Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  Apropos of the mystery of Cohen’s European vacation, the Guardian reports that British intelligence “became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. . . . This intelligence was passed to the US. . . . Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians. . . . The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence—known as SIGINT—included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia . . . also relayed material.”37 Politico augments this reporting by noting that the Steele dossier “said the Kremlin used ‘operationally soft’ cities in Europe such as Prague for meetings with Trump associates in order to evade detection and provide both sides with plausible deniability. . . . Russia’s intelligence services—known informally as the FSB, the GRU and the SVR—have for decades used such a tactic in Europe. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials [say] . . . Kremlin spies are trained to hold their meetings in neutral and inconspicuous locations.”38 Certainly, Papadopoulos had met Mifsud in Italy in March 2016 and then traveled again to Italy to Mifsud’s place of employment in May 2016; whether Cohen was in Italy, Prague (the Czech Republic), or both, he was in a location conducive to meetings with Russian intelligence, according to their standard operating procedures.

  On April 13, 2018, McClatchy will break the news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidence Cohen did indeed go to Prague in the time frame alleged in the Steele dossier—August or September—entering the Czech Republic via Germany.39 The mystery of why Cohen went to Italy—a repeated Trump-Russia meeting spot in the 120 days before the Republican National Convention—and then gave the media a false alibi has not yet been resolved. According to BuzzFeed, “The [Steele] dossier claims that Cohen was dispatched to Prague to ‘clean up the mess’ left behind by two revelations: that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had a financial relationship with a politically toxic Ukrainian president and that campaign adviser Carter Page visited top Russian officials [in Moscow in July].”40 While information about Manafort’s ties to Ukraine would indeed not become public knowledge until mid-August, Cohen entered Italy just a day after Page left Moscow.41

  At the convention in Cleveland, Jeff Sessions, chairman of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, meets with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; in June 2017, Sessions, while testifying before Congress, will agree with the late senator John McCain (R-AZ) that he raised “Russia[’s] invasion of Ukraine or annexation of Crimea” when he spoke to Kislyak in Cleveland.42 After what Sessions later calls a “short and informal” conversation with Kislyak, the two men agree to continue their discussion in Sessions’s office on September 8.43 Sessions will fail to disclose either meeting in his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017.44 Even when he does reveal that these conversations occurred, he will not disclose that he and Kislyak also discussed—as he had originally assured Congress he had not—the presidential campaign. The truth is revealed only by subsequent U.S. intelligence intercepts of Kislyak reporting back to Moscow.45 Instead of admitting to this topic of discussion, Sessions will dissemble before Congress by saying that he took both the Republican National Convention and September 2016 meetings with Kislyak exclusively in his role as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.46

  During a pre-convention subcommittee meeting, J. D. Gordon, Sessions’s right-hand man and the director of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, insists that the GOP change a plank of its platform to eliminate proposed language on giving lethal weaponry to anti-Russia rebels in Ukraine.47 When Diana Denman, the sponsor of the platform language on lethal weaponry in Ukraine, resists, Gordon persists, telling her across several conversations that he has called Trump Tower and spoken to Trump personally multiple times and that Trump wants the language changed. He says, moreover, that the language he is pushing for was not only “cleared” by Trump but explicitly laid out by him at a meeting at Trump International Hotel in D.C. on March 31. Gordon succeeds in blocking the language.48 Afterward, Manafort will say he had no involvement in the change; when asked about the change, Trump will likewise say he was in no way involved in it.49 Asked by CNN to explain his comments indicating Trump’s involvement, Gordon will suddenly change his story and say that in fact neither Manafort nor Trump was involved in the platform change.50 Meanwhile, Manafort’s protégé, Kilimnik, will later boast to political operatives in Ukraine “that he had played a role in gutting a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that would have staked out a more adversarial stance towards Russia.”51

  Shortly after the platform is changed, Carter Page, recently returned from Moscow, sends an email to Gordon and several other members of the National Security Advisory Committee, including former Department of Defense inspector general Joseph Schmitz and Bannon associate Tera Dahl, congratulating them on the change to the platform.52 Page, Gordon, Phares, and Sessions will all engage with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event in Cleveland, an event also attended by Schmitz. Gordon will say that Phares was present when Gordon “stressed to the Russian envoy [Kislyak] that he would like to improve relations with Russia”; for his part, Phares will emphatically deny ever meeting the Russian ambassador.53 USA Today, reporting on the story in March 2017, will note that in November 2016 Trump’s personal assistant, Hope Hicks, told the media, “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign,” and “The campaign had no contact with Russian officials.”54 Several days after the convention, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos will ask Manafort if there are any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia or its president. “No, there are not,” Manafort will say, “and you know, there’s no basis to it.”55 Some of the Trump team’s late-summer denials on the Russia front will be even more bewildering; in September 2016, spokesman Jason Miller will say of Carter Page, “Mr. Page is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign. He’s never been part of our campaign. Period.”56

  On July 20, 2016, Papadopoulos is asked to sit on an American Jewish Committee panel at an event connected to the Republican National Convention. He appears alongside U.S. congressmen Tom Marino (R-PA) and Ted Yoho (R-FL), Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), and several others, and is introduced as the “director of the Center for International Energy & Natural Resources Law at the London Centre of International Law Practice.”57 Papadopoulos is also contacted, in July, by Sergei Millian, a man “claiming to have worked with the Trump organization to sell real estate in Russia,” according to a July 2016 interview with ABC News.58 Papadopoulos will tell CNN in a September 2018 interview that Millian asked him to “work for him for $30,000 a month as some sort of P.R. [public relations] consultant for an energy firm in Russia. . . . the qualifier was that I had to work for Trump at the same time.”59

  As the Trump campaign begins in earnest its hunt for Clinton’s “missing” emails (see chapter 9), the data firm Jared Kushner just hired, the Bannon-founded Cambridge Analytica, reaches out to WikiLeaks in an attempt to see if Russian hackers have deposited Clinton’s emails with Julian Assange’s outfit—which has just released twenty thousand emails and eight thousand files stolen from the Democratic National Committee.60 It will later be revealed that a Cambridge Analytica director, Brittany Kaiser, met directly with Assange in February 2017 to “discuss [the] U.S. election” and that she “channeled payments and donations to WikiLeaks” post-election.61

  As Cambridge Analytica—called “Steve Bannon’s baby” by longtime employee and eventual whistle-blower Christopher Wylie—is “reaching out” to Assange in late July, Bannon is just three weeks from being named the chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign.62 Meanwhile, Manafort is approximately three weeks from being ousted from his role as campaign manager—a campaign shake-up that occurs almost immediately after Trump receives his first classified national security briefing.

  Unbeknownst to
the media, the Trump campaign’s hunt for the Clinton emails—marked by attempts to reach out to Russians on the dark web to locate any tranche of Clinton documents it can find—is in full swing by the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-month. Indeed, by July 27, 2016, the date of Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment in Florida, a GOP operative named Peter W. Smith, who says in documents signed by his hand that he is working with Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and Kellyanne Conway, claims to have already connected with Russian hackers on the dark web and received a stockpile of Clinton emails.63 Smith had by then already reached out to Matt Tait, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Texas at Austin, to try to authenticate the emails, but had been unable to do so because Tait refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.64

  On July 25, the FBI begins investigating the hack of the DNC; on July 26, U.S. intelligence officials tell the White House that they have “high confidence” that Russia was behind the hack; on July 27, Trump, having heard the by then universal speculation that Russia has hacked the DNC, publicly invites the Russians to continue committing cybercrimes against American citizens.65

  On July 29, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announces that it also has been hacked.66

  Annotated History

  * * *

  At the convention in Cleveland, Jeff Sessions, chairman of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, meets with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; in June 2017, Sessions, while testifying before Congress, will agree with the late senator John McCain (R-AZ) that he raised “Russia[’s] invasion of Ukraine or annexation of Crimea” when he spoke to Kislyak in Cleveland. After what Sessions calls a “short and informal” conversation with Kislyak, the two men agree to continue their discussion in Sessions’s office on September 8. Sessions will fail to disclose either meeting in his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017. Even when he does reveal that these conversations occurred, he will not disclose that he and Kislyak also discussed—as he had originally assured Congress he had not—the presidential campaign. The truth is revealed only by subsequent U.S. intelligence intercepts of Kislyak reporting back to Moscow. Instead of admitting to this topic of discussion, Sessions will dissemble before Congress by saying that he took both the Republican National Convention and September 2016 meetings with Kislyak exclusively in his role as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  In March 2017, Sessions’s spokeswoman told the media that Sessions’s omissions under oath were justified by Sessions having been asked by Congress only about “communications between Russia and the Trump campaign—not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.”67 In responding to questions from Senator John McCain during his June 13, 2017, congressional testimony, Sessions said that he “may” have discussed “Russia-related security issues.”68 He then said to McCain, “I just don’t have a real recall of the meeting,” and “I just was basically willing to meet and see what he discussed.”69 This last comment indicates that, counter to what he would later contend, Sessions was not clear with Kislyak before their September 8 meeting that only certain topics appropriate to his Senate role could be discussed. Moreover, while Sessions claimed that his discussion of Ukraine with Kislyak got “testy,” Sessions, as a Trump surrogate on national security, was obligated to hew closely to Trump’s pro-Russia, anti-sanctions policy—which would have been highly unlikely to anger Kislyak.70 Nor would Sessions have been likely to speak extemporaneously on the subject; during Sessions’s 2017 testimony, McCain had drily observed, in response to the notion that the Alabama senator had discussed “Russia-related security issues with Kislyak,” “I don’t recall you as being particularly vocal on such issues.”71

  The Sessions-Kislyak meetings in 2016 were irregular in other ways as well. In March 2017, Vox contacted all twenty-six members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and not one had met with Russia’s ambassador in 2016; meanwhile, Sessions had encountered the Russian ambassador three times: at the Mayflower Hotel, at the Republican National Convention, and in his office in the Capitol.72 And when the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe asked a senior Republican Senate staffer in June 2017 whether Sessions “was known as a foreign-policy specialist who met regularly with ambassadors during his 20 years in the Senate,” the staffer’s incredulous response was, “Is that a serious question? He’s clueless.”73

  * * *

  During a pre-convention subcommittee meeting, J. D. Gordon, Sessions’s right-hand man and the director of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, insists that the GOP change a plank of its platform to eliminate proposed language on giving lethal weaponry to anti-Russia rebels in Ukraine. When Diana Denman, the sponsor of the platform language on lethal weaponry in Ukraine, resists, Gordon persists, telling her across several conversations that he has called Trump Tower and spoken to Trump personally multiple times and that Trump wants the language changed. He says, moreover, that the language he is pushing for was not only “cleared” by Trump but explicitly laid out by him at a meeting at Trump International Hotel in D.C. on March 31. Gordon succeeds in blocking the language. Afterward, Manafort will say he had no involvement in the change; when asked about the change, Trump will likewise say he was in no way involved in it.

  Business Insider reported in March 2017 that on March 2 Gordon had told CNN’s Jim Acosta that he “advocated for the GOP platform to include language against arming Ukrainians against pro-Russian rebels [because] this was in line with Trump’s views, expressed at a March [2016] national security meeting at the unfinished Trump hotel [in D.C.].”74 According to Gordon, “this was the language Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March [2016].”75 At that March 31, 2016, National Security Advisory Committee meeting—which Trump in November 2017 called “very unimportant”—Gordon said that the candidate had laid out a sufficient vision of his Russia-Ukraine policy for his assembled team to understand how he would want a highly technical plank in the GOP platform handled nearly four months later.76 But Gordon’s summary of Trump’s March 2016 remarks (“he didn’t want to go to ‘WWIII’ over Ukraine”) does not explain his confidence that in seeking a pro-Russia platform change in Cleveland he was doing the then candidate’s bidding.77 Gordon told Business Insider in January 2017 that he “never left” his “assigned side table” or “spoke publicly” at the RNC committee meeting in which the platform change on Ukraine was discussed.78 He said also, again contradicting what he would later tell Acosta, that “neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Manafort were involved in those sort of details [of the GOP platform], as they’ve made clear.”79

  NPR reported in December 2017 that Gordon told Denman that “Trump [had] directed him to support weakening that position [on Ukraine] in the official platform.”80 Denman said that Gordon was quite specific about his orders, “inform[ing] her he had phoned ‘New York’ about the Ukraine proposal” and “had discussed the issue with Trump.”81 Denman later indicated that another “Trump campaign representative” was with Gordon when he protested her amendment, and that Gordon himself later disclosed, unexpectedly, that he had run the amendment by John Mashburn and Rick Dearborn—the former of whom later told Congress that he already knew (from Papadopoulos) that the Kremlin had stolen Clinton emails, and the latter of whom had been in contact in both May and June with Alexander Torshin, the Russian banker now alleged to be accused spy Maria Butina’s handler.82

  That the platform change was a substantial topic of conversation within Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee is evidenced by the July 14, 2016, email read aloud by Congressman Schiff during Carter Page’s House Intelligence Committee testimony—“As for the Ukraine amendment, excellent work.” That email was sent to a much wider group of Trump national security advisers than originally supposed, including Joseph Schmitz, Walid Phares, Bert Mizusawa, and Chuck Kubic, as well as J. D. Gordon and Tera Dahl.83

  In March 2017, USA Today reported that it wasn’t just Page, Gordon, S
essions, Phares, and Schmitz who attended the Global Partners in Diplomacy event in Cleveland—with the first four of those five meeting with Kislyak—but also future Trump deputy National Security Advisor K. T. McFarland.84 Whether McFarland met with Kislyak in July is unknown, but five months later she would advise Flynn during his clandestine negotiations with Kislyak over U.S. sanctions on Russia.85

  These repeated overlaps between Gordon, Page, and Schmitz are also noteworthy. Given the trips to Hungary taken by Page and Schmitz in the summer of 2016, it’s significant that Gordon, too, was a “frequent visitor” to that country, according to Hungarian Spectrum, which noted Gordon had a “long-standing relationship with Hungarian government figures.” According to an interview Gordon gave to Hungarian media outlet Mandiner, the Trump adviser visited Hungary six times between 2013 and 2016—most recently just after the 2016 election.86 Not long after Schmitz and Page returned from Hungary, GOP activist and NRA member Paul Erickson introduced Gordon to Maria Butina. The two would later attend a Styx concert together.87

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE HUNT FOR HER EMAILS

  July to September 2016