by Luke Harding
Manafort appears in subsequent Steele memos. One follows his August resignation and is titled “The Demise of Trump’s Campaign Manager Paul Manafort.” On August 15—a day after the Times broke the ledger story—Yanukovych held a secret meeting with Putin, it said. The venue was near Volgograd in southern Russia, not far from Yanukovych’s base-in-exile at Rostov-on-Don.
Western media revelations about Manafort and Ukraine featured prominently on the agenda, the memo said.
YANUKOVYCH had confided in PUTIN that he did authorize and order substantial kick-back payments to MANAFORT as alleged but sought to reassure him that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this.
Putin had always held a dim view of Yanukovych. He saw him as uncouth and something of an idiot. This occasion was no different. The dossier said:
Given YANUKOVYCH’s (unimpressive) track record in covering up his own corrupt tracks in the past, PUTIN and others in the Russian leadership were sceptical about the ex-Ukrainian president’s reassurances on this relating to MANAFORT. They therefore feared the scandal still had legs, especially as MANAFORT had been commercially active in Ukraine right up to the time (in March 2016) when he joined TRUMP’s campaign team. For them it therefore remained a point of potential vulnerability and embarrassment.
There was a further piece of gossip. An unnamed political consultant working on the Trump campaign said it was true the Ukraine revelations had played a part in Manafort’s demise. Additionally, several senior players close to Trump had wanted Manafort out. They had sought to loosen Manafort’s control “on strategy and policy formulation.” Chief among them was Lewandowski, “who hated MANAFORT personally and remained close to TRUMP.”
Beyond the dossier there were lingering questions over Manafort’s longtime colleagues in Ukraine. Some were rumored to have links with Russian intelligence.
On the day that Manafort quit Trump’s campaign, Politico published a long profile of Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik worked with Manafort from 2005. He led Manafort’s office in Kiev and helped to advise the new opposition bloc. In 2016 Kilimnik flew to the United States twice to see his old mentor—once in May, two weeks before Manafort became Trump campaign chairman, and again in August. The second meeting took place at the Grand Havana Room, an upmarket New York cigar bar. The two men discussed the forthcoming election, Ukraine, and unpaid bills, Kilimnik told the Post.
In addition, Manafort and Kilimnik swapped a large number of private emails. In one, sent two weeks before Trump accepted the nomination, Manafort delivered a message via Kilimnik to Deripaska. It made an offer: Manafort was willing to give the oligarch the inside track on Trump’s election campaign. “If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote on July 7. Deripaska’s close relationship with Putin meant that any such briefing would reach the Kremlin. The two colleagues also discussed money owed to them by various clients. This cash was referred to in euphemistic terms as “black caviar.”
The briefings never happened. The emails were “innocuous” and the offer “routine,” Manafort’s spokesman said.
Still, the exchange raised further questions, not least because Kilimnik’s biography had unusual moments. Born in Soviet Ukraine, he attended a Soviet military school, where he learned to speak fluent English and Swedish. According to Politico, his first job was as a Russian military interpreter—a post that inevitably brought him into contact with army intelligence and the Aquarium. (In Suvorov’s day, the GRU did everything possible to persuade its officers to acquire foreign languages. You got a 10 percent salary bonus for a Western language; 20 percent for an Asian one, he wrote.)
In 1995 Kilimnik joined the International Republican Institute in Moscow. His American colleagues there knew about his past and referred to him as “Kostya, the guy from the GRU.” This wasn’t a problem since the institute didn’t engage in sensitive work. Former officials described Kostya as smart, nonideological, and interested in money. An IRI alumnus, Phil Griffin, hired him to work with Manafort.
Kilimnik soon became a trusted member of the team—traveling on Manafort’s planes, including to Crimea, and serving as his interpreter. Some associates believed he still had links with “Moscow Central.” Others thought that the military intelligence episode happened long ago.
That August I sent Kilimnik an email. Might he talk about his time with Paul Manafort? His reply was friendly. Then the Politico piece appeared. I emailed again. Was he, by any chance, a spy? Kilimnik was scathing. He replied:
Thank God Politico hasn’t figured out that I taught Colonel Putin German and judo. And that visit to Dallas in November 1963—phew, how could they have missed it. :))
Then:
Seriously though—nobody gives a shit here about such stuff because it is so insane. It is well understood by everybody that the real goal of this whole campaign is to push Manafort away from Trump and annihilate his chances of winning, which are there as long as Manafort runs his campaign. My guess is Trump understands this well and HRC’s strategy has not worked so far.
People who matter here, including the President himself [Petro Poroshenko], understand very well Manafort’s role here and do not buy into all the gibberish about the black ledgers etc. Manafort will make billions on this free PR working for the same people he used to work. And probably get a lot of new clients with his newly found fame.
I am just a minor casualty in the US political game, which honestly has nothing to do with Ukraine or its future. If I am the biggest issue this country has—then we are all seriously in trouble. :)) But now I could write spy novels.
Off to collect my paycheck at KGB. :))
K
Kilimnik’s tone was one of cheerfully aggrieved mockery. Anyone who suggested he was a Putin agent, he implied, was a tin-hatted conspiracy theorist. The black ledger, the campaign against Manafort, Hillary’s smears—all this was media candy floss, spun from nothing in a moment of left-wing American hysteria.
The thing that gave me pause was Kilimnik’s use of smiley faces. True, Russians are big emoticon fans. But I’d seen something similar before. In 2013 the Russian diplomat in charge of political influence operations in London was named Sergey Nalobin. Nalobin had close links with Russian intelligence. He was the son of a KGB general; his brother had worked for the FSB; Nalobin looked like a career foreign intelligence officer. Maybe even a deputy rezident, the KGB term for station chief.
On his Twitter feed Nalobin described himself thus:
A brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship :)
—
By spring 2017 Manafort was at the center of various investigations. There was the FBI’s probe into links between the Trump campaign and Russia. There were ongoing hearings in the Senate and the House. Additionally, agents from the U.S. Treasury Department were actively scrutinizing Manafort’s affairs. The FBI, I was told, visited Ukraine in search of clues.
Manafort’s activities in Eastern Europe extended well beyond conventional campaign politics. Manafort had lobbied on behalf of Yanukovych in Washington. According to Nayyem, this was an extensive operation to look after Yanukovych’s interests in the United States. It encompassed visas—for the president and his team—and arranging top-level meetings. It included business deals.
According to leaked emails, Manafort and Gates ran an undercover U.S. lobbying operation between 2012 and 2014. Its goal was to attract positive coverage for Yanukovych in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. At this point European leaders were calling on Ukraine’s president to free Tymoshenko. The campaign sought to undermine U.S. sympathy for her.
Gates enlisted two Washington lobbying firms to help—Mercury and the Podesta Group. They received around $2.2 million for their efforts, which Gates personally directed. The money was routed via a Yanukovych-linked “foundation.” There was a compelling case that Manafort should have registered at this point as a foreign agent since he was lobbying on behalf of a foreign
government. He didn’t do so.
Meanwhile, by 2017 Manafort’s previous statements regarding the black ledger were coming apart. The Associated Press published financial records that confirmed at least $1.2 million listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name had been received by his consulting firm in the United States. The payments—made in 2007 and 2009—were for $455,249 and $750,000. They were real.
Previously Manafort had dismissed the ledger as a fabrication. Now, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, he was saying something different. He told the Associated Press that the transactions were for “legitimate payments for political consulting work.” “I invoiced my clients and they paid via wire transfer, which I received through a U.S. bank.” His clients had specified the method of payment, he said.
This method was odd. Rather than paying him directly, the “clients” had used an exotic offshore route. It was difficult to trace. The $750,000 had first gone to Central America and to a company registered in Belize, Neocom Systems Ltd. From there it had traveled to Manafort’s account at a branch of Wachovia National Bank in Alexandria, Virginia. The other payment went via another Belize shell firm.
Like his oligarch clients, Manafort was a prolific user of shell companies. The Associated Press reported that another $1 million went from a mysterious firm to a Manafort-linked company. The October 2009 payment was made via the Bank of Cyprus. The next day the cash was split into two chunks of approximately $500,000. It was then disbursed into other accounts with no obvious owner. Cyprus is well known as a center for money laundering and as a destination for dubious Russian wealth.
There’s nothing illegal about using offshore entities. Manafort rejects any charge of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, the pattern of his financial dealings is an eyebrow-raising one—encompassing tax havens, shell firms, and big transactions made in cash. The lobbyist used multiple bank accounts, according to court papers. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network was investigating, sources in Cyprus told the Associated Press.
There were further puzzling transactions featuring New York real estate.
Between 2006 and 2013, Manafort bought three properties in New York City—his Trump Tower apartment; a brownstone in Brooklyn; and a place in SoHo. He purchased all three using shell companies, paying the full amount in cash. Next, he reregistered the properties in his name. Then he took out large mortgages against their value. Three days before Trump’s inauguration, Manafort borrowed $7 million against his home on Union Street in Brooklyn, bought four years earlier for $3 million.
Manafort insists that these were ordinary business transactions, done in a transparent manner, and with his identity fully disclosed.
Others, however, allege in court papers that Manafort used real estate transactions to launder money for his Ukrainian and Russian oligarch friends.
In 2011 Tymoshenko sued Manafort in the district court of New York. Her lengthy writ claimed that Manafort “played a key role in [a] conspiracy and racketeering enterprise.” The alleged scheme saw money “skimmed off” from natural gas transactions in Ukraine. Part of it was then laundered “through a labyrinth of New York–based shell companies and bank accounts.” The cash was “funneled back” to Europe and used to bribe corrupt Ukrainian officials, Tymoshenko alleged.
In particular, she pointed the finger at Dmytro Firtash, Yanukovych’s wealthy supporter. Firtash was the public face of RosUkrEnergo, the intermediary company that imported gas from Russia. Tymoshenko’s writ alleged that the company was a mechanism for massive corruption. Its real owner, she claimed, was Semion Mogilevich, the Ukrainian-Russian mobster wanted by the FBI, who was believed to be hiding in Moscow.
Firtash did invest money in Manafort’s real estate deals. One Manafort scheme was to buy the site of the demolished Drake Hotel in Manhattan and redevelop it at a cost of almost $900 million. Firtash transferred at least $25 million to the project. Tymoshenko alleged that the plan was never serious, with the cash merely sent to the United States for the purposes of money laundering.
Firtash denied this, too. A federal judge threw out Tymoshenko’s lawsuit on the grounds that the allegations were outside U.S. jurisdiction.
For Firtash there were more serious problems. In February 2017 the appeals court in Vienna ruled that he should be extradited to the United States to face bribery charges. Manafort’s onetime business partner was also wanted in Spain, to answer accusations of money laundering.
Collusion, possible treachery, tax havens, offshore shell companies, and a shifting trail of cash stretching from Eastern Europe via Cyprus to the heart of Manhattan—this was a difficult story that would take some unraveling. One could sympathize with the FBI agents charged with the job of making sense of all this. Their investigation was unlikely to be quick.
There was one consoling thought: that the FBI director, James Comey, was only four years into a ten-year term. This extended period in office was a deliberate feature of the U.S. system. It was designed to place the agency’s chief above politics and partisanship. What mattered here was the law and the slow, steady, and impartial pursuit of justice, even if the trail led all the way to the White House.
Since Comey’s position was impregnable, the FBI’s investigation was assured. No one would try to meddle with that. Not even Trump was that stupid.
7
Tuesday Night Massacre
Spring–Summer 2017
Washington, D.C.
A nut job.
—DONALD TRUMP on James Comey, speaking to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak
The scandal that engulfed Washington in the spring of 2017 took place in a remarkably compact area. It had begun at the Democratic National Headquarters at 430 South Capitol Street. When I walked by, the signs on the DNC’s perimeter fence looked—given everything that had happened—mordantly superfluous. They said: “Beware, you are under video surveillance.”
The intruders who had busted into the building were incorporeal. They hadn’t jumped the wall or broken a window. Instead, the Russian hackers had entered electronically, an unstoppable army of ghosts. They had grabbed what they wanted and exited—not that they were in. The Times ran a memorable photo from inside the building. It showed a computer server next to an old filing cabinet, broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary.
I found the DNC office locked up and deserted. It was a Sunday. I sat outside in the spring sunshine and scrawled a few notes. The building looked modernist, with a curvilinear design. There was a Stars and Stripes in one window; on the sidewalk daffodils. Cars droned over a flyover; in the middle distance a factory belched gray smoke—all was urban normality.
Two blocks away, along a shaded road of handsome brick houses and front gardens decked out with pansies, was another building. The road climbed upward. This was the Republican National Committee at 310 First Street SE. Outside pink cherry trees blossomed. If you believed U.S. intelligence, the ghosts had got in here, too. The RNC’s emails hadn’t been released but sat on a server somewhere in Moscow.
A few hundred yards north was Capitol Hill. Here was the U.S. Congress. By this point Congress was home to an inquisitorial process—or, to be more accurate, processes. They involved the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Senate’s judiciary committee, and the House’s oversight and government reform committee. Four committees in all.
Their broad subject was what Twitter had taken to calling #Russiagate or #Kremlingate. These names hadn’t quite stuck, but the political scandal was real, and getting bigger.
Another investigation was going on nearby. A diagonal walk from Capitol Hill led to Pennsylvania Avenue and the J. Edgar Hoover building, the headquarters of the FBI. From the outside the building looked impermeable, its secrets safe. Trump, however, had changed that. The concrete 1970s complex—unlovely, lumpish, and softened only by a line of trees—was now one of the most porous places in Washington, a palace of leaks.
Almost next door was D.C
.’s former post office and clock tower. In autumn 2016 Trump reopened it as a luxury hotel, just before he became the forty-fifth president. It was raining when I got there. I went inside to dry off. A giant U.S. flag hung in a cavernous atrium. There were security guards with earpieces; above the bar TV sets were tuned to Fox and CNN. Families were having lunch. The women and their daughters had Alice bands; the men wore golfing sweaters.
Trump had had dinner there a few weeks earlier, in late February. One of his guests—added at the last minute—was Nigel Farage. Farage was the grinning architect of Britain’s Brexit and the public face of the anti-immigration UK Independence Party. And a Trump cheerleader. Other guests included Ivanka, Jared, and Florida governor Rick Scott. (Back in London ten days later, Farage dropped in to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy.)
Trump’s actual office, the White House, was close by. In the surrounding streets—Mother Jones on F Street, The Guardian in Farragut Square—investigative journalists were hard at work. Some research happened here, some out of office. Later that evening I met someone in the Tabard Inn, an idiosyncratic English country house–style bar and hotel on N Street. Here reporters and bureaucrats got together over pale ale. Information—Washington’s currency of choice—flowed in all directions.
In the lead-up to the U.S. election, the intelligence community hadn’t taken Trump terribly seriously. They had—according to one source I spoke to—viewed him as quirky and entertaining. There was a widespread assumption that he wouldn’t win. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office, there was a new and unsettled mood. “There is a very high level of anxiety inside the tent. It stretches across all agencies. It concerns who Trump is and what he’s up to,” the source said. “And his entourage.”
