By
Bob Dreyfuss
Ever since he glided down the escalator at Trump Tower two years ago
to announce his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said it again
and again. "I have nothing to do with Russia, folks," he proclaimed at a campaign rally last fall. A few months ago, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt, he said,
"I have nothing to do with Russia. I have no investments in Russia,
none whatsoever. I don't have property in Russia." And, just in case
anyone missed the point, last January he tweeted in all caps, "NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!"
Well, not exactly. For three decades,
Trump, key members of his family and several first-rank aides to the
Trump Organization sought repeatedly to strike deals with top Russian
banks and billionaires to build Trump-branded properties in Russia, and
Trump's real estate properties have engaged nonstop with Russian
oligarchs who've bought lavish houses and apartments in New York,
Florida and elsewhere. And now we know, thanks to bombshell revelations by The New York Times and The Washington Post
this week, that the most recent effort by Trump & Co. came last
year, at the height of his campaign for president. In late 2015 and
early 2016, just as the Republican primary was gearing up, two key aides
– his top lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a shady business partner, Felix H.
Sater – were deep in talks with Russian investors about building what The Post called a "massive Trump Tower in Moscow."
Sater,
a career criminal who'd been convicted of slashing someone's face in a
bar with the broken stem of a margarita glass and who'd also been found
guilty in a $40 million stock fraud case, emailed Cohen positively giddy
about his real estate negotiations in Russia – and in terms that, were
you Robert Mueller, the dogged special counsel investigating Russiagate,
you might consider a smoking gun. "Our boy can become president of the
USA and we can engineer it," emailed Sater. "I will get all of Putin's
team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."
If we're
counting smoking guns, this one should be Number Two. Number One, of
course, was the revelation last month that in June 2016 three Trump
intimates – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then campaign manager
Paul Manafort – had met in Trump Tower with a Russian delegation
promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton that came straight from
Russian intelligence and the Russian state prosecutor. ("I love it!"
responded Trump Jr.) Both are being folded into Mueller's high-powered
inquiry, along with parallel investigations by Senate and House
intelligence committees, which are looking to determine not whether
Russian spies meddled in the 2016 election – that's taken for granted
now, and was conclusively verified by the U.S intelligence community in a
January report – but whether Trump and his allies cooperated or
colluded with Russian efforts to throw the election to him.
Ever since Mueller empaneled a Washington, D.C., grand jury and ordered a predawn raid
on Manafort's stately Virginia home, revelations have been piling up.
(Though not from Mueller's office, which is notoriously tight-lipped,
doesn't have a website and issues no press releases.) No one knows the
full story yet, since what we know consists of scattered media reports
and incomplete testimony from some of those involved. But for Trump,
who's intervened at least seven times
to slow down or obstruct justice in the investigation – not least by
firing FBI Director Jim Comey in May – the Mueller investigation must
look not unlike the Terminator: unstoppable. There's no timetable for
its conclusion yet, but in the end Mueller's report could lead to
indictments of top Trump allies, a devastating report on Trump-Russia
collaboration and even a recommendation that the president be impeached.
Yes, it's that serious.
Among the recent revelations:
—A series of reports in the Wall Street Journal
reveal that Peter W. Smith, a GOP operative who claimed to be working
with General Mike Flynn, actively sought cooperation with Russian
hackers to obtain Clinton emails in 2016. (Flynn, of course, was Trump's
chief national security aide during the campaign, and he served as the
president's national security adviser for less than a month before being
fired, in February, because of undisclosed conversations with Russia's
ambassador to the United States.) "We knew the people who had these
[emails] were probably around the Russian government," Smith – who committed suicide two weeks later – told the Journal. Mueller, says the paper, is investigating the report.
—The Washington Post revealed that
George Papadopoulos, an eager young Trump aide, repeatedly offered to
set up meetings between Russian officials, including President Vladimir
Putin, and Trump campaign officials in 2016. One email, to seven Trump
aides, was titled "Meeting with Russian Leadership – Including Putin."
Apparently, Papadopoulos' work got no takers from the campaign, although
investigators working with the congressional committees are looking
into it. "Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right,"
wrote Papadopoulos.
—CNN reported
that top Trump official Rick Dearborn, who now serves as deputy chief
of staff in the White House, sought to arrange a meeting between Putin
and Trump campaign officials in June 2016, around the time Trump Jr.,
Kushner and Manafort were meeting with Russians in New York. Dearborn
and an unnamed Republican in West Virginia sought to bring Trump and
Putin together over their "shared Christian values," CNN reported. Many
American conservatives, who support Trump's overtures toward Moscow
since taking office, believe Putin's reputed strong Russian Orthodox
Christian ties make him a likely partner against external enemies,
including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
While any one of these
leads – plus, no doubt, many more that have yet to surface from inside
the Mueller investigation – could prove not to be incriminating, taken
together they make a convincing case that Team Trump knowingly had
multiple contacts with Russia in 2016 even as the Obama administration
began to uncover evidence that Russia's GRU spy service was involved in
the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee and the email
account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Among the other
officials under scrutiny – besides Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, Sater,
Kushner, Trump Jr., Dearborn and Papadopoulos – there's also Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, who had to recuse himself from overseeing the
Russiagate inquiry after it was revealed that he had a series of still
unexplained meetings with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador.
Dearborn served as Sessions' chief of staff.
Mueller has unleashed
a flurry of subpoenas since establishing his grand jury last month,
aimed at many of those Trump officials and their aides and associates.
And Mueller is not restricting himself to collusion with Russia alone,
but he's digging deep into the Trump-Kushner real estate and financial
empire. In addition, he's investigating whether President Trump tried to
obstruct justice by blocking the investigation, firing Comey,
threatening to dismiss Sessions and asking U.S. intelligence officials
to defend him against Russiagate charges. Most recently, according to NBC,
Mueller is "keenly focused" on reports that Trump help craft a
misleading statement issued by Trump Jr. when reports of the Trump Tower
meeting first surfaced.
And Sater, the convicted felon who worked
with Trump over a period of years to find deals in Moscow, could be a
prime target. "Michael," Sater wrote to Cohen, Trump's attorney, "I
arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin's private chair at his desk and
office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get
Donald elected."
And maybe impeached.
Rolling Stone
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