The Receipts: How Russia Bought an American President | #9 The Deal

Before we go any further, let’s do a quick recap so we’re all on the same page.

The KGB built a profile on Trump back in the seventies because he checked every box on their target list – ego, debt, vanity, no impulse control (Essay 1). They tested him by letting the Russian mob move into Trump Tower as soon as it opened. (Essay 2). Then they invited him to Moscow in 1987 and rolled out the red carpet (Essay 3). The Russian mob set up shop inside his buildings in Brighton Beach (Essay 4). His Atlantic City casinos got turned into laundromats for that mob’s cash (Essay 5). Once American banks finally stopped lending to him after his bankruptcies, Deutsche Bank – the same bank simultaneously laundering billions for Russia – became his only lifeline (Essay 6). Felix Sater and Bayrock ran a Russian-intelligence-connected real estate operation out of an office two floors below Trump’s in Trump Tower (Essay 7). And then the same network franchised the Trump brand into Toronto and Panama with VEB and Russian mob money (Essay 8).

Forty years of slow, patient cultivation. A thousand small favors. A thousand small entanglements. By the time we get to 2013, Trump isn’t a target anymore. He’s an asset.

This is the essay where I show you when Russia made their move. It happened in November 2013, in Moscow. Trump walked into a room full of Russian oligarchs at the Miss Universe pageant and they knew they had picked the right guy. These folks had been playing footsie for years – but now it was time to start going steady.

Aras Agalarov is one of those oligarchs. He owns the Crocus Group, one of Russia’s biggest construction companies, and his son Emin is a pop star Trump had been doing business with for a few years already. That year, Agalarov paid $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow [1]. Trump owned the pageant, so he walked away with $2.3 million for the night, and NBC walked away with another $2.3 million. He spent the trip schmoozing – figuring out who had money and how to get close to them. The pageant wasn’t the point. The networking was.

Trump wanted to meet Putin while he was in Russia. He literally tweeted Putin a personal invitation, asking if he was going to be his “new best friend” [1].

Putin didn’t show.

But Putin made sure to reach Trump anyway. His press secretary Dmitry Peskov called Aras Agalarov directly to pass along Putin’s apologies and his interest in meeting Trump another time. After the pageant ended, Putin sent Trump a personal gift and a handwritten note, hand-delivered weeks later by Agalarov’s daughter to the Miss Universe office in New York. So no, Putin didn’t appear in person. But he made sure Trump felt seen.

The Agalarovs walked away from that weekend as Trump’s permanent connection to Russian money and Russian power. Three years later, Aras Agalarov was the same guy whose people set up the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. The trip was really about Russia handpicking the family that would be Trump’s permanent bridge into the Kremlin. They were placing their guy. He just didn’t know it.

Two years later, in November 2015, the operation finally made its move. Trump was officially running for president, and the Sater email I broke down in Essay 7 – the one where he tells Cohen “our boy can become president and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this. I will manage this process” [2] – wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was a project, with deliverables and a timeline. Cohen was inside Trump Tower running the Moscow side of the deal. Sater was working Putin’s people. And Trump knew about all of it.

I want to be careful with that last line, because it’s the kind of thing people throw around without proof.

So here’s the proof. In February 2019, Michael Cohen testified to Congress, under oath, that Trump knew about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations and personally directed them throughout the entire campaign [4]. Cohen said Trump asked him at least a half-dozen times between the Iowa Caucus and the end of June 2016 some version of “How’s it going in Russia?” That isn’t Cohen speculating about Trump’s mood. That’s Cohen describing a boss who was actively managing a private business deal with the Russian government while running for President of the United States.

The negotiations went on through 2016. Not just during Iowa. Not just during Super Tuesday. All the way through June 2016 [5]. Which means while Trump was on every cable news show in America saying “I have nothing to do with Russia” [3], he had people in Moscow at that exact moment trying to lock down a licensing deal that would have personally made him hundreds of millions of dollars if Putin’s government signed off.

Now, you don’t just go build a skyscraper in Moscow the way you’d build a Marriott in Dallas. In Russia, every major real estate deal of that size needs the personal blessing of the Kremlin. The land, the permits, the financing – it all runs through Putin’s people, and ultimately through Putin himself. Nothing this big moves in Russia unless he wants it to.

So the licensing deal Cohen and Sater were chasing wasn’t a normal business deal. It was Trump asking the Russian government to personally hand him the biggest payday of his entire career. While he was running for President. While he was the Republican frontrunner. While the FBI and CIA were actively briefing him on Russia as a hostile foreign power.

That is the most basic conflict of interest you can imagine. And it gets worse, because it doesn’t go in one direction. The minute Putin knows Trump wants the deal, Putin owns him. Putin doesn’t have to threaten anything. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone. He just has to slow-walk the approvals and let Trump’s people figure out for themselves what they need to do to keep the conversation going. That’s the leverage. You don’t have to bribe a guy if you’ve made him desperate to please you.

And once you understand that’s the dynamic, the rest of 2016 stops looking like a bunch of unrelated weird events and starts looking like exactly what it was: a candidate quietly doing favors for a foreign government because that government was holding a half-billion-dollar payday over his head.

Let’s walk through them.

On June 9, 2016 – the same exact month the Moscow Tower negotiations were still going – Trump’s campaign held the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting [6]. Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, sat down in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting was set up by people who worked for – guess who – the Agalarovs. The same family from Miss Universe. Same network, three years later, now talking directly to the campaign.

The pitch was that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Don Jr.’s response when offered the meeting was, in writing, “if it’s what you say, I love it.” Manafort, by the way, would later go to federal prison for, among other things, secretly working as an unregistered foreign agent for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs.

A lot of people treat that meeting as its own scandal that exists in a vacuum. It isn’t. It’s one data point inside a much bigger pattern, happening in the same building where Cohen was simultaneously negotiating the Moscow tower upstairs.

That same month, the Republican Party platform got rewritten on Ukraine [7]. A delegate named Diana Denman tried to add language calling for the United States to send Ukraine “lethal defensive weapons.” Why did Ukraine need them? Because Russia had invaded Crimea in 2014, was still occupying it, and was actively backing a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. Thousands of people had already died. Denman wasn’t proposing something radical. She was proposing standard Republican Cold War policy. Help the people getting invaded by Russia.

The Trump campaign pushed back hard. They sent staff onto the platform committee specifically to gut the language. The final version got watered down to “appropriate assistance” – vague, toothless, exactly what Moscow wanted [7]. The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, the party that built its entire identity around standing up to Russia for forty years, suddenly went soft on Russian aggression in Ukraine because the Trump campaign told it to.

So one Trump operation was in Moscow asking the Russian government for permission to build a building. Another Trump operation was in Cleveland, telling the Republican Party to stop arming the Ukrainians that Russia was killing. You don’t have to call that a quid pro quo. Call it whatever you want. But that’s what one looks like when nobody’s stupid enough to put it in writing.

Now remember Evgeny Buryakov. I introduced him in Essay 8. The SVR officer stationed at VEB – Russia’s state development bank, the one Putin personally chaired by law, the same bank that financed Trump Toronto. The FBI arrested him in the Bronx in January 2015 [8]. His job: gathering intelligence on U.S. sanctions on Russia [9].

So this is a Russian state bank, chaired by Putin, with Trump money flowing through it from one direction. A Russian intelligence officer sitting inside that same bank, working sanctions intel out the other direction. And then in 2015 and 2016, the Trump campaign just happens to start taking positions favorable to lifting sanctions on Russia, and Trump’s personal lawyer is quietly negotiating a Russian tower with Sater that needs Russian state approval to move forward.

Are you connecting the dots?

Now fast forward to December 2016. Trump’s just won. Nobody saw it coming, including, by some accounts, the Russians themselves. Michael Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, gets on the phone with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador [10]. They talk about sanctions.

Hours before that call, the Obama administration imposed brand new sanctions on Russia, specifically as punishment for interfering in the 2016 election. Real sanctions. The intelligence community knew Russia ran an active campaign to help Trump win, and Obama, on his way out the door, was sanctioning them for it. Normally, when one country sanctions another, the sanctioned country retaliates. That’s how it works. Putin should have been hitting back hard.

Instead, Flynn called Kislyak and told him to “reciprocate moderately” [11]. In plain English: don’t hit back hard, hang tight, the new administration is about to come in and everything is about to change. And Putin listened. Russia did almost nothing in response. The retaliation everyone was bracing for never came. The transition team was coordinating with a foreign adversary before they were even sworn in. That’s a backchannel between business partners, not between governments.

When the FBI later asked Flynn what he and Kislyak talked about, he lied. He pled guilty to that lie in 2017. He didn’t lie about a phone call to a guy he barely knew. He lied about a coordinated sanctions strategy with the Russian ambassador, conducted while Obama was still President, on behalf of an incoming administration that was about to roll back the punishment Russia had earned for interfering in the election that put it in power.

Okay, now, back up a few weeks to October 2016. Things were getting messy for the campaign. The Access Hollywood tape dropped – the open-mic recording from 2005 where Trump bragged about grabbing women. The campaign nearly collapsed in the 48 hours after it leaked. Around that same time, Michael Cohen was panicking about something else completely. He later described it as the lowest point of the entire 2016 campaign [12]. He was worried about what he called a “compromising tape” – and to be clear, this isn’t the Stormy Daniels payoff, and it isn’t the alleged pee tape from the Steele dossier. This was something different and more specific.

The rumor was that there was actual security camera footage from a Trump Tower elevator showing Trump physically striking Melania. The story went that the master copy was held by a former Trump Tower employee who’d quietly walked off with it years earlier, and that copies had been shopped around to tabloids, then bid on at a private auction, and were now floating somewhere in the kompromat ecosystem – meaning anyone with enough money and the right Russian connections could presumably get a copy.

Federal prosecutors would later look into claims that the elevator footage existed [13]. Tom Arnold publicly went on a long crusade trying to find it. Cohen has, at various points, said he doesn’t believe the tape is real. Trump’s people deny any of it. Nobody has ever produced the footage. So on the merits, it’s unconfirmed.

But here’s the thing about kompromat – that’s the Russian word for compromising material. Kompromat doesn’t have to be real to work. It just has to be plausible. And it has to be in the air around the target at the exact moment he can’t afford another scandal. They don’t actually have to show you the tape. They just have to make sure you can’t ever quite forget that it might exist. And that someone who isn’t on your side might get to it first.

Trump Tower is owned and managed by the Trump Organization. Its security camera footage was, for decades, accessible to a tight little circle of people – including, let’s not forget, the Russian-mob-adjacent Bayrock crew working two floors below Trump’s office (Essay 7), and the entire ecosystem of Russian-money-laundering shell-company tenants in the building (Essays 4 and 5). The idea that a tape from a Trump Tower elevator could end up in Russian hands isn’t a wild conspiracy. Russians had been moving in and out of that building for thirty years.

So the fact that Cohen was in full panic mode about an elevator tape in October 2016, three weeks before Election Day, is itself the receipt. It tells you what Trump’s inner circle believed they were exposed to. It tells you who they thought might have leverage. And it tells you they understood, even if they never said it out loud, that the operation they were running could get blown up at any moment by something they couldn’t control.

What we do know for sure is that just weeks before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s company quietly got a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank [14]. He personally guaranteed it. This was the same Deutsche Bank from Essay 6 – Trump’s bank of last resort, the bank that was at that exact moment negotiating a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over its role in laundering at least $10 billion for Russian oligarchs. So Trump’s son-in-law’s company got a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar lifeline from the same bank that was, at that very moment, in active negotiations with U.S. prosecutors over moving Russian dirty money. Days before Trump won the presidency.

Coincidence. Sure.

Spies have a name for what this all looks like. They call it cultivation. Cultivation isn’t recruitment. There’s no contract, no codename, no dead drop, no bag of cash in a parking garage. You find someone with ego and ambition and a constant need for money and approval. And then you spend years – decades, if you have to – feeding all three. By the time the asset is useful to you, he doesn’t think of himself as your asset. He thinks of himself as a successful guy who happens to have a lot of rich friends in Russia who keep doing him favors.

A retired Kazakh intelligence official named Alnur Mussayev claims that Trump was given a KGB codename – “Krasnov” – back in the 1980s [15]. That’s pretty specific. Probably too specific to make up out of thin air.

Yuri Shvets, a former KGB officer, has said publicly that Trump has been “under cultivation” since his 1987 Moscow trip [16] – the trip I covered in Essay 3. Shvets says the KGB spotted Trump back then as a textbook target – a guy with ego, vanity, financial pressure, and the kind of self-interest that made him exploitable. So they worked on him. Slowly. For decades.

By the time Trump walked into that Miss Universe pageant in 2013, he wasn’t somebody Russia was trying to win over. He was somebody Russia had already recruited – even if Trump didn’t realize it.

The Moscow Tower talks. The Ukraine platform. The Flynn-Kislyak sanctions backchannel. The Kushner Deutsche Bank loan. The elevator footage panic. The Sater email saying we can engineer it. The Trump Tower meeting set up by Agalarov’s people. Don Jr. saying “if it’s what you say I love it.” Manafort sharing campaign polling data with a Russian intelligence asset. Cohen running the Moscow deal upstairs while the campaign ran downstairs.

That’s not a conspiracy. A conspiracy implies people sneaking around, hiding what they’re doing. This was coordinated action by people who all knew exactly what they were doing and why. They weren’t even hiding most of it. We just weren’t paying attention.

Felix Sater promised in November 2015 that “our boy can become president and we can engineer it.” Then he managed it. Then Trump won.

Tomorrow, the bills come due.

SOURCES:
[1] NPR: At The 2013 Miss Universe Contest, Trump Met Some Of Russia’s Rich And Powerful
[2] Boston Globe: ‘Our boy can become president,’ Trump ally said of Russia deal
[3] NPR: Trump Moscow Real Estate Talks Continued Into Presidential Run, Documents Show
[4] CNN: The 29 most consequential lines from Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony
[5] BuzzFeed News: Trump Moscow Negotiations Continued Through June 2016
[6] PBS NewsHour: What we know about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting and why it matters
[7] NPR: How The Trump Campaign Weakened The Republican Platform On Aid To Ukraine
[8] FBI: Charges Against Russian Spy Ring in New York City (Buryakov)
[9] DOJ: Russian Banker Buryakov Sentenced for Conspiring to Work for Russian Intelligence
[10] NBC News: Key Decision Awaits New Intel Chief Over Release Of Flynn Call
[11] CNN: Flynn-Kislyak Transcripts Sent to Congress
[12] Vice: What You Should Know About the Mysterious Trump Elevator Tape
[13] HuffPost: Federal Prosecutors Looked Into Trump Elevator Tape
[14] Washington Post: Kushner Firm’s $285 Million Deutsche Bank Loan Came Just Before Election Day
[15] Times of Israel: KGB Groomed Trump as an Asset for 40 Years, Former Spy Says
[16] Kyiv Post: Shvets on Trump Cultivation