Proof of Collusion

by Seth Abramson

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TESTIMONY AND PLEA

  June to December 2017

  Summary

  ONCE FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY is fired and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints Robert Mueller special counsel, the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion continues with even greater vigor than before. As Mueller and his team—which includes forty of the top attorneys and investigators in the country—request or subpoena large numbers of potentially inculpatory documents, including Trump’s personal banking records and all Russia-related documents in the possession of the Trump Organization, there are major developments on the testimonial side of the Trump-Russia case as well: key witnesses in the investigation either disappear, become unavailable, get arrested, or are successfully corralled into hours of testimony before Congress that reveals, in many instances, that they have not been telling the truth.1

  In Europe, George Papadopoulos’s primary conduit to the Kremlin, Joseph Mifsud, suddenly disappears without even telling his fiancée where he’s gone; in the United States, Papadopoulos himself is arrested.2 Mueller’s team meets with Christopher Steele to debrief him on his dossier, and even as Steele continues to refuse to testify before Congress, Trump advisers Erik Prince and Donald Trump Jr. do so—but when both men testify extensively before Congress, their interrogations reveal substantial holes in their accounts of what they did during the presidential campaign.3 In October 2017, Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy campaign manager Rick Gates are indicted on twelve federal charges, including conspiracy against the United States.4 Later in the month, Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI—an event that seems to presage Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn being charged with the same offense, cutting a cooperation deal with Special Counsel Mueller, and pleading guilty to one count of making false statements in December 2017.5

  Meanwhile, the congressional investigation of Trump-Russia collusion moves ahead, even if progress is slow and the results unclear. Sessions and Comey testify again before Congress in June 2017; in July, Jared Kushner meets with Senate investigators and Paul Manafort with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In August, Mueller’s grand jury interviews June 2016 Trump Tower meeting participant and former Soviet intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and the Senate Judiciary Committee interviews Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, the man who hired Christopher Steele to compile raw intelligence about Trump’s business dealings abroad. Donald Trump Jr. testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September and the House and Senate intelligence committees in December. Mueller’s team interviews former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, former Trump campaign national cochair Sam Clovis, and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer in October 2017, as well as current Trump domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller in November. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence interviews Corey Lewandowski in October, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence questions both Carter Page and Erik Prince in November.

  With each new indictment, plea, and transcript of testimony—as well as new reports on Russia’s social media meddling from Facebook and Twitter and on Russia’s electoral-infrastructure hacking campaign from the Department of Homeland Security—the breadth and depth of Russia’s attack on the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election becomes clearer. This clarity stands in stark contrast to two puzzling events that cast a long shadow over the second half of 2017: Trump’s insistence, in July, on meeting Putin face-to-face—and multiple times—under highly unusual circumstances during the G20 summit, and his inexplicable delay in carrying out new sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs that are overwhelmingly passed by Congress the same month.

  The Facts

  AS THE FIRST YEAR OF Trump’s presidency wears on, the beleaguered president becomes more and more erratic. He floats the possibility that he has secretly recorded James Comey, before retracting that claim; he brags about his ability to pardon whomever he wants, including himself; he attacks his own attorney general in the media, suggesting that he wouldn’t have nominated him had he known Sessions wouldn’t protect him against investigations of his conduct; he signs into law new Russia sanctions passed by a stunning 517–5 vote in Congress but fails to carry out the sanctions by the deadline required by the legislation. Throughout 2017—and beyond—he pays more than $200,000 in legal fees to his personal attorney Michael Cohen out of his campaign coffers, despite Cohen being a witness in a federal criminal investigation Trump has reason to believe is looking into his own actions. And after Putin cuts U.S. diplomatic staff in Moscow in retaliation for President Obama’s December 2016 cuts to Russian diplomatic staff in the United States, Trump thanks Putin for saving the United States money, telling Americans in August 2017 that he is “very thankful” for Putin’s decision.6

  Throughout the latter half of the year, the scope of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election becomes clear. In September, Facebook admits that Russian troll farms purchased thousands of ads on the popular social media platform, turning over more than three thousand of them to Congress.7 Later that month, the Department of Homeland Security informs twenty-one U.S. states that they were hacked by the Russians prior to the election; in subsequent months, DHS will amend the number of states hacked to thirty-nine and admit that seven states’ election systems were in fact “compromised” by Russian hacking.8 September also sees Twitter joining Facebook in acknowledging the role social media played in Russia’s election-year operations, with the company’s confessing that just that month it shut down hundreds of accounts run by Russian operatives—accounts that spent, in total, hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread Kremlin propaganda in the United States.9

  Having declared, on June 9, 2017, from the Rose Garden at the White House, that he is “100 percent” willing to be interviewed by Mueller and would be “glad” to do so, Trump has nevertheless taken no steps to do so by December 2017—and by the end of the year he will have called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt” fourteen times on Twitter.10 Behind the scenes, Trump is raging, threatening to fire Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and/or Robert Mueller, should the Trump-Russia investigation continue; indeed, in the very month he says he’d be happy to be interviewed by the special counsel, he orders his White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller—backing off only when McGahn threatens to quit his job.11 Having failed to rid himself of Mueller, less than a week after stating his willingness to cooperate with the former FBI director he will imply on Twitter that Mueller and the other attorneys leading the Trump-Russia investigation are “very bad” people whose conflicts of interest (he alleges) disqualify them from working on the case.12

  On August 30, 2018, Trump will say “I’ll see what happens” when asked by the media whether he will even honor a judge-issued subpoena from the special counsel—adding that the special counsel’s investigation is “illegal.”13

  Meanwhile, the several ongoing congressional investigations, marked by fierce partisan infighting, continue. From Emin Agalarov’s publicist Rob Goldstone, Senate Judiciary investigators learn a great deal about how “the participants [of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting] scrambled to square their stories in July 2017 after public scrutiny began of the Trump Tower meeting,” with Goldstone messaging both Emin Agalarov and Ike Kaveladze, a vice president at the Agalarovs’ Crocus Group, after news of the meeting broke to ask “how to respond.”14 One result of these contacts appears to be Goldstone changing his story as to who he believed was at the meeting he attended; whereas in June 2016 he had told Trump Jr. he was bringing a “Russian government attorney” to Trump Tower as part of “Russia and its government’s support” for Trump, after he corresponds with the Russians he will say the meeting was “in no way connected with the Russian Government or any of its officials.”15 The Senate Judiciary Committee discovers, too, that Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer sent Goldstone a statement for him to issue after the meeting was made publi
c, which Goldstone then forwarded to Kaveladze. Bloomberg calls this “an apparent effort to keep their stories consistent.”16 Trump Jr.’s attorney asks Goldstone to begin his statement with the claim that “the statements I have read by Donald Trump Jr. are 100 percent accurate.”17

  Investigators also learn that when Goldstone emailed Trump Jr. and Trump himself (via Rhona Graff) in January 2016 to offer “massive exposure for Mr. Trump on the [Russian equivalent of Facebook] site—and it will be covered in Russian media also—where . . . your campaign is covered positively almost daily . . . [with] extremely gracious comments from President Putin,” Graff did in fact respond to this offer of foreign assistance to Trump’s presidential campaign.18 Though the proffered “massive exposure” on a Russian social media site called “VK” had high in-kind value and might therefore be construed as an illegal campaign contribution, Graff wrote Goldstone in response to the offer—whether on her own initiative or on Trump’s behalf is unclear—that it was a “terrific opportunity” and that Goldstone should follow up with Dan Scavino, the Trump campaign’s social media director.19 By the time Goldstone wrote Scavino about receiving this assistance from the Agalarovs and VK, he was able to represent that “Don [Jr.] and Paul [Manafort]” had told him they were, in CNN’s description of the email, “on board with the idea.”20 While a source will tell CNN that Goldstone brought up the idea for a Trump page on VK to Trump Jr. and Manafort at the end of the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, Trump Jr. will insist that he has no recollection of it when he testifies before Congress.21

  Investigators also learn that, just five days after the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting—when news dropped that Russian hackers had accessed Democratic National Committee emails—Goldstone emailed Emin Agalarov that that news was “eerily weird” in light of the meeting Goldstone had just attended at Trump Tower.22 In the same tranche of emails, congressional investigators also find an email to Ike Kaveladze from his son George, in which George asks his father, of Donald Trump Jr.’s decision to release his emails to and from Emin Agalarov, “Why did he release this email admitting to collusion?”23 The email’s subject line is “dt jr.”24

  From Corey Lewandowski, the Senate Intelligence Committee learns that Donald Trump Sr. does indeed use a blocked number—suggesting that Trump’s son may have called him when, after discussing a prospective June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Emin Agalarov for the first time, he called a blocked number whose owner he insists to Congress he cannot recall.25 Lewandowski does not answer all the questions asked of him, however, and by January 2018, he is refusing to answer any “questions about events that took place during the campaign and his conversations with President Donald Trump since then,” though his legal rationale for either refusal is unclear.26 Steve Bannon will later attempt to do the same. As it turns out, however, campaign conversations are not privileged, and former campaign advisers who do not work in the White House as presidential advisers cannot assert executive privilege or adopt a president’s assertion of executive privilege.27 Bannon will later say that the White House told him to invoke executive privilege.28 The result of his stonewalling is a subpoena from both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Special Counsel Mueller; after a brief negotiation, Mueller allows Bannon to interview voluntarily with his office instead.29

  Another witness who cooperates with Mueller but not Congress—albeit for very different reasons—is former MI6 agent and dossier author Christopher Steele, who speaks with Mueller’s team in the summer of 2017.30 Shortly thereafter, in August 2017, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee includes some startling new revelations about Steele. Simpson recounts how Steele withdrew his cooperation with the FBI one week before the 2016 election because he believed the FBI “was being ‘manipulated’ by Trump insiders.”31 The timing of Steele’s withdrawal from his partnership with the FBI is noteworthy, as it coincides with Trump advisers and allies Rudy Giuliani, Erik Prince, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, Joe diGenova, and Steve Bannon working (see chapter 10) to get leaks from active FBI agents into the media—with the apparent aim of getting FBI director James Comey to focus on the closed Clinton email investigation rather than the still-pending Trump-Russia investigation.32 Steele’s suspicions about pro-Trump factions within the FBI were heightened when, on October 31, 2016, the New York Times cited FBI officials for the proposition that no “conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government” had been found.33 Steele considered the FBI’s representation false and withdrew from cooperation with the Bureau on that basis, Simpson testifies.34 Before their partnership ended, however, Steele “[got] into [with the FBI] who his sources were, how he knew certain things,” according to Simpson.35 Even more startling, Simpson testifies that the FBI told Steele it had “a source inside the Trump campaign”: “an internal Trump campaign source. . . . [whose] intelligence . . . indicated the same thing [as the dossier] and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.”36 Simpson declines to say who the source is, citing “security” reasons. Whether those security concerns involve him or someone else is unclear.37

  Months later, in a January 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, Simpson will publicly stand by his 2017 testimony, underscoring that Fusion GPS never told Steele whom he was working for, that Fusion was not the entity that leaked Steele’s dossier to BuzzFeed in January 2017, and that the commercial research firm never spoke to the FBI about Steele’s work at any time. Simpson will add that “our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously [by the FBI] because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp. The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign.”38 Simpson’s op-ed appears to reject a popular Republican conspiracy theory, which supposes that the FBI used a “mole”—someone not native, or ever adopted into, the Trump campaign—to report on the campaign’s activities through sporadic engagement with it in 2016.39 The Guardian will quote “a person close to the matter” as saying that Simpson was referring to George Papadopoulos as the source inside the Trump camp, but this will remain unclear even after Simpson’s New York Times op-ed.40 The ongoing mystery of the Simpson-cited “human source” is fueled by a letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans to Simpson in which they highlight a phrase from Simpson’s testimony that seems to describe neither George Papadopoulos nor University of Cambridge fellow Stefan Halper—the subject of the right-wing conspiracy theory about an FBI “mole.”41 Halper had only intermittent contact with three Trump advisers as an outside observer of the Trump campaign; Simpson’s testimony clearly refers to “a human source from inside the Trump organization. . . . who decided to pick up a phone and report something” (emphasis added).42

  In August 2018, the New York Times will reveal that U.S. law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community have lost nearly all their human sources of information in Russia, in part because Trump and his congressional allies insisted on “burning” Stefan Halper as a confidential informant on Russia by naming him publicly.43 According to the Times, among other potential factors, “officials also [raise] the possibility that the outing of an F.B.I. informant under scrutiny by the House intelligence committee—an examination encouraged by President Trump—has had a chilling effect on intelligence collection [in Russia].”44

  Investigators also make some unexpected discoveries involving Michael Cohen. From January through August 2017, an American company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg paid Michael Cohen $500,000—depositing the money, the purpose of which remains unknown, into the same shell corporation (Essential Consultants, LLC) that Cohen had set up for the exclusive purpose of paying off Trump’s ex-mistresses. The news raises the possibility of Trump receiving illegal campaign contributions—or other illicit payments—from a foreign national throu
gh Cohen.45 Slate, noting that Essential Consultants is a single-member LLC that was created just a month before the 2016 presidential election, and that Vekselberg’s company indeed stood to be “affected by Trump administration decisions,” will call explanations for the payments given by Vekselberg’s company and others “ridiculous”—and speculate that a more likely explanation is either “bribery” or “a cash-for-access contribution to a sleazy hush-money slush fund.”46 That Cohen also receives payments from other companies into the same account, and that the services he is ostensibly being paid for do not match up with his areas of expertise, further suggests, Slate will argue, that these payments are not on the level.47 The New York Times will note that “Cohen also used the company [Essential Consultants, LLC] to collect $250,000 after arranging payments in 2017 and 2018 by a major Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, to a former Playboy model he allegedly impregnated”; notably, Trump named Cohen and Broidy co-deputy finance chairs of the Republican National Committee in April 2017, as Cohen was still collecting money from Broidy to cover up his alleged affair.48 That during this period Broidy—alongside Mueller cooperating witness George Nader—was selling access to Trump for $1 billion to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates makes Broidy’s payments into Trump’s ex-mistress slush fund even more problematic.49 New York Magazine will write that Broidy was likely giving Trump more than money for his lobbying access. Basing its conjecture on knowledge of the backgrounds and known behaviors of Broidy, who has has been accused of paying off the girlfriend of a friend before, and Trump, who has a “well-documented history of having unprotected sex with women in the adult-entertainment industry,” the magazine contends that Playboy Playmate Shera Bechard became pregnant not by Broidy, but by Trump.50 The magazine cites as part of its evidence the fact that Bechard was paid off through a contract that used Trump’s longtime alias for such “hush money” payments, “David Dennison.”51