House of Trump, House of Putin2
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Eight days later, on June 23, the United Kingdom became an example of what Ryan had called Russia’s attempts to “basically blow up” a country, when Britain dealt an extraordinary and unexpected blow to the European Union by severing its most vital connection to Europe. To the astonishment of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, 51.9 percent of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. And what was Russia’s role? At the time, few people were aware of the extent of Russia’s interference. Only later, in 2018, did a minority report from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee conclude that “the Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption.”6
“The Kremlin has long aimed to undermine European integration and the EU, in addition to its aims to sow confusion and undermine confidence in democratic processes themselves, making Brexit a potentially appealing target,” it added.
According to a research team from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, Russia had assembled at least 150,000 Twitter accounts to promote Brexit.7 A report by Britain’s National Bureau of Economic Research later showed that automated tweeting played “a small but potentially decisive” role that was “possibly large enough to affect the outcomes” in the 2016 Brexit vote, by adding 1.76 percentage points to the pro-“leave” vote share.8 The bottom line: Russian interference may have made the difference.
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In early July, Republicans began gathering in Cleveland, Ohio, prior to the Republican National Convention to hammer out their platform. The party elders had had little input from the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, on most issues, with the striking exception of American policy with regard to Ukraine.9 Throughout the campaign, Trump had been less than supportive of Ukraine in its ongoing battle with Russia. In August 2015, when asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press what he thought about Ukraine’s joining NATO, “I wouldn’t care,” he replied. He also said that Ukraine was “really a problem that affects Europe a lot more than it affects us.” Coupled with his prediction to Bill O’Reilly that “I would have a great relationship with Putin,” Trump’s remarks led anti-Russia activists in Ukraine to call Trump a “Kremlin agent.”10
That Trump’s sentiments also were directly at odds with most Republicans became readily apparent when platform committee member Diana Denman, a longtime GOP activist from Texas, called for a plank saying the US would provide lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine for its battle with Russian separatists. Denman did not expect a battle. Her proposal was very much in line with age-old GOP policies. But before long, two men who said they were part of the Trump campaign came over to her, read the language she wanted to insert, and said it needed to be reviewed.
One of the men was J. D. Gordon, a forty-eight-year-old former Pentagon spokesman who was now a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign. He introduced himself to Denman and said he had phoned New York about the Ukraine plank. When she asked Gordon whom he had spoken to, he told her he had discussed it with Trump.11 Gordon has called Denman’s account inaccurate.
“[Gordon] said this is the language that Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March at a meeting at the unfinished Trump hotel here in Washington, D.C.,” CNN’s Jim Acosta reported. “J. D. Gordon says then candidate Trump said he didn’t want to, quote, ‘go to World War 3 over Ukraine.’ And so, as J. D. Gordon says, at the Republican convention in Cleveland he advocated for language in that Republican Party platform that reflected then candidate Trump’s comments.”12
In the end, Gordon won, and the language was changed from calling on the US to provide Ukraine “lethal defensive weapons” to the phrase “appropriate assistance.” Ohio senator Rob Portman described the radical change in policy as “deeply troubling,” and even Charlie Black, a veteran Washington political operative who was once a partner of Manafort’s, said the “new position in the platform doesn’t have much support from Republicans.”13
Which, of course, was something of an understatement. The direction indicated by the new plank was a far-reaching and profound departure from everything the Republican Party had stood for.
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But Trump wasn’t the only person Gordon spoke to who would have approved of the change. During the convention, Gordon also had two brief encounters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who had quietly started to pop up in secret meetings repeatedly with Trump operatives.14 It’s not clear what role Kislyak might have played in aiding the Trump campaign, but the Kremlin was always eager to know the latest on Trump’s positions regarding sanctions and Ukraine.
Just two months earlier, in April, Hope Hicks, a Trump spokesperson, had said, incorrectly, that a meeting with Kislyak in Washington “never happened.”15
“There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign,” Hicks told the AP.
Yet on April 27, Trump gave a major foreign policy speech sponsored by the Center for the National Interest at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, in which he called for better relations with Moscow: “I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible,” Trump said.16
That Trump chose the Center for the National Interest as the forum to make his remarks was in itself of interest, in that Putin had referred to its director, former Nixon aide Dmitri Simes, as his “American friend and colleague” in 2013, and Simes had pledged his full support for Putin’s aggressive stance on Syria.17
As it happened, however, Ambassador Kislyak was seated in the front row18 and before the event there was a private meeting with him and Trump; Jeff Sessions, then the Republican senator from Alabama who had joined the Trump team in February; and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.19 Sessions denied being at any such meetings.20
This was not a question of chance contacts occurring with Russian officials at embassy soirees in the Washington social whirl. Throughout the operation, Trump surrogates repeatedly, and deliberately, reached out to Russian officials and otherwise made clear their knowledge of ongoing Russian operations to attack Clinton’s campaign.
Current and former US officials familiar with the exchanges told Reuters that Michael Flynn and other Trump advisers made at least eighteen calls and emails to Kremlin operatives during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential campaign.21 Even before he attended the December 2015 dinner in Moscow with Putin, and before Guccifer 2.0 took credit for the DNC hacking in 2016, General Flynn and his son had met secretly with Kislyak at the ambassador’s residence in Washington. And Flynn’s correspondence strongly suggested that he was very much in the loop with regard to Russia’s hacking operation. In mid-July 2016, he emailed an unnamed Trump communications adviser, “There are a number of things happening (and will happen) this election via cyber operations (by both hacktivists, nation states and the DNC).”22
In the wake of the Trump Tower meeting in June, and the weakened Ukraine plank, Russian support came pouring in—in the form of money, strategic advice, and newly forged alliances. Simon Kukes, a Russian-born American citizen who had replaced Putin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky as head of Yukos, gave a total of $283,283 to various Trump entities, including a joint fund-raising committee called Trump Victory, whose beneficiaries included the Trump campaign, the RNC, and several state-level committees.23
At about the same time, even before his firm had finalized a contract with the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix reached out to Julian Assange and asked him to share the DNC emails so CA could help disseminate them.24
On July 14, George Papadopoulos sent an email to a contact with Kremlin ties asserting that top Trump officials had agreed to a pre-election meeting with representatives of Putin in the UK that would include the campaign’s “national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser.” �
�It has been approved by our side,” Papadopoulos wrote in the email.25
Four days later, the Heritage Foundation staged a seminar which Jeff Sessions attended, and took the opportunity to speak with Kislyak. A number of Sessions’s conversations with the ambassador were intercepted by US spy agencies, which characterized them as “substantive” discussions on US-Russia relations in a Trump administration and Trump’s positions on various issues concerning Russia.26 During the Republican National Convention, Kislyak had also met with Carter Page.27
Then, on July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention was to open in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks released nearly twenty thousand hacked emails from the DNC. Though they revealed nothing illegal, the emails showed that party officials, who are meant to remain neutral, favored Hillary Clinton and had discussed ways to undermine Bernie Sanders, leading to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Typical of much of the mainstream press, the New York Times mentioned allegations “that Russian hackers had penetrated [the DNC] computer system,” but focused on the internal bickering within the Democratic Party. That was more important than the fact that a hostile foreign power was assaulting America’s electoral system.28
And so, one of the most unusual political campaigns in American history was under way, with Trump putting forth a right-wing, nativist, protectionist, anti-immigrant populism, all under the umbrella of “making America great again.” Again and again throughout the campaign, contrary to every expectation, Trump’s transgressions worked to his advantage, not his disadvantage. Thanks to his showmanship, Trump benefited enormously from getting more free media attention than any other candidate. Indeed, according to analysis from SMG Delta, a firm that tracks television advertising, from the beginning of his campaign through February 2016—still early in the campaign cycle—it was estimated that Trump received nearly $2 billion in free media, twice what Clinton got.29
Mixing the aesthetics of professional wrestling and reality TV, he threw red meat to his base. It was good—not bad—to demean Mexicans as rapists; to say women who have abortions should serve time in jail; to deride Senator John McCain, a Vietnam War hero who was tortured and spent six years as a POW, because he had been captured; to ban immigrants solely on the basis of their Muslim religion; even to urge a supporter to “knock the crap out of ’em [anti-Trump protesters].”
“I promise you, I will pay the legal fees,” Trump added. And the crowds loved it.
Even then, Trump upped the ante. When she was secretary of state, Clinton had used a private email address and server, rather than State Department servers, thereby raising concerns about security and the preservation of emails, and leading to an FBI probe. That had ended on July 5, with a recommendation that no charges be filed.30
But Trump wouldn’t let go. In Doral, Florida, on July 27, Trump said he hoped Russian intelligence had successfully penetrated Hillary Clinton’s network and stolen her emails, and urged Russia to release them, as a way of getting to the bottom of it. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”31
Now, as the Times reported, Trump was explicitly encouraging “a foreign adversary to conduct cyber espionage against a former secretary of state.” He had openly urged Russia to interfere on his behalf in a presidential election.
Soon, Russian support for Trump flooded in from all over. The Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization that, according to a Justice Department indictment, aims “to interfere with elections and political processes,” had started producing, purchasing, and posting pro-Trump ads on American social media. By July it had hired more than eighty employees to put out ads to social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.32
Not everyone was in the dark. On July 30, the Guardian reported on Trump’s ties to Russia and Manafort’s to pro-Putin forces in Ukraine as they may have related to the changed Ukraine plank in the GOP platform. In addition to the DNC hack, additional hacks against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign had been reported. “The FBI is investigating, with all signs pointing to Russian involvement,” the Guardian reported, adding that “experts argue Vladimir Putin has attempted in the past to damage western democracy, saying Russian security agencies have made cyberattacks on French, Greek, Italian and Latvian targets during elections.”33
On September 5, the Washington Post published a story by Dana Priest, Ellen Nakashima, and Tom Hamburger reporting that “U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.” The article added that the Russian campaign used cyberwarfare to hack computers used in politics and to spread disinformation.34
At about the same time, Malcolm Nance published The Plot to Hack America, exposing how the Russians were using cyberspies and WikiLeaks to hack the DNC, the Clinton campaign, their friends and allies in the media, and voter registration systems in no fewer than twenty-five states. In October, the Financial Times35 presented evidence that Trump SoHo had multiple ties to “an international money-laundering network.” But the article, which was published behind a paywall, was not widely picked up, and with so much other reporting grabbing headlines, the issue of Trump’s laundering money never dominated the national conversation.
But these reports were the exceptions. The ongoing drip, drip, drip of thousands of emails being released throughout the campaign by Guccifer and WikiLeaks commandeered the news cycles far more than the revelations of the Russian intelligence operation.
Meanwhile, contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign continued unabated, under cover of news instead of night. In August, Manafort met with longtime aide Konstantin Kilimnik at a Manhattan cigar bar, the Grand Havana Room, and “talked about bills unpaid by [their] clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement by Kilimnik.36 In Ukraine, political foes charged that Kilimnik might be working with Russian intelligence, but Kilimnik told the Washington Post that his meetings with Manafort were “private visits” and were “in no way related to politics or the presidential campaign in the U.S.”37
Yet suspicions were raised when a jet linked to Oleg Deripaska landed in New Jersey within hours of a meeting between Manafort and Kilimnik.38 (A Deripaska spokeswoman told Vice News the billionaire was not offered and did not receive briefings from Manafort.)39
In mid-August, Manafort resigned as campaign manager after it was revealed that he’d received secret payments from Ukraine. A few days later, however, on August 19, one of Manafort’s daughters, Andrea Manafort Shand, texted a friend that the resignation was merely for show. “So I got to the bottom of it,” she wrote, in texts published by the Huffington Post.40 “As I suspected, my dad resigned from being the public face of the campaign but is still very much involved behind the scenes. He felt he was becoming a distraction.”
As for the campaign staff, Trump’s team merely shuffled the deck. The media spotlighted newcomers Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, but Manafort continued to have influence. His deputy, Rick Gates, who had been with him in Ukraine, moved to the Republican National Committee, where he soon established himself as a player in Trump’s circle.41
Delighting in the transgressions underlying the apparent chaos, Roger Stone broadcast his complicity, appearing by phone on the Alex Jones show, hosted by the noted conspiracy theorist/radio broadcaster in April, and predicting that “devastating” revelations would be forthcoming from WikiLeaks about the Clinton Foundation. On August 21, Stone tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”42
In August, Stone, in an appearance at the Southwest Broward Republican Organization in Florida, answered a question about what
he suspected would be the campaign’s “October surprise” by saying: “I actually have communicated with [Julian] Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”43
“I expect Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis fairly soon,” Stone said later, in September, on Boston Herald Radio. He added he was in touch with Assange “through an intermediary.”44
Stone was not the only Trump operative working with WikiLeaks. Representatives of the site coordinated points of attack directly with Donald Trump Jr. as well, with WikiLeaks emailing him on October 12, “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications.” (A couple of days earlier, Donald Trump had proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!”)
“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks wrote, directing Don Jr. to a link that suggested it would help Trump supporters sort through the stolen documents.45 “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”
Don Jr. didn’t respond to that message, but as the Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, just fifteen minutes later the candidate himself tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
By this time, Donald Trump’s ties to WikiLeaks and the Russian bots were fully operational and more than capable of coming to Trump’s rescue when necessary. That became apparent on October 7, when the Washington Post released the infamous video of Trump with Billy Bush, then-host of the television show Access Hollywood, in which Trump says about women that you can just “grab ’em by the pussy.”