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

by Seth Abramson

On August 19, Paul Manafort resigns as Trump’s campaign manager, though the move is a cosmetic one only. As the New Yorker will later report, “FBI wiretaps show that Manafort continued his association with Trump long after he resigned. Manafort was also in touch with his business partner,” Rick Gates, who after Manafort resigns remains on the campaign but “transition[s] to become [campaign] liaison with the Republican National Committee,” according to NBC News; post-inauguration, Gates will come to be regarded as a “White House insider.”

In May 2017, Politico will reveal that after his firing Manafort not only stays in touch with the campaign, and later the presidential transition team, but even advises Trump staffers—and Trump himself—on how to navigate the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia ties.

Manafort “remained in contact with the president and his aides” even after the FBI’s Russia probe began, “brief[ing]” Trump and his team on details of his own ties to Russian interests. Per Politico, these Trump-Manafort conversations include discussion of Ukraine as well as Manafort’s many conversations with Konstantin Kilimnik, which had focused on sanctions relief and a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian “peace deal.”82 Trump will later tell federal investigators, under penalty of a federal indictment for making false statements to law enforcement, that he “do[es] not remember Mr. Manafort communicating to me any particular positions Ukraine or Russia would want the United States to support.”83 As to whether Trump’s statement to the special counsel’s office is true, only he and Manafort would know.

The Trump campaign’s clandestine summer 2016 efforts to secure the Clinton emails allegedly stolen by the Russians continue after Manafort’s departure—despite the fact that if the campaign were to receive the emails, it would be not only receiving stolen property but potentially aiding and abetting the computer crimes that led to the theft of the emails in the first instance.

Alongside separate efforts to secure Clinton’s emails executed by Trump national security adviser Joseph Schmitz—a man once caught running a Saudi-financed scheme to sell Russian weapons in Syria—and longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone, another effort, led by a GOP operative named Peter W. Smith, had begun in June 2016 and involved searching the “dark web” for Clinton’s emails.

In late July, his public comments on the matter notwithstanding, Trump had privately broached the sort of effort Smith had been involved in for weeks, “ask[ing] individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the...

During the weekend of August 27, 2016, Smith meets with “several groups of hackers” at a suburban Washington hotel, only two of which (out of five) he identifies as Russian; he is just eleven days from producing documentation claiming that his efforts to find Clinton’s emails are known to top Trump advisers Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and Kellyanne Conway—all of whom, per Smith, he is “coordinat[ing] [with] to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure.”97 According to the Wall Street Journal, Smith’s Washington meetings occur at a time when he “and his associates” say they are “in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia” who they believe are “tied to the Moscow government.”

The Journal notes also that during this period “reports from intelligence agencies … tell of Russian hackers discussing how to get emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.”

Whether Smith was meant by the Kremlin or its agents to be the Russian Federation’s chosen intermediary with Flynn is unknown, though it is clear, according to the Journal, that by the tail end of his monthslong, Trump-campaign-“coordinated” search for Clinton’s emails, S...

Smith does receive direct assistance in his efforts from Trump adviser Erik Prince, however, as Prince “provide[s] funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of … emails” Barbara Ledeen brings to Smith’s attention in September 2016.106 Prince’s expert determines that the emails are fakes, but this does not deter Prince from falsely telling an interviewer from Steve Bannon’s Breitbart media outlet two months later that local law enforcement in New York City has found “those 650,000 emails” from Clinton’s email server, and that the emails contain, per Prince’s false account, “State Department emails … [and] a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein … [and] Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times … [while] Hillary Clinton went there at least six times. The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments.’”

An investigative report by Rolling Stone in November 2017 will reveal that Russian sources were indeed behind much of the disinformation Prince spread on Breitbart pre-election.108 Nor is Prince’s pre-election promotion of Russian disinformation exclusive to him within the Trump campaign and Trump’s circle of advisers; Prince’s Russian disinformation-laced interview with Breitbart will be retweeted on Twitter by Michael Flynn, and its substance tweeted out by Donald Trump Jr.

Emails and documents associated with Smith’s research—an encompassing and sophisticated effort that swept into its net “technical experts, lawyers, and a private investigator in Europe who spoke Russian,” as well as “two controversial alt-right activists … journalist-turned-entrepreneur Charles Johnson and his former business partner Pax Dickinson”—identify Flynn Intel Group and Michael Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr. as “allies in the operation.”

In May 2017, Peter W. Smith dies under suspicious circumstances, just days after disclosing his clandestine, “coordinated” efforts to acquire Clinton’s emails to the Wall Street Journal.124 The note Smith leaves behind in a Minnesota hotel room, reading in part “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER,” will cause consternation to journalists because of statements made thereafter by retired Wall Street financier Charles Ortel, a friend of Smith’s who says “he spoke with Mr. Smith on the phone in the hours before his death about a new project to brief the Obama Foundation on and warn its leaders against the mistakes they believed were made by the Clinton Foundation. According to Mr. Ortel, Mr. Smith sounded excited, and he began brainstorming who to contact and how to proceed.”125 Hours later, Smith was dead by what was officially ruled a “suicide.”

Longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone also spends the period from June 2016 through Election Day trying to get access to Clinton’s stolen emails through clandestine means—or, failing that, to get sufficient information about when the Kremlin will leak the emails that he can pass this information on to the GOP candidate himself.

On October 7, 2016, the day the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape of Trump confessing to being a serial sexual assailant was released, WikiLeaks released the first of thirty-three tranches of emails authored by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—an action that had the effect of bumping the Access Hollywood tape from the top of certain newscasts in the days ahead.

But for the partial distraction of the WikiLeaks release, the Trump campaign might have ended on October 10, with then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) telling congressional Republicans in a “rare” all-members conference call that “they could abandon Trump” and no longer needed to “remain loyal to the party’s [presidential] candidate due to the deeply disturbing tape of Trump’s 2005 comments.”

Six days before the October 7 WikiLeaks release, comedian and radio host Randy Credico had written Roger Stone a text message that read, “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”

Indeed, despite the Access Hollywood tape, NBC News will note that it was the WikiLeaks releases in October 2016 that “alter[ed] the trajectory of the presidential race.”164 Between October 7 and November 7, WikiLeaks will release all thirty-three tranches of Podesta emails, and the organization’s work will be cited by Trump in campaign speeches at least 137 times.

Nevertheless, the revelation of the sexually explicit Access Hollywood tape will augment the already significant anxiety within the Trump campaign about the potential for information regarding Trump’s personal conduct to be released pre-election.166 Ten days before the ele...

Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who is a mutual business associate of both Trump and Aras Agalarov, texts Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen to assure him that he...

Rtskhiladze will tell the special counsel that his reference to multiple Russia-produced videos of interest to the Trump campaign involves “compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with [Aras Agalarov’s] Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group,” a family and company whose last contact w...

Rtskhiladze has himself been in business with Trump since 2011 on projects in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Kazakhstan.169 More recently, he has been in contact with Cohen to discuss the Trump Tower Moscow proposal Cohen was, in the fall of 2015, negotiating—with the aid of his friend Felix Sater—with both Rozov and the Kremlin. Rtskhiladze was also working with Cohen on the possibility of a Trump-Putin summit in New York City, telling another busine...

Less than ninety days after Rtskhiladze texts Cohen about compromising “videos” in the possession of Trump’s Russian business partners the Agalarovs, the BBC will report that, according to “active duty CIA officers dealing with the [Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation] case file,” the Kremlin is in possession of compromising “audio and video” tapes of Trump from both his 2013 stay at the Ritz Moscow as a guest of the Crocus Group and from another date in St. Petersburg; according to the officers, there is “more than one tape,” from “more than one date,” involving “more than one place,” and the tapes are “of a sexual nature.”

That Trump knew the Kremlin or its cutouts were claiming to have such tapes in the days before the 2016 election—at a time he was promoting a foreign policy that greatly pleased Putin—is confirmed by Cohen, who will tell the special counsel’s office that he “spoke to Trump about the issue [before Election Day] after receiving the texts from Rtskhiladze.”

After the November 2016 election, Jerome Corsi attempts to scrub his computer of his emails to Stone, deleting all his email correspondence from prior to October 11—a move that mirrors the apparent destruction by Steve Bannon and Erik Prince of all the texts on their phones that predate March 2017.175 During the period of time covered by Corsi’s digital expurgation, Stone contacted Corsi seeking to have him falsely state, in a public forum, that Randy Credico, not Corsi himself, was Stone’s “intermediary” with WikiLeaks.

Privately, according to the Mueller Report, the president was “ask[ing] his lawyers for advice on the possibility of a pardon for Manafort and other aides,” even as “Manafort remained in a joint defense agreement with the President following Manafort’s guilty plea and agreement to cooperate, and … Manafort’s attorneys regularly briefed the President’s lawyers on the topics discussed and the information Manafort had provided in interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office.”

After Manafort’s bail was revoked, the report notes, “the President’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, gave a series of interviews in which he raised the possibility of a pardon for Manafort.”

Other covert contacts with federal witnesses by Trump and his legal team include Trump contacting Michael Flynn in April 2017 and telling him to “stay strong”; a November 2017 phone call to Flynn by Trump’s attorney John Dowd, a call that, according to the special counsel’s office, “could have affected both [Flynn’s] willingness to cooperate [with federal prosecutors] and the completeness of that cooperation”; and an allegation by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that one of his successors in that role,...

Yet even as Trump is repeatedly tweeting about and speaking in interviews of fairness—at one point saying, “I do want to see people [like Manafort] treated fairly. That’s what it’s all about”—he is privately, according to the Mueller Report, expressing a very different concern, “discuss[ing] with aides whether and in what way Manafort might be cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation, and whether Manafort knew any information that would be harmful to [him]”; Trump attorney John Dowd’s November 2017 phone call to Flynn’s counsel expresses the very same anxiety, with Dowd telling Flynn attorney Robert Kelner in a voicemail, “If … there’s information [that Flynn has] that implicates the president, then we’ve got a national security issue … we got to deal with, not only for the president, but for the country. So … then, you know, we need some kind of heads up. Just for the sake of … protecting all our interests, if we can … remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”

The Mueller Report also reveals that less than ninety days after Manafort and Gates were charged with federal felonies, “Manafort told Gates that he had talked to the President’s personal counsel and they were ‘going to take care of us.’ Manafort told Gates it was stupid to plead [guilty], saying that he had been in touch with the President’s personal counsel and repeating that they should ‘sit tight’ and ‘we’ll be taken care of.’”

episode reminiscent of Trump and his legal team’s handling of Manafort’s two federal cases, Michael Cohen “understood based on … conversations with the President’s personal counsel that as long as he stayed on message” about his 2015 and 2016 contacts with Russian businessmen and government officials on Trump’s behalf, “he would be taken care of by the President, either through a pardon or through the [Russia] investigation being shut down.”

In 2018, Mueller indicts Roger Stone for three crimes: obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and making false statements to federal law enforcement.

According to the Stone indictment, “A senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign.”201 Because few people on the Trump campaign besides the candidate himself would have had the authority to “direct a senior Trump campaign official,” media outlets have speculated that the individual who issued such a directive during the presidential campaign was Donald Trump.

The same day as the meeting between Trump and el-Sisi, Trump Jr. begins to have “direct electronic communications with WikiLeaks,” according to the Mueller Report.209 If Trump Jr. has received any information about the Russian threat to the 2016 election from either of Trump’s first two security briefings—information held not only by Trump but also by Michael Flynn and Chris Christie—the presidential candidate’s son is required under the federal law against aiding and abetting to take no action that might induce further crimes by the Russian government’s nonstate cutout, WikiLeaks. Arguably, Trump Jr. is already in this position on the basis of public statements made by the U.S. intelligence community and a DNC-hired cybersecurity firm regarding Russia’s election-related hacking.

What Trump Jr. does on September 20 and September 21, however, is agree to access a password-protected anti-Trump website with a password sent to him by WikiLeaks; confirm to the campaign via email that he follows WikiLeaks on Twitter; respond to a “direct message” from WikiLeaks on Twitter; email “a variety of senior campaign staff” information he received as a result of his direct message from WikiLeaks; and tell WikiLeaks via Twitter direct message that he will “ask around” in response to its request for “comments” on the website to which it had just directed him.210 Less than two weeks later, Trump Jr. receives and replies to another query from WikiLeaks and adds one of his own: “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?”211 Then, on October 14, two days after WikiLeaks sends Trump Jr. a private message thanking him and his father for “talking about our publications” and asking Trump to tweet out a specific link, Trump Jr. tweets the WikiLeaks-specified link himself.

In Israel in fall 2016, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking forward to the end of the Obama presidency. Netanyahu has said to his aides that Obama has “no special feeling” for Israel and is dangerously foolish for wanting to “foster a kind of balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”218 Netanyahu’s belief is that Saudi Arabia must always hold the upper hand over Iran for the Jewish state to maintain its security. As for the Obama administration, by fall 2016 it has long since ceased to believe that Netanyahu earnestly wants a peace deal with the Palestinians; President Obama believes Netanyahu has deceived him and other U.S. politicians with an only illusory commitment to peace. As early as 2012, the mistrust between Obama’s team and Netanyahu’s had been such that Obama suspected the Israeli prime minister of secretly backing Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and hoping, moreover, to goad the United States into a military conflict with Iran.219 Obama’s fears about Netanyahu with respect to the 2012 election will appear prescient, given Netanyahu’s clandestine positioning vis-à-vis the 2016 Trump campaign and his hawkish posture toward Iran from 2017 onward (see chapter 10).

As the New Yorker will report in June 2018, prior to the 2016 presidential election Netanyahu was “confident that Trump would look out for his interests and share his opposition to Obama’s policies [in the Middle East]. Even before Trump entered the White House, Israeli officials talked about having more influence and a freer hand than ever before.

Netanyahu has already decided what he will do with this “freer hand,” too; during the Obama administration the Israeli prime minister has developed a “grand strategy for transforming the direction of Middle Eastern politics. His overarching ambition [is] … to form a coalition with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to combat Iran.

In midsummer 2016, per Bloomberg, Dustin Stockton, a writer for Breitbart, sponsors a “10-week [media] blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul [Trump], or simply sit out the election.”223 Steve Bannon’s level of involvement in the Breitbart writer’s campaign is unknown, but in May 2018 a former employee of Trump’s data firm—Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica—will tell a Senate committee “that Bannon tried to use [Cambridge Analytica] to suppress the black vote in key states.

At former Bannon employee Stockton’s direction, a man named Bruce Carter founds Trump for Urban Communities (TUC), an organization that, according to Bloomberg, “never disclose[s] its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law.”226 Carter will say that in founding Trump for Urban Communities, “he believed he was working for the [Trump] campaign” and that the campaign was therefore reporting all spending by TUC in accordance with federal law.

If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as [TUC] must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate.”229 Bloomberg will note that one supporter of TUC alone “far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000” to the organization.230 Noble, now director and general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, says, “I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation.”231

In late October 2016, Thomas Barrack writes an op-ed for Fortune that details what the longtime Trump adviser believes the next president—which he long ago predicted would be Trump—should do in the Middle East. In his editorial, Barrack insists that “the United States should make a radical, historic shift in its outreach towards the Arab world.… America should forge alliances with a new generation of Arab leaders.… [T]he US should take the lead in establishing a 21st century ‘Marshall Plan’ of economic aid” to the Middle East.

Flynn and Barrack are the two ringleaders of the effort. Because the plan the two top Trump advisers are championing requires that Trump drop sanctions on Russia, it is little surprise when, at the direction of a “senior transition official”—who communicates with Flynn through his deputy K. T. McFarland—the retired general and future Trump national security advisor tells Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016, that if Russia will hold off on retaliating for the sanctions just imposed upon it by President Obama (sanctions imposed for the Kremlin’s pro-Trump interference during the 2016 election), Trump will review the entire U.S.-Russia sanctions regime post-inauguration.262 Kislyak eventually agrees, informing Flynn in a subsequent phone call that the Kremlin will stand down and not retaliate for the new sanctions.263 The next day, December 30, Trump tweets to the nation, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”264 Trump makes no mention of any negotiations between his transition team and the Kremlin urging such a “delay,” though the Mueller Report will intimate that Trump was told, just after the new sanctions were announced, that his top national security advisor, Flynn, would imminently be speaking with the Russian ambassador.

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.

Just eleven minutes after Trump takes the oath of office in D.C. on January 20, his new national security advisor, Mike Flynn, texts Alex Copson, the managing partner of ACU Strategic Partners, to tell him that ACU’s “nuclear reactor project” is “good to go.”

According to the Washington Post, Copson’s boast about Trump “ripping up” U.S. sanctions against Russia comes directly from Michael Flynn, who has told Copson that removing all sanctions on Russia is exactly what Trump will do post-inauguration. Copson explains to the future whistleblower with whom he is speaking at Trump’s inauguration that “this is the start of something I have been working on for years.… Mike [Flynn] has been putting everything in place for us”—a comment that suggests Flynn’s course of foreign policy advising on the Trump campaign may well have been part of “putting everything in place” for a grand bargain on nuclear materials and technology involving Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Arab allies of the Saudis and Emiratis.

That Flynn and those partners planned on enriching and otherwise benefiting Trump’s most reliable foreign allies through a redirection of U.S. foreign policy—including allies who had offered Trump collusive assistance pre-election—closes the circle on a broader multinational bargain. As Copson tells the whistleblower at Trump’s inauguration, “This is going to make a lot of very wealthy people.”275

On January 28, 2017, two days after acting attorney general Sally Yates warns White House counsel Don McGahn that the nation’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, is susceptible to Russian blackmail and is therefore compromised—and one day after Yates gives that warning to McGahn a second time, face-to-face—Flynn receives an email from Bud McFarlane, who is at the time a member of the U.S. Energy Security Council.282 The email, which is sent also to McFarlane’s protégé (and Flynn’s deputy) K. T. McFarland, includes two documents: first, a “cover memo,” to be given to the president of the United States, intended to “launch the Marshall Plan for the Middle East” by formally outlining the “origins, geopolitical necessity, benefits—to the United States and host countries—[and] structure” of the plan and by naming Thomas Barrack chief executor of the plan on Trump’s behalf; and second, a memo “for the president to sign” ordering cabinet members to give Barrack any resources he needs.283 McFarlane notes that both Barrack and “our team”—meaning the team at post-ACU/post-IP3 entities SCP Partners, Iron Bridge Cybersecurity, and Iron Net Cybersecurity, all of whom are copied on the email—are on board with the content of the memos.

In a portion of its notes on Kushner leaked to the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, MBS’s November 2016 delegation to the president-elect and Kushner reports that “[Trump’s] inner circle is predominantly deal makers who lack familiarity with political customs and deep institutions, and they support Jared Kushner.”301 According to the New York Times, another section of the Saudi delegates’ report makes “special note of what it characterized as Mr. Kushner’s ignorance of Saudi Arabia.”302 MBS’s team underscores Kushner’s unfamiliarity with the history of Saudi terrorism—for instance, the fact that nearly all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. MBS’s agents plan to remedy this knowledge deficit to Kushner’s “satisfaction” by “explain[ing]” to him what they describe as “their international leadership in fighting Islamist extremism.”

The Saudis also propose an “intelligence and data [exchange] to help the [incoming] American administration carry out its strategy of investigating those requesting residency” in the United States—a proposal relevant to what will become Trump’s travel ban two months later (a ban that will, in the event, be crafted to leave Saudi travel to the United States unaffected).