Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Luke Harding

Overall the CIA-FBI-NSA report was persuasive: Moscow had indeed sought to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, even if the result—a Trump victory—had caught the Kremlin by surprise. It omitted one big truth. Namely that the operation was so successful because it exploited preexisting fault lines in American society.

The bots in conjunction with the leaked emails and the Facebook ads fueled an anger that Trump voters already felt toward Clinton. As General Hayden, the former NSA director, put it, the divisions in U.S. society ran deep. Trump modeled himself on Andrew Jackson, the United States’ seventh president, whose portrait he hung in the Oval Office. Jackson was an outsider and a white nationalist, who viewed the United States as a nation, a Volk, a narod, Hayden said, citing the German and Russian equivalents. Those who supported Clinton took another view. For them, the United States was an Enlightenment idea, rather than a chunk of land that belonged exclusively to one ethnic group. It was best expressed by Alexander Hamilton, President Woodrow Wilson, and the dictum: “We, the People.” The Hamiltonian approach was fact-based, humble in the face of complexity, and respectful of evidence, Hayden said. None of which applied to Trump’s incoming White House.

There was speculation inside the Kremlin that Trump might be forced to withdraw from the presidential race, “ostensibly on grounds of his psychological state and unsuitability for high office.”

Yates had assumed that the Trump administration would do something. The White House’s priority, it appeared, was different: to find out what the FBI had on Flynn. McGahn said he wanted to look at the underlying evidence. Yates said her officials would work over the weekend to make that possible. This was the moment for President Trump to show leadership—and to fire Flynn. Flynn’s conduct and pattern of deceit had laid the United States open to Russian string-pulling, or worse. The lies were piling up. Instead, Trump responded by firing Yates. He fired her after she told Justice Department attorneys not to defend his new executive order banning travelers arriving in the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Manafort began working for Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire Russian oligarch who made his fortune in the aluminum industry during the 1990s. Deripaska’s alleged ties to the mafia meant that for some years he was unable to get an American visa.

That autumn the Party of Regions hired Manafort and his team—including long-term aide Rick Gates—as advisers.

Manafort’s specialty, according to Kovzhun, is running expensive campaigns and targeting the “big unwashed.” “It’s the same element who voted for Putin, supported Brexit, back Erdogan, and who like Trump. Manafort works the lowest common denominator. I find him repulsive and his message ugly. He leaves destruction in his wake.”

The question being asked inside the FBI was a troubling one: Was the president of the United States a patriot? Increasingly, the answer was no. “Trump’s priority is to take care of his personal interests. These may not align with the interests of the country,” the source said, adding: “Russia is a point of great sensitivity.” The source continued: “Most [intelligence community] people haven’t seen a president like that. They frequently have ones they disagree with on policy. They don’t fundamentally question whether they are patriots.”

Niebuhr’s view of the world was pessimistic. He described himself as a member of a “disillusioned generation” and wrote from an age of war, totalitarianism, racial injustice, and economic depression. Individuals were capable of virtuous acts, he thought, but groups and nations struggled to transcend their collective egoism. This makes social conflict inevitable. Niebuhr was brutally honest about human failings. American contemporary culture was “still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason,” he wrote. He didn’t see much room for goodness in politics. Instead he identified “greed, the will-to-power and other forms of self-assertion” at the level of group politics.

In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists, and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.

Putin was furious about the passage of the Magnitsky Act. He retaliated by banning the adoption of Russian babies by U.S. couples. The Kremlin launched a campaign to overturn the act. It frequently lobbied on the issue of “adoptions”—Kremlin-speak for lifting U.S. sanctions.

When the Times first contacted Trump Jr. over the emails, he was evasive. He claimed the meeting with Veselnitskaya had been to discuss something else: the Kremlin’s decision to ban the adoption of Russian babies by U.S. couples. If it was not clear before, “adoption” was Moscow code for lifting sanctions, and it would come up again.

With or without his senior advisers, this was the moment for Trump to make the American interest clear—namely, that the Kremlin’s hacking of the election amounted to ill-considered interference. And that any attempt by Moscow to do the same in 2018 or 2020 would lead to a stringent U.S. response—more sanctions, travel bans, even a cutoff of Russia’s access to the SWIFT banking payments system. Putin would interpret anything less than this as American weakness. And, practically, a green light for his operatives to tamper again in Washington’s affairs. All done, of course, under the same cover of plausible deniability. There was no official hacking, the government wasn’t involved, et cetera. Apparently, Trump said none of this.

Unseen by those outside, something strange was going on inside. During the concert the Trumps sat next to the Macrons. At dinner spouses were separated. Melania was placed next to Putin; Trump alongside Juliana Awada, the wife of Argentina’s president. At some point Trump got up. He sat down again—next to Putin. For the next hour Trump and Putin were deep in conversation. Only one other person was with them, Putin’s personal interpreter. What they discussed was a mystery. Trump left his own interpreter behind, in a breach of national security protocol. G20 leaders looked on in amazement. Circulating at these high-level events was normal. But the U.S. president, who had skipped most of the plenary sessions, only appeared to want to talk to one person. The White House kept quiet about the meeting. It was revealed only after two people who were there tipped off Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group. Bremmer said his informants were “startled” by what they witnessed. “It’s very clear that Trump’s best single relationship in the G20 is with Putin. U.S. allies were surprised, flummoxed, disheartened,” he said. “You’ve got Trump in the room with all these allies and who’s the one he spends time with?”

Trump was unpopular in Germany. For Merkel to distance herself from his administration made electoral sense. At the same time, Merkel’s negative view of Trump might be explained by other factors. In 2016 the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, supplied material to the Obama administration concerning contacts between the Trump team and Russians. The BND reported directly to Merkel’s office. It had inside knowledge of Trump’s business transactions, many of them conducted via German banks. One former senior director on the U.S. National Security Council speculated: “Merkel knows how bad Trump is. She’s been briefed [by her agencies].” The ex-director said that as someone who grew up in communist East Germany, Merkel—the daughter of a pastor, a onetime research scientist, and a fluent Russian speaker who visited Soviet Moscow—had little tolerance for lying. “She lived through that. She’s almost Calvinist,” the former official said.

Dmitry Rybolovlev wasn’t the only Russian to acquire a Trump property. In fact, Russian and Eurasian buyers had been purchasing real estate from him for a long time, ever since the building of Trump Tower began in 1980.

Whole section lists extensive ties to Russian mafia

The FBI spent two years monitoring the activities inside Trincher’s luxury apartment—number 63A. Its location? The fifty-first floor of Trump Tower. Trump Tower was now a significant crime scene. Trump lived just three floors above Trincher, in a lavish triplex penthouse. Nahmad had purchased the entire fifty-first floor of the building, at a cost of $20 million, and funded gambling operations run by Trincher’s son Ilya. Federal agents weren’t seeking to eavesdrop on Trump. Rather, their probe was directed at the Russian mob, who happened to be Trump’s almost-next-door neighbors.

Sater was confident he could arrange everything. On November 3, 2015, he wrote to Cohen: I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know that no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. We don’t have Cohen’s reply. But the emails lay out Sater’s plan for glory—a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow and praise from Putin of Trump’s peerless business skills. To achieve this, Sater said he could show video clips to his Russian contacts of Trump speaking glowingly of Russia: “If he [Putin] says it, we own this election. America’s most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald was a good guy to negotiate.”

All of this was happening in private. U.S. electors knew nothing of Sater’s Kremlin outreach scheme. Trump did, though. So did Cohen. Cohen said he talked to Trump about the Moscow tower three times. When it appeared that the project was faltering, despite a letter of intent, Cohen took a bold step. He sent an email to someone big: Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. The email was a petition, a meekly phrased plea for help. It was sent in mid-January 2016. Cohen wrote: Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City. Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled. As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon. Cohen dispatched the email to a generic address, rather than to Peskov’s personal account. Nonetheless, the email would have been found and closely examined. The email’s recipient, Peskov, wasn’t only Putin’s long-serving mouthpiece—he was also in charge of the operation to compromise Clinton, according to the Steele dossier, and someone who saw Russia’s president practically every day. Cohen insisted there was no collusion. And yet this is precisely ...

For four decades Trump’s property empire effectively functioned as a laundromat for Moscow money.

A Reuters investigation found that at least sixty-three individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded towers in Florida. The true figure was probably higher. Nearly one-third of all units were sold to limited liability companies, whose buyers were unidentified.

According to an analysis by Bloomberg, by the time he became the forty-fifth president Donald Trump owed Deutsche Bank around $300 million. All four debts were due in 2023 and 2024. This was an unprecedented sum for an incoming president and one that raised awkward questions about conflict of interest.

Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, said this question hangs over the president. Dearlove told the magazine Prospect: “What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the West would not lend to him.” (Dearlove said allegations of illegal contact between Trump’s staff and Moscow were “unprecedented.”)

The Kushner-Kislyak meeting on December 1 took place at Trump Tower. Michael Flynn was present, too. Kushner made an unusual proposal. He asked Kislyak if it would be possible to set up a secret and secure communications channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin. The purpose, seemingly, was to keep any conversations hidden from the outgoing Obama government and U.S. intelligence. A back-channel, in effect. Could this be done, Kushner wondered, by using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States?

Targeting Kushner was logical. He was soon to become a federal employee. His portfolio included tax, banking policy, the military, and international affairs. In a protean White House—where anyone could be fired—Kushner’s status as the president’s son-in-law made him unfireable. During his meetings with Russians, Kushner said nothing about Moscow’s attack on U.S. democracy. Afterward, he kept quiet about the encounter. So did the Trump administration. In his security clearance form Kushner didn’t mention Gorkov or Kislyak. (Kushner said this was an administrative mistake, made by an underling, and that he left out details of all foreign contacts.) The American public only found out because of leaks.

As a candidate, Trump’s praise of Putin had been a steady theme. In the White House, his fidelity to Russia’s president had continued, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI, bawled out his attorney general, and defenestrated his chief ideologue, Steve Bannon. It was Steele’s dossier that offered a compelling explanation for Trump’s unusual constancy vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow’s kompromat operation against Trump going back three decades, to the Kryuchkov era. If Trump had indulged in compromising behavior, Putin knew of it. Second, there was the money: the cash from Russia that had gone into Trump’s real estate ventures. The prospect of a lucrative deal in Moscow to build a hotel and tower, a project that was still being negotiated as candidate Trump addressed adoring crowds. And then there were the loans. These had helped rescue Trump after 2008. They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. Finally, there was the possibility that the president had other financial connections to Moscow, as yet undisclosed, but perhaps hinted at by his missing tax returns. Together, these factors appeared to place Trump under some sort of obligation. One possible manifestation of this was the president’s courting of Putin in Hamburg. Another was the composition of his campaign team and government, especially in its first iteration. Wherever you looked there was a Rus...