Sergey Kislyak is not the only Russian trying to contact Trump and his team during the transition period. On November 28, Emin Agalarov’s publicist Rob Goldstone once again writes Rhona Graff, the key “conduit” to Trump, according to Politico.33 What Goldstone sends to Graff in late November is a message from Aras Agalarov urging Trump to eliminate the Magnitsky sanctions on Russia. In making the request, Agalarov initiates at least the second “follow-up” on the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower he had arranged, the first being Goldstone’s late June email to Trump aide Dan Scavino about a new, Russia-oriented social media push for the Trump campaign.34 Members of Trump’s campaign have long insisted, including under oath, that the June 2016 meeting was never followed up on in any fashion. Indeed, on July 8, 2017, a statement issued by Donald Trump Jr. about the June 2016 meeting—which was later found to have been dictated by Trump himself—will say that the Magnitsky Act “was not a campaign issue at the time [in June 2016] and there was no follow up.”35 That Trump dictated these words will not be discovered until June 2018, after many months of the Trump administration’s denying that Trump had anything to do with the statement and a shorter period of time in which the administration said Trump may have “weighed in . . . like any father would do,” but did not ultimately write the statement himself.36
The Magnitsky sanctions on which Agalarov lobbied Trump during the transition were leveled in mid-December 2012 against forty-four “suspected human rights abusers”—many of whom are “Russian government officials and businessmen”—to punish the apparent state-sanctioned murder of a lawyer who accused the Putin government of corruption.37 Agalarov alleges, in his letter to Trump in November 2016, a series of facts identical to those raised by Kremlin agent Natalia Veselnitskaya at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, specifically allegations of a fraudulent tax scheme involving major Clinton donors.38 Agalarov’s letter then references Veselnitskaya by name, as well as her arguments for ending the sanctions.39 Trump Jr., testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 7, 2017, will agree that what Goldstone sent Trump’s secretary on Agalarov’s behalf was “generally speaking” the same as what was presented to him by Veselnitskaya in June 2016.40 Goldstone further offers to have a lawyer working to overturn the Magnitsky sanctions meet with Trump’s transition team.41
After his early December meeting with Kushner and Flynn, Kislyak subsequently arranges for Kushner to meet, on either December 13 or 14, with Sergei Gorkov, a former FSB agent and the head of Russian bank VEB, which is on the U.S. sanctions list.42 According to Foreign Policy, Gorkov “runs a major state entity that is nearly a century old and effectively serves as a slush fund for the Kremlin’s pet projects. . . . Any decision to send Gorkov to serve as an intermediary with the Trump transition team would have been considered deliberately at the highest levels [in the Kremlin].”43 After the meeting, Gorkov and VEB issue a statement maintaining, as summarized by the Washington Post, that “the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family real estate business”; meanwhile, Kushner takes the position that “the meeting was unrelated to business” and was, instead, “diplomatic” in nature.44 The New York Times notes that as Trump’s son-in-law and Gorkov meet, Kushner’s company is in the midst of “seeking financing for its troubled $1.8 billion purchase of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York.”45 Gorkov leaves New York and, according to flight records, goes directly to Japan, where Vladimir Putin is making a visit on December 15 and 16.46
Having joined the transition team due to Kushner’s intervention, and having met with Kislyak alongside Kushner, in late December Michael Flynn makes at least five calls to Kislyak to discuss both a pending UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements and the question of whether the United States will maintain its sanctions on Russia. Kushner is allegedly the “very senior member” of the Trump transition team who gives Flynn the order, on December 22, to make the calls to Kislyak.47 As the Washington Post will report, however, “The talks were part of a series of contacts between Flynn and Kislyak that began before the Nov. 8 election and continued during the transition. In a recent interview, Kislyak confirmed that he had communicated with Flynn by text message, by phone and in person, but declined to say whether they had discussed sanctions” (emphasis added).48
On December 12, 2016, “former” Trump national security adviser Carter Page makes his second trip of the year to Moscow. While there, he is asked by a Russian journalist during a public Q&A whether he has—or plans to have—any influence on Trump’s transition team or administration and whether he has any back channels to connect “Moscow and Team Trump.”49 Page does not answer any of the questions asked. Instead he says,
The biggest influence is the process of helping to advance the objectives of the president-elect. . . . One of the biggest areas of impact is in terms of various research projects, which I’ve been involved in with some of the most prominent leaders in the United States and in Russia. So, it’s absolutely accurate that I was limited in terms of what I can do, because I think that had a lot to do with the huge challenges and the misperceptions and fake news. As I told to the team as I was leaving, unfortunately, in September [2016], I did not want to be a distraction. . . . But I couldn’t be more excited and happy as to the new opportunities that are not only for a number of the companies I’ve worked with here [in Russia], but really people across the United States. I think, particularly given my focus in the energy sector, the level of enthusiasm about some of the changes that are under way is really hard to overstate.50
According to the Steele dossier, Page is still secretly working for Trump at this point.51
Asked about his reasons for coming to Moscow, Page replies, “My main objective when I first moved over here in 2004 and when I’ve been coming back and forth throughout my life is really to have a positive impact with improving the situation with U.S.-Russia relations.”52 Asked about (a) whether he is, while in Moscow, carrying out his pre-trip plans to discuss “business contracts” and hold “negotiations” with Russian nationals; (b) whether any such negotiations have been successful, if already held; (c) whether he has had any contact with Rosneft executives while in Moscow; and (d) whether he knows who in the incoming Trump administration will be put in charge of negotiating the Ukraine crisis, Page makes reference to a just-closed deal in which Russian oil giant Rosneft sold a 19.5 percent stake of its ownership to a joint Swiss-Qatari venture. This is the deal the Steele dossier alleges Page helped Trump benefit from financially by means of a “brokerage” fee from Rosneft.
I did have the opportunity to meet with an executive from Rosneft, and I think, unfortunately, it’s a great example of where the recent deal which Glencore and Qatar were able to move forward with [was one that] unfortunately, United States actors were constrained [from being part of], and I think there’s a lot of ways where a lot of the impact of sanctions has really affected individuals from the U.S. side much more so than we’ve seen with Russia.53
Page does not clarify who the “United States actors” are who had been hoping to profit from the Rosneft sale. As Page’s questioner finishes asking him whether he has met with anyone from Rosneft and begins asking who will be handling the Ukraine crisis for the Trump administration, an unusually loud English-language, Russian-accented voice-over not native to the audio or video of the Q&A takes over the official RT YouTube clip of the event, making it difficult to hear Page’s response. The unexplained audio distortion ends ten seconds after Page says he has met with Rosneft executives during his December trip.54
According to the Steele dossier, which cites a “close associate” of Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, on July 7 or 8, 2016, during one of the two days of his first 2016 trip to Moscow, Page speaks face-to-face with Sechin.55 During the conversation, Sechin allegedly tells Page that Sechin will offer Trump a “brokerage” windfall layered atop the upcoming Rosneft sale of a 19 percent stake in the company, but only if Trump
agrees to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia should he become president.56 Per the dossier, Page expresses interest in the offer and assures Sechin that Trump will end all sanctions on Russia if elected.57 The dossier adds that Sechin later reports to his associate that, while Page never said so explicitly, he feels that Page does speak “with the Republican candidate’s authority.”58
Five months later, in December 2016, Page is once again in Moscow as the Rosneft deal—Russia’s largest ever oil deal—closes. Rosneft sells a 19.5 percent stake in the company for $10.2 billion; the purchasers of the stake, in a fifty-fifty venture, are Swiss oil trading firm Glencore and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).59
As the transition team does its work in December 2016, a small (if overlapping) group of additional Trump aides, associates, and allies—including Michael Flynn, Tom Barrack, Rick Gates, and Bud McFarlane—do a different sort of work: they lobby Trump to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia so that Russian companies and others can get billions of dollars in contracts to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East.60 The proposal would “require lifting sanctions on Russia,” according to Reuters, to allow currently sanctioned Russian companies to partner with American entities to build reactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—the latter nation, too, because, under the terms of a deal signed many years ago by the United States, if the American government relaxes nuclear-weapon safeguards on Saudi Arabia, a “gold standard” clause from a past U.S.-UAE nuclear deal would ultimately entitle the UAE to enrich uranium as well.61 As explained by ProPublica, “Saudi Arabia needs approval from the U.S. in order to receive sensitive American technology. Past negotiations broke down because the Saudi government wouldn’t commit to certain safeguards against eventually using the technology for weapons. Now the Trump administration has reopened those talks and might not insist on the same precautions.”62
On December 15, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, George Nader, and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), meet secretly at Trump Tower.63 Kushner never discloses the meeting on his SF-86 federal security clearance form, and MBZ breaches diplomatic protocol by not alerting the Obama administration to his presence in the United States.64 Over the next few months, Nader will come to the White House several times to meet with administration officials, and one of these times he will bring Joel Zamel—who was present at the August 3, 2016, meeting Nader had with Donald Trump Jr.—and meet with Bannon and Kushner.65
After the December 15, 2016, meeting, Erik Prince reaches out to MBZ “on behalf of Trump” and asks him to set up a back-channel meeting with a close Putin associate.66 According to ABC News, Prince contacted MBZ through an agent of his, Nader, and Nader thereafter set up a January 2017 meeting between Prince and Kirill Dmitriev of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF).67 Leon Black, a friend of Jared Kushner’s with whom he was spotted at the U.S. Open just a few months before the 2016 election, is both the CEO of Apollo Global Management, which in 2017 will loan Kushner $184 million, and an RDIF board member; the parent company of the RDIF is VEB, the same sanctioned Russian bank whose chief executive Kushner had just met with a few weeks earlier.68
ABC News will report in August 2018 that Special Counsel Mueller has now accessed Erik Prince’s phone and computer. This is “a sign,” says ABC, “that Mueller could try to squeeze Prince, as he has others, probing potential inconsistencies in his sworn testimony.”69 According to ABC, “earlier this year . . . [Mueller] obtained evidence that calls [Prince’s] testimony into question. Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, a key witness given limited immunity by Mueller, told investigators that he set up the meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and Dmitriev. . . . [Also,] before and after Prince met Nader in New York a week before the trip, Nader shared information with Prince about Dmitriev.”70 ABC suggests that Prince could therefore be in legal jeopardy, not just because of his testimony about Dmitriev, about whom he indicated to Congress he knew virtually nothing when he met him, but also because of other statements he made under oath that also appear to be untrue, including his claim he has “zero” “ ‘investments’ or ‘business partnerships with Russian nationals.’ ” According to ABC, multiple Prince associates have been contacted by Special Counsel Mueller and have told Mueller’s investigators of Prince’s partnership, through his Frontier Services Group, with “Dimitriy Streshinskiy, a former Russian special forces soldier turned arms dealer and manufacturer.” ABC says Streshinskiy “acted as Prince’s partner in an effort to secure a possibly illegal private security contract with Azerbaijan. . . . For the proposed contract, named ‘Project Zulu,’ Prince and Streshinskiy, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen, each stood to make $21 million, or 20 percent of the proposed $216 million deal.”71 ABC also found evidence that Prince “deal[t] with the Russian state-owned energy firm Rostec. According to [a] former associate [of Prince], Rostec asked Prince’s Frontier Services Group to work on logistics for a proposed refinery operation in Tanzania and Uganda. . . . Work began, the associate said, but the deal fell through when the United States imposed sanctions on the Kremlin-run firm in 2014. . . . [The associate said] there was no ‘business’ because the deals weren’t finalized, . . . but Prince provided manpower and resources in both projects. . . .”72 Prince thus joins Flynn as another “shadow” national security adviser to Trump who discussed sanctions with a Russian national during the presidential transition—a fact he failed to disclose and indeed misled investigators about. And Prince stood to benefit personally if Russian sanctions were lifted; like Flynn, who met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before as well as after the election, Prince met with foreign nationals both before and after Election Day who were in a position to assist him in securing business deals with the Russians going forward—as long as Trump ended U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Michael Flynn’s first recorded payment as a lobbyist working to convince the U.S. government to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia came in 2014 from a company called ACU Strategic Partners.73 By 2015, he was partnering in his lobbying effort with the British-American Alex Copson, who “was telling people he had a group of U.S., European, Arab and Russian companies that would build as many as 40 nuclear reactors in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.” Meanwhile, “[i]n his role with ACU, Flynn flew to Egypt [in 2015] to convince officials there to hold off on a Russian offer . . . to build nuclear power plants.”74 Given the association between Flynn and George Papadopoulos, it is noteworthy that just two months before the 2016 presidential election, Papadopoulos was in New York City, arranging a meeting between Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.75 Papadopoulos’s academic specialization—one that dovetails with Flynn’s lobbying interests, as well as with the general-turned-lobbyist’s own interest in Egypt—is Middle Eastern energy issues.76
By 2016, Flynn’s lobbying efforts had transitioned into new entities and partnerships, and he was working with Bud McFarlane in a new iteration of ACU called IP3 International. By early 2017, Tom Barrack had joined them in lobbying Trump to sell nuclear technology to the Saudis.77
Jared Kushner’s activities in 2016 and 2017 suggest an alignment between his business and professional interests and those of Flynn, McFarlane, Prince, Barrack, and Papadopoulos. In October 2017, Kushner will take a sudden trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where, according to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, “Kushner . . . discusse[s] the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince”—including highly classified information from his father-in-law’s president’s daily brief (PDB).78 Soon after, the crown prince tells friends that Kushner is “in his pocket.”79 Kushner is said to regularly use WhatsApp Messenger (an encrypted messaging app for smartphones) to text the crown prince, against the advice of his attorneys and in possible violation of the Presidential Records Act.80 His use of WhatsApp means his communications with the Saudi Arabian prince are likely invisible to outside requests for review.81
In early November 2017, Kushner advises his father-in-law to support
Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Qatar—one of Trump’s only advisers to do so. According to NBC News, “some top Qatari government officials believe the White House’s position on the blockade may have been a form of retaliation driven by Kushner, who was sour about the failed [December 2016] deal” with the QIA to save his property at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City with a massive investment from Qatar.82 Later that month, Leon Black’s Apollo Global Management, one of whose largest investors is the QIA, lends Kushner $184 million after Apollo cofounder Joshua Harris has several meetings with Kushner in the White House.83 According to the New York Times in February 2018, “Even by the standards of Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, the previously unreported transaction with the Kushners was a big deal: It was triple the size of the average property loan made by Apollo’s real estate lending arm. . . . [and] one of the largest loans Kushner Companies received [in 2017].”84 The concurrence of all these events raises the suspicion, among several media outlets, that Kushner has used his father-in-law’s support of the Saudi blockade of Qatar to squeeze the Qataris for money.85 As Vanity Fair will sarcastically observe, “there’s no way to know whether the Trump administration’s decision to rain hell on Qatar was the result of Jared not getting his way. Certainly, neither the Kushners nor the Trumps are known for holding grudges, or for retaliating against people they believe have wronged them. But the timing is interesting. . . . one could almost say a pattern is emerging[.]”86
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