Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  When agents briefed senior national security officials about the hack, which they code-named “Raven Rain,” the officials pushed back, questioning the agents’ evidence. In response, the agents showed the officials copies of White House emails that the bureau had obtained through its own spying on the Russians. Among the emails the Russians had obtained, in fact, were those sent by the president himself.

  The White House hack would be one of more than a hundred such hacks that the Russians pulled off in the years leading up to the election. When American departments and agencies belatedly fortified their defenses against these types of intrusions, the Russians moved to the next layer of institutions in Washington: the organizations on the periphery of the government, such as think tanks, and by 2016, political parties, most notably the Democratic National Committee.

  The American intelligence community watched these hacks but completely misunderstood them. They perceived them as part of intelligence-gathering operations. All the Russians were doing, the FBI and intelligence community concluded, was looking to learn what was going on behind the scenes. They had no clue that the true intentions were to weaponize the information. By the summer of 2016, the American intelligence community had little to no intelligence that the Russians had launched a disinformation campaign on the United States through fake social media posts and that they planned to deploy the stolen emails. In a classified briefing about Russia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fell asleep.

  Russia’s election meddling would dramatically change American history. Unlike after 9/11—when Congress, with the support of President Bush, appointed a bipartisan panel to study the failures that led to the attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda—there would be no such commission created to look at the failures that led to the Russian active measures launched by Moscow, aiming to influence the outcome of the American election.

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  Had counterintelligence investigators scratched under the surface a bit more, they would have discovered long-standing ties between Trump and Russia and Trump’s penchant for praising the strongman in Putin, who, with dreams of a resurgent empire, had strangled Russia’s brief post–Cold War experiment in democracy.

  Trump had a long-standing affinity for Russia, Putin, and his business opportunities there. He first traveled to the Soviet Union in 1987 with his first wife, Ivana—a Russian speaker—to look for sites to build a Trump Tower there. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Trump returned to Russia in 1996 with two American businessmen to again examine sites for Trump buildings. Trump claimed at the time that he would invest $250 million in Russia for real estate projects. But it was a hollow boast; he never invested the money. In 2005, he once again pursued real estate properties in Russia. The following year, Trump arranged for his two oldest children—Ivanka and Don Jr.—to travel to Moscow to scout properties with a Russian American businessman. There, his children toured the Kremlin and sat in Putin’s office chair. By 2007, Trump was publicly praising Vladimir Putin.

  “Whether you like him or don’t like him he’s doing a great job,” Trump said in an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live.

  At a business conference in Moscow later in 2007, he proclaimed that he would now be selling Trump Vodka in Russia. And in 2008, Trump profited enormously from a real estate deal with a Russian oligarch. He had purchased a waterfront Florida mansion three years earlier for $41.35 million and then—after making few improvements—sold it for $95 million to the oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev.

  The Trump Organization—through Don Jr.—continued to scout out real estate properties in Moscow and build business ties with Russians. The family was so enthusiastic about their ties to Russia that Don Jr. openly discussed them in 2008 at a conference in New York.

  “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. said. “Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

  The Russians continued to deliver important help to Trump. In 2010, Russia’s state-run bank provided key funding for Trump Tower Toronto.

  By 2013, the family business had become so closely tied to the Russians that Trump’s son Eric openly discussed the subject at the opening of a new Trump golf course just outside Charlotte that August. At the time, the golf industry was in bad shape. The Great Recession had particularly hurt golf; at least one course in the United States was closing every week. Despite that downturn, Trump had invested heavily in the industry. The course in Charlotte was just one of nine others he purchased in the United States, Ireland, and Scotland between 2008 and 2014.

  A well-known North Carolina golf writer named Jim Dodson attended an event to mark the opening of the Charlotte course. On the practice range, Trump addressed a group of about fifty people, boasting about how he was “saving” the industry, Dodson said. Dodson and another golf writer were then asked to play with Eric Trump, who had taken over responsibility for the family’s golf courses. Several holes in, Dodson casually asked Eric about his father’s comments on how he was “saving” golf. Dodson noted that no one else at the time was investing in golf and that it was widely assumed throughout the industry that golf courses would remain profitless for the foreseeable future.

  “I simply wondered what banks or investment groups were financing their purchases—which in my experience was the way big-time resort developers operated,” Dodson recalled. “I asked him who or what entity was helping to finance the many properties they were reportedly buying up—pointing out that no banks that I knew of were investing in golf these days.”

  Eric said that they did not need to rely on American banks for their money, explaining they had strong foreign investors who were interested in the game.

  “Well, we don’t rely on American banks,” Eric said, according to Dodson.

  Dodson wondered whether it was the Chinese, or maybe the Israelis, who he had been told were bargain hunting for golf courses in the United States. Eric told Dodson that the money had come from Russians who were very interested in American golf.

  “We have all the funding we need out of Russia,” Eric said, according to Dodson.

  Dodson recalled being surprised by the disclosure, because it seemed unusual in the industry. But he said that at the time there was no other reason for the issue to raise a red flag. In the days that followed, Dodson told several of his friends and associates about the conversation. In interviews, the associates confirmed his account to me and another colleague at the Times.

  (Years later, when Dodson would discuss the conversation publicly, Eric Trump would attack him for it, tweeting, “This story is completely fabricated and just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media in our country. #FakeNews.”)

  In October 2013, as a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, Donald Trump continued to publicly discuss his business dealings with Russia. When Letterman cracked a joke about the Russians being “commies,” Trump interjected, previewing what would become a defining feature of his presidency: a reflexive defense of Russia. Trump told Letterman, “They’re smart, they’re tough, and they’re not looking so dumb right now.”

  Trump also told Letterman that he had met Putin once and that he was a “tough guy.”

  The following month, Trump traveled to Moscow, where his Miss Universe pageant would be held. He publicly raised the possibility of a budding kinship with Putin, tweeting, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow? If so, will he become my new best friend?”

  The Russians paid Trump $20 million for the event. Putin did not show. In the days after the event, the Russian press reported that Trump was once again considering building a Trump Tower there.

  By February 2014, as Trump weighed whether to run for president, his son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, and daughter Ivanka traveled to Russia, where the wife of an oligarch close to Putin served as their host. During that trip, Ivanka visited a potential site for a Trump Tower in Moscow. That May, Trump continued to praise Putin and contrast him favorably with President Obama.

  “I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer,” Trump said near the end of a speech as he discussed his trip to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant, “but to do well, you have to get the other side to respect you, and he does not respect our president, which is very sad.”

  A year later, Trump rode down the escalator of his Fifth Avenue skyscraper to announce his intention to run for president of the United States. As he campaigned in the Republican primary, his affection for Russia and Putin was a common refrain.

  “They’re terrific people,” Trump said of the Russians during an interview with the conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt in September 2015. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”

  Then, in October 2015, just before he took center stage at the third Republican debate, Trump signed a letter of intent to “facilitate further discussions” about building a Trump Tower in Russia.

  At the following debate in November, Trump, in response to a question about handling Russian aggression, suggested that he understood Putin well because the two had gotten to know each other when they were both on a 60 Minutes episode that aired in September.

  “We were stablemates,” Trump said. “And we did very well that night.”

  Trump, in fact, was well over four thousand miles away from Putin during the filming of the interview, so it is unlikely that it led them to know each other much better.

  By June 2016, Trump had surrounded himself with a slew of individuals with their own ties to Russia, including one who was already under investigation for being a Russian agent and another being scrutinized by federal authorities for his work for Russian-aligned Ukrainians.

  One of Trump’s closest national security campaign advisers, the retired lieutenant general Michael T. Flynn, had served as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—the arm of the Pentagon that studies foreign countries’ military capabilities. Flynn had been fired from the DIA by President Obama in July 2014. At the agency, he had taken a number of suspicious actions. In June 2013, Flynn had scheduled a trip for a team of military personnel to go to Moscow for four days to meet with officers from the GRU, the Russian intelligence agency. He believed that a “leadership development” program would be helpful for both sides.

  But the idea of the trip raised concerns in the intelligence community, where officers knew that similar attempts to build bridges with Russian intelligence agencies often resulted in the Russians using the contact as an opportunity to hurt the United States. Still, Flynn took the trip and believed it went so well that several months later he wanted to invite the top Russian intelligence officials to the United States. This time, however, the top American intelligence official, James Clapper, forbade it.

  After he was pushed out of his DIA post in 2014, Flynn became an occasional guest on RT, the English-language Russian propaganda outlet. The following year, he took home roughly $45,000 for speaking at RT’s anniversary dinner in Moscow. At the gala event, he dined with Vladimir Putin. Also that year, he received $11,250 from Russian companies for speaking engagements in Washington, including one for Kaspersky Lab—a Putin-connected cybersecurity firm. The American intelligence community had known for years that Kaspersky and its antivirus software had been used by Russian intelligence to steal information from Americans.

  Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, was deeply involved in trying to get the Trump Tower built in Moscow. In January 2016, during the presidential campaign, Cohen sent an email to a spokesman for Putin asking for assistance with the negotiations for the tower, which Cohen believed had stalled.

  Then, in March, as the Russians were accelerating their hacking of Democrats, Trump added three people to his campaign who also had significant ties to Russia. Trump had faced questions about his inability to attract established or credible national security officials to support him. So in mid-March he announced that he had formed a foreign policy team. Among the members were George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, both sometime energy consultants.

  The same month that his hiring was announced, Papadopoulos traveled to London and met with a Maltese professor who was willing to help connect the Trump aide with people he knew at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to establish a channel between the campaign and the Russian government. A Russian woman, who Papadopoulos believed was Putin’s niece, also attended the meeting and told Papadopoulos that she, too, could help him build relationships in Moscow.

  Page had been on the FBI’s radar for several years. In 2013, while working for a private equity firm that invested in energy companies, he had provided Russians whom he later learned were intelligence officers with documents about the American energy sector. By March 2016, counterintelligence agents and prosecutors in New York had decided to open an investigation into whether Page was a Russian asset because of his continued contacts with Russian intelligence officers.

  Later that month, Trump held a meeting with his foreign policy team at the not-yet-opened Trump International Hotel in Washington. The closed-door meeting largely served as a means to get some positive publicity, but it was at this meeting that one of those in attendance, Papadopoulos, told Trump that his sources had suggested that Putin desired to meet with Trump and that he could arrange a meeting with the Russian president if Trump wanted to. Trump was indeed interested.

  Also in March 2016, the Trump campaign hired Paul Manafort—a veteran Republican strategist who had done work for several previous presidential candidates dating back to Gerald Ford—to devise a convention strategy for the campaign and defend against a potential challenge from within the Republican Party. Trump was the clear leader for the Republican nomination. But there were still widespread misgivings among rank-and-file Republicans who thought Trump not only had no chance of winning but could badly embarrass their party if he were the eventual nominee. Given the shakiness of Trump’s support, many of his advisers were concerned he could face a contested convention and needed an experienced delegate wrangler like Manafort.

  Manafort—who had for years worked as a political consultant abroad—brought with him considerable baggage, especially when it came to his work in Ukraine and Russia. In 2005, he had written a proposal for a Russian oligarch on how he could help “greatly benefit the Putin government” in the United States and Europe by promoting pro-Russian ideas. In 2006, Manafort received a contract worth $10 million a year from the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who in the same year was described in a classified State Department cable as “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” But by 2014, the business relationship had Manafort in a vise, with Deripaska having significant leverage, claiming that Manafort owed him $19 million.

  Manafort also had a close relationship with a Ukrainian, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI would later conclude had ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort had hired Kilimnik in 2005 to work for him in Kyiv, and the two men had remained close. So close in fact that in May 2016, as Trump was closing in on the Republican nomination, the two met in New York, and Manafort instructed his deputy to share internal polling data and other campaign updates with Kilimnik. Why the Trump campaign’s most proprietary data would be shared with a figure who may immediately in turn share it with Moscow remains a mystery.

  Never before had an American political campaign been so deeply connected to a foreign power, and never had a foreign power been so vested in the outcome of an American election. Th
e entire Russian election interference campaign represented a giant leap for the Russians and their aggression toward the United States, and demonstrated how the intelligence services had evolved under Putin from the one-dimensional Cold War–style espionage to new and sophisticated electronic active measures. Getting to the bottom of what was going on would test a part of the FBI that rarely received much public scrutiny.

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  JULY 29, 2016

  175 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  THE FBI DIRECTOR’S CONFERENCE ROOM—The bureau’s top counterintelligence investigators were gathered to brief Comey on what had quickly become the most sensitive matter any of them had ever been involved in.

  His investigators told the director that they had received some alarming intelligence from one of the United States’ closest allies, Australia.

  Two days earlier, Australia’s top diplomat in London had gone to the U.S. embassy there to hand deliver a copy of a classified cable he had sent back to his bosses in Canberra. The cable was mostly blank except for one paragraph that mentioned a Trump campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos. The cable said that Papadopoulos had told the ambassador that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton and had offered to help the campaign by having damaging information released to the public.

  The ambassador, Alexander Downer, had learned the information in May while meeting with Papadopoulos at a wine bar in the Kensington neighborhood in London. At first, Downer was unsure what to do with it. But in July, Julian Assange’s antisecrecy group, WikiLeaks, had released a trove of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee right before the party’s national convention, creating chaos. It was then that Downer decided he needed to alert the Americans.