The Two Donnies¹

Donald Trump's ties to Russia go back at least 30 years.

According to USA Today, in 1987 Trump was invited to Moscow by the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. to discuss developing luxury hotels. "I like the people and the people like me," he told the Interest Rate Observer in December 1987. Trump discussed the Moscow negotiations in a 1990 Playboy interview. Trump told Playboy that he was "unimpressed" with the Soviet system. He did not make a deal.

On Christmas day 1991 the Soviet union dissolved. Five years later, in the wake of several bankruptcies Trump's business model had changed from actually building projects to making licensing agreements that in some cases gave him an ownership stake without putting up any of his own money. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, told USA Today that in the late 1990s Russians bought many of the condominiums in Trump World Tower in New York.

In 2005 Trump gave the Bayrock Group an exclusive deal to develop a project in Moscow, as reported by Forbes. Bayrock founder Tevfik Arik worked for 17 years in the Ministry of Commerce and Trade in the former Soviet Union, serving as the deputy director of its Department of Hotel Management. According to New York real estate news web site, The Real Deal, a court deposition named Felix Sater the likely second in command at Bayrock. In 1993 Sater had been convicted and sent to prison for stabbing a commodities broker in the face with a broken margarita glass. He subsequently became involved in a $40 million stock manipulation scheme involving the Gambino and Bonanno organized crime families. Sater cut a deal in 1998, and in exchange for becoming a government informant, managed to avoid jail time. Associates claim that Sater worked for the CIA on a deal to buy antiaircraft missiles, although the CIA has never confirmed his role.  

According to the Washington Post, from 1996 to 2006 Trump or his son traveled to Russia at least eight times in search of deals. In 2007 Trump launched his Trump Super Premium Vodka brand at the Millionaires Fair in Moscow. Despite an initial burst of large orders, by 2009 the brand was discontinued because "the company failed to meet the threshold requirements," i.e. no one was buying it. Or as vodka expert Aleks Zilcovs told Vice's Micah Spengler last year, “This is the vodka that no one is buying … ever.”

In 2008 the Russian daily Kommersant reported that Donald Jr. told Russian investors that the Trump name had been trademarked in Russia, and that projects were planned in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi including licensing deals. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," he declared. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

That year the Trump company sold a Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million -- more than twice the purchase price of $41 million. (In July 2016 Trump cited the transaction as his sole interaction with things Russian.)

In 2010 Trump partnered again with the Bayrock Group in developing Trump SoHo in New York. The same year Bayrock founder Arik was arrested in Turkey on suspicion of prostitution. According to Bloomberg News, ten models were detained in the helicopter raid on a yacht. Initial reports identified two models as underage, but the court report when Arik was acquitted in 2011 stated that all women were older than 18.

In 2013 Trump's Miss Universe Pageant was held in Moscow, and he used the occasion to once again seek opportunities for construction projects. With Russian real estate developer Aras Agalrov, who was funding the beauty pageant, Trump discussed building Trump Tower Moscow. The event also may have marked the beginning of Trump's bromance with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Already an inveterate twitterrer, Trump tweeted "Do you think ­Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend." Putin did not attend the beauty contest, but in an interview aired on MSNBC Trump said "I do have a relationship [with Putin], and I can tell you he is very interested in what we’re doing today... Putin has done an amazing job of showing certain leadership that our people have not been able to match." Trump's praise for Putin  led to a "friendly letter" from Putin, Agalrov told the Washington Post in 2016.

Trump also appeared in a music video with Agalrov's son Emin, a Russian pop singer, along with Miss Universe contestants. After Trump announced his presidential bid in 2015, Emin Agalrov visited him in the U.S. and reported that Trump chided the Obama administration for "not being able to be friends with Russia."

Paul Manafort

In March 2016 Trump hired lobbyist and GOP political operative Paul Manfort to manage his convention delegate operation ahead of the July Republican convention in Cleveland. A month later Trump supposedly fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, although he continued his association and was paid by the campaign. Manafort was promoted to the position of campaign manager.

Manafort's association with Russia had come under scrutiny during the 2008 McCain campaign. McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, was Manafort's partner at the lobbying firm Davis Manafort. In 2006 Davis Manafort reportedly received several million dollars from Russian business interests with Kremlin connections for help promoting the Montenegrin independence referendum. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1992 Serbia and Montenegro had formed a union, but after 1996 Montenegro pulled away from Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, and the two states operated as virtually separate countries. Putin supported Montenegrin independence as a way of extending Russian influence in the region, and, in particular, acquiring an outpost in the Mediterranean.  In 2006, 55.5% of voters voted for independence, which was declared on June 3 of that year. Writing in Newsweek in 2008, former UK Minister for Europe Denis MacShane said, "Montenegro is almost a new Russian colony, as rubles flow in to buy property and business in the tiny state, and Russia is using money and energy contracts to buy favors and influence in the rest of the Balkans."

Manafort's involvement with Putin associates in the Ukraine has received more publicity. Shortly after the overthrow in 2004 of Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovich, his chief backer and Ukraine's richest oligarch, Rinet Akhmetov, fled the country rather than face a murder investigation that implicated him. From exile in Monaco Akhmetov initially hired Manafort to rehabilitate Akhmetov's company's image, but the work soon shifted to promoting Yanukovich's political party.  Yanukovich's pro-Russian Party of Regions won the Ukrainian elections in 2006, and Akhmetov returned to the Ukraine. With Manfort's help Yanukovich won again in 2010, and Manafort stayed in the Ukraine as an adviser.

Yanukovich fled the country in 2014 in the wake of the popular uprising in the Ukraine dubbed Euromaidan. In August 2016 the Ukrainian National Corruption Bureau reported that investigators had uncovered accounting ledgers showing payments to Manafort totaling $12.7 million. Reporting on the revelations, the New York Times also noted that Manafort had never registered as a foreign agent during the time he was working on behalf of Yanukovich and Akhmetov -- a violation of federal law. 

Manafort's activities in the Ukraine became a liability to the Trump campaign as Republican members of Congress, among others, raised questions about payments from Russian-connected figures. A few days after the Times report appeared, Manafort resigned; Trump appointed Kellyanne Conway campaign manager, and Steve Bannon campaign CEO.

Carter Page

Carter Page is a U.S. investment banker who specializes in Central Asian energy markets. According to Page's Bloomberg profile: He is founder and managing partner at Global Energy Capital, which "invests growth capital in private energy services companies," including "oil and gas drilling and production services;" he spent seven years working for Merrill Lynch, including assignments in London, Moscow, and New York; he opened Merrill Lynch's Moscow office, and was a key adviser on transactions involving Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company. According to the New York Times, Gazprom "supplies a third of the European Union's gas."

Page emerged in the public eye in March 2016 when Trump included his name on a list of foreign policy advisers during an interview with the Washington Post. Contacted by the New York Times after Trump's interview, Page confirmed that he had sent some policy memos to the campaign and would "be advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia." On September 23, 2016 Yahoo News reported that U.S. intelligence officials were investigating whether Page had made contact with Russian government officials, possibly including discussions of lifting economic sanctions against Russia if Trump were to become president. 

Page had previously irked U.S. embassy officials in Moscow by criticizing U.S. policy and making pro-Putin statements during business trips to Moscow. "He was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did," a U.S. official who served in Russia told Yahoo News. Speaking in July 2016 at the New Economic School in Moscow, Page declared that western governments, including the U.S. had helped slow progress in Russia "through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change."

According to Reuters, Page declined to say whether he would be meeting with Russian officials during the July trip. But Yahoo News reported that intelligence officials learned Page met with Igor Sechin. Sechin is chairman of Rosneft, Russia's leading oil company, as well as a former deputy prime minister and longtime Putin ally. Sechin's name was on an August 2014 list prepared by the U.S. Treasury Department of individuals sanctioned in connection with Russia's interference in the domestic affairs of the Ukraine. Yahoo News also reported that Page met with Igor Diveykin, a "former" Russian security official who "now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election."

Politico's Julia Ioffe, a self-described "Russia wonk" for most of her life who "spent years living and reporting from Moscow" was intrigued by Trump's offhand introduction of Page during his Washington Post interview, and the extravagant claims in Page's bio. Polling her contacts in the expat Moscow business community she found that none had heard of Page. That included a western energy company CEO whose time in Moscow would have overlapped with Page, and a prominent western businessman who worked in the former Soviet Union for twenty years. Bill Browder, who Ioffe describes as "one of the biggest Western players in the Russian market until President Vladimir Putin turned on him" wrote via email "Strangely, I've never heard of Carter Page until this Trump connection.... It's odd, because I've heard of every other financier who was a player on Moscow at the time."

Ian Craig, CEO of Sakhalin Energy from 2004 to 2009, and a party to the negotiations with Gazprom told Ioffe that Merrill Lynch wasn't even involved in the deal, and he didn't know anyone named Carter Page. A second western businessman who worked in the former Soviet Union for over twenty years and reportedly socializes with Sechin and the Russian elite told her he had rolled his eyes at Page's claims.

Page had also listed Russian electrical holding company RAO UES on his bio. RAO UES was created when roughly 70% of state-owned electrical energy assets were transferred to it in 1992. Artem Torchinsky, who worked in the company's financial department, did remember Page. "His nickname was stranichkin," meaning "little page," Torchinsky told Ioffe. Torchinsky did not have fond memories of Page or his colleagues from Merrill Lynch. "These guys didn’t know what they were talking about," Torchinsky said. Page himself "... made no impression whatsoever. Whether he was there or not, it made no difference." 

Sergei Aleksashenko, the former Russian Central Bank Chairman who ran the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch for part of the time Page worked there told Ioffe that Page "did not create the impression of someone who was intellectual or well-educated, or someone who was in any way interested or knowledgeable in foreign policy."

Page was also largely unknown to the Trump campaign, Ioffe found. When she asked Stephen Miller, who was a campaign policy adviser at the time, about Page, his response was "Who?" after which he went off-the-record to elaborate on how Page was not involved in the campaign.  Hope Hicks, who was campaign press secretary at the time, told Ioffe that Page had "no formal role in the campaign."

Ioffe's digging revealed, in a scenario emblematic of the Trump campaign and possibly presidency, that randomness, laziness, and incompetence had contributed to Page being identified as a Trump foreign policy adviser. Campaign co-chair Sam Clovis had been putting together a list of people who could serve as foreign policy advisers to the campaign "[a]t a time when established Republican foreign policy specialists were tripping over each other to get away from Trump." Page, by contrast, was apparently among those who had contacted Clovis asking to be part of the campaign. Thus Page ended up on a list, and subsequently -- without knowing who he was, but likely impressed with the Ph.D. after Page's name -- Trump read it off a list during his Washington Post interview. 

"What I did find, however," Ioffe wrote, "is that while Page might not be helping Trump, Trump has been a significant help to Page." After Trump's semi-random invocation of Page's name during his Washington Post interview, Page "finally began to be noticed" in Russia and Central Asia. In Ioffe's view it's unlikely that Page could have arranged meetings with key Russian officials like Sechin and Diveykin without Trump's imprimatur. "Carter Page, Ph.D., has found a perfect candidate to latch on to, like a pilot fish feeding off the carnage wrought by the oblivious Trump shark," she wrote.

In a key insight Ioffe suggests that it may not make a difference whether "Putin is trying to destroy America" through agents like Page and Manafort, or if Page, like Trump, is what communists called a "useful idiot" -- a naive individual susceptible to manipulation for propaganda purposes. Speaking in Kyrgystan in September 2016, Putin said "... so far as the use of Russia and the president of Russia in the U.S. presidential campaign, I want to hope that this is connected with the growing influence and significance of Russia."

Michael Flynn

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn is likely the most widely recognized of the Trump advisers associated with Russia. His fraught appointment as the Trump administration's National Security Adviser and subsequent firing have arguably received wider media coverage than Manafort's or Page's exploits. In particular, reporting on Flynn's private conversation with the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions against Russia during the month before Trump took office is one of the more widely publicized stumbles of the early days of the Trump administration.

Flynn's contacts with Russia date back to at least 2013. In 2013, over the objections of Steven Hall, then chief of Russian operations for the CIA, Flynn organized a trip to Moscow to speak to a group of Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers about leadership development.  "Every time we have tried to have some sort of meaningful cooperation with the Russians, it’s almost always been manipulated and turned back against us," Hall told The New Yorker's Nicholas Schmidle.

Flynn had planned to have the GRU officers visit the U.S., but was warned off by Director of National Intelligence, at the time, James Clapper. In the intervening period since Flynn's Russian trip, Russia had annexed Crimea and was fomenting conflict in the Ukraine.

Flynn's attempt to apply his experience in tactical operations to the Defence Intelligence Agency during his tenure as director had been more disruptive than productive, and Flynn was eventually forced out by Clapper and Michael Vickers, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Flynn retired in August 2014. In retirement, his views took a turn from pragmatism to what former State Department counterterrorism official Daniel Benjamin termed "very hard-edged ideas," particularly with regard to Iran and Islam in general.

The apparent change in world view may have come from Flynn's association with neoconservative writer and sometime defense consultant Michael Ledeen. Ledeen gained notoriety during the Iran-Contra scandal, acting "as a go-between for the Reagan administration and the Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar. According to official investigations into the Iran-contra scandal, Ledeen helped initiate the effort to use Israeli contacts to pursue an arms for hostages deal with Iran." 

Flynn met Trump in August 2015. That October Flynn appeared on RT, the English-language TV channel that the New Yorker's Schmidle refers to as "widely regarded as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin," and that intelligence reports would later reveal had played an important role in Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election. The following month, a representative of RT contacted Flynn's speaker's bureau at the time, LAI, and invited Flynn to Moscow for RT's tenth-anniversary festivities for a fee of $40,000. Michael Ledeen's daughter Simone, who had worked for Flynn in Afghanistan, pleaded with him not to attend, representing it as something of a betrayal of the analysts he had worked with. Flynn dismissed her and other associates' concerns, asserting that his values and beliefs wouldn't change because he was on a "different piece of geography."

At the gala dinner Flynn sat at the head table, with Putin on his left.  Putin praised RT for its success and presenting "various points of view;" Flynn stood and applauded with the other guests.

During the Trump campaign Flynn was reportedly considered as a vice-presidential candidate, although it's impossible to tell how seriously. At the Republican convention Flynn was assigned a speaking slot following Melania Trump. By most accounts his speech was most notable for emptying the convention hall. Trump named Flynn National Security Adviser on November 18, 2016.

In early December at a closed door briefing on Capitol Hill, the CIA shared with a select group of senators its "consensus view" that "Russia’s goal" in its hacking and propaganda efforts during the presidential campaign "was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected." On December 9 the Obama administration reported that it had ordered a full review of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election. 

On December 29 the Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia  in connection with accusations that it had intervened in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf. The sanctions included expelling 35 Russian diplomats from the U.S. The next day Russian president Putin announced that he would not retaliate, but would instead wait for the presumably friendlier Trump administration to take office. Obama administration officials came to suspect that a secret deal had been struck between Russian and the incoming Trump administration. The F.B.I., which "routinely" monitors conversations of Russian diplomats, informed the Obama administration that Flynn had been in touch with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to the sanctions announcement. The agency confirmed that sanctions had been discussed, but not a deal.

A declassified version of the review of Russian influence in the 2016 election ordered by the Obama administration was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on January 6. The report concluded that the Russian government and president Putin had "developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump," and sought to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency," and declared "high confidence in these judgments." Among its findings the report documented the key role that the RT network played in disseminating misinformation and Russian propaganda during the campaign, and well before. It asserted that RT had been broadcasting stories about alleged voter fraud, and the weak U.S. election infrastructure, since 2012.

On January 10, website and news outlet BuzzFeed published a document containing unverified allegations that the Russian government had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Donald Trump for "at least 5 years," and that Russian security had "compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him." The report also cited "evidence of extensive conspiracy between Trump's campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in the US."

The chief author of the report was subsequently revealed to be ex-MI6 operative Christopher Steele, who had worked undercover in Moscow in the 90s and became the top Russian specialist at MI6 headquarters. Steele's report was initially commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans and later was made available to the Democrats. While some allegations remain unconfirmed as of this writing, the times and locations of conversations among Russian nationals reported in the Steele dossier were subsequently corroborated, according to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials, lending credibility to the report in the eyes of the U.S. intelligence community.

Among its allegations the dossier states that "an ethnic Russian close associate of Donald Trump admitted that there was a well developed conspiracy of cooperation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, and others as intermediaries." The report also details "clandestine meeting/s between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, and Kremlin representatives in Prague, in August 2016." Cohen denies having been in Prague, and CNN subsequently reported that intelligence officials concluded the meeting may have been with a different Michael Cohen.

On January 12 the Washington Post's David Ignatius reported that Flynn had phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times the day the sanctions against Russia were announced. Transition spokesman (now Press Secretary) Sean Spicer confronted Flynn who assured him that sanctions were not discussed, and Spicer repeated Flynn's claim to reporters. Flynn repeated the assertion to  Vice President-elect Pence and incoming chief-of-staff Reince Priebus, who in turn made the same claim on news talk shows that weekend.

Asked about Ignatius' report at Spicer's first full press briefing on January 23, Spicer maintained that Flynn's December 29 conversation with Kislyak had not included a discussion of sanctions. That prompted Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates to notify the Trump White House "that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials" about his discussions with Kislyak, and that he was "potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail." Flynn would have known that his conversations were monitored, and officials who spoke to the Times and the Post were surprised that he and Trump administration officials denied aspects of conversation. 

The Post and the New York Times subsequently reported that Flynn had a "series of contacts" with Kislyak, starting before the November 8 election. Kislyak confirmed that he and Flynn had communicated by text message, phone, and in person. Contact between the Russian ambassador and the designated incoming National Security Adviser is not in itself problematic, and in fact is to be expected. But the revelation that Flynn had discussed the Russian sanctions with Kislyak before they were announced by the Obama administration set off alarms in Washington and elsewhere. The Time's sources "said that Mr. Flynn had never made explicit promises of sanctions relief, but that he had appeared to leave the impression it would be possible."

With Flynn under fire, on February 1 congressional Democrats ratcheted up the pressure, formally asking the Pentagon for information about Flynn's paid attendance at the RT anniversary event in Moscow in 2015. The letter, signed by ranking members of six House committees, requested information about any payments Flynn received, and whether he had sought approval from Congress or the Defense Department. It also suggested that Flynn may have violated the emoluments clause, which prohibits members of the government from receiving anything of value from foreign governments "without the consent of Congress." 

In a February 8 interview with the Post Flynn denied that he had discussed sanctions with Kislyak, but later moderated his denial saying that he "had no recollection," but that "he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up." On Thursday, February 9 the Post published a story with the headline "National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say." On Monday, February 13, Flynn resigned.

The morning of the 13th Flynn admitted to the conservative news website Daily Caller that he had discussed elements of the Obama administration sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak. "It wasn’t about sanctions. It was about the 35 guys being thrown out," he said. "It was basically, ‘Look, I know this happened. We’ll review everything. I never said anything such as, ‘We’re going to review sanctions,’ or anything like that," the Daily Caller reported. "... It was basically to say, ‘Look, we’re coming into office in a couple of weeks. Give us some time to take a look at everything.”

The Washington Post subsequently reported that, in an interview with the F.B.I., Flynn had denied discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador. It is unclear why Flynn, an experienced intelligence official, would deny to the F.B.I. something he knew would have been documented as a part of the agency's routine activities. His denial could expose him to legal action, as lying to the F.B.I. is a felony, although officials who spoke to the Post suggested prosecution was unlikely.

Epilogue and Prologue

In early February, Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, hand-delivered a document to Michael Flynn's office containing a proposal that would enable Trump to lift sanctions against Russia. The proposal was promoted by Cohen, longtime Trump business associate Felix Sater, and Ukrainian politician Andrii V. Artemenko -- a member of the political movement described above whose activities Paul Manafort had guided previously.

Presented as a "peace plan," parts of the proposal seem more like opposition research, and include allegations of corrupt activities by Ukrainian president Poroshenko. Artemenko has claimed that aides to Russian president Putin supported his plan. According to the New York Times, the three men met at Loews Regency hotel in late January. The core of the plan, which seems to have originated primarily with Artemenko, is that Russian forces would withdraw from eastern Ukraine, and a referendum would be held to decide whether Crimea, seized from Ukraine in 2014, would be leased to Russia for a lengthy term.

Calling it a gross violation of the Ukrainian constitution, the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly dismissed the plan, saying it could only have been concoted by someone representing Russian interests. Artemenko “is not entitled to present any alternative peace plans on behalf of Ukraine to any foreign government, including the U.S. administration,” Chaly told the Times.

And in a macabre conclusion to this chapter in Trump's labyrinthine connections to Russia, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the U.N. died suddenly Monday, February 20 at age 64. The New York City medical examiner has determined that the "cause and manner" of Churkin's death needed further study. Churkin makes the seventh death of individuals connected to the Steele dossier since its publication.

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1None of this is funny, of course, but Boomers will recognize the reference to British comedians The Two Ronnies.