The warm words for Putin would make sense only in hindsight, when it became clear that, just as Trump was making his comments, his lawyer and Sater were in the midst of talks for a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project that could move forward only with help from higher-ups in the Russian government.
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A couple of weeks after that November debate, Nellie Ohr came back with her first big memo on Trump and his Russia ties, a copious sweep through Russian-language media. Among other things, Ohr noted the importance of Trump’s holding the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and how he had talked about plans for a Trump Tower there. “Possible partners included the Crocus Group of Aras Agalarov, which had helped organize and provide the venue for the beauty pageant,” Ohr wrote in one memo. Over the following months, Trump’s connections to the Agalarovs piled up, and Aras Agalarov would become a figure in the Steele dossier.
On December 14, 2015, Ohr supplied Fusion with a second batch of findings in which she dug deeper into the lesser-known history of Trump’s ties to Russia. She had unearthed a number of puzzling statements, such as when Trump supposedly told a Russian reporter in 2015 that he had donated $5,000 to RT, the Russian government’s propaganda machine, “to fight against the American evil in the form of Senator John McCain and other idiots.”
Far more significant to Fusion’s emerging theory of the case, she found a 2008 article in Russian in which Trump said that Russians were his favorite customers because they always paid in cash and did not need mortgages. The article also stated that Trump had invited a group of Russian reporters to the United States to see the Trump SoHo and even paid some of their travel expenses. The story lent support to the idea that sometime in the mid-2000s, Trump revived his business enterprise with hot cash from the former Soviet Union—something that Fusion now set out to attempt to document.
“I have a very good business relationship with the Russians,” Trump told the Russian magazine Seagull. “A Russian recently bought a house in Florida from me for $100 million. Some Russians buy homes for $50 million. Great shoppers! People with good taste and good money understand the value of the Trump brand. It is always a guarantee of quality and a win-win location. By investing in Trump, you invest for sure. By the way, I really like Vladimir Putin. I respect him. He does his job well. Much better than our Bush.”
The Russian buyer in Florida was Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire from Perm who ditched a career in alternative medicine to build potash producer Uralkali into a global player in the fertilizer industry. Rybolovlev spent eleven months in jail in 1996 in Russia under indictment for racketeering, including the suspected murder of a competitor. Later, his legal problems mysteriously cleared up, allegedly with the help of some high-level contacts in Moscow. Moscow’s modus operandi for years has been to identify Russians in legal jeopardy who can redeem themselves by using their wealth abroad to advance the Kremlin’s influence-buying operations. Rybolovlev eventually emigrated to Monaco, where he acquired the local soccer club and a taste for overpriced fine art.
In July 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, he purchased a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for $95 million, more than twice what Trump had paid for it in 2005. At the time, it was the most expensive single-family home sale ever in Palm Beach County. The purchase price was well above the going market rate—by some estimates, double the rate. The massive profit helped Trump out of a hole at a crucial moment in his career. The transaction smelled fishy, to put it mildly. To Fusion, it looked like it could be a Russian payoff that got Trump out of another liquidity jam.
By early 2016, Fusion had prepared its own lengthy survey of Trump’s many mysterious connections to the former Soviet Union. All of the disparate threads were beginning to come together into a disturbing picture. Some in the media had also begun to catch on.
“Before he was a presidential candidate, Trump’s hunger to be popular in Russia was less troubling,” Bloomberg columnist Josh Rogin wrote in March 2016. “Now it is a conflict of interest. At minimum, there is the appearance of wrongdoing: The candidate’s foreign-policy positions are conveniently aligned with his long-standing business agenda. But what’s good for the Trump Organization isn’t necessarily good for America.”
That feeling would be cemented among a small group of Trump watchers as his path to the nomination cleared and his team added an ominous figure from Simpson’s and Fritsch’s journalistic past: a political consultant named Paul Manafort.
By late March 2016, Donald Trump had solidified his front-runner position and his path to the nomination was beginning to look assured. Jeb Bush was out. So were Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and all but three of the original stampede of candidates that had entered the race the previous summer. Now it was just Trump, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and Ohio governor John Kasich, the last of the vehement Trump foes, still standing.
The more headway Trump made, the more the ranks of the Never Trump movement swelled. A number of well-known Republicans were determined to deny him the nomination. The clamor to stop Trump did not appear to be motivated primarily by heartburn over his policy positions, his ties to criminals and dubious Russian oligarchs, or even a fear that a Trump presidency could destroy the Republican Party. The primary motivation appeared to be the widely held conviction among political pros that Trump was a sure loser in November. “Hillary would beat him from jail,” predicted one former Jeb Bush adviser.
In an effort to quell these concerns and put down a brewing internal GOP revolt, Trump turned to an old political pro, Paul Manafort.
The move set off shock waves among a small group of loosely affiliated Republican operatives whose primary candidates had already dropped out of the race and were now aiding the GOP’s Never Trump effort and talking to Fusion.
“Trump just hired this guy Paul Manafort,” one Republican operative working with Fusion’s client wrote to Simpson on March 29, 2016. “Has ties to Oleg Deripaska, Russian tycoon and Putin crony. Do we have anything on this?”
“Tons,” Simpson replied. “He is super close to the Russians.”
As it happened, Fusion was already looking into Manafort for a legal client in a matter unrelated to the presidential campaign and had recently obtained fresh evidence of his ties to Deripaska, a Russian billionaire long banned from entering the United States for his alleged ties to organized crime.
Manafort’s emergence as an adviser to Trump seemed unlikely to be a coincidence and in fact added fuel to the smoldering concerns within Fusion that Russians were trying to get their hooks into Trump. When you combined Trump’s many unexplained links to Russia and the history of foreign attempts to sway U.S. elections, it wasn’t that big a stretch.
To Fusion, Manafort wasn’t just another Beltway bandit from yesteryear. He was a seminal figure in the annals of Washington consulting, a famously avaricious and venal operative who was close to the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater and a former business partner of Richard Nixon’s old dirty trickster Roger Stone. Here was a consultant who had a history of blending foreign lobbying with his work on presidential campaigns and, more recently, had spent more than a decade working actively against U.S. interests in Europe, in furtherance of Putin’s goal of driving a wedge through the NATO alliance.
The son of a Connecticut mayor, Manafort climbed up through the Republican ranks during the Reagan era as a slick young operative who could control a room and manipulate party factions with uncanny skill. He parlayed his success wrangling delegates at the 1980 Republican National Convention into what soon became Washington’s most mercenary lobbying firm: Black, Manafort and Stone. It was a firm, The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer would later write, that “exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s.” Manafort carved out a very lucrative niche burnishing the reputations of and seeking favor for some of the least savory of world leaders, people like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Jonas Savimbi of Angola.<
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For the past decade, he had worked extensively for the Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin pet, reaping millions in consulting fees that he poured into his increasingly lavish lifestyle. But by the time Trump came calling, Manafort had hit a rough patch in both his professional and personal lives—just how rough, Fusion would soon find out.
Trump cast the hiring of a veteran operative like Manafort as proof that the campaign was swiftly moving to acquire the right kind of talent to assure all went well at the GOP convention in Cleveland as fears of a delegate fight mounted. Manafort would be the adult in the room, the guy who had been there before. The New York Times described the longtime operative as “among the few political hands in either party with direct experience managing nomination fights.”
The Times and others noted his recent work in Ukraine, but his ties to Russian oligarchs and his questionable PR and political consulting work over the prior decade received only cursory coverage. The hire shocked those who knew the full story, but didn’t make a big news splash. It was as if most of Washington had forgotten who Manafort was.
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Simpson and Fritsch didn’t fall into that camp. The two had pursued very different paths through the Journal over the years before coming together as reporter and editor for the first time in Brussels in 2006. Fritsch had spent years as a foreign reporter and editor before arriving from Singapore as Journal bureau chief for Northern Europe. Simpson had spent most of his career in Washington investigating political corruption, including cases of illicit foreign influence. He had been a European investigative reporter since coming over from Washington in late 2004, writing about the organized crime and kleptocracy seeping westward from the lawless states of the former Soviet Union. He quickly discovered that escaping Washington wouldn’t be so easy: There was a gold rush under way of sketchy Washington political consultants seeking to service the nouveau riche of ex-Communist nations, who had lots of political and legal problems and plenty of cash to pay for top-dollar American talent.
Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby, also a Journal reporter, had written several articles in 2007 and 2008 exploring this phenomenon. Those stories, edited by Fritsch, starred none other than Paul Manafort. By that point, Manafort had faded from the D.C. scene and resurfaced as a big-ticket political Svengali in the endemically corrupt and dysfunctional Ukraine—Russia’s largest western neighbor and the object of deep historical Kremlin obsessions. Ukraine was a big story in Europe and occasionally also in Washington. For much of the 2000s, Putin’s efforts to dominate Ukraine politically and squeeze it economically generated big headlines, because Europe depended on Russian natural gas piped across Ukraine to fuel its factories and heat millions of homes. Every time Putin threatened to cut off gas to Ukraine, Washington’s key European allies shuddered.
Their reporting had thrown a spotlight on how Manafort, while representing clients involved in those fierce geopolitical struggles over Ukraine, had not seen fit to comply with a lobbying law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)—the very law that Robert Mueller and his team would come to rely on years later to help pry open Manafort’s years of criminal activity.
FARA is one of those federal laws known largely to a small cadre of PR executives, specialty lawyers, and lobbyists who have to register under its auspices. It exists, though, for compelling reasons. Congress passed the law in 1938 in response to the rise of Adolf Hitler and a flood of Nazi propaganda and subversion. Anyone conducting political activities in the United States on behalf of a foreign power now had to register and report their spending. The felony statute was used in twenty-three criminal prosecutions during World War II.
The tactics the Nazis used to influence Washington in the years before World War II weren’t much different from the Kremlin’s modern-day methods. One case under FARA brought in 1941 involved fake news produced by a Nazi-controlled wire service called Transocean News Service. While posing as a legitimate news organization, Transocean was in reality “nothing more nor less than a propaganda arm of the Nazi regime,” according to a congressional report.
Over several months in 2007, Simpson and Jacoby reported on Manafort’s PR and lobbying efforts on behalf of Yanukovych. They concluded, based on what they found, that Manafort might be in violation of the foreign agent law, a serious crime. They wrote a letter to Manafort seeking his comment. He didn’t reply. His apparent failure to register under FARA was included in a story in The Wall Street Journal that laid out how a who’s who of Washington players—from Bob Dole to former FBI Director William Sessions—were lining up to help controversial clients from the former Soviet Union. Many of those clients had run afoul of the law and wanted help cleaning up their reputations so that they could travel to and bank in the United States. In other cases, the lawyers and lobbyists brokered deals with the U.S. government under which oligarchs with suspected criminal ties would obtain visas to visit the United States on the condition that they help law enforcement better understand Putin’s Russia—a promise that often fell short of U.S. officials’ hopes and expectations.
The story also delved into a Washington lobbying campaign by Deripaska, then a little-known Russian oligarch close to Putin and a veteran of Russia’s “Aluminum Wars”—violent battles for control of the country’s vast bauxite mines and aluminum smelters after the fall of Communism. Deripaska emerged from those fights with a fortune estimated at over $6 billion and a reputation scarred by his battles with competing oligarchs.* Simpson and Jacoby had come across filings made by lobbyists for Deripaska involving “US Department of State visa policies and procedures,” an indication that the U.S. government was reluctant to let him into the country.
They followed up and Jacoby eventually came across a Republican political appointee at the State Department named David J. Kramer, who said he knew a lot about the matter from his previous senior post there working on European affairs. Kramer told Jacoby that Deripaska’s visa had actually been revoked by State at the request of the FBI, which suspected he wasn’t telling the truth about his possibly criminal background.
Simpson and Kramer would cross paths intermittently over the coming years as they compared notes on Putin’s Russia. They never dreamed their paths would cross again, in dramatic fashion, nearly a decade later when Kramer would become the one to leak the Steele dossier to the media.
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The first Journal story in 2007 caused barely a ripple in Washington, as stories on lobbying violations there were common fare, and Deripaska was far from a household name. But the scoop that Deripaska was being blackballed by the State Department at the behest of the FBI made a splash in official circles both in the United States and in Europe. The report had trade, foreign policy, and national security implications and contributed to early signs of a dark turn under way in Russia. The story caught the eye of, among others, CIA analyst Nellie Ohr.
What Simpson and Fritsch didn’t know yet was that the Manafort and Deripaska stories overlapped. That only became apparent nearly a year later, after Manafort’s Russian connections resurfaced at the start of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.
In a follow-up to the original Journal story, The Washington Post reported in January 2008 that Manafort and his longtime consulting partner Rick Davis—working then as a firm known as Davis Manafort—had arranged a meeting in Switzerland in 2006 between Deripaska and Senator John McCain that was described as a social occasion including drinks and dinner. At the time, Deripaska was trying to drum up support in Washington for an independence referendum in Montenegro, and Davis and Manafort were angling to snag a fat contract running the pro-independence campaign.
“Part of the warm Manafort embrace of sleaze,” Fritsch wrote in an email to Simpson and Jacoby, both of whom by this time had moved back to Washington.
The story was big news in the United States, because Davis was no longer jus
t a lobbyist; he was on leave from Davis Manafort, managing McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The inference was that one of Putin’s more notorious cronies could potentially have influence over McCain via Manafort and Davis.
This concern seemed hypothetical at the time. In reality, it had more validity than anyone but Manafort and Davis knew: Manafort had secretly been hired by Deripaska in 2006 for a whopping $10 million a year after pitching the oligarch on a confidential plan to “greatly benefit the Putin government.”
This history would later prove critical to Fusion’s understanding of Trump’s relationship with Russia and aspects of the Steele dossier.
Simpson and Jacoby broke the story in May 2008 that Manafort and Davis were working for both McCain’s campaign and a pro-Putin party in Ukraine at the same time. The story recounted in detail how Davis and Manafort had avoided registering under FARA for years but had finally done so retroactively in January 2008. The issue came roaring back weeks before the 2008 election when other media accounts detailed more connections between Davis Manafort, McCain, and Deripaska.
Years later, Simpson would look back on the Manafort and Deripaska controversies from that period as the first inklings of an emerging Kremlin program to win sway in Washington through a network of captive oligarchs and their well-connected—mostly Republican—fixers.
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Manafort’s entanglements with foreign clients were well known among top GOP operatives. “We dealt with this in ’08 because Rick Davis was constantly getting the campaign dinged over his ties to Manafort,” one anti-Trump Republican consultant recalled to Simpson at the time. “No one is eager for a replay of that.”
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