Trump’s attempts to derail the FBI investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia are unusually direct, forceful, and persistent. In addition to his effort to stop any further investigation of Flynn and his inappropriate contact with Flynn post-firing, he asks Comey four times to declare that the Russia investigation is not and will not be looking at him; commands White House counsel Don McGahn to try to get Sessions to “un-recuse” himself from the Russia investigation and then personally lobbies Sessions himself, while also, according to the New York Times, “complain[ing] to friends about how much he would like to get rid of Mr. Sessions” because of his decision to recuse himself; and unsuccessfully tries to convince both his director of national intelligence and his NSA director to “help him push back against the FBI investigation . . . and publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election,” requests that both men deem inappropriate and refuse.41 Trump had earlier made the same request of Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, asking him to directly refute the Steele dossier—and had been denied then, too.42 Clapper will observe, in a May 2018 interview on MSNBC, that in his interactions with the president-elect, Trump’s focus “seemed to be . . . [on] the dossier.”43 All of these actions beg the question of what it was in the Steele dossier Comey shared with Trump on January 6 that initiated Trump’s intense concern about federal law enforcement’s ongoing consideration of Russia’s ties to his presidential campaign.
The day after Trump fires Comey, he hosts Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office. The latter features prominently in the Steele dossier as one of the Russian officials aware of the Kremlin’s interference campaign; the former had met secretly with many of Trump’s national security aides. As the Washington Post will report, while Lavrov and Kislyak are in the Oval, “Trump brag[s] about the intelligence he receives and share[s] highly classified information from a U.S. partner” with Lavrov and Kislyak; it will later be revealed that the “U.S. partner” is Israel and the “intelligence” is the classified details of a February 2017 military action against ISIS in Syria.44 Worse still, writes Newsweek, “Trump is alleged to have revealed the name of the city where the operation took place, leading to fears that the source who alerted the Israelis to ISIS’s intentions may be compromised.”45 Trump also brags to the two Russian officials about firing Comey, calling the former FBI director “crazy” and a “nut job” and saying that with Comey gone the “great pressure” he had been facing “because of Russia” has been “taken off.”46
The next night Trump tells a national television audience, via an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing.”47 He also confirms that he had been planning to fire Comey “regardless of [the] recommendation[s]” he solicited and received from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—both of which supported Comey’s firing.48
Annotated History
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In the final few days of Flynn’s tenure as National Security Advisor, the Kremlin attempts to pass a sanctions relief proposal to Flynn—framed as a “peace deal” for Ukraine—through a Kremlin-allied Ukrainian politician, Andrii V. Artemenko. Artemenko meets with Trump business partner Felix Sater and Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. At the meeting, he hands them an envelope with the Kremlin-approved anti-sanctions proposal inside. The envelope later ends up on Flynn’s desk. Cohen at first acknowledges bringing the envelope to the White House and giving it to Flynn, and then changes his story and says he had no interest in what Artemenko was “selling” and told the Ukrainian to mail his proposal to the White House by regular mail if he wanted to contact President Trump.
According to a February 2017 New York Times article, on February 6, 2017, Michael Flynn, just a week from his resignation as Trump’s National Security Advisor, received a “sealed proposal . . . hand-delivered to his office.”49 Inside was a plan for “President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.”50 The Times reported that the plan was being “pushed” by Michael Cohen and Felix Sater in cooperation with a Ukrainian politician who had proudly informed Cohen and Sater that the plan “had received encouragement . . . from top aides to Mr. Putin.”51 That Sater should again be attempting to connect Putin and Trump on what he euphemistically called “peace”—and indeed, the Times categorized Artemenko’s proposal as a “peace plan for Ukraine and Russia”—is not surprising given his astounding level of access to Putin as far back as Ivanka Trump’s 2006 foray into Putin’s office.52 That by “peace” Sater meant peace for three countries—Russia and Ukraine, but also the United States—was confirmed by his February 19, 2017, statement to the Washington Post on the Artemenko proposal: “I got excited about trying to stop a war. I thought if this could improve conditions in three countries, good, so be it.”53 And to the Times, Sater said, in justification of his actions, “I want to stop a war, number one. Number two, I absolutely believe that the U.S. and Russia need to be allies, not enemies.”54 As ever, though, the improvement of relations between America and Russia depended, in the Russian view, on the lifting of U.S. sanctions.
It is difficult to believe Cohen’s representations about his handling of the proposal from Artemenko. Just days after the New York Times scoop on the “peace deal,” the Washington Post asked Cohen about the allegation that he had delivered a sealed envelope to Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor. Cohen responded that he had taken the envelope from Artemenko but had done nothing with it and had never discussed it—with anyone—ever again.55 He added that he had advised Artemenko, even as he was taking the sealed envelope from the Ukrainian politician, to mail his envelope (the very one Cohen had just taken) to the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue via regular mail.56 Reached for comment by the Post, the Times stood by its more plausible account of events, which it said had been sourced from Cohen himself just days earlier: “Mr. Cohen told the Times in no uncertain terms that he delivered the Ukraine proposal to Michael Flynn’s office at the White House,” Times deputy manager editor Matt Purdy told the Washington Post.57
In fact, Cohen had said quite a bit more than that, telling the Times that he brought the Artemenko proposal with him to the White House on a day he was scheduled to meet with President Trump himself; he left the proposal in Flynn’s office while there, he said.58 His implication that he brought a Kremlin-backed sanctions deal into the White House—on a day he was meeting with the president himself—and never raised the matter of the document in his possession with Trump directly strains credulity. That he would later claim to have left the White House without giving the documents to Flynn is also hard to believe. Cohen’s narrative is especially improbable given that, as the nation was learning that very month, Flynn had been the presidential transition’s covert point man on sanctions negotiations with Russia. Artemenko’s proposal would therefore have been of enormous interest to the Trump administration generally and to Trump and his National Security Advisor specifically.
Speaking to the Huffington Post six months later, Cohen changed his story once again: he now suggested that his friend Sater hadn’t told him in advance whom he would be meeting with, and that at the meeting Artemenko handed him a “long brown envelope,” which he both “never opened” and yet could reliably report contained “one or two pages.”59 He went so far as to confirm his knowledge of the length of the document by saying, “When was the last time you saw a peace proposal on one piece of paper? SAT computations for algebraic equations take at least two pages or more.”60 He added that he rejected Artemenko’s request to pass along the proposal because, for reasons he did not clarify, he “had no interest in what he was selling.” This explanation might be difficult for investigators to accept, given that Artemenko had represented to Cohen that the proposal came with the Kremlin’s imprimatur and that Artemenko had gone to the 2016 Republican National Convention, attended Trump’s inauguration, and visited Congress as part of his lobbying ef
forts in Washington.61
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All of these actions beg the question of what it was in the Steele dossier Comey shared with Trump on January 6 that initiated Trump’s intense concern about federal law enforcement’s ongoing consideration of Russia’s ties to his presidential campaign.
Following the Steele dossier’s January 10, 2016, publication by BuzzFeed, conversation about its veracity began. Andrei Soldatov, writing for the Guardian, argued that—based on his experience “covering the Russian secret services since 1999 and hav[ing] spent the last five years researching Russian cyber activities”—Steele’s dossier “rings frighteningly true.” “[O]verall it reflects accurately the way decision-making in the Kremlin looks to close observers,” wrote Soldatov, adding, “[T]he Trump dossier is a good reflection of how things are run in the Kremlin—the mess at the level of decision-making and increasingly the outsourcing of operations, combined with methods borrowed from the KGB and the secret services of the lawless 1990s [in Russia].”62
A review of the dossier’s key claims suggests that a great many of them have been confirmed.63 CBS News wrote that “investigations and criminal cases are revealing some truth” in the dossier and “have begun to resolve at least some of the questions surrounding the memos”; Newsweek reported that former director of national intelligence James Clapper had concluded that “more and more of the infamous Steele Dossier is turning out to be true”; CNN wrote, in early February 2017, that “U.S. investigators [have] corroborate[d] some aspects of the Russia dossier”; and in the United Kingdom, the Independent observed that “Trump denounced the document as fake, but much of [the dossier’s] contents have turned out to be true.”64
As individual claims in the dossier have been confirmed, the media has taken note—such as when the pension scheme described in the dossier (by which the Kremlin made clandestine payments to its agents) was confirmed as still in existence.65 At the time, the BBC wrote that a “key claim” in the dossier had just been “verified.”66 After Carter Page’s congressional testimony, Business Insider wrote that the former Trump national security adviser’s testimony was “filled with bombshells—and supports key portions of the Steele dossier,” particularly with respect to whom Page met with in Moscow in July 2016 and the fact that he did indeed discuss the privatization of Rosneft with at least one executive from the company, Andrey Baranov.67
Former FBI director James Comey concluded in 2018 that the dossier came “from a credible source, someone with a track record, someone who was a credible and respected member of an allied intelligence service during his career.”68 Moreover, the dossier gained credibility with both American and foreign journalists when one of its suspected sources, Oleg Erovinkin—a former KGB chief turned top aide to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin—was found dead in Moscow in the backseat of a car on December 26, 2016, not long after the FBI took possession of a copy of the dossier.69 According to Christo Grozev, an expert on Russian security threats interviewed by the Telegraph, Erovinkin was likely the source Steele mentioned in his dossier as being a “close associate of Sechin.” According to Grozev,
Insiders have described Erovinkin to me alternately as “Sechin’s treasurer” and “the go-between between Putin and Sechin.” One thing that everyone seems to agree [on]—both in public and private . . . is that Erovinkin was Sechin’s closest associate. I have no doubt that at the time Erovinkin died, Mr. Putin had Mr. Steele’s Trump dossier on his desk. He would—arguably—have known whether the alleged . . . story is based on fact or fiction. Whichever is true, he would have had a motive to seek—and find the mole. . . . He would have had to conclude that Erovinkin was at least a person of interest.70
The Daily Beast concurred with Grozev’s judgment that Erovinkin’s death might have been dossier-related: “The notorious dossier on Trump that Republicans want to discredit may well have been credible enough in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes to get at least one person [Erovinkin] killed,” wrote the digital news outlet in January 2018.71 It noted, too, that initial reports on Erovinkin’s death announced that he had been “killed”—but the reports were subsequently altered, without explanation, to read that Erovinkin had simply “died.”72
The possibility that Erovinkin was a Steele source was aired officially when Glenn Simpson, the head of the firm that hired Steele, was asked a question about the dossier during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and his attorney, Joshua Levy, suddenly interjected, “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.”73
Erovinkin’s death was one in a string of suspicious deaths of influential Russian figures, CNN noted in March 2017. Andrey Malanin, a senior diplomat at the Russian embassy in Athens, Greece—the city where Papadopoulos sought to make clandestine contacts with Russians or Russian allies in 2016—“died suddenly of natural causes” less than two weeks after Erovinkin.74 On Election Day in November 2016, Sergei Krivov, the Russian consulate’s duty commander for security affairs in New York City, was found dead; Russian officials first told investigators that Krivov fell from a roof and then that he died of a heart attack, but the police report ultimately filed that day identifies the apparent cause of death as “an unknown trauma to the head.”75 In March 2017, Nikolai Gorokhov, the former lawyer for Sergei Magnitsky—after whom the sanctions Putin wanted so urgently for Trump to drop were named—“fell” from the fourth floor of his Moscow apartment and nearly died; he had been continuing his old client’s fight against corruption in the Kremlin.76 In all, nine prominent Russian officials died under suspicious circumstances (often a “heart attack”) in the nine months after Trump’s election victory.77
Broadly, the Steele dossier alleges that the Russian regime had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years”—from 2011 to 2016—a claim supported by Kremlin-connected Russian nationals’ repeated outreach to Trump for business deals, including overpayment for his properties in the United States.78 This outreach began at least five years before the 2016 presidential election, and possibly even fifteen years before Trump’s November 2016 victory (see chapter 1). The dossier says Putin’s aim between 2011 and 2016 was to “encourage splits and divisions in [the] western alliance”—an ambition that has been confirmed many times over by Putin’s attacks on NATO and the European Union, his government’s meddling in the Brexit vote, and his attempts to sow discord within America via social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.79 Of still graver concern, however, is that Trump—perhaps because of cultivation, support, and assistance from Russia—has put forward since 2011 a foreign and domestic policy that dovetails with Putin’s designs on Western democracy, particularly with respect to the NATO alliance. Trump has declined to affirm NATO’s Article 5—its mutual defense clause—and more recently scrapped the trilateral NAFTA agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.80
The dossier correctly notes that Trump has not followed through on any proffered deals from Russia this decade; it would have been more salacious for the dossier’s sources to claim otherwise, but the dossier is sober on this point. The dossier does indicate that Trump has received a “regular flow of intelligence” from the Kremlin—a claim that now seems prescient, as it was recorded by Steele six months before the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos about his back channel to the Kremlin. This was a back channel that, in April 2016, led to his discovery that the Russians were stealing emails from Americans, or at least claiming to have done so.81 The dossier points to Manafort as a key “manager” of Trump-Russia coordination, which tracks with both Manafort’s past work on behalf on Russian interests and the discovery, in September 2017, that Manafort had offered a close associate of Putin, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, “private briefings” on the internal machinations of the Trump campaign.82
There is substantial support for the dossier’s claims about Russian kompromat collected in November 2013 (see chapter 3). CIA officers who spoke to the BBC on this issue through an intermediary confirmed
the dossier’s core contention: that there are compromising videos of Trump.83 The dossier also makes the explosive allegation that Putin personally oversaw the recent Kremlin operations interfering with America’s political process; in January 2017, a consensus report from the nation’s three foremost intelligence agencies confirmed that Putin directly ordered the 2016 “influence campaign” that helped Trump secure victory at the polls.84 Part of Putin’s plan, says the dossier, was to “sow discord and disunity within . . . the United States itself” through an “extensive program of state-sponsored offensive cyber operations”; certainly, Special Counsel Mueller’s 2018 indictments of Russian nationals connected to Russia’s GRU (military intelligence) and its so-called Internet Research Agency confirm that segment of the Steele dossier.85
The dossier’s depiction of the Kremlin’s power structure tracks with what is presently known of it, from the centrality of Dmitry Peskov and Sergei Lavrov to the Kremlin’s use of “people who ha[ve] family and ethnic ties to Russia and/or ha[ve] been incentivized financially to cooperate.” The description of recruiting such people by incentivizing them financially “to cooperate” seems to explain the actions of Felix Sater, Michael Cohen, Trump’s two Trump SoHo partners, and many other Americans in Trump’s orbit from the mid-2000s onward.86 The dossier’s reference to Putin’s reliance on Jewish Americans with a Russian ethnic background matches the unusual number of Israeli persons and organizations—like Joel Zamel and his firm Wikistrat, Black Cube, and the mysterious Israeli who met George Papadopoulos in Tel Aviv—who connected with Trump’s aides and advisers in the United States and abroad. Indeed, Israeli newspaper Haaretz observed that “of ten billionaires with Kremlin ties who funneled political contributions to Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders, at least five are Jewish.”87 The dossier contends that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague in late August or early September 2016 to assist Trump in coordinating with the Russian government; in April 2018, McClatchy reported that Special Counsel Mueller indeed has evidence that the trip occurred.88 While some of the allegations in the dossier are unverifiable—and so may, due to their nature, remain unverified—as former director of national intelligence James Clapper said in May 2018, none of the dossier has been disproven.89
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