by Lee Smith
All four protodossiers are footnoted with links to press reports, including Russian-language media. Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr and onetime professor of Russian history, began working for Fusion GPS in October 2015. (Edward Baumgartner, who also has Russian-language skills, was reportedly rolled into the Trump project after finishing another job for Fusion GPS around June 2016.)
Ohr was hired, as she put it, to look “into the relationship of Donald Trump with Russian organized crime figures.” She said that part of her work involved researching the travels and business dealings of Trump’s children. That work is reflected in the protodossiers. For instance, one passage claims that in 2004, “Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump travelled to Moscow with convicted felon Felix Sater of the Bayrock group to explore additional deals.” Nellie Ohr is almost certainly an author, likely the primary author, of the protodossiers.
Two of the protodossiers deal specifically with one of Glenn Simpson’s recurrent subjects, Beltway lobbyist Paul Manafort. Those dossiers were titled “Paul Manafort—Ukraine and Lichtenstein” and “UPDATE—Paul Manafort.” The two Manafort documents were produced after Manafort was named campaign convention manager at the end of March 2016. They deal extensively with his business in Ukraine, focusing on former president Viktor Yanukovych.
Another protodossier is a twelve-page document with five separate reports dealing with topics regarding Trump’s connection to the former Eastern Bloc states: “Trump in Azerbaijan”; “Trump’s Business Partners in the Trump SoHo” (the partners named are figures from the former Soviet states); “Trump in Russia”; “Trump in Georgia”; “Trump in Serbia.” According to sources, the undated document was distributed to the media in April and May 2016.
The most significant of the four protodossiers is a fifteen-page document titled “Donald Trump and Russia” and dated May 20, 2016. This looks like the road map for Steele’s research, as it highlights the Trump campaign advisers whose activities he would report to the FBI allegedly starting in early July. By that time, Fusion GPS had been briefing the press on the same Trump associates—in particular Manafort, Page, and Flynn—for several months.
A key difference between the protodossiers and Steele’s seventeen memos is that the former discuss Trump’s supposed connections to Russian and Eastern Bloc figures alleged to have ties to organized crime and also possibly to Russian state interests. Steele’s documents, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with alleged ties connecting Trump and his associates to Russian government officials and figures publicly known to be close to Kremlin leadership.
The header of the May 20 protodossier reads “PRIVILEGED—PREPARED AT THE INSTRUCTION OF COUNSEL.” “Counsel” apparently refers to Perkins Coie, the law firm that retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. “Donald Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin’s Russia are deeper than generally appreciated and raise significant national security concerns,” the document begins. It continues:
Trump has partnered on real estate deals with several alleged Russian mafia members. Several of his closest advisers have recently worked for Russian oligarchs loyal to Putin—arguably the world leader most hostile to U.S. and European interests.
The protodossiers are thick with atmosphere, as sketchy figures from the Eurasian criminal underworld and former Trump associates circulated among New York and Moscow, Toronto, Baku, Florida, Kazakhstan, and other locations. But for all the novelistic texture, there wasn’t much connecting Trump to the Russian figures named in the documents.
Ohr and her colleagues were constantly grasping at straws—and coming up empty. “Trump’s relations to Russia and the Russian mob,” the document suggests, may date back to his father, Fred, who “began by developing properties in the heavily Russian neighborhoods of Brooklyn.”
One former Trump partner, the same document alleges, “was linked to a murder-for-hire plot of his former business partner in the former Soviet Union.” He was connected to someone else who was involved in organized crime, who was alleged to have donated to Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaigns—“which could suggest closer ties to Trump.” And from another passage: “Trump and his children have travelled to Russia on multiple occasions over the past thirty years, ostensibly to license his name to local partners. The deals never materialized.”
The author of the protodossiers tried to find the missing link, but even the innuendo misfired. Trump marketed luxury apartments to Russians, the May 20 protodossier reported. “The head of Trump marketing was a Russian émigré,” it noted ominously, who “recently passed away.”
The salacious bits were tepid: ”Credible anecdotal evidence suggests Trump was at least as interested in meeting Russian women on these trips as inking deals.” What did that mean to a celebrity who’d appeared in the pages of the New York Post for decades with beautiful women on his arm?
There was no fire, not even much smoke. What reporter handed an opposition file like the May 20 protodossier had time to look into twenty-five-year-old media reports “of Russian mobsters living in Trump’s public housing buildings in Brighton Beach”?
It wasn’t front-page material. Still, the protodossiers provided journalists with some leads. Four pages were devoted to Felix Sater, a Moscow-born businessman, convicted of assault in a bar fight and alleged to have ties to organized crime. Sater had an office in Trump Tower. The May 20 protodossier provided links to reports of his involvement in several projects with Trump, such as the Trump SoHo building. Two paragraphs in the May 20 document were devoted to Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani businessman who, along with his son, Emin, had produced the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow for Trump. Several sources, the document claimed, said the Agalarovs “are close to Putin.” The same document contended that the Agalarovs had been “integral to the Trump Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan” and “close to an investor” involved in the aborted Trump Tower project in Georgia.
The Azerbaijan and Georgia projects were further detailed in the “Trump in Azerbaijan” and “Trump in Georgia” reports from the undated protodossier. The May 20 document noted Carter Page, saying that he worked at “Merrill Lynch in Moscow,” where the firm’s clients, the document notes, included Alfa Bank. Also, the dossier notes that Page “regularly writes about enhanced cooperation with Russia in energy policy and is against sanctions.”
In addition to the two separate protodossiers on Paul Manafort, the May 20 document includes a paragraph on him.
The May 20 report also points at Michael Flynn, who, as the document concluded in its last line, “showed up at a Moscow dinner honoring the Russia Today channel, seated near Vladimir Putin.”
Page, Manafort, Flynn, the RT dinner, Alfa Bank, Sater, and the Agalarovs—those were the names and themes that populated media accounts of Trump’s relations to Russia as stories derived from the protodossiers started to fill the press in the spring, summer, and fall. Aside from Sater, they were also the names that would come to feature prominently in Steele’s memos.
Stories hitting Fusion GPS talking points began appearing in early April 2016. An April 5 New York Times story by Mike McIntire recounted the Trump SoHo saga, featuring Felix Sater and two Kazakh businessmen, Tevfik Arif and Alexander Maskevich, whose parts were outlined in the May 20 document. The last two had starring roles in the “Trump’s Business Partners in the Trump Soho” report from the undated dossier.
Customarily, editors are reluctant to assign stories that repeat news or analysis that’s already published, unless there’s some fresh angle or new detail. That went out the window with the Trump-Russia series, as the same names, projects, and allegations were recycled repeatedly, and nearly identically, before the election and even after it. The purpose of the stories wasn’t to break news but to inundate the voting public with the same message: that Trump and his team had been compromised by Russians.
An April 26 Washington Post article by Steven Mufson and Tom Hamburger delved into Manafort’s business in Ukraine and rela
tionship to Abdul Rahman al-Assir, a Middle Eastern arms dealer featured in one of the separate Manafort dossiers.
On April 27, The Guardian published an almost identical article about Manafort’s Ukraine work. Reporter Peter Stone quoted a longtime aide of Senator John McCain. “Advising Yanukovych is like putting lipstick on a pig,” said David Kramer.
Franklin Foer’s April 28 Slate profile of Manafort rounded out the three-day, three-pronged attack on the Trump adviser, probing his connections with Yanukovych.
A May 17 Washington Post article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported on Sater’s Trump-related business, hitting on themes from the May 20 protodossier. The Post’s Hamburger had known Glenn Simpson for more than a decade. They had shared a byline on stories when they had both worked at the Wall Street Journal.
A Washington Post article with a May 30 Baku dateline by Kevin Sullivan reported on the Trump project in Azerbaijan, starring Anar Mammadov. His family’s exploits, alleged criminal ties, and relationship with Iran were detailed in the “Trump in Azerbaijan” report and briefly mentioned in the May 20 protodossier.
Five days later, June 4, the AP’s Jeff Horwitz published virtually the same story on Trump, Azerbaijan, and the Mammadovs. It also included accounts of Trump’s ties to Sater.
On June 17, the Washington Post’s Hamburger and Helderman went to the well once more. Joined this time by Michael Birnbaum, the Post team hit as many of the four protodossiers’ talking points as possible: Manafort and the “Russia-aligned Ukrainian president” (Yanukovych), Page’s work in Moscow, Flynn (who “stunned the diplomatic community by sitting near Putin at a 2015 Moscow dinner honoring RT”), and the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, which Trump coproduced with the Agalarovs. Indeed, a quote from the article repeats the major key of the May 20 document: “Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.”
According to the article, a Post reporter had recently spoken with the Agalarovs in Moscow. The father and son said they were close to Putin. The Russian president had “awarded the elder Agalarov the ‘Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.’” The Agalarovs had wanted to go into business with Trump. “I convinced my father it would be cool to have next to each other the Trump Tower and Agalarov Tower,” Emin told the Post. They appreciated Trump’s respect for Putin. “He keeps underlining that he thinks Putin is a strong leader,” the younger Agalarov said.
John McCain aide David Kramer, who would later play a key role in disseminating the Steele Dossier to the press, also popped up in the Post piece, saying he was “‘appalled’ by Trump’s approach” to Russia.
There were two seminal Trump-Russia articles in that time frame. One was Josh Rogin’s July 18 Washington Post article. Titled “Trump Campaign Guts GOP’s Anti-Russia Stance on Ukraine,” the article was angled to push the narrative that Trump was a Kremlin asset. Rogin referred to Manafort’s work for Yanukovych. Rogin reported that the Trump campaign had “stripped out the platform’s call for ‘providing lethal defensive weapons’” to Ukraine. According to the article, the Trump campaign had weakened the Republican National Committee’s support for Ukraine in its convention platform.
That was not true. As Washington Examiner columnist Byron York explained, a delegate for candidate Ted Cruz had proposed an amendment that supported providing “lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian armed forces. A Trump campaign official had altered the proposed amendment to use a more diplomatic construction that promised “appropriate assistance” to the Ukrainian army—which does not rule out lethal weapons. In other words, the Trump campaign had slightly softened the Cruz delegate’s amendment, but the adoption of that amendment actually strengthened the RNC platform’s stance on Ukraine. Nevertheless, Rogin’s article was recycled through numerous subsequent pieces to push the narrative that Trump was pro-Kremlin.
So was the second key story from that period, another Franklin Foer piece, “Putin’s Puppet,” published July 4 on Slate. That piece was routinely cited by other journalists joining the messaging campaign. It included figures from the May 20 protodossier rarely mentioned in other reports, such as Richard Burt. The former US ambassador to Germany, Foer noted, sat on the board of Alfa Bank. At the end of October, Foer would write about the bank’s alleged ties to the Trump Organization, an article immediately debunked by the FBI and external experts. In the same piece, Foer again zeroed in on Manafort and his work for Yanukovych, the second time in three months. But he went after the new targets as well, discussing Sater at length. Sater, wrote Foer, “worked in Trump Tower; his business card described him as a ‘Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.’”
Page was mentioned in the article as well. In the 2000s, he had “advised the state-controlled natural gas giant, Gazprom,” wrote Foer, “and helped it attract Western investors.” Foer hammered Flynn, too, with Fusion GPS talking points. The retired general “journeyed to Moscow and sat two chairs away from Putin at the 10th anniversary gala celebrating Russia Today.”
The media operatives quoted one another to fill out their lack of original reporting. Foer cited Michael Crowley’s April article in Politico about RT and Flynn’s appearance at the December banquet. In turn, Foer’s July 4 story was quoted by Jonathan Chait in a July 18 New York magazine article. Trump’s “relationship with Russia,” Chait wrote, “is disturbing and lends itself to frightening interpretations.” Chait extravagantly claimed that Putin had overthrown the Ukrainian government “through Paul Manafort, who is now Trump’s campaign manager.” Chait also repeated Rogin’s story on the RNC platform regarding Ukraine. In Chait’s view, the platform change “suggests that the candidate’s extensive, fulsome praise for the Russian dictator is more than a passing fancy.”
At the tail end of July, another group of writers and national security experts expressed worry that a President Trump would abandon NATO, fracture the international order, let Ukraine fall to Russia, and embrace totalitarian despots the world over.
The articles cited the now-familiar names from the May 20 protodossier—Page, Manafort, and Flynn—and quoted the main takeaways from the Foer and Rogin articles.
In a July 21 Washington Post column, Anne Applebaum cited both stories: “The extent of the Trump-Russia business connection has already been laid out, by Franklin Foer at Slate,” she wrote. She also referenced the article written by her Post colleague Rogin: “Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign team helped alter the Republican party platform to remove support for Ukraine.” She named Page and noted his “long-standing connections to Russian companies.” She argued that a “Trump presidency could destabilize Europe.” For Applebaum, the only way to explain why Trump would express skepticism about NATO was that he was trying to appease Putin. Her approach was hardly subtle. Beginning her column by invoking the film The Manchurian Candidate, she portrayed Trump as an outright Russian asset. “Russia,” she alleged, “is clearly participating in the Trump campaign.”
In an article published the same day in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg made many of the same observations. Titled “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin,” the article opens: “The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” As evidence, Goldberg repeated the false claim that “Earlier this week, Trump’s operatives watered down the Republican Party’s national-security platform position on Ukraine.” Goldberg cited a speech that Page had delivered in July during a trip to Moscow and wondered “whether the U.S., under [Trump’s] leadership, would keep its [NATO] commitments” or if he “would bring an end to the postwar international order.”
In a July 24 Weekly Standard article, “Putin’s Party?,” the magazine’s editor, William Kristol, an early and vehement Republican Trump opponent, listed the ostensibly shady connections the Trump tea
m had to Russia through Page, Manafort, and Flynn, who “was paid to give a speech at a Russian propaganda celebration and was seated next to Putin.” Kristol also recycled the false story that the Trump campaign had changed the GOP’s platform “to weaken language supporting Ukraine.”
In an article from the same period, “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” New Yorker editor David Remnick cited the “original reporting” of Foer’s Slate article. He mentioned Manafort and his work with Yanukovych, “the pro-Russian (and now deposed) leader of Ukraine.” The New Yorker chief also noted Page’s “longstanding ties to… Russia’s energy industry.” Remnick, like Applebaum, Goldberg, and Kristol, was worried that Trump “declared NATO ‘obsolete.’”
Oddly, this handful of writers, all of whom hit the same talking points—the RNC platform, NATO, Page’s job in Moscow, Manafort’s work for Yanukovych, Flynn at the RT banquet, and so on—all had extensive experience covering foreign affairs as well as national politics. Yet not one of them seemed to notice that everything they feared about a Trump presidency had already transpired under Obama. Most glaringly, their concern that Trump would pull support from Ukraine neglected the fact that the Obama White House had refused to supply the Ukrainians with arms.
There were other issues the national security experts couldn’t have missed by accident. Surely it couldn’t have escaped Applebaum’s notice that Obama had scrapped missile defense for the United States’ central European allies, the Czech Republic and Poland. She’s a naturalized Polish citizen. Her husband had served as defense minister and foreign minister of Poland. How could she have missed what had happened under Obama’s watch?
Goldberg had interviewed Obama five times, most recently in March 2016. Had Goldberg, fretting about the future of NATO, forgotten in only four months that it was under Obama that Moscow’s escalation in Syria put Russian forces on NATO’s southern border and on the borders of two other US allies, Israel and Jordan?