Among the persons and entities contributing to the $4.4 million Cohen received through Essential Consultants in 2017, Viktor Vekselberg is a particularly troubling example. Vekselberg attended Trump’s inauguration—as did Kremlin agent Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Soviet intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and accused Russian spy Maria Butina—and is subject to U.S. sanctions on Russian persons and entities. These are the sanctions that Putin was pushing in 2017 (and even now) to have repealed.52 Even more strikingly, Vekselberg sat next to Putin at the same 2015 RT gala that Michael Flynn attended while he was advising then candidate Trump on national security issues.53 According to Business Insider, Vekselberg is “closely aligned with Putin, with whom he frequently meets to discuss business”; moreover, “two of Vekselberg’s American associates donated a combined $1.25 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.”54 These donations, coming as they did from Russia-connected Americans rather than Russian nationals, might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that, as of January 2018, tens of millions of dollars are missing from the inaugural fund Vekselberg’s associates donated to—raising the possibility they were steered to private individuals.55 Trump’s inaugural committee collected approximately twice the amount (and for a relatively modest inaugural celebration) that President Obama did for the more expensive of his two inaugurations; the man in charge of Trump’s inaugural organizing committee was his good friend Thomas Barrack, who at the time was lobbying him on nuclear reactor sales to Saudi Arabia alongside Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and Bud McFarlane.56 This confluence of facts will lead Mueller’s team to, in March 2018, “[stop] Mr. Vekselberg . . . at a New York–area airport . . . [search] his electronic devices and [question] him.”57 All told, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the total payments to Cohen’s shell corporation—$4.4 million—will dwarf the payout to Trump’s mistress Stormy Daniels ($130,000) for which the corporation was ostensibly originally created.58
When Senate investigators interview Jared Kushner in July 2017, they discover that his defense to accusations of untoward conduct is his own inexperience.59 Kushner tells investigators that the reason he had to update his federal security clearance forms so many times—with officials discovering more than a hundred errors or omissions, a record of nondisclosure Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau, will call the worst he’s ever seen—was that he had “thousands” of meetings and exchanges during the campaign and that some, including the many Russian contacts he left off his SF-86 form, were not “impactful or memorable.”60 In saying “I have never seen that level of mistakes” on an SF-86 form, Phalen will note that Kushner’s initial SF-86 form “did not mention any foreign contacts” and that his subsequent update of the form added “100 contacts” but still did not mention the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.61 In his July 2017 statement to congressional investigators, Kushner will claim to have never initiated contact with any foreign officials—though he will concede that he set up Trump’s April 2016 Mayflower Hotel speech and that at the VIP event beforehand he did communicate separately with each ambassador, including Sergey Kislyak. Kushner will further say that he did tell Kislyak—as he told the other three ambassadors when he met with them, according to his statement—that he hoped they would be interested in Trump’s “fresh approach” to foreign policy.62 Oddly, Kushner tells investigators that he doesn’t remember speaking on the phone to Kislyak even once, though Reuters reports he has done so at least twice.63 Despite Reuters having “six sources” who are “U.S. officials” saying that Kushner had “multiple” contacts with Kislyak by telephone, Kushner will tell investigators he is “highly skeptical” any such calls occurred.64 And although sanction relief for Russia is critical to the “good deal” Trump spoke of during his speech at the Mayflower Hotel, Kushner tells investigators that when Natalia Veselnitskaya brought up the Magnitsky Act sanctions in Trump Tower, “I had no idea why that topic was being raised.” He will add that he “thought nothing more” of the meeting after he left it and believes “[n]o part of the meeting I attended included anything about the campaign.”65
As for his meetings with Kislyak and VEB chairman Sergei Gorkov during the transition, Kushner says he solicited neither meeting. Furthermore, Kushner asserts that it was Kislyak who wanted to discuss Syria with him and Flynn rather than the reverse. He makes this assertion even though he was the architect of Flynn being brought aboard the transition team, Flynn had been in contact with Kislyak prior to the election, and, after the election, Flynn immediately moved to get involved in Syria policy—possibly as part of a “grand bargain” to simultaneously end U.S. sanctions on Russia and Russian support for the Iranian militants aiding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.66 As for his meeting with Gorkov, Kushner will denounce Gorkov’s description of the event—just as he had, in the same statement, denounced the intelligence community’s description of his contacts with Kislyak—and insist that “at no time was there any discussion [with Gorkov] about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements, or any private business of any kind.”67
Just two months after Kushner says, following his two-hour interview with Senate investigators, “Hopefully, this [interview] put these matters to rest,” the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will discover—not from Kushner, but from TV—that Kushner has a secret private email server he never disclosed to the committee.68 Moreover, the only reason Kushner’s private server makes the news is that his attorney Abbe Lowell accidentally sent an email to a prankster who was pretending to be Kushner; Lowell thereby revealed the existence of an email server his client had not disclosed to investigators.69 In November 2017, a bipartisan letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee to Kushner will accuse Trump’s son-in-law of providing—even after the revelation of his private email server—“incomplete” information to Congress.70 The letter will accuse Kushner of not disclosing “emails related to WikiLeaks and Kushner’s security clearance form that originally omitted certain contacts with Russian officials.”71
While Kushner, in the statement he issues after his congressional interview, will present himself (as summarized by Rolling Stone) as having been “out of place, confused, and polite” during the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting—as well as arriving late and leaving early—Goldstone’s testimony to Congress will paint an entirely different picture.72 According to the British publicist, Kushner became “agitated and infuriated” when the Russians didn’t provide the dirt on Clinton that Kushner had apparently anticipated—suggesting also that, contrary to Trump Jr.’s testimony to Congress, Kushner had foreknowledge of what the meeting was about.73
Little is known about Rinat Akhmetshin’s August 2017 appearance before the grand jury convened by Mueller, as grand jury proceedings are secret. In an interview not long after his testimony, however, Akhmetshin will tell the Financial Times that Veselnitskaya told Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner about “bad money end[ing] up in Manhattan and . . . [being] put into supporting political campaigns.” Akhmetshin’s implication is that the campaign in question was Hillary Clinton’s.74 It is unclear what legally obtained “official documents and information”—to use Goldstone’s characterization of Veselnitskaya’s evidence—the Russians intended to provide (or did provide) the Trump campaign to establish that allegation as true. However, Akhmetshin will be clear on one point over the course of his media interviews: Veselnitskaya did indeed give documents to the Trump campaign during the June 2016 meeting.75
One additional note about Akhmetshin’s conduct in Trump Tower will come not from Akhmetshin but from Agalarov employee Ike Kaveladze, who testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the former Soviet intelligence officer’s “ ‘highly inappropriate’ pink attire” at the meeting—a significant observation given that Trump Jr. will cite Akhmetshin as the one Russian in the room whose presence he couldn’t thereafter remember at all.76
While little is known of Priebus’s mid-October interview with Mueller’s
team, the Washington Examiner reports in March 2018 that Trump attempted to get Priebus to tell him what Mueller’s agents had asked him.77 One likely topic of discussion was the contemporaneous memos Comey wrote in early 2017 about his interactions with President Trump and his staff; according to an April 2018 report in the Washington Post, Comey wrote, shortly after a February 8, 2017, meeting with Priebus, that Priebus had asked to have a “private conversation” with the FBI director and then requested a key piece of information from him: whether there was a FISA order on then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had attended Trump’s August 17, 2016, classified security briefing with the candidate and then New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Comey answered at the time that the question was inappropriate—it needed to be “asked and answered through established channels”—but gave Priebus the information he was looking for anyway (though his answer is redacted from his memo before it is made public).78 Priebus’s question is curious, because any FISA order on Flynn might have picked up conversations Flynn had in December 2016 with other Trump officials about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak—and Priebus was one of the officials K. T. McFarland kept in the loop about Flynn’s ongoing sanctions negotiations with the Russians. In fact, Priebus was scheduled to be on a call with the president-elect and his whole national security team on the day Flynn conducted his negotiations with Kislyak. If Flynn were to have been on that call while under a FISA warrant, both Priebus and the president-elect might well have had their statements about negotiating with the Russians captured. As the Washington Post notes, “The fact that [Priebus] asked Comey on February 8 about whether Flynn was under surveillance suggests [Priebus] may have had reason to believe that Flynn’s transgressions were more serious than just lying to Pence. If that’s true, the chances that Trump didn’t know that Flynn had done something extremely serious are shrinking.”79
In October 2017, Sam Clovis, the man who hired both George Papadopoulos and Carter Page—one of whom has already pleaded guilty to a federal felony, and the other of whom invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—is interviewed by Mueller’s investigators. He then testifies before Mueller’s grand jury in October 2017.80 Within seventy-two hours of his cooperation with Mueller being revealed to the public, Clovis withdraws from Trump’s nomination of him to be the chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture.81 One of the senior members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), says at the time that at Clovis’s confirmation hearings he would have asked the former Air Force colonel about his knowledge of Papadopoulos’s back-channel communications with the Russians; after Clovis’s withdrawal, Leahy will call Clovis “almost a comically bad nominee, even for this administration.”82 According to Reuters, one of the key topics Mueller’s team had asked Clovis about under oath was whether Trump knew of Papadopoulos’s back-channel communications with the Russians. Papadopoulos—one of Mueller’s cooperating witnesses—has said that Trump did indeed know about his communications with the Russians, with Newsweek noting that, according to Papadopoulos, “[Trump] met with [him] one-on-one . . . [and he] told Trump about his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.”83 Papadopoulos will later change his story and say that the first time he ever met Trump was at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. on March 31, 2016—ten days after Trump singled him out as an “excellent guy” in an interview with The Washington Post.84
That Flynn’s December 2017 plea deal requires him to plead guilty to only a single count of making false statements to the FBI confuses many who have followed the Flynn headlines. As Lawfare writes, “[Flynn’s] behaviors raised a raft of substantial criminal law questions. . . . His problems include, among other things, an alleged kidnapping plot [to capture and extradite a dissident Turkish cleric to Turkey], a plan to build nuclear power plants all over the Middle East, alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) involving at least two different countries [Turkey and Russia], and apparent false statements to the FBI.”85 Flynn’s deal is based on stipulated facts that add little to the public’s understanding of what he did, given that his actions (discussing ending U.S. sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador and then lying to the FBI about doing so) have already been widely reported. New, however, is the information in the Flynn plea affidavit that when he called K. T. McFarland at Mar-a-Lago to ask for advice on how to conduct his negotiations with Kislyak, McFarland was with “other senior members of the Presidential Transition Team.” Given this, it would have been difficult for McFarland not to share the content of her phone call with Flynn with her superiors on the transition.86 That McFarland communicated to Flynn, during at least one of their calls, that “the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to escalate the situation [regarding sanctions]” suggests that McFarland was passing on information from her superiors to Flynn—also difficult to do if the superiors were not aware that Flynn was both on the phone and asking for guidance from above him in the chain of command rather than from his deputy, McFarland.87 The affidavit also establishes that Flynn didn’t discuss just Obama’s sanctions with Kislyak but also “the incoming administration’s foreign policy goals” writ large, which, as would later be reported by Yahoo News in June 2017, included “secret efforts to ease Russia sanctions” upon Trump taking office.88 The affidavit also notes that when Flynn’s course of negotiations was complete, he “spoke with” not just one but multiple “senior members of the Presidential Transition Team” to brief them on Russia’s decision not to retaliate against the United States for Obama’s imposition of new sanctions. It is unclear whether Flynn merely told these senior officials of the outcome of his conversations or also what he had said to Kislyak during those conversations to achieve that outcome.89 Finally, Flynn’s plea deal establishes that Kushner asked him to find out various nations’ position on a UN resolution related to Israeli settlements; Mueller’s court filings assert that Flynn did more than merely ask countries’ representatives for their position on the resolution, but also requested that the nations he spoke to vote a certain way on it. The affidavit gives no indication of whether all of Flynn’s actions were sanctioned by Kushner.90
Papadopoulos’s late October plea documents are rather more detailed and revealing than Flynn’s.91 They establish, as discussed here in previous chapters, that Papadopoulos was in touch with top officials on the Trump campaign to keep them perpetually apprised of his progress in negotiating, with several Kremlin agents, a Trump-Putin summit.92 The affidavit also establishes that Papadopoulos tried to destroy evidence that would have confirmed his Russian ties; in February 2017, he shut down a Facebook account that, when searched by the FBI, revealed “communications . . . with Russian nationals and other foreign contacts.”93 The affidavit does not say which other countries’ nationals Papadopoulos was in contact with, though separate reporting suggests, at a minimum, Israel, Greece, and Egypt as likely answers to that question (see chapters 5, 6, and 7).
The affidavit does not establish which Trump campaign officials Papadopoulos told about the Russians having “thousands” of Clinton emails. But it does contend that his claim that he never told anyone on the campaign what Mifsud had told him about Clinton “dirt” was a “false statement.”94 The affidavit further indicates that Papadopoulos had an “extensive talk” with Russian deputy foreign minister Ivan Timofeev, and that the result of this talk was Papadopoulos learning that the Russians were indeed “open to cooperation.”95 Papadopoulos also revealed to Timofeev that a meeting between top Trump campaign officials and Russian government officials (“members of President Putin’s office”) had been “approved” on the Trump side, and that the purpose of such a meeting would be “a day of consultations.”96
The Papadopoulos affidavit states that, on April 11, 2016, Papadopoulos received an email from Olga Polonskaya (née Vinodagrova) offering—as she eventually makes
clear, on behalf of both her contacts at “the [Russian] Embassy in London” and the “Russian Federation” as a whole—to “support your initiatives between our two countries.”97 Finally, the affidavit confirms that Papadopoulos wanted Russian government officials to see his late September 2016 interview with Russian media outlet Interfax; in that interview, Papadopoulos stated that Trump opposed all sanctions on Russia.98
The most explosive Trump-Russia testimonies of 2017 are those of Carter Page, Erik Prince, and Donald Trump Jr. The most startling revelation from the last of these is Trump Jr.’s September 2017 concession that he cannot recall whether he told his father about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting at the time it was happening—a question he has answered in the negative on other occasions.99 As USA Today notes, “Interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee” could not answer the question of whether Trump Jr. told his father about the June 2016 meeting, “as Trump Jr. said he couldn’t remember whether he talked to his father about it.”100 Rolling Stone offers a longer account of this critical segment of Trump Jr.’s testimony:
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