donald Trump Jr. testified that, during the campaign, “a lot” of the communications sent to Trump went through Graff.107

  But writing Graff instead of Trump wasn’t just the accepted way to contact Trump when he was away from his office, Politico noted.108 “POLITICO spoke to seven associates of Trump who still pass on messages to the president through Graff, most of whom requested anonymity so as not to risk their access. ‘If I really wanted to whisper something in his ear, I would probably go to Rhona,’ said [a] New York grocery billionaire . . . [who] has known Trump for decades.”109

  * * *

  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.

  Manafort, according to the Washington Post, prohibited any such Trump-Putin meeting in May 2016.110 At the time, Manafort said via email to his deputy Rick Gates that the Russians needed to be informed of Manafort’s decision “by someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”111 Some of Trump’s allies have taken this as an indication that Manafort intended for no one involved in the Trump campaign to meet with any Russian agents, while acknowledging that that prohibition then needed to be respectfully conveyed to the Kremlin; in fact, Manafort’s email covered only Trump himself and only prospective Trump trips to Moscow or Putin visits to America. In October 2017, Slate observed that Manafort’s reference to a “signal” was likely not about decorum: “It’s more plausible,” wrote William Saletan, “that Manafort was trying not to alert nosy Americans—perhaps the same ones [in the intelligence community] who, on behalf of our government, might have monitored a Trump-Putin meeting more easily in the United States than in London.”112

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION

  July 2016

  Summary

  JULY 2016 SEES THE TRUMP campaign beginning its frantic search of the dark web for the Russian hackers holding Clinton’s “missing” emails (see chapter 9), increasing the pace and boldness of its attempts at making direct contact with and receiving direct assistance from Russian nationals, and permitting not just its foreign policy but the Republican Party platform to be guided in part by the input of known Kremlin agents.

  As the month begins, it is clear that America’s electoral infrastructure is under significant, sustained attack; by the last week of the month, it is nearly certain that the Russians are behind this attack. The certainty that these attacks are benefitting only the Trump campaign encourages Trump’s team to draw itself still closer to the Russians. In this effort, campaign staffers are emboldened by the candidate himself, who toward the close of the month will openly ask a hostile foreign nation to attack America. Even two years later many of those who heard Trump say, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” refuse to accept that they heard—live—collusion between a U.S. presidential candidate and a geopolitical foe.

  In Rome, a former MI6 agent shares with an FBI agent the first pages of a dossier of raw intelligence he will be compiling through the end of the year. The actions of the Trump campaign in July 2016 will seem to confirm a good deal of the dossier’s intelligence. For instance, Carter Page indeed meets with Kremlin officials in Moscow, as the dossier indicates, and Michael Cohen takes a suspicious trip to Italy just before the Republican National Convention that dovetails with the allegations about the extent of his collusive activities made in the dossier. And at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Jeff Sessions discusses sanctions with Sergey Kislyak and J. D. Gordon amends the GOP platform to benefit the Kremlin in ways that suggest the unifying conspiracy described by Steele’s dossier—a traitorous policy-for-aid quid pro quo between Trump and the Kremlin—is accurate.

  The Facts

  AS TRUMP PREPARES TO ACCEPT the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland, many long-simmering Trump-Russia plans come to fruition, with Trump aides, allies, and associates finally making the direct contact with their Russian counterparts they have long planned—while simultaneously delivering on past promises of a reliably pro-Russia foreign policy. These intense exchanges come in the shadow of a national realization: that the Russians are attacking America’s electoral infrastructure and seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. This knowledge not only doesn’t slow the pace of Trump-Russia interactions, it speeds them to a frenetic pace.

  On May 16, 2016, Carter Page proposes in an email to Walid Phares and J. D. Gordon that Trump make a trip to Moscow that summer in place of Page himself, who has been invited to speak at the New Economic School in Moscow in July.1 Page writes, in part, “As discussed, my strategy in order to keep in sync with the media relations guidelines of the campaign has been to make my key messages as low-key and apolitical as possible. But after seeing the principal’s [Trump’s] tweet . . . I got another idea. If he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him.”2 The tweet Page is referring to, according to Vox, is one in which Trump calls Barack Obama “the worst president in U.S. history,” because “in politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.”3 In November 2017, Page will confirm that “take my place” indeed referred to Page’s intention, at the time, of traveling to Moscow to give a lecture; Page’s suggestion, therefore, was that he coordinate with his Russian contacts for Trump to make a trip to Russia during the campaign to “raise the temperature a little bit.”4

  This mid-May proposal from Page, along with a similar one from Papadopoulos around the same time, will eventually prompt new campaign manager Paul Manafort to write an email to his deputy Rick Gates, saying, “We need someone to communicate [to the Russians] that DT [Donald Trump] is not doing these trips [to Moscow]. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”5 The Washington Post will refer to Manafort’s use of the term “signal”—a term also used by Papadopoulos in an email to one of his Russian contacts, Ivan Timofeev—as significant, noting that “some see that as a potential tell when it comes to a larger effort to coordinate with the Russians.”6 Indeed, at the time, Manafort is engaged in regular clandestine contact with his old business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Soviet-born businessman whom Robert Mueller’s team will describe as having “active ties to Russian intelligence through the 2016 presidential election” in a 2017 court filing.7 Kilimnik, according to the Atlantic, came to the United States shortly after Manafort ascended to the position of Trump’s campaign manager; “He told his friends that he had come to the United States for ‘very significant meetings,’ ” the Atlantic writes. “It wasn’t hard for his friends to intuit what he meant. They had read the news reports that Paul Manafort had engineered his own comeback, procuring a top job in the Trump campaign. Just like in the good old days, Manafort had summoned Kilimnik to trail after him.”8

  Around the same time Manafort sends the message that some
one “low level” needs to “communicate” to the Russians on Trump’s behalf that he cannot make a trip to Moscow himself, Page will get a somewhat contradictory message from the campaign’s recently ousted campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly tells Page that it is fine for him to travel to Moscow in July: “if you’d like to go on your own, not affiliated with the campaign . . . that’s fine.”9 In March 2017, Lewandowski will deny ever giving permission to Page to go to Moscow, telling Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “I’ve never met or spoken to Carter Page in my life.”10 Eight months later, he will declare that his “memory has been refreshed” on the question and that he did indeed give Page permission to go to Moscow.11 J. D. Gordon will say in November 2017 that he tried to “dissuade” Page from going to Moscow in July 2016 and that Page “went around me” to get permission to go; it will subsequently be revealed that not only did Page email Gordon alongside Lewandowski at the time he received permission for the trip, but that he contacted Gordon immediately after his return to report on the results of his visit to Moscow.12 On being confronted with this evidence, Gordon will reply, “[I don’t] recall all of Carter Page’s emails. I was getting thousands of emails on the campaign and didn’t read all of them.”13 Page will note that Hope Hicks, Trump’s personal assistant, was also on the recipient list of his May email to Lewandowski and Gordon.14

  In late August, Page will say that he is going “on leave” from the Trump campaign, a somewhat different account from what the Trump campaign will give via Sean Spicer in January 2017. Spicer will say Page was “put on notice months ago by the campaign.”15 During a December 2016 speech in Moscow, however, Page will refuse to say what sort of involvement he still has with Donald Trump and his team.16

  Between January and November 2017, Page will maintain that he spoke “not one word” to anyone from the Kremlin when he was in Moscow in July 2016.17 However, when the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff, confronts him, during his November 2017 congressional testimony, with a July 2016 email he sent to Gordon and Tera Dahl—an “ally of Steve Bannon’s,” according to CNN—in which he discussed the “incredible insights and outreach” from “Russian legislators” and “senior members of the Presidential administration [in Moscow]” that had resulted from his trip to Moscow, Page will concede that he did indeed have contact with both the Kremlin and Rosneft (Russia’s state-owned oil company) in Moscow.18 The latter admission is significant, because the Steele dossier alleges that not only did Page meet with a Rosneft executive in Moscow, but while doing so he received an offer from Rosneft’s CEO, Igor Sechin, that, if accepted, would potentially provide Trump hundreds of millions of dollars from the then upcoming sale of a stake in the state-owned oil giant to Glencore, a Swiss multinational trading and mining company, and Qatar Investment Authority, a Qatari state-owned holding company that is Glencore’s largest shareholder.19 In November 2017, Schiff will further confront Page with a memo Page wrote to campaign officials after his Moscow trip in which he alerts them to the fact that “in a private conversation, [Russian deputy prime minister Arkady] Dvorkovich expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of international problems.”20 Page’s explanation of the memo will be that he was not being forthright—that there was no “private conversation” with Dvorkovich, only Page “listening to Dvorkovich’s speech and public statements, and . . . reading the Russian press and watching Russian television” in order to triangulate what he thought Dvorkovich’s reaction to the Trump campaign might be.21 Page’s “incredible insights and outreach” were, he told Congress, taken from television, newspapers, and lectures that Page consumed without any contact with Dvorkovich beyond what he described as some “pleasantries.”22 In June 2018, Congressman Schiff will write the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Devin Nunes, of his concern that “certain witnesses may have testified untruthfully before our committee. . . . [and] Mr. Mueller should consider whether perjury charges are warranted in light of the additional evidence in his possession.”23

  While Page is in Moscow, Manafort is preparing for the convention in part by contacting Oleg Deripaska, his old boss and one of Putin’s two or three closest allies, via Kilimnik; Manafort’s offer to Deripaska is a simple one: private briefings for the Russian oligarch on the internal workings and goings-on of the Trump presidential campaign.24 As more of Manafort’s spring and summer 2016 emails are released, it is discovered that he referenced Deripaska—and his significant debts to Deripaska—in code when writing to Kilimnik.25 Manafort’s spokesman will call the emails “innocuous”; Deripaska’s spokesman “dismisse[s] the email exchanges as scheming by ‘consultants in the notorious “beltway bandit” industry,’ ” referring to the defense contractors operating along the Capital Beltway, Washington’s outer ring expressway.26

  A month before the convention, Trump business associate Felix Sater—the Russian mafia–linked rainmaker for the Trump Organization who is, in June 2016, still trying to help Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen advance a Trump Tower deal with Andrei Rozov—emails Cohen to suggest that Cohen attend a business conference in Russia “that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladimir Putin.”27 Sater’s suggestion isn’t a casual one, as the Washington Post will later observe; Sater had put a lot of thought, time, and effort in setting up this opportunity for Cohen. According to the Post,

  Sater encouraged Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, with Sater telling Cohen that he could be introduced to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders and perhaps Putin. . . . At one point, Sater told Cohen that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, could help arrange the discussions, according to a person familiar with the exchange. . . . The correspondence included a formal invitation to the conference from the Russian leader of the event. . . . The invitation included a letter signed by a conference official designed to help Cohen get a visa from the Russian government. The St. Petersburg forum is a premiere [sic] government-hosted economic conference held annually under Putin’s auspices. Business leaders from Russia and other countries convene in what is designed to allow high-level conversation similar to the international business conference held each year in Davos, Switzerland, and at the same time to show off Russian investment opportunities.28

  Peskov’s involvement in the plan to bring Cohen to Moscow is noteworthy, as Cohen had emailed Peskov asking for his help on the Trump-Rozov tower prior to any Americans voting in the 2016 GOP primaries. Peskov never responded to that email, according to statements by the two men, though he would later admit to having seen it.29 But now, with Trump scheduled to assume leadership of the Republican Party at the party’s national convention in Cleveland, Peskov offers to introduce Cohen to many of the most powerful Russians in business and government, perhaps including Putin himself. It is an offer that would have given Trump and Cohen much of what they had wanted since the mid-2000s: immediate, facilitated access to the corridors of power in Moscow. Whereas Trump had once boasted, falsely, that “all of the oligarchs” came to his 2013 beauty pageant in Moscow, in this instance Cohen really would have the opportunity to hobnob with those oligarchs and politicians Trump had once hoped to meet in Russia.

  Yet Cohen tells Sater no.

  Cohen’s reason for declining Sater’s offer is worth additional consideration. According to the Washington Post, “Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention.”30 On its face, Cohen’s reply is reasonable, given how important the attorney was to Trump at the time (and vice versa) and the fact that Cohen had only three clients on his client roster in mid-2016, with Trump being far and away the most time-consuming. Moreover, the convention was a landmark event in Trump’s life, and Cohen was, after all, Trump’s loyal foot soldier.

  As it turned out, Cohen was in
deed busy in the twelve days immediately prior to the 2016 Republican National Convention: he was on “vacation.”31

  According to Cohen, his pre-convention vacation saw him sunning in Italy with actor and E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Per BuzzFeed, “[Cohen] said credit card receipts would prove he stayed in Capri, an island off the Italian coast, but he declined to make those receipts available.”32

  Roger Friedman, a longtime Fox News journalist and the founder of the entertainment news website Showbiz 411, says that Cohen is not telling the truth about his whereabouts in early July 2016. “I can tell you exclusively that Cohen lied,” writes Friedman. “Sources tell me that Maureen van Zandt, Steve’s wife, has confirmed that even though she was in Rome with her husband at the time for work, they know nothing about Cohen or his statement. They weren’t in Capri.”33 BuzzFeed calls Cohen’s claim that he was in Italy when the Steele dossier says he went to Prague in the summer of 2016 “intriguing,” because flying into Italy—as it appears Cohen did, based on the stamps in his passport—immediately “places [him] in what’s known as the Schengen Area: a group of 26 European countries, including the Czech Republic, that allows visitors to travel freely among them without getting any additional passport stamps. Upon entering the Schengen Area, visitors get a rectangular stamp with the date, a country code, their port of entry, and a symbol showing how they entered—such as an airplane or a train.”34 Cohen’s passport is a topic of speculation in the media after he goes on Sean Hannity’s television show and waves it about, saying it clearly has no stamps from Prague; Hannity mentions wanting to look inside it but never does.35 Journalists will later uncover that Hannity is one of Cohen’s three clients, a fact Hannity has never disclosed in any of his interviews with the attorney.36