by Luke Harding
Trump’s comments—made from his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey—weren’t even true. Foreign Service staff evicted from Moscow would remain on the federal payroll and work elsewhere. State Department employees were left appalled and angry by Trump’s failure to defend them, and by Secretary Tillerson’s feeble silence.
A day later Trump said his comments were sarcastic. But he offered no criticism of Putin.
When it came to Trump and Putin, one person was stronger, one weaker. Putin knew the full extent to which Trump and his entourage had—or hadn’t—collaborated with Moscow. This gave the Kremlin leverage.
Putin’s usual method in these circumstances was to exploit the situation to his advantage. He could turn the pressure up on Trump or dial it down. Either way, the president was helpless.
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By summer 2017 two processes were taking place in Washington. They were opposites.
One involved discovery: finding leads, turning over stones, following evidence. The other: hiding tracks, making false or misleading statements, and generally covering up.
The second process of concealment appeared to be led, erratically and impulsively, by the president himself. The first by Trump’s most dangerous adversary. Not Congress or the Democratic Party but Bob Mueller, whose inquiry into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was gaining speed and force.
The Hamburg summit had a final chapter. The Times discovered the Veselnitskaya meeting, featuring Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort. It asked the White House for comment. According to The Washington Post, Kushner and Ivanka held discussions with their lawyers on the sidelines of the G20, to plot a way forward.
It was unclear at this point how much the Times had. One version said that Trump Jr. wanted to give a full explanation; another that he was opposed. Kushner was in favor of transparency, believing that it would be better to give details and release the relevant emails to the media. His view: sooner or later the story would come out. The president’s legal team, led by Marc Kasowitz, agreed, as did Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Kushner, the Post reported.
The consensus lasted until Trump climbed aboard Air Force One. Sitting in a forward cabin en route to Washington from Hamburg, Trump rewrote his son’s press statement. What emerged was a minimal four-line version. Trump Jr. said:
It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow-up.
This was erroneous—a lie, in fact.
There was no mention of the fact that the Kremlin had pre-promised “sensitive” material on Clinton that could help the Trump campaign. Instead, the president made out that the meeting was exclusively about adoptions. It happened following an approach from an unnamed “acquaintance,” Trump dictated.
Here, then, was the president’s method: to conceal and to obfuscate, even if others thought this a poor strategy. It appeared to flow from Trump’s belief that he was his own best adviser and tactician. In this case, Trump’s actions were counterproductive. As with his firing of James Comey, it looked as if Trump was trying to impede justice. Or—if not that—to throw dirt in the face of those who would investigate him.
The special counsel’s probe began in May. It was based in a nondescript office in Washington, where more than a dozen attorneys, investigators, and support staff were busy at work. These were Mueller’s staff. According to CNN, the atmosphere was akin to that of a small attorney’s office, with FBI agents and prosecutors examining different aspects of a growing investigation.
There was the core collusion inquiry and the possible obstruction of justice from within the White House. Plus the role of Manafort and Flynn, both of whom had neglected to register as foreign agents despite their lobbying efforts for foreign governments.
There were few hard facts. As Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, put it to me: “Mueller is famous for managing an extremely tight ship in terms of leaks.” His inquiry was being conducted against the backdrop of “an incredible storm” inside the FBI. Staff were furious at the way Trump had treated Comey, Horton said, with the mood one of unprecedented “hostility” toward the White House.
Mueller may have been tight-lipped but his choice of team gave clues. His investigation was moving in a classic manner. It was following the money—in this case the flow of cash from Russia and Eastern Europe. One of those hired by Mueller was Andrew Weissmann, a New York federal prosecutor known for going after mafia families in the city with Russian ties. Mueller—who also investigated Enron—had come from the Justice Department, where he headed up the criminal fraud section.
Another recruit was Lisa Page. Page was a Justice Department trial attorney who had been based in Budapest. There she had pursued Russian organized crime and Semion Mogilevich, the mobster allegedly under FSB protection. Budapest was an important FBI center and a hub for Russian intelligence.
Other high-powered names included Elizabeth Prelogar, a fluent Russian speaker who had studied in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar. Plus Michael Dreeben—a former deputy solicitor general—described in the blog Lawfare as “quite possibly the best criminal appellate lawyer in America.” And James Quarles, a veteran attorney who worked as an assistant prosecutor during the original Watergate investigation.
It was a formidable team. No surprise, then, that the White House was keen to discredit Mueller and slime the FBI.
Trump decried the investigation as a political witch hunt. He indicated that he might consider firing Mueller and attacked Sessions. In an interview with the Times Trump said that if he had known Sessions would recuse himself over Russia—an act that led indirectly to Mueller’s probe—he would never have made Sessions attorney general. Trump said his own financial affairs were irrelevant to the Russia thing and a “red line.”
These public hostilities appeared not to deflect Mueller from his job. Without fuss, he relocated to a secure suite of offices better equipped to handle secret and classified material. Mueller was an obvious target for Russian espionage and technical collection measures such as bugging. His office grew. It had sixteen attorneys, with Greg Andres, a fraud specialist and expert on foreign bribery, the latest.
When it came to collecting evidence, Mueller had different tools in his box. He could informally request documents, issue subpoenas, or—the legal equivalent of a big hammer—carry out raids on a suspect’s property.
In late July FBI agents gathered outside an innocuous-looking residential building in Alexandria, Virginia. It was early. They didn’t have an appointment. Dozens of agents burst into an apartment. They carried away documents.
The home belonged to Paul Manafort. Later the same day, July 26, Manafort had been due to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The FBI preempted this by going before a judge and obtaining a search warrant. The FBI had to offer evidence that a crime had likely taken place to persuade a judge that its actions were proportionate.
The raid was a stunning sign to the White House that Mueller’s inquiry was in earnest. Moreover, it implied that FBI investigators weren’t fully confident Manafort would tell them everything he knew.
It’s unclear what the FBI took. Manafort had already turned over three hundred pages to congressional committees, including notes taken during his Trump Tower sit-down with Veselnitskaya. A similar request was made to the White House, asking for records from the meeting. Manafort denied collusion and said via his lawyer that he was cooperating with law enforcement.
Investigators also zeroed in on Flynn. They asked the Trump administration to hand over material concerning Trump’s former national security adviser. Witnesses were also questioned in connection with Flynn’s lobbying activities, The New York Times reported. Mueller’s focus was on whether the Turkish government was secretly behi
nd the payments made to Flynn via a Turkish businessman.
Chris Steele declined to say whether Mueller had been in touch with him. But it would be logical for Mueller to establish a channel of communication with him in London. And for Steele to help the investigation where possible.
When Mueller took over, he used a grand jury in Virginia, set up by his predecessor, to execute his requests. His next step was to convene a dedicated grand jury in D.C., a few blocks away from the suite of offices where he and his team were working. This indicated that Mueller intended to use the jury to make extensive requests for documents.
As The Guardian’s Julian Borger noted, this was inhospitable terrain for the president. Republicans were an endangered species in the District of Columbia, where Trump won just 4 percent of the vote. It was a nightmare jurisdiction for him politically—unlike Virginia, where Republicans were more prevalent—and the place from where any indictments would be issued. And where potential criminal trials could be held.
All of this was ominous for Trump and his beleaguered presidency. There were further unhappy rumors sweeping Washington—that either Manafort or Flynn, and possibly others, had been “flipped.” This meant that they had agreed to become cooperating witnesses with the FBI in exchange for leniency down the line.
There was no proof of this. And it was unclear when Mueller would report it or if the evidence his team was accumulating in painstaking fashion would ever lead to criminal charges. The big question—as one former national security adviser put it to me—was whether Mueller’s “arrows would impale Team Orange.”
But the legal net appeared to be tightening. Of its own accord Trump’s administration was freely imploding. First Flynn, then Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, and then Steve Bannon—by midsummer all were fired and out.
Trump repeated his claim that he had no investments in Russia, no deals, no loans. This was formally true. But as Mueller was discovering, there was plenty of flow in the other direction—of Russian money into Trump real estate and related entities. Going back several decades.
There was also the matter of the oligarch who bought Trump’s former Florida house. The purchase left Trump with a $50 million profit. Why would a Russian do that?
10
From Russia with Cash
1984–2017
Perm–Florida–Monaco–Cyprus–New York
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
—DONALD TRUMP, JR., speaking in Moscow in 2008 about the Trump Organization
Perm, 1984. It was the beginning of term at Perm’s medical academy. Student doctors were lining up for registration. One of them was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the son of accomplished local medics.
Rybolovlev couldn’t help but notice the girl standing immediately behind him in the line. She was blond, blue-eyed, and—as he would soon discover—smart, a whiz at math, daughter of an engineer. The girl’s name was Elena. Dmitry and Elena took the admissions test together. They found themselves in the same class for cardiology.
Their teenage romance was a coup de foudre. Over the next six years they passed all their exams together. Elena won the Lenin Prize, three times. As well as study, the young couple explored the subsidized cultural life on offer in the late Soviet Union. There were weekly trips to the city’s opera house and ballet, to museums and the theater.
It was a modest lifestyle—but who lived better?
At the age of twenty-one they married. The first of two daughters, Ekaterina—Katia—arrived two years later. By this point Rybolovlev was considering his options. He could pursue the same steady career as his father, Evgeny, a cardiologist. Or he could move to Moscow, learn about finance, and plunge into the untried world of Russian capitalism. He chose the second.
What happened next resembles a dark fairy tale. In 1992 Rybolovlev took a business course in the capital. He returned to Perm, set up an investment bank, and applied what he knew about privatization to the region’s Soviet-era chemical factories. He acquired a stake in Uralkali, Russia’s biggest producer of potassium-based fertilizer. By 1996 he had control.
Rybolovlev would insist that unlike other tycoons he received no leg up from the state. Apparent proof of this came the same year when he spent eleven months in jail, accused of murdering a rival factory executive. After getting out, exonerated, he joined his family in Switzerland and the safety of Geneva. Uralkali expanded. So did Rybolovlev’s fortune.
In 2007 Uralkali floated on the London Stock Exchange. By the spring of 2008, according to Forbes, Rybolovlev was the world’s fifty-ninth richest man. He was worth $12.8 billion, the magazine said. He was considerably better off than Trump.
It was at this point, in July, that Rybolovlev purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for a staggering $95 million. The mansion had eighteen bedrooms, Greek fountains, a hundred-foot swimming pool, a cavernous underground garage, and a Jacuzzi overlooking the ocean. And a French name—Maison de l’Amitié. Rybolovlev managed to knock $5 million off Trump’s original $100 million asking price. Trump’s profit was in the region of $50 million.
Even so, the purchase raised eyebrows. First, the Florida property market had been cooling for some time. Second, the house had been on the market for two years. Third, Trump had paid $41.4 million for it less than four years earlier. Fourth, subsequent renovations were modest. Fifth, Rybolovlev had never set foot on the estate, although he did once visit to take a look and paddled on the edge of the territory. Sixth, the house had mold.
The Palm Beach home would feature in a spectacular divorce action brought in December 2008 by Elena against her husband after two decades of marriage. In court papers, she accused him of infidelity. She alleged that Rybolovlev had secretly shipped off their art collection to warehouses in London and Singapore.
This was no trivial matter. The Rybolovlevs, the papers said, owned several Picassos and Modiglianis, together with two Monets, a Gauguin, a Van Gogh, a Degas, and a Rothko. Plus a collection of rare furniture, much of it from Paris. (One piece, a circular-top table, or guéridon, was decorated with mythical figures celebrating the history of love.) There was a yacht, bought for $60 million, named My Anna after the couple’s second daughter. And other assets.
In 2015 they reached a private settlement. As for the Palm Beach mansion, Rybolovlev showed little interest in it.
He never lived there.
He eventually demolished it.
According to the French sportswriter Arnaud Ramsey, Rybolovlev was not an idiot or the kind of person to throw away money. Rather he was intelligent—“his brain is really quick”—shy, modest, lacking in ostentation or “bling-bling.” His appearance was unremarkable. When Ramsey met him, he was wearing a tracksuit.
At the same time Rybolovlev had an aura of “being the boss” and “not being afraid of anybody,” Ramsey said.
The Russian wasn’t a fan of the media. It took Ramsey several attempts before Rybolovlev finally agreed to an interview. They met at Rybolovlev’s penthouse mansion in Monaco. The apartment had a private elevator, terrace, spa, and library. And a backstory: its previous owner, the Lebanese-Brazilian financier Edmond Safra, burned to death in it in 1999 in a grisly case of arson.
The oligarch acquired another local asset, Monaco’s soccer team. In 2011 he became the majority owner of AS Monaco FC, which soon scaled the French premier league. One person who had lunch with him in his penthouse around this period told me that Rybolovlev said he was looking at productive ways of investing in the United States. The billionaire was on a diet and “ultra-thin,” the person said.
Ramsey interviewed Rybolovlev again on the Greek island of Skorpios. They talked about AS Monaco’s prospects while sitting on the Russian’s yacht. The island used to belong to the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and was now owned by Rybolovlev’s daughter Katia. Her other assets included an apartment overlooking Central Park, which she bought at age twenty-two for $88 million—a New
York record at the time.
Ramsey turned his encounters with the publicity-shy billionaire into a lyrical French-language biography. Its title was The Russian Novel of the President of AS Monaco.
In fact, at age twelve or thirteen, Rybolovlev was inspired not by Russian literature but by the books of an American writer, Theodore Dreiser. As a Soviet teenager he read Dreiser’s novel The Financier. It was from this portrayal of nineteenth-century capitalism, set in Philadelphia, that Rybolovlev learned about speculation and profit, taking inspiration from Dreiser’s youthful hero, Frank Cowperwood. The fictional Cowperwood and the future oligarch both spent time in jail.
Rybolovlev said his success, like Cowperwood’s, was self-made. This was true. But getting rich in Russia and—more important—protecting what you owned from predatory external attack required connections, as Aras Agalarov and other oligarchs well understood.
In 2000 the Perm region held an election for governor. It was assumed that the liberal incumbent, Gennady Igumnov, would win. Instead Rybolovlev unexpectedly backed another candidate, Perm’s mayor, Yuri Trutnev. Trutnev was duly elected.
This was a shrewd move on Rybolovlev’s part. Four years later Trutnev was due to go on vacation when he got a phone call from Moscow. It was the Kremlin. Trutnev had hosted Putin when the president visited Perm. They had got on. Both were practitioners of martial arts: for Putin, judo; for Trutnev, karate. Putin summoned Trutnev and appointed him minister for the environment and natural resources.
This was a key post. Trutnev was now in a position to oversee Russia’s oil and gas sector. He could find environmental violations—or not.
One of Trutnev’s allies was Igor Sechin, the head of the major oil company Rosneft and Putin’s powerful ally. The two sometimes had bureaucratic squabbles. But Trutnev consistently backed Sechin in his conflicts with other oil firms. For example, Trutnev’s ministry supported Rosneft when it took over the assets of Yukos. (In 2003 Putin jailed Yukos’s billionaire owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.) Inside Russia’s power structures Trutnev’s reputation was unwavering—he was the president’s loyal creature.
