Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Harding, Luke

  At this point Trump Jr. might have notified the FBI. And declined to cooperate with Goldstone, who was acting as emissary for a power with its own agenda.

  Instead Trump Jr. answered:

  Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?

  Later in the summer meant closer to the election—to a time when Moscow-supplied kompromat might cause maximum damage to Clinton. A weekend passed. Then, on Monday, June 6, Goldstone emailed again, this time with the unambiguous subject line: “Russia-Clinton—private and confidential.”

  Let me know when you are free to talk with Emin by phone about this Hillary info—you had mentioned early this week so wanted to try to schedule a time and day. Best to you and your family.

  Trump Jr. messaged back—“Rob could we speak now?” Goldstone tracked down Emin, who was onstage in Moscow, and arranged for him to call Trump Jr. on his cell phone.

  The following day, June 7, Goldstone emailed again:

  Hope all is well. Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and the Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday. I believe you are aware of this meeting—and so wondered if 3 p.m. or later on Thursday works for you? I assume it would be at your office.

  Trump Jr.:

  How about 3 at our offices? Thanks Rob appreciate you helping set it up.

  Goldstone:

  Perfect…I won’t sit in on the meeting, but will bring them at 3pm and introduce you etc. I will send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today.

  Trump Jr.:

  Great. It will likely be Paul Manafort, my brother in law [Jared Kushner] and me. 725 Fifth Avenue 25th floor.

  The next day, June 8, Goldstone sent another email, postponing the meeting by one hour to 4:00 p.m. since the “Russian attorney is in court.” Trump Jr. offered to bring the meeting forward by a day. Goldstone replied that the attorney—Natalia Veselnitskaya, who worked for Agalarov—hadn’t yet arrived from Moscow. Trump Jr. forwarded the whole exchange with its damning subject line to Manafort and Kushner.

  Goldstone didn’t act much like an undercover operative. When he arrived at Trump Tower on June 9, he posted his location on Facebook. Veselnitskaya brought several people with her to the meeting. One of them was Rinat Akhmetshin. Akhmetshin was a lobbyist and U.S. citizen who had previously campaigned against the Magnitsky Act.

  He was also a former Soviet intelligence officer who had served in Afghanistan. Akhmetshin insisted he was never GRU and had merely worked for a branch of the army that supported the Special Department, a KGB unit attached to the military. But he made no secret of the fact that he was still in contact with people from Russian intelligence. One associate described Akhmetshin as fun, charming, erudite, a gastronome, and “a total sleazebag” who would work for anybody, regardless of whether they were pro- or anti-Kremlin. Indeed, Akhmetshin told the Financial Times that his spy contacts in Moscow didn’t trust him because “they know I’m a mercenary.”

  Also in the room was a translator, Anatoli Samochornov, since Veselnitskaya didn’t speak English. Plus Ike Kaveladze, the U.S.-based vice president of Agalarov’s Crocus Group.

  Akhmetshin turned up at the meeting in sneakers and jeans. He later said Veselnitskaya handed over a folder of documents to the Trumps—“lawyerly stuff,” as he put it. It concerned a firm linked to Browder’s Hermitage Capital that had donated to Bill Clinton’s foundation. This could be “a great campaign issue,” Veselnitskaya said, according to Akhmetshin.

  Veselnitskaya had hired Fusion GPS in 2014. It had supplied her with some of the material on Browder. (Glenn Simpson saw no conflict of interest between the Magnitsky project and his work beginning a year later on Trump. His view: he wasn’t a political activist or a crusader; he was an investigator.)

  What was going on at this meeting? Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin had been lobbying against the 2012 Magnitsky Act for some time. They had originally hoped to give evidence in Washington to Congress and its foreign affairs subcommittee. This fell through after Republicans scheduled a full committee hearing. In the meantime, Trump’s political ascent raised their efforts to a new level.

  Alex Goldfarb—a friend of Litvinenko’s—spotted Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin four days after the Trump Tower meeting. This was in D.C. They were at a special screening of The Magnitsky Act, a documentary by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov.

  The film was bitterly critical of Browder and suggested that his version of Magnitsky’s death was wrong. Goldfarb exchanged a few words with Akhmetshin—a relatively small guy, as he put it, and chubby, who spoke English with some accent but not much. Goldfarb saw Veselnitskaya mingling with guests. The event at Washington’s Newseum ended in a shouting match between members of the audience and the panel. Much of the audience interpreted the film as little more than antisanctions propaganda.

  Formally, Veselnitskaya wasn’t in the United States on a government mission, Goldfarb acknowledged. But he said this distinction was meaningless since the lawyer and the people she represented back in Moscow were “all part of the same octopus.” “It’s a big conglomerate, Kremlin Inc., based not on power but on money. They are part of the same club,” he told me.

  Why had the Kremlin picked a midlevel lawyer as emissary to the Trumps? “It was purely opportunistic,” Goldfarb said. “You don’t send a gangster like Mogilevich. She had access.”

  —

  Donald Trump, Jr.’s emails emerged in July 2017. Before that, Trump Jr. had dismissed the suggestion that his father had received furtive help from the Russian government as “disgusting” and “phony.” Now there was proof of collusion.

  When the Times first contacted Trump Jr. over the emails, he was evasive. He claimed the meeting with Veselnitskaya had been to discuss something else: the Kremlin’s decision to ban the adoption of Russian babies by U.S. couples. If it was not clear before, “adoption” was Moscow code for lifting sanctions, and it would come up again.

  When it emerged that the Times had the emails, Trump Jr.’s explanation changed. He admitted that an acquaintance—Goldstone—had asked him to meet someone who “might have information helpful to the campaign.” Trump Jr. then characterized the meeting as a zero, “the most inane” nonsense—an unevent that left him “actually agitated,” with nothing handed over. Manafort and Kushner claimed not to have read the email chain or clocked its incendiary offer.

  What mattered here, though, was intent. Trump’s two relatives and his campaign manager must have believed they might receive covert information from a foreign government. They seemed willing and ready to accept it—and, it appeared, to conceal its provenance. This would be a textbook definition of collusion. It was further material for Bob Mueller, the special prosecutor. Trump said he knew nothing about it. Like most of Trump’s denials—he was in Trump Tower at the time—it wasn’t convincing.

  Trump Jr. said he was disclosing the emails in order to be “totally transparent.” But in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity he kept quiet about some of the other characters in the room. He said nothing about Akhmetshin, the former counterintelligence officer.

  In the wake of these embarrassing disclosures, the White House’s explanations for its dealings with Russia mutated. First, there were flat denials—there had been no meetings. Then—there were meetings but nothing of importance transpired. Finally, we were offered material, but this was standard political opposition research. By the summer of 2017 Trump’s message amounted to this: Sure, we cheated. But what are you going to do about it?

  It had been a long road to get to that point. Putin may not have had much luck in recruiting students from South America. But now—three decades later—he was finally going to meet someone the KGB had talent-spotted all those years ago. Putin was meeting President Trum
p.

  9

  Thraldom

  Summer 2017

  Hamburg–Washington, D.C.

  The Russian leadership did not interfere in these elections. He [President Trump] accepts these statements.

  —SERGEI LAVROV, speaking at the G20 summit in Hamburg

  It looked like a war zone. Smoke, the sound of breaking glass, burning vehicles, sirens. A sinister procession of masked men dressed entirely in black, advancing through a city with evil purpose. Gaza? Aleppo? Mosul? A parade by ISIS fighters? Or perhaps a pyrotechnic film set built for a Hollywood fantasy movie pitting humans against some mythical fire monster?

  Nope. The apocalyptic scenes were taking place in Hamburg, one of Germany’s most civilized northern cities. The men in black were left-wing protesters. They belonged to a radical autonomous faction known as the Schwarzer Block. The Black Bloc. And the reason for their protest was the arrival in Hamburg of global capitalism—or at least its best-known politician-representatives.

  The G20 summit hadn’t even officially started. Nevertheless, the Schwarzer Block was up and about. While most residents in the Altona district were having breakfast, the activists were already creating carnage. They moved on Elbchaussee, a sinuous street of bourgeois villas overlooking the Elbe River and Hamburg’s port. There they started smashing stuff.

  The destruction was methodical, efficient. One protester would stave in a car window. Seconds later another would chuck in a flare. Shadowy figures overturned al fresco café tables, dragged plant pots into the middle of a pedestrian shopping precinct, and sprayed graffiti on walls. The group, an ambulant ant-army, then passed on.

  Video taken from a balcony shows the protesters advancing toward a blue-and-yellow symbol of capitalist hegemony—Ikea. Behind them thick gray smoke fills the air. Some of their targets seem distinctly underwhelming. They include cars parked outside an old people’s home and a local drugstore.

  You had to feel a stab of sympathy for Angela Merkel, the G20’s host. Dozens of anti-G20 demonstrations were taking place, one called appropriately: “Welcome to Hell.” Some of her least favorite people were coming: Trump, Putin, and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as more sympathetic faces such as France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

  German officials had spent a year preparing the agenda. It encompassed trade, migration, climate change, a compact to build private investment for Africa. It was an opportunity for world leaders to overcome their differences and make common cause.

  The five thousand members of the press accredited for the two-day event, however, were mainly focused on one question:

  How would Trump get on with Putin?

  It turned out: just great. The two met at a summit get-together that morning and at bilateral talks in the afternoon. This second encounter coincided with a plenary session on climate change. The schedule clash seemed deliberate: the German media suggested that Trump and Putin had “bunked off” the session, following Trump’s exit from the Paris accord.

  The American and the Russian sat down together on white leather chairs. There had been phone calls, three of them, and long-distance blandishments, delivered by Trump to Putin and Putin to Trump. Now, at last, they were meeting face-to-face. Before the cameras Trump said it was an “honor” to meet Russia’s president. He added that he looked forward to “a lot of very positive things happening for Russia, for the United States, and for everybody concerned.”

  Putin sat impassively. He waited. Then it came—Trump extended his hand. Putin paused for a fraction of a second, his left hand clasping his right. And then he took Trump’s outstretched palm.

  The resulting photo was what Putin had surely intended. Russian state media adopted it joyfully. It depicted the U.S. president, hand out in greeting, as a petitioner, a junior player—seeking approval from the world’s preeminent statesman. Putin looks Trump coolly in the eye. As told by Moscow, here was Russia’s leader dominating the international stage again.

  Putin made a few comments in Russian on how a personal meeting was better than a phone call. He gestured to the TV cameras and journalists with his right thumb and whispered to Trump, in what looked like solidarity:

  “Are these the ones who insulted you?”

  —

  This was a cozy affair. The restricted discussion format suited Moscow perfectly. Taking part in the talks were Putin, Trump, and just two other principals, Sergei Lavrov and U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

  Putin may not have met Trump before but he went back a long way with Tillerson. In 2013 Russia’s president pinned a prestigious state medal to the oilman’s chest—the Order of Friendship. Tillerson described his relationship with Putin as “great.” It dated back almost two decades. They met in 1999, when Tillerson was an executive at Exxon Mobil seeking to develop an oil field on Sakhalin Island.

  Tillerson succeeded where other foreigners failed by striking a deal with Rosneft and Igor Sechin. Rosneft got a controlling stake in what would become the Sakhalin-1 project. Tillerson’s partnership with Sechin—who talked of wanting to ride motorbikes in the United States with Tillerson—continued when in 2006 Tillerson became Exxon Mobil’s chief. It would lead to a further agreement in 2012 to codevelop Russia’s Arctic.

  Of all the CEOs in America, it was Tillerson who had the best contacts with senior Russians. Sechin was at Tillerson’s elbow when the American got his Kremlin medal. Putin, Sechin, and Tillerson celebrated with champagne.

  Was it this—rather than Tillerson’s passion for diplomacy—that led Trump to name him unexpectedly as secretary of state?

  Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster—a serving general skeptical of Russia, appointed after Flynn’s departure—was missing from the Hamburg bilateral talks. Also excluded was Fiona Hill, the president’s senior Russian adviser. Hill is a career academic and Russia scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard. As a director of the Brookings Institute she had coauthored a book titled Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. In 2014 Hill published an updated edition after Russia took Crimea.

  It was safe to say that Trump hadn’t read it.

  With or without his senior advisers, this was the moment for Trump to make the American interest clear—namely, that the Kremlin’s hacking of the election amounted to ill-considered interference. And that any attempt by Moscow to do the same in 2018 or 2020 would lead to a stringent U.S. response—more sanctions, travel bans, even a cutoff of Russia’s access to the SWIFT banking payments system.

  Putin would interpret anything less than this as American weakness. And, practically, a green light for his operatives to tamper again in Washington’s affairs. All done, of course, under the same cover of plausible deniability. There was no official hacking, the government wasn’t involved, et cetera.

  Apparently, Trump said none of this. The discussions went on for two hours and sixteen minutes. At one point Melania Trump came in to break up the talks, only to exit again, Tillerson said. The time went well beyond the allotted slot. A record of what was discussed would have been illuminating—but there wasn’t one.

  Afterward, Tillerson hailed the talks as successful and said “there was a very clear positive chemistry” between the two leaders. He said that the White House had demanded a future commitment from Moscow that it wouldn’t interfere in U.S. politics. But, he said, neither side saw much value in “relitigating” the past.

  There were positive outcomes, Tillerson said, including a ceasefire in southwest Syria. And a new working U.S.-Russian group on…how to prevent cyber crime. This second announcement lit up Twitter. Trump had agreed to cooperate with the Kremlin on preventing election hacking and to form an “impenetrable” joint team. (The plan—akin to inviting in your burglar to discuss home security—was soon dropped.)

  Lavrov gave a Russian account of what happened. According to Lavrov, Putin told Trump that the Kremlin hadn’t interfered and had nothing to do with hacking or the “strange” incidents in the lead-up to the
U.S. vote. Trump “accepted” this statement, Lavrov said in Russian. The verb in the original—prinimat—has a definitive ring to it.

  If Lavrov’s report was accurate, it meant that Trump had chosen to believe Putin over his own intelligence community. For months, Trump had equivocated about Moscow’s involvement. Twenty-four hours earlier, during a visit to Poland, Trump had said, “I think it was Russia,” but added that “nobody really knows” and “it was probably other people or countries.”

  Now he was signing off on Putin’s Big Lie.

  —

  Outside the G20 security zone, there were chaotic scenes. The Hamburg police were overwhelmed. The summit was taking place next to the Schanzenviertel district, a traditional bastion of left-wing activism and dissent. Protests were always likely. Some residents felt that the police’s heavy-handed tactics made the situation worse.

  Hamburg’s Social Democrat–run city hall was having a lousy time. It would face criticism—from the owners of torched cars and broken corner shops—that it had mishandled everything. The Schwarzer Block succeeded in alienating left-leaning residents who might have otherwise sympathized with its stance on neoliberalism.

  One of the city’s headaches was finding accommodation for heads of state. Hamburg’s senate put Trump in a nineteenth-century neoclassical villa located between the Alster River and a pond, the Feenteich. If Trump had gotten into a boat and rowed across, he would have received a warm reception. There was located the Russian consulate.

  The Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, Philip Oltermann, tried to visit the temporary presidential guesthouse, only to find the road blocked. He met an old man on a bike, stopped next to a security barricade. Looking at the port city—wreathed in black smoke and with a helicopter patrolling ominously in the sky above—the man remarked:

  “This must be the end of the world, then?”

  On the eve of the summit riot police had intercepted one group of protesters determined to march to the G20 locale. The authorities broke up the protest next to Hamburg’s fish market using water cannons, baton charges, and pepper spray. By Friday afternoon, July 7, the demonstrators were regrouping and attempting to reach another Hamburg venue—the Elbphilharmonie.