Kindle Notes & Highlights
Gathered on a boat in the Red Sea in the fall of 2015 were Mohammed bin Salman (known as “MBS”), deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who would shortly become the heir apparent to the throne of the Saudi kingdom; MBZ himself, by 2015 the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Egypt; Prince Salman bin Hamad, the crown prince of Bahrain; and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
The Red Sea meeting, though technically convened by Nader, is a means for MBZ to advance ambitions that he and MBS have designed together.7 The two Sunni Arab leaders’ intention, Hearst records, is to remake the Middle East with the covert assistance of a highly placed American politician.
The proposed GCC realignment would evict Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar from the council and replace these three countries with Egypt, Jordan, and Libya, thereby eliminating the entity’s historical association with the Persian Gulf and remaking it as, instead, an alliance constituting “an elite regional group of six countries, which would supplant [the GCC and] … form the nucleus of [a coalition of] pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli states” in the Middle East.
by early 2018 Nader had become a “focus” of a federal investigation over “possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign.”
According to an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “If you’re the Saudis, the nice thing about Trump is that he lacks any subtlety whatsoever, so you don’t have to wonder how to approach him. He has said explicitly that the way to win his favor is to give him money. He has established means for you to do so—buying Trump properties and staying in Trump hotels.”
The same Arab nations that feared that President Obama’s peaceful entreaties to Iran could be a preview of what a Hillary Clinton administration would bring therefore steeled their resolve to avoid that eventuality by whatever means possible.
The Red Sea Conspiracy, variously referred to by its participants and in media as the “grand bargain” or the “Middle East Marshall Plan,” is in its basic contours relatively simple: the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, Bahrainis, and Egyptians, in conjunction with the Russians, aid Trump’s election as the next U.S. president while encouraging him to drop all sanctions on the Russian Federation if and when he secures election. In compensation for this dramatic reversal of U.S. policy toward Russia—an about-face worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the Kremlin in recaptured post-sanctions
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This grand bargain was to be overseen by MBZ, MBS, and Egypt’s el-Sisi in coordination with both the Kremlin and Donald Trump. It is as audacious a plot as the world has seen in half a century, requiring years of continent-crossing communications, negotiations, and accommodations that must go unseen by major media until they are complete. It is a complex story drawing into its matrix of persons, places, and events nationals from at least a dozen countries, and it begins many years ago with the slowly converging exploits of three men: a pedophile, a mercenary, and a political flack.
The result of all these intertwining connections is that by the time of the 2016 election, three men who will be among Trump’s foremost clandestine foreign policy advisers—Nader, Prince, and Broidy—all have longtime ties to the Israeli government and deep roots in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
As the New York City businessman is building connections in Abu Dhabi, D.C. political consultant Paul Manafort is busy building connections in a former Soviet republic, Ukraine—a course of ingratiation and shilling that will lead directly to revelations, during the course of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference years hence, that not only implicate Donald Trump but also provide a window into how and why several foreign nations saw such promise in the 2016 Trump campaign.
During the Trump-Russia scandal following the 2016 presidential election, Manafort will be accused by special counsel Robert Mueller of secretly transmitting proprietary Trump campaign polling data to foreign nationals through a man “the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Konstantin Kilimnik, with the evidence suggesting that Manafort intended this information to ultimately be seen by, among others, Akhmetov “and another Ukrainian oligarch”
Manafort’s work for the Party of Regions—a political outfit “aligned with Moscow,” according to CNN—begins in 2005 and ends in 2012, a seven-year period during which Manafort, who in 2016 will offer to work for Donald Trump for “free,” earns $60 million for his services. Even after the Party of Regions payments cease, Manafort continues meeting with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politicians, including a 2014 meeting with Viktor Medvedchuk—a man who will ultimately fall under U.S. sanctions for his role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and who is so close to Putin that the Russian president is his
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Yanukovych’s first acts as Ukrainian president is to jail his chief political opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the “gold-braided heroine of the Orange Revolution”—a political movement that had successfully protested Yanukovych’s elevation to the presidency back in 2004, partly on the grounds that the Kremlin had interfered in that election.39 This, too, offers an echo of Manafort’s subsequent work as a U.S. campaign adviser, with Donald Trump calling for the jailing of his own chief political opponent, Hillary Clinton, just five years after Yanukovych jails Tymoshenko, and
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In 2006, Manafort signs a $10 million-a-year consulting and public relations contract with a man Reuters calls a “Putin crony,” Oleg Deripaska, who not coincidentally had also been the man who originally connected Manafort to Akhmetov’s Party of Regions.44 In May 2019, U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) will quote a Treasury Department document to describe Deripaska as “a designated [U.S.-sanctioned] individual. He possesses a Russian diplomatic passport. He regularly claims to represent the Russian government. He’s an aluminum—and other metals—billionaire and he’s been investigated by the U.S.
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Shortly after he begins working for Deripaska, Manafort purchases a $3.7 million condo in Trump Tower—Trump’s home—using an LLC called John Hannah rather than a personal account, suggesting that the purpose behind the purchase of the condo may be business-related.
by 2015 Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska, his and Kilimnik’s old boss, has soured, with Manafort “deeply indebted” to the Putin crony.
Soon after Manafort joins Trump’s presidential campaign on March 28, 2016, Deripaska dispatches former GRU officer Victor Boyarkin to pressure Manafort to square his debts with the oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin will tell Time in 2018, “and he was offering [in 2016] ways to pay it back. I came down on him hard.”59 Indeed, just two weeks after Manafort’s hire (a hire that occurs once Manafort tells Trump friend Thomas Barrack that he “really needs to get to” Trump), Manafort emails “his old lieutenant” Kilimnik asking him how he can “use” his “media coverage” as Trump’s
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In the ensuing 120 days, Manafort meets face-to-face with Kilimnik at least twice, once on May 7 and again on August 2, not long after the Republican National Convention; offers “private briefings” on the Trump campaign to Deripaska; transmits proprietary Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik with the aim of it reaching Deripaska, Manafort’s old boss Akhmetov, and another Ukrainian oligarch, Serhiy Lyovochkin; and, as the campaign’s overseer of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, helps orchestrate a change in the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform regarding the provision
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Nine days before Sessions, Gordon, and Page interact with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference, Gordon participates in the Republican National Convention’s committee hearings to debate amendments to the party platform. Prior to the hearings, Trump’s policy director, John Mashburn—who will later testify to Congress that before the convention George Papadopoulos, another member of Trump’s national security advisory committee, told him of the Kremlin having damaging information about Clinton—explicitly orders Gordon to “take a hands-off approach” to the hearings.69 Gordon
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73 When his objection meets resistance from Denman and others, Gordon, according to Denman, picks up his phone, dials a number, and thereafter pretends, while arguing with Denman, to be on the phone with Trump campaign headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City—when in fact he appears to be getting his direction from a different source altogether, as he is actually on the phone with the office of his national security advisory committee supervisor, Jeff Sessions.
At Sessions’s office the next day, Sessions and Kislyak discuss Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, and Kislyak once again informs a top Trump campaign representative—having consistently done so since Trump’s first foreign policy speech in April—that the Kremlin is “receptive to the overtures Trump [has] laid out during his campaign.”
After the Sessions-Kislyak meeting on September 8, attended as well by two Sessions aides, Kislyak invites Sessions to come to his house alone to dine.84 Sessions does not follow up on the invitation, however, as the Trump campaign—having recently asked Manafort to resign due to his ties to Ukraine and Russia—is just days away from asking two members of Sessions’s committee, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, to resign as well, and for the same reason.
On August 23, Millian sends a Facebook message to Papadopoulos—which Papadopoulos will insist to the special counsel’s office he has no recollection of—telling him that he wants to “share with [him] a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign.”92 Papadopoulos meets Millian twice more after this offer of campaign assistance, once in November 2016 and once at Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, apparently to discuss, among other things, a possible consulting partnership.93 The partnership—Millian’s idea—does not go forward.
Less than six months after his fourth and final meeting with Millian, Papadopoulos will be approached in Tel Aviv by the founder of Terrogence, an Israeli business intelligence outfit dealing in digital marketing campaigns and intelligence services that could be considered “disruptive” technologies “instrumental” to those political campaigns willing to use them (see chapter 8). Millian is later revealed to be a key source—if an “unwitting” one—for much of the dossier compiled by former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in 2016 and published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed News.
Just as well-connected Israeli politicos and other key players in Middle Eastern politics have identified George Nader, Erik Prince, and Elliott Broidy as key U.S. political connections by the mid-aughts, so too have the Russians come to appreciate this same quality in Paul Manafort by the end of that decade. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that long after becoming Trump’s de facto campaign manager, and just days before being officially named his campaign manager on June 20, Paul Manafort finds himself at a meeting in Trump Tower with a cadre of individuals sent to the campaign by the
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According to an FBI interview with Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, Trump Jr.’s concealment of the meeting includes false testimony to Congress insisting that he never told his father of the meeting—as Cohen testifies under oath that he himself was in “Donald J. Trump’s office on June 6 or 7 when Trump Jr. told his father that a meeting to obtain adverse information about Clinton was going forward.… From the tenor of the conversation, Cohen believed that Trump Jr. had previously discussed the meeting with his father.”
That the June 9 meeting is considered significant at the time is underscored by the fact that Trump’s de facto (soon to be official) campaign manager, Manafort, takes notes throughout, and that Trump Jr., rather than shutting down the Kremlin agents once they proffer valuable but illegal campaign assistance, tells Veselnitskaya that his father “could revisit the [sanctions] issue” if he wins the presidential election—implicitly soliciting and encouraging a continuation of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” as previously spoken of by Goldstone.
With respect to Manafort’s pre-election transmission of polling data to pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, the New York Times will note that at the time Trump’s campaign manager secretly ordered proprietary campaign information transferred to Kremlin agents, “Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.”
Manafort’s nearly a decade of public relations work in Ukraine came to a halt in 2014, when a revolution against his and Putin’s man in the country, Yanukovych, led to Yanukovych and his allies fleeing to Russia to seek Kremlin protection.136 Putin’s subsequent illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula was part of his pushback to this rebellion; his actions led to the very sanctions on Russia that Trump and Manafort would thereafter oppose throughout the 2016 primary and general election seasons.
In 2006, the same year that Manafort moves into Trump Tower on a mission for Deripaska and Putin, the owner of the building—who has spent his career in real estate surfing on an ever-cresting wave of debt—suddenly shifts his philosophy on real estate development dramatically by putting up cash for most new projects.
By 2011, Trump had spent at least $46 million on all-cash purchases” since 2006.141 The Post notes that Trump’s mysteriously accessible $46 million may have been attributable in part to a single transaction he completed in 2008: the sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is close to a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin, Yuri Trutnev.142 Trump had purchased the southern Florida estate for $41.4 million in 2004, and had sought to flip it immediately. After finding no takers for several years, in 2008 he was suddenly offered $95 million by Rybolovlev, an offer
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How Trump came to Rybolovlev’s attention in the first instance is unknown, though recent investigations suggest a connection to Trump’s longtime, Kremlin-connected rainmaker, Felix Sater—a man who had by the time of the Trump-Rybolovlev sale spent years attracting Russian business clients to Trump properties.
Sater is a U.S. and Israeli citizen whose father, Mikhail, according to Haaretz, has been “named [by the FBI] as a lieutenant for Russian mafia kingpin [Semion] Mogilevich,” the latter a man who has been called “the most dangerous mobster in the world.”
Just six months before the Korbatovs purchase the mansion on Rodeo Drive that will, in short order, move through Trump’s hands, the New York City businessman incorporates two companies in Egypt that thereafter will remain (to all outward appearances) inactive: “Trump Marks Egypt Corp.” and “Trump Marks Egypt LLC.”
It would take access to Trump’s tax returns to see what if any business Trump subsequently does with or through these companies; Trump has declined, however, to release his returns. As noted by the Center for American Progress, Trump “served as president, director, and chairman of Trump Marks Egypt Corp. and was listed as the president and a member of Trump Marks Egypt LLC. But because of Trump’s continued insistence on hiding his tax returns and general evasiveness when it comes to his business dealings, it is unclear the purposes for which these companies were created and their future
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The year 2007 also sees Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, make the worst business decision of his career in real estate: the purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City for $1.8 billion, “the highest price [ever] paid at the time for a U.S. office tower,” according to the Washington Post—which Kushner, then running his family’s real estate firm, Kushner Companies, pays despite a gen...
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Kushner’s desire to atone for the error of his 2007 purchase of the building will appear to drive his perspective on global geopolitics well into his term of service as a top adviser to Trump—a circumstance that in 2018 “raises questions about a possible conflict of interest” when he appears to support the punishment of the nation of Qatar via blockade just a month after Qatar’s ministry of finance refuses to bail out Kushner Companies from its Fifth Avenue investment (see chapter 7).
How Trump came to Rybolovlev’s attention in the first instance is unknown, though recent investigations suggest a connection to Trump’s longtime, Kremlin-connected rainmaker, Felix Sater—a man who had by the time of the Trump-Rybolovlev sale spent years attracting Russian business clients to Trump properties.
Shortly after Trump decides to run for president, the Kremlin begins its covert election interference campaign. Tensions in the Middle East rise as Russia and a large alliance of Western nations sign a nuclear deal with Iran that both Israel and a Saudi-led Sunni axis in the Gulf strongly oppose. Two men with Kremlin ties who will have a profound effect on Trump’s 2016 campaign, Dimitri Simes and Joseph Mifsud, make visits to a prestigious discussion venue in Moscow of which Vladimir Putin is the chief patron.
In October 2014, six months after Flynn is forced out of the DIA, his former employer informs him via letter that he is prohibited from receiving, without advance approval, any “consulting fees, gifts, travel expenses, honoraria, or salary from a foreign government unless congressional consent is first obtained.”15
In November 2013, Donald Trump travels to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. While there, he negotiates a lucrative deal for a Trump Tower Moscow with several Kremlin agents, including the Kremlin’s premier real estate developer, the head of a state-owned bank, and the Kremlin official in charge of building permits in Moscow—this last a Kremlin employee whom Putin has personally sent to the pageant in his stead.
Trump’s earlier-than-acknowledged public commitment to run for president is presaged by an event that occurs in January 2014: Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen secretly pays an IT firm, RedFinch Solutions, to rig two online presidential polls in Trump’s favor.26 Trump will ultimately cheat the man he hired to cheat the two polls, one on the CNBC website and one on the Drudge Report; though Trump owes RedFinch $50,000 for fraudulently casting votes on his behalf in both polls, what Cohen gives the firm’s owner as payment is “a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 and, randomly,
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During the course of this investigation, federal law enforcement determined that Page gave two Kremlin agents nonpublic information about the U.S. energy sector; the Mueller Report notes that when questioned, “Page acknowledged that he understood that the individuals he had associated with were members of the Russian intelligence services,”
How or why Page found himself once again in contact with Kremlin agents just days after being hired by Sam Clovis for the Trump campaign is unknown, though the same phenomenon occurs almost immediately after Clovis hires Papadopoulos in March and—yet again—almost immediately after Clovis appears on a conference panel with Papadopoulos in July. It is clear that the men to whom Clovis gives access to the Trump campaign’s small national security shop very shortly thereafter are contacted by agents of the Kremlin (see chapter 4).
According to the Mueller Report, the IRA’s activities will ultimately reach between 29 million and 126 million Americans via Facebook, across 80,000 posts and hundreds of thousands of followers of bogus IRA-run Facebook groups.138 On Twitter, the IRA runs 3,814 accounts, which, all told, tweet 175,993 times in just the ten weeks before the 2016 election.
Approximately 1.4 million Americans are “in contact with” an IRA account on Twitter before the election, per the Mueller Report.
The Mueller Report identifies an additional 50,258 Twitter accounts linked to the Kremlin—which combined send out more than a million tweets in the ten weeks before Election Day in 2016.143
The Wall Street Journal found that from January 2014 through June 2015, the pretax income for the entire Trump Organization was $160 million—an approximately $106 million annual income before taxes. As the New Yorker notes, “With that money, Trump had to pay for his business, his taxes (if he paid any), his personal life style, and that of his family. His Boeing 757 alone cost more than ten thousand dollars per hour of use, not to mention the dozens of staffers at his various properties, the clothes and food and jewelry of a status-conscious family, and countless other expenses that could
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In 2014 Trump did more than buy Turnberry for $48.5 million, however. He also spent $29.2 million to buy yet another golf course, this one in Doonbeg, Ireland (ultimately named Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland).146 Between 2014 and 2018, the Washington Post reports, material improvements to the two properties notwithstanding, Trump had to drop another $164 million in cash just to keep Turnberry and Doonbeg open.147 Doonbeg was priced at $16 million when it initially went on the market, according to the Guardian, suggesting that Trump may have overpaid for it by as much as $13.2
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Per CNN, “the Gulf states, along with Israel, worry that the deal with Tehran will pave the way for a nuclear bomb rather than prevent one, and unlock billions of dollars that Iran will use to wreak havoc in the region. That fear has forced the six [GCC] nations to overcome a host of internal differences, heal long-standing rifts and show a level of unity that has been lacking. It also has led the bloc to show less deference to the United States.”3
