The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy

Manafort, meanwhile, moved to exploit his new position. Two weeks after being brought on as campaign adviser, he emailed his most trusted employee in Kiev, Konstantin Kilimnik, who, according to U.S. officials, also had long-standing ties to Russian intelligence. Citing his new connection with Trump, Manafort asked, “How do we use to get whole?”

The messages between Manafort and Kilimnik were written in deliberately cryptic fashion, but references to “OVD” made clear that one of Manafort’s top priorities was to find a way to settle accounts with Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, the Russian billionaire who had accused Manafort in a Cayman Islands court proceeding of taking money intended for the cable television properties in Ukraine as well as other investments, then failing to account for the funds. (In the messages Manafort and Kilimnik appeared to use the Russian delicacy “black caviar” as code for sums of cash.) A Manafort spokesman would later claim that the emails reflected an “innocuous” effort to collect debts owed by assorted Eastern European business associates. If so, Manafort seemed to go to significant lengths to obscure that legitimate purpose.

Deripaska has been among the Russian leader’s closest allies for years. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables described Deripaska in 2006 as “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and a “more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” His ties to Manafort went back almost as far. In 2005, Manafort sent a memo to Deripaska pitching the aluminum magnate on a plan to engage in lobbying and other activities to advance Russia’s interests in the former Soviet republics, according to an Associated Press investigation. As part of this effort, Manafort offered to lobby the U.S. and other Western governments to help oligarchs in Ukraine hold on to assets looted from the state, to extend his consulting work into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, and to help pro-Russian entities develop “long-term relationships” with Western journalists. Deripaska denied that he ever enlisted Manafort for such work, but acknowledged in a 2017 defamation lawsuit against AP that the two had business arrangements dating back to the mid-2000s.

On July 7, while Page was in Moscow and Trump was on the verge of securing the GOP nomination, Manafort sent another email to Kilimnik, asking him to relay a message to Deripaska offering secret updates from inside the campaign. “If he needs private briefings,” Manafort wrote, “we can accommodate.”

Despite his flimsy résumé, Papadopoulos was in some ways the most resourceful in cultivating contacts with the Kremlin. More than the others, he appeared to be doing so at the direct bidding of the Trump campaign.

Ten days after Trump introduced Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy,” the newcomer took part in a disjointed meeting of the Trump foreign policy brain trust at the still-under-renovation Trump Hotel in Washington. The session—the only known gathering of the group that Trump attended—was convened by Gordon, the campaign adviser, and presided over by the future president.

Photos of the meeting show Trump seated at the head of a table in a disheveled room with stacked dishes and poster-size photos of the Trump Hotel interior positioned on easels, presumably for those overseeing the final phases of construction. Trump was surrounded by at least ten advisers, including Sessions at the far end of the table. Page was not present. Papadopoulos, sporting a fresh haircut and a blue suit, was shown leaning forward attentively, his elbow resting on the black tablecloth. There is no record or transcript of the conversation that transpired. But witnesses said that Papadopoulos astonished those assembled by announcing, upon introducing himself, that he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. It was a staggering assertion for someone who never worked in government, had apparently never been in Russia, and had no recognizable diplomatic or foreign policy credentials. The assembled advisers seemed unsure how to respond, and neither endorsed the idea nor shot it down.

AFTER A BRIEF STINT AS A FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER FOR GOP CANDIDATE Ben Carson, who had also been desperate to fill his roster, Papadopoulos found his way aboard the Trump campaign after an interview with Clovis, who had also brought in Page. The campaign cochairman saw an eager volunteer and gave him a fateful bit of advice on how to ingratiate himself with the candidate. Clovis told his latest recruit on March 6 that one of the campaign’s central foreign policy goals was to improve relations with Russia. Papadopoulos had made significant if indirect contact with the Kremlin in a matter of weeks.

While traveling in Italy on March 14, Trump’s “excellent guy” met Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta with mysterious ties to senior officials in Russia. Mifsud took little interest in the lowly think tank researcher until he noticed Papadopoulos’s name in press coverage of Trump’s Washington Post meeting. Mifsud quickly set up a meeting in London, where he introduced the fledgling Trump aide to a woman from St. Petersburg, Olga Polonskaya, who he falsely claimed was Putin’s niece.

Papadopoulos reported to Clovis that he had made rapid progress on arranging “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.” “Great work,” Clovis replied, though he noted that the idea would have to be discussed more widely among senior officials in the campaign.

Papadopoulos and Mifsud remained in touch frequently over the next month by email and Skype. On April 18, Mifsud connected the young Trump aide to Ivan Timofeev, the program director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a government-backed think tank. Timofeev had substantial ties to the Kremlin, serving as program director of the Valdai Club, an annual foreign policy conference in Russia attended by Putin. According to U.S. prosecutors, Timofeev also served as an undeclared proxy for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A few days later, on April 26, Mifsud relayed tantalizing information to Papadopoulos. Having just returned from the Valdai event, Mifsud said that he had learned that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of thousands of emails. It was three months before the first batch of DNC files would be dumped online.

FLYNN HAD MET TRUMP FOR THE FIRST TIME BACK IN AUGUST 2015, a year after his DIA ouster. The retired general said he had received a call from Trump’s team and agreed to a meeting at Trump Tower. The conversation was scheduled for thirty minutes but went for ninety.

“I was very impressed. Very serious guy. Good listener,” Flynn recalled. “I got the impression this was not a guy who was worried about Donald Trump, but a guy worried about the country.” Trump’s positions on a range of issues—support for the use of torture, suspicion of European allies—were in complete opposition to Flynn’s previous statements on those subjects. But the men shared hard-line views of Islam, an unusual affinity for Russia, and a deep resentment of the current president, both feeling he had disrespected them.

“I found him to be in line with what I believed,” Flynn said.

Flynn had interactions with several GOP candidates, and for a time served as an informal adviser to Carly Fiorina. But as he moved more visibly into the Trump camp, Flynn got a remarkable offer from RT: an invitation to a gala in Moscow celebrating the network’s tenth anniversary. Flynn would be paid $45,000—money he would later fail to disclose on federal forms—and would be seated at a VIP table next to Putin, though he would later say he didn’t know about that arrangement in advance.

Before the trip, Flynn had stopped by his former agency, the DIA, for a courtesy classified briefing on Russia. Agency officials said Flynn did not disclose the nature and purpose of his Moscow visit, and that when photos surfaced of Flynn wearing a black tie and seated next to Putin, his successor at DIA, Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, was so furious that he imposed new restrictions on sharing information with former agency executives. On the morning of the December 10 event, Flynn sat for an extended interview with Sophie Shevardnadze, a prominent correspondent for RT and the granddaughter of the former Soviet foreign minister. Flynn seemed uncomfortable in that setting, onstage before a Russian audience, asking at one point, “Why am I here? I’m sort of in the lair.”

In many of his media appearances, Flynn had a tendency to fault U.S. leaders for lacking an adequate understanding of global problems without being able to articulate a coherent position or prescription himself. Even so, his words to Shevardnadze must have sounded encouraging to the Kremlin. “The U.S. can’t sit there and say, ‘Russia, you’re bad,’” Flynn declared. The two countries need to “stop being like two bullies in a playground. Quit acting immature with each other.” Later, he added, “My wish is that we figure out a way strategically to work together.”

While in Moscow, Flynn also sought meetings with U.S. officials, including the CIA’s station chief, the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the country. Out of courtesy, the station chief agreed, only to find himself being lectured by Flynn on how the United States was mishandling its relationship with Russia and needed to “ease back,” according to a U.S. official briefed on the exchange. When Flynn pressed for a follow-up meeting the next day, the CIA officer became concerned that Flynn had met with Russian officials and had more unwanted advice to impart or, worse, information he wanted to collect. The station chief said no.

THOUGH THE CAMPAIGN WAS GAINING A PRO-RUSSIA ELEMENT, NO one seemed more enamored of Moscow than the candidate himself. At a Trump rally in San Jose on June 2, 2016, he bristled at mounting criticism of his affection for Russia, mocking those, including many in his own party, who had begun calling on him to disavow his praise for Putin.

“Then Putin said, ‘Donald Trump is a genius, he’s going to be the next great leader of the United States,’” Trump said. (Putin, when asked about Trump in December, had actually called him “colorful” and “talented” while saying “it’s not our affair to determine his worthiness.”) “No, no, think of it,” Trump continued. “They wanted me to disavow what he said. How dare you call me a genius. How dare you call me a genius, Vladimir. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia? Wouldn’t that be good?”

One day after Trump’s San Jose appearance, his son Donald Trump Jr. received an email offering “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” The message came from Rob Goldstone, a music publicist with ties to the Trump family as well as to a Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov, whose father, Aras, had made billions in construction contracts under Putin. The elder Agalarov had partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013.

Goldstone’s email had some garbled information. He claimed that the older Agalarov had gotten the information on Clinton after meeting “the crown prosecutor of Russia,” although there is no such position in Russia. He added that “this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. neither tripped over the odd reference to the crown prosecutor nor the remarkably explicit offer of campaign assistance from the Kremlin. “Thanks Rob I appreciate that,” he replied. “I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first.”

America’s main adversary for nearly a century was offering damaging information, almost certainly obtained through illicit means, to subvert the U.S. process for selecting a president. There are many ways that Trump Jr. might have responded. He could have ignored the email, directed it to the campaign’s lawyers, or placed a call to the FBI. But he did none of those things. Instead, he wrote back with unambiguous enthusiasm. “If it’s what you say I love it,” he said, “especially later in the summer.”

Part

Two

CHAPTER 4

“I BELIEVE YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION FOR US”

CANDIDATES ALWAYS SEEK SYMBOLIC BACKDROPS AT MOMENTS of political embarkation. Ted Cruz chose a Christian college in Virginia for his announcement that he was entering the 2016 race. Jeb Bush wore shirt-sleeves at a state college in Miami. Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Clinton released a two-minute video that devoted more screen time to images of everyday Americans taking on new challenges than to the prohibitive favorite to be the next president.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump had entered the presidential race on a gilded escalator. Without taking a step, he descended into a crowd of cheering supporters in the baroque lobby of Trump Tower.

A monument to excess, Trump Tower was an unlikely setting for the launch of a populist campaign. But it was inconceivable that Trump would begin anywhere else. The center of his self-created universe, with his palatial residence and his business offices on the skyscraper’s upper floors, the building is a fifty-eight-story manifestation of the image he spent his entire life cultivating: that of a dealmaker and business titan who transformed a family empire of unglamorous apartment complexes into a global brand synonymous with success and opulence.

The tower also served as a symbol of the vaunted boardroom savvy that Trump promised to bring to Washington. Certainly the breadth of his properties and the ubiquity of his brand were evidence of undeniable business talent—for seizing opportunity, sizing up people, and of course, selling himself. But like the tower’s marble and metallic veneer, the Trump aura has always masked a less regal reality. Behind the glittering name were repeated bankruptcies, racial discrimination claims, unpaid contractors, class action lawsuits, and financial entanglements with the criminal and corrupt. Beneath the tale of spun gold were opinions and a pattern of behavior that without the offsetting charms of wealth and fawning media attention would have led to ostracism. Discrepancies about the building’s true dimensions (he claims it has sixty-eight stories, ten more than actually exist) speak to a life premised on falsehood.

From childhood, Trump had been perceived as egotistical and a bully. As an adult, his views of women and minorities, as well as his vision of the American dream, seemed stuck in a bygone era, unaltered by the social movements that otherwise defined the majority of his generation and the politics of his hometown. Like anyone in high-end real estate, Trump was prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement. But he seemed to take these traits to extremes, habitually overstating—and outright lying—about the size of his fortune, the measure of his charity, even the ratings of his reality show. When he wasn’t making such claims directly, he would impersonate imaginary characters in phone calls to journalists, describing “Donald Trump” with a cascade of superlatives and fabrications.

These tendencies were on display from the outset of Trump’s campaign. As he stepped onto a stage draped with American flags, he dispensed with the clichés of announcing one’s candidacy—the faint praise of political rivals, the lofty rhetoric about hope, unity, and higher purpose. Instead, he delivered a diatribe that depicted America as a global laughingstock and presented himself as its only viable savior, a role he said he was willing to suspend his luxurious life to accept.

Many voters would be repulsed by the fact that Trump made no effort to subdue the coarse aspects of his personality or refine his message to avoid insulting entire demographic categories. But to others, it made him appealingly unscripted. In a field of candidates whose positions and even personalities were shaped by polls and focus groups, Trump stood out as strikingly authentic no matter the factual inauthenticity of many of his claims.

Trump’s opening speech was actually more honest than most to the extent that it was a remarkably accurate reflection of who he was as a person and what he would be like as president. He opened with a stream of falsehoods. He claimed a turnout of “thousands” to see his announcement, though reporters counted hundreds—some of them movie extras hired for the occasion; he said that America’s gross domestic product had plunged “below zero,” when it was well into the trillions and even its growth still registered positive; he accused the U.S. government of having spent $5 billion on the troubled website used by citizens to enroll in the subsidized health insurance program known as Obamacare, for which he offered no evidence.

His spurious depictions of the country’s finances were matched by extraordinary exaggerations of his own. He touted a personal net worth exceeding $9 billion, and brandished a supposed balance sheet verifying this total drawn up by a “big accounting firm” that he declined to name. In fact, he had overstated his net worth by at least a factor of two, according to the most reliable estimates,1 and had opened his bid for the presidency with a version of the falsehood he had probably told most frequently in his public life.

Trump had long been utterly obsessed with his standing among America’s richest people, and often had gone to extraordinary lengths to cheat his way up such rankings. In 1984, smarting over Forbes’s decision a year earlier to value his holdings at $200 million—a fifth of what he claimed in interviews with the magazine—Trump waged a campaign to influence the next round of tabulations. He courted one of the main reporters on the project, twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Greenberg, with invitations to his office and company parties. He threw fistfuls of fictitious data at Forbes, claiming the Trump family owned more than 23,000 apartments worth $40,000 apiece. (Greenberg’s scrutiny found only 8,000, perhaps worth an average of $9,000.)

At one point, Greenberg took a call from a supposed Trump subordinate named “John Barron,” who sought to persuade the journalist that he failed to fully grasp the scale of Trump’s empire. Barron told Greenberg that Trump had taken possession of the majority of his father’s assets—a falsehood revealed later by family legal filings—and that because of the consolidated holdings Trump should be considered a billionaire. Greenberg made recordings of the odd conversations with Barron, and they made clear Barron was just Trump trying to alter the cadence of his voice.2 Forbes saw through the ruse, at least in part, assigning Trump a net worth of $400 million. More rigorous scrutiny showed that even $400 million vastly overstated Trump’s wealth, so while the magazine had rejected the outrageous figures pushed by Trump and his phony alter ego, it still had moved him up. “This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real,” Greenberg later wrote. It “led to future accolades, press coverage, and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.”

The most poignant moment in Trump’s opening speech came when he spoke of his father. Fred Trump was the son of Friedrich Trump, a German immigrant who had been a barber and then a hotel manager and moved the family to a house on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and began accumulating money and properties in the burgeoning borough. Friedrich died during a flu epidemic when Fred was only twelve, leaving his family with the seeds of their future fortune. His widow, Elizabeth, managed the budding real estate business she renamed E. Trump & Son. Fred grew up to take the reins of the company, and as New York’s population and economy boomed, he turned its focus toward building sprawling apartment complexes. In the 1920s, vast tracts of Brooklyn and Queens were undeveloped. It was an auspicious and lucrative moment, and Fred Trump made the most of it.

“I started off in a small office with my father in Brooklyn and Queens,” Trump said during his announcement speech. “I learned so much just sitting at his feet playing with blocks listening to him negotiate with subcontractors.”

That father was a stern figure with streaks of his own vanity—neighbors recalled marveling at the Cadillacs in the family driveway with FCT license plates. The cars were the least of it: Donald grew up in a faux southern plantation twenty-three-room mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, surrounded by the trappings of wealth, including a chauffeur and a cook.3 Trump attended the nearby private Kew-Forest School, though poor grades and surly behavior later prompted his father to send the teenager to an upstate New York military academy.

The combination of Trump’s privileged upbringing and extraordinary ambition facilitated his future success, but it possibly stunted his development in other ways. Little about his background, for example, was conducive to racial sensitivity or an ability to empathize with the less fortunate. Class pictures from his childhood are even more lacking in diversity than the overwhelmingly white male cabinet he assembled as president. And while Fred Trump may have been a professional inspiration for his son, his views on race appear to have been less than enlightened. In 1973, the family firm was sued by the Justice Department for “refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks.” (The Trump organization marked applications with a c for colored.)

Donald had stepped into the family business after earning a degree at the University of Pennsylvania, with ambition beyond his father’s low-rent apartment empire. That made fighting back the Justice Department not just a matter of the moment but his future, and he enlisted attorney Roy Cohn, infamous for his role as a top lawyer to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s anticommunist purges in Washington (which came much closer to an actual witch hunt). With the no-holds-barred Cohn steering them through the crisis, the Trumps fought back, filing a countersuit alleging false and misleading claims. The dueling suits ultimately ended in a settlement requiring the Trumps to refrain from further discrimination and place ads in newspapers assuring renters of all races they would be welcome. Cohn’s scorched-earth approach had a lasting influence on the twenty-seven-year-old Trump. Among the lessons was that truth could be drowned out by counterclaims and legal threats, and that the Justice Department wasn’t to be treated as an enforcer of enlightened laws or stalwart of American democracy. Sometimes it was the enemy, and you fought it.

EVIDENCE OF RACIAL ANIMOSITY WOULD CONTINUE TO FLARE UP throughout Trump’s career, and he would establish himself as the most xenophobic mainstream presidential candidate in recent history. The United States, he said, had become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He directed a stream of vitriol at America’s southern neighbor. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” That Trump’s buildings existed largely because of the labors of thousands of immigrants seemed irrelevant to him.

“He used to say, ‘Donald, don’t go into Manhattan. That’s the big leagues,’” Trump said of his father in his announcement speech. “I said, ‘I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings.’” With his father’s financial backing, Trump was able to take that leap. In 1975, he embarked on his first big deal, reaching an agreement with the Hyatt chain to acquire a tired 1919 hotel, the Commodore, in midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal, and transform it into a gleaming Grand Hyatt. It was a springboard to all the deals that followed.