In August, that director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, will say that he still doesn’t “fully understand” what happened in Helsinki, as he is “not in a position” to “know what happened in that meeting.”91 He will add that it is the “President’s prerogative” to have private conversations with foreign leaders without informing his top intelligence officials of any of the contents of those conversations.92
On September 14, 2018, Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, pleads guilty in D.C. to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; Manafort’s plea deal could land him in federal prison for seventeen to twenty-one years—with the incarceration to run concurrent to any prison time he receives in the Eastern District of Virginia—but his sentence can be reduced if he offers full cooperation to Mueller across all areas of the Trump-Russia probe.93
News of Manafort’s plea sends shockwaves through U.S. politics, given NBC News’ January 2018 reporting that Trump considers Manafort the one person who could place him in legal peril should he “flip.” “Trump is telling friends and aides in private that things are going great—for him,” NBC News wrote at the time. “Some reasons: He’s decided that a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”94
As America nears the 2018 midterms, the popular political speculation is that voters will rebuke Trump’s excesses and malfeasance with a “blue wave”: a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. The Republicans’ Senate majority is considered safe; in any case, should the Democrats by some significant electoral surprise take the Senate, the sixty-seven votes needed to convict a president who has been impeached by the House means that any removal of Trump from the Oval Office would have to be bipartisan.
If the Democrats take the House, however, they can push on their own for significant progress in the investigation of the president—an investigation that might culminate in impeachment proceedings. Witnesses who previously were not subpoenaed and therefore were not compelled to testify before Congress could be subpoenaed; witnesses who appeared voluntarily but refused to answer certain questions could be required by either subpoenas or threats of being held in contempt of Congress to answer those questions; documents Congress never sought that would normally have been the subject of investigative inquiry and eventually, if not produced, subpoenaed—such as Trump’s tax returns—could now be demanded. Should the midterm elections indeed result in a “blue wave,” by mid- to late 2019 many of the questions that remain unresolved in the Trump-Russia investigation may be close to a resolution, as may be the entire affair—whether the final chapter is impeachment and removal, a dramatic resignation from office, or some unforeseen and unpredictable machination relating to Trump’s criminal liability for actions taken both before and after Russian interference in the 2016 election. In one way or another, the chaos of 2018 will be resolved, although perhaps not before it has deepened, widened, and put even more pressure on America’s public institutions and culture.
Until then, what the citizenry has is a public record of the Trump-Russia investigation that comes, for now, from the results of investigative journalism by reporters and enterprising citizens and perhaps, at some point in the future, from what Mueller himself has referred to in court filings as an “ongoing criminal investigation with multiple lines of non-public inquiry.”95
Annotated History
* * *
But many other 2018 mysteries remain unresolved.
For instance, the lasting importance of the strange saga of twenty-one-year-old Belarusian escort Nastya Rybka (real name: Anastasia Vashukevich) remains difficult to determine. In February 2018, Rybka claimed to have audio recordings of Paul Manafort’s former boss, Russian oligarch and Putin confidant Oleg Deripaska, that would, she said, confirm that Russian government officials colluded with the Trump campaign.96 At the time she made this claim, Rybka had just been arrested in Thailand, along with a number of others, on allegations of working without a work permit—specifically, conducting a “sex workshop.” As she was being transported to jail, she recorded and released a video indicating that if American officials would come rescue her from incarceration, she would give them hard evidence establishing connections between top Kremlin officials, Paul Manafort, and Trump himself.97 Her evidence was teased in a February video by Putin critic Alexei Navalny, who does not know Rybka, but used public records research to reveal that the young escort had long boasted on her social media feeds of “seducing some oligarch.” Her claim seemed to be supported by the fact that she’d posted online many pictures and videos of herself and Deripaska spending time together.98 In one video, Deripaska is heard and seen saying to Sergey Eduardovich Prikhodko, a longtime Putin adviser who at the time of the video was a deputy prime minister and top adviser to Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, “We’ve got bad relations with America, because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich, [then U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria] Nuland . . . is responsible for them. When she was your age, she spent a month on a Russian whaling boat. She hates our country after this.”99 Navalny, seeking to discover more about this secretly recorded but publicly published conversation, learned that Rybka had written a book in which she detailed exactly when the conversation on the boat—Deripaska’s yacht Elden—occurred: August 2016. Moreover, pictures on Rybka’s social media feed established the location of her yacht trip with Deripaska as the coastline of Norway. In her book, Rybka referred to Deripaska as “Ruslan” and Prikhodko as “Daddy.”100
Navalny thereafter contended, in a video posted online that now has nearly eight million views on YouTube, that Deripaska’s invitation to Prikhodko to take a trip on his yacht and—as Rybka’s video makes clear—Deripaska’s purchase of multiple escorts for Prikhodko’s entertainment and enjoyment constituted a bribe; Navalny laid out evidence that Deripaska had also arranged for Prikhodko to be transported by private jet to a remote area of Norway for their meeting.101 Navalny alleged that one of Prikhodko’s many surprisingly luxurious homes—surprising, as he is ostensibly merely a government minister, albeit a powerful one who is “responsible for Russian foreign policy,” per Navalny—was in the same building as the family of Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s CEO, and that Prikhodko was friendly with the Sechins.102 Navalny theorized that Paul Manafort’s offer of private briefings for Deripaska was made as part of a slightly longer back channel intended to lead from Manafort to Deripaska, Deripaska to Prikhodko, and Prikhodko to both Putin and Medvedev. Navalny’s implication that Prikhodko’s astounding personal wealth and landholdings are the product of graft—bribes from oligarchs like Deripaska—is unverifiable. But in Rybka’s book and social media accounts and in Navalny’s investigation, there is evidence that Deripaska was briefing Prikhodko on goings-on in American politics as part of a secretive meeting on a yacht off Norway.103 Within six months of his video’s going viral, Navalny was jailed for thirty days by Putin’s government for a January 2018 protest. In the meantime, Rybka’s arrest, which began as a deportable status offense, has suddenly turned into more serious crimes, such as indecency and solicitation, for which Rybka now faces ten years’ imprisonment in Thailand.104
In March 2018, the New York Times quoted the chief of Thailand’s Immigration Bureau, Suttipong Wongpin, as saying of Rybka, “She will be deported. Her immigration offense is working without a work permit.”105 Once word of her offer to American officials became international news, however, her circumstances changed: her charges were amended from immigration offenses to indecency, conspiracy, and belonging to a secret society, charges that carry, with conviction, a significant prison sentence in Thailand.106 While the New York Times quoted Rybka and her codefendants as “claim[ing] they are facing [increased charges] because of the intervention of a foreign power [Russia] they angered,” the Times also noted Rybka now was “coy about the content of her recordings—and said she now has no plan to make them pub
lic.”107 Her coyness and change of heart were easily explained: she gave the tapes to Deripaska, the Associated Press reported, after she “promised Deripaska she would no longer speak on the matter, and . . . he had . . . promised her something in return for not making that evidence public.”108 As she changed her plea to guilty in a Thai court—she will be sentenced for soliciting (prostitution) and conspiracy to solicit at a sentencing hearing in late summer 2018—she told the Associated Press, “He [Deripaska] promised me a little something already. If he do that [what he promised] then there will be no problem, but if he don’t . . .” Then she shrugged and smiled. The Associated Press reported her having the same reaction to a question on whether she still held copies of the audio and video she previously offered to American law enforcement.109 Prior to making an arrangement with Rybka, Deripaska had been so concerned about her allegations that in February he had sought and received an injunction from a Russian court against Instagram and YouTube; the injunction, demanding the immediate removal of all Rybka-Deripaska-Prikhodko material from the two sites, threatened to block access to both sites in Russia if the two companies did not comply. Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, or Roskomnadzor, backed the order and promised to punish both YouTube and Instagram for any noncompliance.110
Rybka was not the only potential Trump-Russia witness whose silence in 2018 spoke as loudly as her words. In August 2018, George Papadopoulos’s attorneys filed a sentencing memo in advance of Papadopoulos’s sentencing hearing, the defendant and the government having experienced enough of a breakdown in their relationship that Mueller’s team was now insisting on incarceration for Papadopoulos, while Papadopoulos, through his attorney, was requesting probation. In the affidavit accompanying his sentencing request, Papadopoulos revealed five facts heretofore unknown to the public: that he had unsuccessfully sought a job with Trump in mid-2015 before suddenly being hired in early March 2016, just days before traveling to Italy; that he was hired to assist with “the [Trump] campaign’s foreign policy focus,” which he was told was “Russia,” despite the campaign’s knowing he had “no experience in dealing with Russian policy or its officials”; that then candidate Trump “nodded with approval” when Papadopoulos told him, on March 31, 2016, at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., that he was a Kremlin intermediary tasked with setting up a secret meeting and back channel between Trump and Putin; that then senator Sessions’s reaction to the proposal was to “like the idea and [state] that the campaign should look into it”; and that Papadopoulos told the Greek foreign minister, whom he met on a campaign-approved trip to Greece in late May 2016, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton—even as he maintained, still, that “he [did] not recall ever passing the information on to the campaign.”111
What is still unclear is what Mueller’s decision to recommend imprisonment for Papadopoulos was primarily based on: it could be based on the impact of Papadopoulos’s lies on federal law enforcement’s ability to question and apprehend Mifsud; on Papadopoulos’s decision to begin speaking to the media in December 2017; or, most tellingly if so, on Mueller’s conclusion that “the defendant did not provide ‘substantial assistance’ [to prosecutors], and much of the information provided by the defendant came only after the government confronted him with his own emails, text messages, internet search history, and other information it had obtained via search warrants and subpoenas.”112 While Mueller’s team cited all three aggravating factors in its sentencing memorandum, only the last of these suggests that prosecutors do not believe Papadopoulos is telling them the entire truth and that he may still be trying to protect Trump officials, through whom, the memorandum notes, Papadopoulos was seeking full-time employment in either the State Department, the Department of Energy, or the National Security Council at the time of his questioning by FBI agents.113 Regardless, that Papadopoulos put in his sentencing memo that his back-channel communications with the Russians were approved by both Trump and Sessions—who have since denied giving any such approval—raises the possibility that Papadopoulos and the three other March 2016 meeting attendees who have spoken with Mueller concur with Papadopoulos’s version of events and are telling the truth, while Trump and Sessions are not.
Among the events that followed the March 31 meeting is another mystery: the matter of the electronic “pinging” detected throughout 2016 between a server in Trump Tower and two servers at Alfa Bank in Russia. During the months-long period available to data analysts, 87 percent of all pings to Trump Tower came from Alfa Bank, with nearly all the remainder coming from a server in Michigan under the control of Erik Prince’s brother-in-law.114 However, no expert has yet been able to conclusively determine what the pings mean—whether they indicate a transfer of information, some sort of signal, or nothing at all.115 Slate will note, however, that “[t]he conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. ‘At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,’ according to [Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean] Camp.”116 The FBI is now examining the evidence, but no conclusion has yet been revealed.117 The key intersections of the Trump-Russia case with Alfa Bank, pings aside, are these two: the man who helped write Trump’s “Mayflower Speech,” Richard Burt, was at the time on the advisory board of Alfa Bank, and Maria Butina, the accused Russian spy now idling in a D.C. jail, had an account at Alfa Bank that exchanged hundreds of thousands of dollars with her boyfriend’s bank account at Wells Fargo in the years leading up to the 2016 election.118 What, if anything, any of this means remains unclear.
Equally unclear is what role Cambridge Analytica will have in the Trump-Russia saga when its full history is written. In May 2018, the data-collection firm shut down permanently, even as questions still abound about its founder, Steve Bannon; about Jared Kushner, the man who contracted it to control the Trump campaign’s data operation; about its CEO, Alexander Nix, who reached out to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign and was caught on undercover video implying that the company engaged in domestic psychological operations, “honeypot” operations, and other unsavory tactics in order to win elections; and about the Soviet-born data scientist Aleksandr Kogan, who, while receiving funding from a Moscow university, not only compiled fifty million Facebook profiles, but then left that data accessible to unknown Russian nationals, possibly giving Russian propagandists the tools they needed to better target their election interference campaign.119
Finally, we cannot know what the effect of whistle-blowers will be on the Trump-Russia investigation. Tell-all books like Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, Bob Woodward’s Fear, or Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury—the last of which gave Steve Bannon an opportunity to opine about the Trump White House, including a claim that there was “zero” chance Trump Jr. didn’t tell his father about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting beforehand—could yet lead to revelations otherwise inaccessible to Congress, the special counsel, or public journalism. While Trump has tried to gag former staffers with nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) or seduce them into silence with do-little “jobs” that pay handsomely, the legality of such NDAs is in dispute and future staffers may, like Manigault Newman—who now says she will “blow the whistle” on what she calls Trump’s “corruption”—opt for transparency rather than complicity in Trump’s still-opaque machinations.120
AFTERWORD
THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF AMERICA
A REVIEW OF EVERYTHING DONALD Trump has done since deciding to run for president shortly after the 2012 presidential election, as well as everything we have learned about what he, those of his children working in the Trump Organization, and his closest associates did in the decade prior, should cause profound unease in the heart of every American. The picture that emerges is of a man whose venality and solipsism have left him vulnerable to being compromised by the Kremlin.
Since the 1980s, Trump has shown a commitment to his own self-interest over any other consi
deration. As he hopes for more business opportunities to develop in Moscow and St. Petersburg, his views on Russia bear more similarity to Kremlin propaganda than anything we would expect to hear from the mouth of an American, let alone our president. When Trump was just a businessman, it was possible to find those views, which nearly always castigated our allies and heartened our enemies, odious but ultimately irrelevant. Now, all of America can see what the Kremlin long ago saw: Trump was always headed for a life in politics. The only question was what the consequences for America would be. We now have an answer to that question: the result of elevating such a man to international prominence and authority is a foreign policy that Trump implicitly surrendered to foreign interests thirty years ago and explicitly traded for continued access to foreign money and influential foreign leaders in 2013 or shortly thereafter. It was in that year that the Kremlin made it abundantly clear how much Trump, his family, and his business stood to gain if he threw over U.S. interests in favor of a policy portfolio that echoed the public statements of the Russian government—or, more simply, those of Vladimir Putin.
From his campaign to transition to administration, there have been dozens of clandestine meetings between those in his inner circle and hostile foreign actors, all of which were subsequently lied about to the media, to voters, to law enforcement, and to Congress. Throughout it all, Trump and those voluntarily sheltered in his strange milieu have exhibited an unwillingness to change course, even after it became clear that Russian interests were poised to threaten Western-style democracy.
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