The Apprentice

CHAPTER 3

MOTHS TO THE FLAME

AVOIDING THE MAIN LOBBY AS A SECURITY PRECAUTION, DONALD Trump was escorted through a loading dock, into a freight elevator, and up to The Washington Post publisher’s suite on the ninth floor. As he made his way into a March 2016 meeting with the paper’s editorial board, the Republican candidate walked past historic plates of the Post’s front pages lining the walls. On them were headlines that marked Hitler’s rise to power, America’s plunge into World War II, and the U.S. blockade of Cuba as the Soviet Union sought to install nuclear weapons a hundred miles off the coast of the United States.

Trump had from the beginning faced profound doubts about his qualifications to handle such harrowing events. Even within his own party, there was concern that his disposition and ideas—backing torture, praising Putin, criticizing European allies—were themselves threats to international stability. As Trump took a seat in the Post conference room, overlooking Franklin Square Park in downtown Washington, he had two objectives: to quiet these doubts and introduce a credible foreign policy team.

The paper’s opinion writers had been told in advance by the campaign that if asked about foreign policy advisers, Trump would make news. When the question came at the outset of the interview, Trump feigned ignorance about this bit of stagecraft.

“Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names,” he said, turning to a piece of paper for this purpose. He proceeded to read a list that raised not a glimmer of recognition among the writers, some of whom had covered foreign policy for decades. Several participants would say later that Trump himself seemed unfamiliar with the individuals he introduced.

Of the five names that Trump listed, only one would actually end up working in his administration: retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, who had commanded the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and held a senior job with the Coalition Provisional Authority in postwar Iraq, would end up chief of staff on the National Security Council. Two others had fleeting associations with the campaign and résumés that raised eyebrows: Walid Phares had ties dating to the 1980s to militant Christian groups in Lebanon and anti-Islamic views; Joseph Schmitz had resigned as inspector general at the Pentagon amid allegations of obstructing investigations of political appointees.

The final names on Trump’s list were virtual unknowns.

“Carter Page, PhD,” Trump said, glancing at his list. “George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.”

In fact, Page was a familiar figure to only one corner of the national security establishment in Washington: the FBI agents in charge of investigating Russian espionage.

THAT TRUMP FELT COMPELLED TO PRESENT THIS ROSTER WAS A reflection of the pressure brought by his surging candidacy but also the extraordinary isolation of his campaign. By March, Trump could no longer be dismissed as a long shot or a joke. He had stockpiled delegates with convincing victories in a string of primaries, and vanquished all but two opponents in the Republican field: U.S. senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.

Both senators seemed incredulous to find themselves losing to a reality television star. “I will do whatever it takes, I will campaign as hard as it takes, I will stay in this race as long as it takes,” Rubio told a crowd of seven thousand supporters in Atlanta on February 27, 2016. “A con artist will never get control of this party.” Two weeks later, after Trump claimed a massive haul of delegates on Super Tuesday and captured Rubio’s home state of Florida, the chastened senator was done. Cruz soon bowed in defeat as well.

Yet many in Washington were not so ready to acquiesce. Candidates with momentum like Trump’s ordinarily exert a gravitational pull on the powerful in their parties, attracting donors and would-be advisers eager to position themselves for influence with, or jobs in, a new administration. With Trump, however, the inverse was happening: the closer he got to securing the nomination, the more determined many of the most experienced and respected policymakers affiliated with his party were to reject him.

On March 2, as the dust from Super Tuesday was still settling, a collection of 122 self-described GOP national security leaders published a letter online vowing “to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.” The missive was signed by a roster of Republican loyalists, some of whom had held senior positions in government, others regarded as influential advisers and columnists. The petition was drafted by Eliot Cohen, who had served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration. Other signatories included Michael Chertoff, former head of Homeland Security, and Dov Zakheim, who had held senior positions at the Pentagon.

The letter excoriated Trump, saying that his views were so “unmoored” that he veered from “isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” His support for resuming the use of torture on terror suspects was “inexcusable,” and his “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric” needlessly inflamed tensions across the world. The letter noted that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.” It concluded with a stab at his supposed business acumen. “Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might,” the letter said. “There is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.”

The next day, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, gave a scathing speech opposing Trump’s candidacy, declaring that his foreign policy was “alarming allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies.” Trump, Romney said, was a “phony, a fraud,” a candidate “playing the American people for suckers.” Two weeks later, party insiders gathered at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington to devise plans to block Trump’s nomination and potentially launch a third-party bid. The “never Trump” movement would intensify in the coming months, ultimately to no avail.

Trump’s decision to announce his team of foreign policy advisers on March 21 at the Post was meant to arrest the intraparty revolt. But the anonymity of those included on his roster only reinforced the impression of a campaign bereft of experience or expertise. The résumés of Page and Papadopoulos were laughably thin.

Public records showed that Papadopoulos had graduated from DePaul University in Chicago in 2009, lived in London for a stretch, and then worked as a research assistant for the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. His few writings, including several op-eds for Israeli news sites, focused on Greece, Cyprus, and Israeli natural gas holdings in the eastern Mediterranean. On his personal LinkedIn page, he highlighted his role as a representative to the 2012 Geneva International Model United Nations, a mock exercise in global diplomacy for high school and college students. It was the sort of credential one might include on an application for an internship, not present as a qualification to advise a potential president. (The UN claim may also have been dishonest—others at the Geneva event that year have no record or recollection of him attending.)

Page had more seemingly legitimate experience. A 1993 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, he had worked at Merrill Lynch before starting his own company, Global Energy Capital, in Manhattan. He claimed affiliations with respected think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York–based organization that counted a dozen former secretaries of state among its members.

Hidden at the time, apparently even to Trump, were more disconcerting aspects of his background. Just days before the candidate’s meeting with the Post’s editorial board, Page had been questioned by the FBI—not for the first time—about his ties to Russian intelligence. In fact, by that point the bureau had been tracking Page, intermittently, for at least three years in connection with an FBI probe of a Russian spy ring in New York.

Page was aware of the bureau’s interest. Back in June 2013, he had met with FBI agents at New York’s Plaza hotel (once owned by Donald Trump until indebtedness forced him to sell), insisting that his contacts with Russians were related to “my research on international political economy” and that any documents he had provided related to the energy business. He made it clear that he was doing the FBI a favor by assisting them voluntarily because, he said helpfully, “it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated toward addressing real national security threats, particularly given the recent Boston Marathon bombing.”

As part of their surveillance, the bureau had lengthy transcripts of Kremlin agents describing their efforts to recruit and manipulate Page. Portions of those transcripts appeared in a 2015 complaint filed in the Southern District of New York—referring to Page anonymously as “Male-1.” The Russians’ conversation had been captured by a listening device the FBI had planted on a binder the Kremlin operatives had unwittingly carried into a conference room. They spoke of Page with undisguised scorn, frustrated and amused by his seemingly clueless behavior.

In his encounters with Page, Victor Podobnyy had cast himself as someone who could help the American pursue energy-related business deals in Russia. In reality, Podobnyy was an SVR agent posing as an attaché at the Russian mission to the United Nations. He marveled at Page’s affection for Russia and said of his American mark: “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do.”

Page later told the FBI that he had met Podobnyy in January 2013 at an energy industry conference in New York. The Russians regarded Page’s interest in oil riches as a vulnerability. Page “got hooked on Gazprom [the largely state-owned oil and gas company] thinking that if they have a project he could be rise up,” Podobnyy explained in the exchanges intercepted by the FBI, referring to the Russian energy giant. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money,” he concluded with a laugh.

On another recording, a different Kremlin operative, Igor Sporyshev, who was working undercover as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York, complained that the charade they were running would eventually mean that he would have to get involved with the bumbling American. Podobnyy brushed him off, saying that he would continue to “feed him empty promises” and eventually cut Page loose. “You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”

Page did provide documents to the Russians, though he later claimed to reporters that he had shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research.” He added that he furnished “nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester, ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets, and Technology’ course which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.” (Page, an adjunct professor at NYU, had twice failed to defend his PhD thesis at the University of London before finally earning his doctorate.)[1]

In the end, the FBI probe had limited results. The two Russians caught speaking about Page were protected from prosecution in the United States by diplomatic immunity. A third, however, was under what intelligence agencies call “non-official cover”—that is, using phony private sector credentials rather than working out of an embassy or consulate. Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as an executive at Vnesheconombank, a Russian development bank, was arrested and convicted of espionage as part of a broader case in which Page was only a small player. Buryakov served a thirty-month sentence before he was released in 2017 and deported to Russia. Page was never accused of wrongdoing, in part because the bureau was never sure that he knew he was interacting with Russian spies.

His brush with the FBI did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for Russia. In the ensuing years Page continued to travel to Moscow, pursue business deals there, and publish articles and blog posts that read like Kremlin talking points. In one remarkable 2014 piece for Global Policy—a scholarly publication of Durham University in England—Page praised a particularly controversial Putin ally. Igor Sechin was Russia’s former deputy prime minister and chairman of the Rosneft energy conglomerate. He was also one of the oligarchs sanctioned by the United States to punish Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. Page wrote of Sechin with reverence, saying that he had “done more to advance U.S.-Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade.” A year later, Page likened the rationale behind the American sanctions to one of the nation’s darkest legacies, equating the effort to dissuade Moscow from meddling in other countries to an 1850 guide on how to produce “the ideal slave.”

In December 2015, Page sought a volunteer position with the Trump campaign by reaching out to Ed Cox, the son-in-law of former president Richard Nixon and the chairman of the New York State Republican Party. Cox, who was directing would-be volunteers to many of the GOP candidates, helped Page get an appointment with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. When Page arrived at Trump Tower, he encountered an overwhelmed political operative who interrupted their conversation repeatedly to answer calls on a pair of incessantly ringing cell phones. Lewandowski took Page next door to the office of Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host from Iowa serving as the Trump campaign cochairman.

After a cursory background check that involved little more than a Google search, Clovis added Page’s name on the list of advisers that Trump carried into his meeting with the Post.

Former colleagues, business associates, and teachers struggled to make sense of Page’s new profile. His adviser at the Naval Academy recalled a student who was a striver, opportunistic but eccentric. “I always found him a little out of place,” said Stephen E. Frantzich,[2] a political science and history professor who supervised Page’s work on a research paper. Page was a “geeky kid, a good writer and hard worker” who displayed no particular interest in Russia. Yet Page claimed in an interview decades later that he was specifically drawn to the academy after seeing two officers in naval uniforms standing in the background on television coverage of U.S.-Russia arms negotiations in the 1980s. Page, then a teenager in Poughkeepsie, New York, said, “I came in off the street on my skateboard and I watched the summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.” The naval uniforms made him think “that’s interesting, maybe that’s some kind of way of getting involved and helping out.”

After five years in the Navy, which included an assignment as an intelligence officer for a UN peacekeeping mission in Morocco, Page devoted himself to chasing riches. In 2004, he moved to Moscow for the position with Merrill Lynch. The title he was given, vice president, sounded more glamorous than the tasks it entailed—planning meetings and drafting papers for the firm’s principals. But Page later depicted himself as a heavy hitter, setting up transactions involving billions of dollars and serving as an adviser to Gazprom. Sergey Aleksashenko, chairman of Merrill Lynch Russia at the time, described Page’s claims as outlandish and said that he reacted to hearing Trump had named him an adviser by “laughing, because he [Page] was never ready to discuss foreign policy.”

Page left Moscow in 2007 and made his way to New York, where he continued to embellish his Moscow business record and social life, even claiming to have had a long-term romance with a Bolshoi ballerina. His company, Global Energy Capital, had a website decorated with stock photos of oil derricks and the Manhattan skyline, but listed no employees or clients. In interviews, Page spoke of working in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that shared an atrium with Trump Tower. In reality, the office he occupied was a windowless room rented by the hour in a corporate coworking space.

For Page, the stars suddenly aligned when a billionaire businessman declared he was pursuing the nation’s highest office with no standing entourage of advisers. Trump’s views of foreign policy were at best a work in progress, but on one subject he spoke with a clarity that Page found intoxicating: Trump was more overtly enamored of Russia than any candidate to compete for one of the major American political party nominations in a century.

“I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin,” Trump said in July 2015, shortly after announcing his run. He was speaking at a forum in Las Vegas when a Russian graduate student in the audience—a woman named Maria Butina, who would be charged two years later as an unregistered Russian agent who had infiltrated conservative circles—asked how he would alter the U.S. relationship with Moscow. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump said. “I think we would get along very, very well.”

AS THE ELECTION APPROACHED, THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ATTRACTED figures who were more recognizable to party veterans, though regarded as damaged or discarded by the establishment. Veteran campaign strategist Paul J. Manafort and retired three-star U.S. Army general Michael Flynn were both from middle-class New England backgrounds—Manafort’s family had started a construction company in Connecticut and Flynn was one of nine children, the son of a retired Army sergeant and a schoolteacher, on the shore of Rhode Island. Each had ascended the ranks of core American institutions, Manafort the Republican Party and Flynn the U.S. military. But neither had ended those associations entirely on his terms. Manafort had drifted to the margins of Republican politics after the 1990s and focused on chasing riches overseas. Flynn had been forced to resign the last position of his military career, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, over concerns with his leadership failings. The Trump campaign offered an unexpected shot at redemption, a chance to restore their reputations and position themselves either for a return to power or profit in the private sector.

Manafort and Flynn had one other thing in common: a charitable view of Russia’s role in the world and a willingness to take money from sources close to the Kremlin.

This approach had already made Manafort rich. After decades at the center of American politics—serving as a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Robert Dole—he had turned his attentions to a surging demand for lobbying firepower among despotic regimes overseas. His qualms were minimal and his qualifications substantial: his decades in Republican back rooms had given him a deeply embedded network of government contacts. His experience running campaigns and his intricate knowledge of modern polling and messaging positioned him as the go-to consultant for autocrats willing to pay huge sums for skills that would help them fend off any rivals but also apply a veneer of American-style democracy in otherwise rigged contests.

The foreign clients Manafort represented had risen or clung to power through corruption and bloodshed. Among them were Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Manafort’s firm took so much money from sources in those countries and others, including Nigeria and Kenya, that he was referenced repeatedly in a scathing 1992 report called “The Torturer’s Lobby” by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization.

Manafort moved into an even more lucrative echelon through his work in Ukraine on behalf of a candidate and party with extensive ties to Putin. After the revote that put Yushchenko into office, his Moscow-backed opponent, Yanukovych, spent the next six years plotting to claim the presidency he’d narrowly lost with the help of a new ally: Manafort. The price tag was staggering and largely hidden from public view. For his services recasting Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (deceivingly) as pro-Europe reformers, Manafort and his company collected millions, much of it laundered through a web of overseas accounts. Manafort would later disclose in one filing that his firm had pocketed more than $17 million in a single two-year stretch, but that was only a part of the payout—The New York Times in 2017 obtained secret ledgers kept by the Party of Regions showing an additional $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort’s company from 2007 to 2012, meaning that from this one client Manafort had brought in nearly $30 million.

Over a decade, Manafort and his subordinates hid vast sums from U.S. authorities through a dizzying array of front companies, avoiding taxes by routing payments from secret accounts in Cyprus—essentially wiring money to pay bills in the United States without ever reporting the income. From 2008 to 2014, according to a Justice Department indictment, Manafort channeled $12 million from overseas accounts into the United States through a titanic shopping spree: $520,440 to a Beverly Hills clothing store, $163,705 for Range Rovers, $623,910 for antiques, $934,350 for rugs. And those were just the incidentals: Manafort shifted millions more from Cyprus to assorted trusts and limited liability corporations to buy homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Washington, D.C., suburbs.

Manafort used his Ukraine connections to pursue lucrative deals with oligarchs. Among them was the $18 million sale of Ukraine’s cable television assets to a partnership assembled by Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, around 2008. Manafort denied taking illicit payments and depicted his consulting work in Ukraine as part of an honest effort to democratize the country and elevate its prospects of joining the European Union. Yet after Yanukovych prevailed in his 2010 bid to be Ukraine’s new president, the evidence of his brutal rule and lavish lifestyle at the expense of ordinary Ukrainians was hard to conceal. If Manafort was uncomfortable working for a leader who had little love for democracy or human rights and a visible affection for Putin, it did not show.

Three years after taking office, Yanukovych—under intense pressure from the Kremlin—rejected an agreement that would have moved Ukraine closer to membership in the EU, which many in the country wanted. Instead, he agreed to take a cash infusion from Russia and edge away from Europe in favor of lashing Ukraine’s political and economic fortunes to Moscow. The nation erupted in a new wave of unrest: protests in the capital city of Kiev spread across other parts of the country and degenerated into riots, clashes with police left dozens of people dead, and government authority teetered on collapse. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014 for the safety he could find only in his true base of support: Russia.

The crisis in Ukraine, such a distant consideration for most Americans, was in hindsight intricately connected to what happened in 2016 in the United States.

For all his projections of strength and security, Putin is deeply insecure about his hold on power, and particularly anxious that a revolt like that in Ukraine could bring his own end. A senior U.S. official who served in Moscow during the Obama and Trump administrations and had contacts in the Kremlin said that Putin’s anxiety is profound and macabre. After the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was dragged from a culvert in 2011 by an angry mob, sodomized with a bayonet, and shot, Putin watched footage of the gruesome incident repeatedly. It was a graphic demonstration of the outcome he most feared, and one that he was convinced had been set in motion by the U.S. intervention in Libya and could occur, if he were not vigilant, in Moscow.

The 2014 unrest in Ukraine intensified Putin’s paranoia, and he again suspected manipulation by Washington, particularly after seeing the State Department’s top official on Russia, Victoria Nuland, handing out sandwiches to protesters.