Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official, will tell Business Insider—crucially, at a time when he does not know that Trump’s intended dropping of sanctions on Russia would have paved the way for a clandestine “nuclear deal” with Russia and Saudi Arabia—that if indeed Trump had dropped sanctions on Russia at the beginning of his presidency, it would have given the Russians “exactly what they wanted in exchange for absolutely nothing.”268 Malinowski is one of several State Department officials whose actions in early February 2017 block Trump’s secret sanctions plan from being enacted.
