Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump's International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy

by Seth Abramson

Not long after these meetings between two Kremlin agents and two of America’s top public financial institutions, the Kremlin makes its first contact with a unit of the Treasury Department, the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, to propose what it calls the “ISIL Project”: an information-sharing agreement between the Kremlin and the United States focused on “financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS.”179 Incredibly, officials within the Treasury Department agree to the Kremlin’s proposed project using “a Gmail backchannel with the Russian government”—a channel that thereafter will be used by Kremlin agents not to track ISIS but to “press[] their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens … [including] sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin.”