Kindle Notes & Highlights
Paul Manafort spends the spring of 2015 in a clinic in Arizona, having suffered a “massive emotional breakdown,” according to his daughter Andrea.17
One of his chief stressors is what Andrea describes as a “tight cash flow state” resulting from his former patron Viktor Yanukovych having recently fled to Russia to escape execution at the hands of a nationwide revolution in Ukraine; whether Manafort is aware that the FBI has already begun investigating him for his work in Ukraine is unclear, but his daughters note that he suddenly seems unwilling or unable to access any of the offshore bank accounts that might have alleviated the serious financial strain he is experiencing.19
He is also being hunted—quite literally—by Deripaska, to whom the United States has denied a visa due to what it believes to be his “ties to organized crime” and who, as Manafort would have been well aware, “won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called ‘aluminum wars’ of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry.”
Manafort’s “disappearance” is short-lived, however. In February 2016, he surfaces at a business lunch with his old friend, longtime Trump confidant Thomas Barrack, telling the Lebanese American billionaire businessman and Colony Capital founder and executive chairman, “I really need to get to” Trump.22
As the Atlantic will note in early 2018, “When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign … he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures … evinced the character of a man … [with a] lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.”23
As longtime Trump friend, adviser, and ally Roger Stone explains, “[Thomas Barrack] is the only person I know who the president speaks to as a peer. Barrack is to Trump as [Florida banker] Bebe Rebozo was to Nixon, which is the best friend.”24 But Barrack is also more than this to the extended Trump family: he is Jared Kushner’s lender, holding $70 million of the debt owed by Kushner on the worst real estate investment of his career, 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City.25 Barrack’s late-2000s investment in Kushner helped save Ivanka’s husband from bankruptcy, a circumstance that could have
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Barrack’s skill at flattery, according to an account in the Times, has been directed most vigorously over the years at three targets: Donald Trump and the Saudi and Emirati royal families.
During the presidential campaign, Barrack will tell the Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, that if he works in conjunction with Barrack, they “can turn [Trump] to prudence. He needs a few really smart Arab minds to whom he can confer.”
Indeed, as Barrack predicts, the Emirates’ agent, al-Otaiba, will become one of the Trump campaign’s most important advisers—though also, like Dimitri Simes, one that the campaign never acknowledges, for reasons that will become clear over time (see chapters 4 and 6).
Trump will later claim, falsely, that he did not know Flynn in 2015, though it was Trump who had his team call Flynn in 2015, and Trump who permitted his first meeting with Flynn to run for ninety minutes instead of the scheduled thirty minutes.35
Flynn’s Iranian American business partner at the Flynn Intel Group, Bijan Kian, who will later be indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on “charges of trying to influence American politicians” on behalf of Turkey without registering as an agent of a foreign government, is responsible for introducing Flynn to Zamel.37
The Flynn-Zamel relationship appears to be key to Trump campaign–Israeli collusion in the months before Election Day.38
In late summer 2016, after he has been serving as a top national security advisor to candidate Trump for a year, Flynn meets at the JW Marriott Essex House New York hotel “with top Turkish government ministers and discusse[s] removing a Muslim cleric [Fethullah Gulen] from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey.”39 The action discussed by the parties would violate the federal kidnapping statute, as it would be orchestrated to “get Gulen … to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process,” according to the Wall Street Journal.40
Three weeks after the White House fires him in early 2017, Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, will file with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent for Turkey. When this happens, press secretary Sean Spicer will tell the media that “Mr. Trump was unaware Mr. Flynn had been consulting on behalf of the Turkish government when he named him national security adviser,” even though Congress had informed Vice President–elect Mike Pence (the head of Trump’s presidential transition team) of this fact in a public letter in November 2016, and President Obama had, in a face-to-face
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According to Politico, in their meeting at the White House two days after Trump’s election victory, Obama didn’t just advise Trump against hiring Flynn but “forcefully told [him] to steer clear of Flynn,” unambiguous advice from the nation’s commander in chief (and Flynn’s former boss) that Trump ignored for reasons that have never been explained.45
At some point during his ten-month candidacy for president, Carson and his team receive a “plan for voter manipulation in [general election] swing states” from an Israeli business intelligence company, Inspiration, which is “run by former Israeli Defense Force officers.”62 After Carson exits the presidential race in March 2016, he “personally present[s] Trump with Inspiration’s plan,” and thereafter Inspiration receives “enormous amounts of information” from a pro-Trump super PAC, information it uses to “compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’
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“everything in foreign policy is personal with [Trump] … and he likes the Saudis. And why does he like them so much? Because they pay him.”108
“Here you have a candidate for president of the United States saying that he is favorably disposed toward a foreign country because they have given him millions of dollars, and all but promising to shape American foreign policy in their favor for that very reason.”109
Trump makes a startling statement at a campaign stop.112 On November 12, 2015, at a community college theater in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump tells the assembled crowd, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do. Believe me.”113 Trump also tells the crowd that he has a plan for defeating ISIS—but that it’s a secret.114
Trump’s seeming willingness to listen to input from foreign agents over U.S. intelligence will be confirmed in February 2019, when it is revealed that in mid-2017 Trump told his intelligence briefers that on the question of whether North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-Un, had just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States, “I believe Putin.” The president of the Russian Federation was at the time was telling Trump, contrary to what the U.S. president was hearing from his own intelligence community, that no such launch had occurred.115
According to Newsweek and McClatchy, Flynn’s summer 2015 trip was part of a “joint venture … involv[ing] U.S. companies, a Russian state-sponsored company, and Saudi financing, and was geared towards providing nuclear power to the Arab world.”144 One indication that Flynn sees the complications inherent in attempting to broker such a transnational deal is that he fails to disclose this trip to Saudi Arabia when he seeks a new federal security clearance in late 2016.145 Moreover, he fails to properly disclose a second, October 2015 trip to Saudi Arabia that is part of the same joint venture. In
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The reason officials at the NRA would want to “influence” Putin is likewise revealed in Erickson’s emails: the GOP operative’s plan, apparently embraced by the NRA brass with whom he spoke, was to “creat[e] a way for the Kremlin to connect with a future Republican president.”170 Because U.S. presidents ordinarily can call other world leaders at will, the implication in the Erickson-NRA effort is that the channel they wish to create to the Kremlin is a covert back channel—an ambition that carries with it the desire to hide GOP-Kremlin contacts from the American public, U.S. media, the U.S.
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As for the NRA, it will ultimately contribute at least $30 million toward Trump’s election, a sum still being investigated by both media and federal law enforcement as possibly having been illegally commingled with “Russian money.”176
More of Trump’s lucrative but clandestine connections to the NRA will surface in 2019, when the Daily Beast reveals that “the Trump 2020 campaign is reportedly using a shell company to buy ads in coordination with the National Rifle Association, using the same potentially illegal techniques as the 2016 campaign.”177
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
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When one of Simes’s key Kremlin contacts in the United States, Maria Butina, is arrested in Virginia in August 2018, the reaction of the Trump campaign’s trusted Russia adviser is telling.207 Within a matter of days, Simes, a man the Washington Post calls “the Washington expert most well connected in Moscow and whose organization [CNI] provides a unique link between the two cities’ elite,” leaves the United States for Moscow—and a job running a political talk show on a Kremlin-owned television network for a mid-six-figure salary.
“Many organization employees were shocked when, in mid-2018 … Simes decided to take a job co-hosting a prime-time news and analysis show on Channel 1, a major Russian television network that is majority-owned by the Russian government. The new job suddenly focused a spotlight on Simes’s ties to Moscow.”
That Trump’s chief campaign adviser on Russia now runs the television edition of the Kremlin’s “Great Game” on behalf of Vladimir Putin can give no comfort to those who fear that Simes’s advice to the Trump campaign was given implicitly or explicitly at the Kremlin’s bidding.
Indeed, the sight of Simes and his co-host Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, chatting with Kremlin officials like Sergey Lavrov—the man the Steele dossier alleges coordinated Russian election interference in 2016, and to whom Trump boasted about firing FBI director James Comey over the Russia investigation in 2017—is surely unsettling to many.
In late February 2017, almost immediately after Trump finally fires his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Simes travels to Russia to meet with Lavrov.213 The two men discuss the ongoing Russia investigation being conducted by the FBI, including the danger that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak will be caught up in it. Simes is well aware that Kislyak will be named in the investigation, as he has facilitated the Kremlin agent’s contacts with the Trump campaign in the past.214 Within 120 days of the Simes-Lavrov meeting in Russia, Kislyak will be recalled to Moscow by Putin, putting him
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As to this question, it must be noted that in November 2018 ex-CIA contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged that Pegasus had been used by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to track Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi—an allegation that NSO has denied.
The Times of Israel confirms, however, that NSO’s Pegasus technology had been sold to the Saudis by the time Riyadh was using the surveillance tools available to the royal family to track, ensnare, and ultimately assassinate Khashoggi
under arrest, bin Talal calls Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, to “praise MBS” and his “vision” and to invite Khashoggi “to come back to the Kingdom and be part of [that vision].”450 Khashoggi “resist[s] [the] pressure from Riyadh” and does not return to Saudi Arabia.451
In an eerie echo of the October 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed because of his opposition to MBS (see chapter 9), Spear Operations Group mercenary Isaac Gilmore concedes that on occasion “there is the possibility that the target [the UAE asked his team to kill]” was not a valid target but just someone “MBZ doesn’t like.”
The UAE, which sees Iran as one of its main enemies, also shared the Trump team’s interest in finding ways to drive a wedge between Moscow and Tehran.”2 MBZ’s chief goal with respect to Donald Trump in 2016 is therefore to “establish[] an unofficial backchannel between Trump and Putin”—an ambition he ultimately achieves through a year’s worth of behind-the-scenes contacts, via several intermediaries, with the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team.
In April, as CNI board members Dimitri Simes and Richard Burt, along with two members of Trump’s new Simes-proposed advisory committee, Papadopoulos and Page, are preparing the GOP candidate’s first major foreign policy address—an address that proposes a “deal” with Russia to resolve any ongoing disputes with the United States—both the IRA and GRU move to the next phase of their operations: the IRA begins publishing pro-Trump ads on social media, and the GRU begins a systematic hack of the Democratic National Committee.
The GRU will also, over time, start targeting, as recounted by the Mueller Report, “individuals and entities involved in the administration of the [U.S.] elections. Victims include[] U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities … [and] private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administrating election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations.”12
The special counsel’s office declines to “investigate further” the GRU’s attacks on America’s electoral infrastructure, citing the existence of an ongoing probe by the Department of Homeland Security.
In May 2019, the Washington Post reports that, contrary to years of federal government denials, the GRU was in fact able to access “voter information files” in at least two U.S. counties in 2016, both in Florida; when one of the two counties is identified by Politico as Washington County, neither county officials nor the FBI is willing to release additional information about the hacks to the public.15 Whether the GRU successfully gained access to sensitive voter information in other “battleground” states—information that could, if altered, affect U.S. voters’ ability to cast a ballot for
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In the seventy-two hours in April 2016 before the Trump campaign announces Trump’s upcoming major foreign policy address—an address substantially written and edited by four men with Kremlin connections—the GRU begins “planning the release[]” of “documents stolen from the Clinton Campaign and its supporters,” going so far as to anonymously register one of the websites it will ultimately use to leak these stolen materials, DCLeaks.com.
Just four months or so on from the development of the Red Sea Conspiracy, MBZ expresses to Barrack through the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, that “confusion about your friend Donald Trump is very high,” adding that Trump “has many people extremely worried” because of his call for a travel ban impacting certain Arab nations.29 Despite MBZ’s trepidation, the Emirati prince knows, as presumably does his emissary al-Otaiba, that a select group of Sunni Arab leaders has lately chosen Donald Trump to be their future American partner in realigning the balance of power in
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April 26, the Trump campaign receives, according to the Mueller Report, “indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
Fabrizio is not a solo operator upon his hire by his longtime associates Manafort and Gates in May 2016. In fact, he works for Arthur J. Finkelstein and Associates, a consultancy run by controversial right-wing political consultants Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum.112 Apart from having advised both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Finkelstein is famous for having been the “secret campaign manager” behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s historically narrow election as prime minister of Israel in 1996, a campaign that made Finkelstein a “star,” according to BuzzFeed News.
By 2016, Finkelstein and Birnbaum are famous for their years of work for Orban, whose 2010 election as Hungarian prime minister—his second stint in the role—was considered an “electoral masterpiece … with implications around the world.”116 One implication of Finkelstein and Birnbaum’s actions is Orban’s construction of an anti-Semitic alternate reality inside Hungary’s cloistered political sphere, one in which George Soros—a wealthy Hungarian-born Jew with few ongoing ties to Hungary—is positioned as the nation’s foremost bogeyman.
By 2016, Finkelstein and Birnbaum have made Orban’s 2018 reelection campaign almost entirely about certain Hungarians’ implicitly anti-Semitic fear of the octogenarian Soros; as The Intercept will note, Orban was thus convinced by two Jewish men, Finkelstein and Birnbaum, to “focus[] his entire re-election campaign on the imaginary threat [to Hungary] posed by Soros.”118 Per BuzzFeed News, “Orban’s campaign against Soros never actually used the word Jew, but it was often implicit. Orban told his people they would have to fight against an ‘enemy’ who was ‘different,’ who didn’t have a ‘home.’
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Though J. D. Gordon, Page’s peer on the Trump campaign’s national security advisory committee, will not disclose to the special counsel any interactions between Page and Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention following Page’s return from Moscow, Page will after the convention tell campaign officials that he did indeed speak with Kislyak in Cleveland and that the ambassador was “very worried about candidate Clinton’s world views.”
“U.S. intelligence officials [are] investigating whether … [Page] opened private communications with senior Russian officials to discuss U.S. sanctions policy under a possible Trump Administration.”233 If Page indeed did so, and at candidate Trump’s direction or with his knowledge, Trump’s request for Russian hackers to attack Clinton’s email servers on July 27, 2016—less than three weeks after Page returns from Moscow—would likely be regarded as a federal felony under the aiding and abetting statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2.234
When Page returns to Moscow in December 2016, it is months after the Trump campaign says it has severed ties with him. While there, however, Page will “give individuals in Russia the impression that he [has] maintained his connections to President-Elect Trump.”235 Indeed, on December 8, 2016, Kremlin agent Konstantin Kilimnik will write to Manafort to say that “Carter Page is in Moscow today, sending messages he is authorized to talk to Russia on behalf of [Donald Trump] on a range of issues of mutual interest, including Ukraine.”
In 2016 and 2017, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will four times find probable cause to believe that Page is an agent of the Kremlin.239
Whereas Nader’s offer to the Trump campaign, according to the New York Times, is a broad one—he tells Trump’s son that “the princes who le[a]d Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates [are] eager to help his father win election as president”—Zamel’s possibly related offer is more tightly focused, involving “an influence operation to help Trump win the election.”78 Both offers appear to be illegal, however.
