Introduction and summary

On January 6, 2017, the United States intelligence community released its unclassified, official assessment of Russia’s unprecedented and unprovoked attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the report, all 17 intelligence agencies unanimously assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” with the specific aim of electing Donald Trump. The assessment in effect concluded that there were two campaigns to elect Trump—one operating out of Trump Tower and the other out of the Kremlin.

Since then, the Russia investigation has revealed a sprawling scandal: Members of Trump’s campaign, including those in the president’s inner circle, were in constant contact with representatives of the Russian government throughout the election and transition. The two campaigns discussed tactics and policy, including the release of “dirt” on their mutual opponent, Hillary Clinton, and rolling back American sanctions against Russia. And they executed their strategies timed to maximally benefit Trump’s chances of victory.

Following the scandal as it unfolds can feel like standing too close to an impressionist painting: It’s easy to see the individual brushstrokes, but much harder to see the whole picture they create. This report, which comprises materials previously published by the Moscow Project along with new research and analysis, takes a step back from the canvas and the day-to-day deluge of stories to provide a clear picture of how Trump’s long history of corruption created one of the biggest political scandals in American history.

That picture traces two main narratives, detailed in this report. In Chapter 1, the report explores Putin’s vendetta against the West, which has spurred his current campaign of asymmetric warfare against the United States and Europe. Chapter 2 explores Trump’s decades of corrupt business practices, which made him vulnerable to compromise by foreign powers. Connecting the two narratives is the Russian oligarchy, a class of businesspeople with whom both players have important and mutually beneficial relationships. For Putin, that relationship is the key to both his ongoing kleptocratic regime in Russia and his attempts to influence politics abroad. He has effectively co-opted his country’s wealthiest individuals to act as unofficial executors of his policy both at home and abroad. For Trump, Russian money has sustained his real estate empire through multiple bankruptcies and a financial crisis, often in ways that raise major red flags concerning money laundering and other corrupt practices.

The third chapter explores the convergence of these two men’s interests—crystallized through Trump’s emergence into American politics as a promoter of racist conspiracy theories and his growing ties to Russian oligarchs—that led the Kremlin to throw its weight behind Trump’s bid for the presidency in 2016.

The fourth chapter delves into the details of that election and the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It not only details many of the key contacts and meetings between the two campaigns to elect Trump but also attempts to offer a straightforward explanation of how and why they worked together to ensure his victory. Though Trump and his allies have strenuously denied that collusion occurred, this report outlines the increasingly clear case that he and members of his campaign worked with the Russian government at the highest levels to swing the 2016 election in his favor.

This collaboration has created an ongoing crisis within the American political system. Chapter 5 shows that collusion was not confined to the election. Trump’s team continued to have secret meetings with Kremlin-linked operatives throughout the transition period, while Trump’s behavior toward Putin since taking office has demonstrated precisely why the Kremlin hoped to ensure his election. Chapter 6 then documents the ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference efforts and the Trump campaign’s complicity, documenting how the president and his congressional allies have repeatedly sought to undermine the investigation and hide the truth.

In response, the U.S. government must act swiftly to respond to Russia’s unprecedented attack and preclude the possibility of future foreign interference. Doing so will require more than simply sanctioning the Russian government; it will require a concerted effort to reduce avenues for corruption within the United States, fix our broken campaign finance system, increase the security of American elections, and hold responsible those involved in the attack at home and abroad. Above all else, it will require a thorough investigation of what happened in the 2016 election and the vulnerabilities the Kremlin—and the Trump campaign—exploited in carrying out their attack. Recommendations for how the U.S. government can achieve these goals can be found in the seventh chapter of this report.

This seemingly complex story, in the end, is rather simple. In 2016, Russia launched an unprecedented and unprovoked attack against American democracy. That attack found willing partners in Trump and his campaign. For months, they conspired to undermine the U.S. electoral process in hopes of ensuring Trump’s victory; for more than two years since, they have collaborated to deliver some of Russia’s biggest policy goals and obscure what happened during the campaign. Overcoming that obfuscation to reveal the truth must be among the top duties of the next Congress.

Chapter 1: An adversary returns

Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was not a unique nor singular event. Rather, it represents part of that country’s broader strategy toward the West, one that has been largely defined by the man in charge for most of the past two decades: Vladimir Putin.

Spymaster in chief

Just as President Donald Trump’s history in real estate shaped his worldview, biographies of Putin, such as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin, Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face, and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy, emphasize how the Russian president’s background as a KGB officer in the waning days of the Soviet Union shaped his political philosophy. As a former spy, they demonstrate, Putin places a high value on espionage and intelligence as foreign policy tools, and his governments have funded those tools accordingly.

Putin’s service in the KGB came at a pivotal moment not just in his own life—he joined in 1975, at age 22—but also for the Soviet Union. After training in Leningrad, he served in Dresden in East Germany from 1985 to 1990. In East Germany, Putin cultivated potential assets in the west and countered western agents in the east. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Putin was leading the KGB’s office when protestors massed outside its gates. As KGB officers frantically burned government documents to ensure that they would not fall into protestors’ hands, Putin went outside and threatened the protestors with violence if they breached the gates. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin was left searching for a new career outside of the KGB. He returned to Russia, serving as an adviser and later deputy chairman in the government of St. Petersburg before becoming part of the national government in Moscow.

As his biographers note, Putin’s trajectory through the government also inculcated in him an antipathy toward democracy and the West. Where America and the West saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union as democratizing moments, to Putin, it humiliated the once mighty Soviet Union, ended his career, and introduced chaos into a previously stable system. The 1990s, during which he sought to reestablish his foothold in the Russian government, were marked by coup attempts, economic crises, and a weak state. Many in Russia—Putin by most accounts included—blamed this on the unbridled capitalism and corrupt privatization of industry that was backed by America and the West. As a result, it is no surprise that since Putin assumed the presidency in 1999, his responses to major world events reflect a worldview that sees Western-style democracy and liberalism as a geopolitical threat.

Putin’s presidency

Putin’s tenures as president, as well as the interregnum when he was prime minister from 2008 to 2012, have seen popular uprisings undermine Russia’s influence abroad, followed by responses from Putin that reaffirm his antipathy toward popular protests and liberal democracy. These include not only the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, which deposed or endangered pro-Kremlin leaders, but also the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East that began in 2010. Putin, ascribing these uprisings to the CIA and U.S.-backed nongovernmental organizations, responded by expelling the Peace Corps and restricting foreign funding of NGOs in Russia.

Putin reportedly became further convinced that the United States was trying to undermine his authority in 2011. After a wave of liberal uprisings in the Middle East that year, Russia held parliamentary elections in December, which were plagued with widespread allegations of fraud from both the Russian electorate and international observers. Russian citizens took to the streets in the largest demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. When Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, raised “serious concerns about the conduct of the election” and called for a “full investigation” into its legitimacy, Putin blamed her specifically for the protests. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he said. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work” to undermine him and his government, according to Putin.

Putin’s antipathy toward the West boiled over after the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine. Although Putin has never been shy about using force to subdue neighboring nations—the country launched cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007 and invaded Georgia in 2008—Russia’s actions against Ukraine in 2014 nevertheless marked a turning point. After Ukrainian citizens ousted the government’s notoriously corrupt pro-Putin leader Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin seized on the ensuing chaos to illegally annex Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and invade its eastern Donbass region.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine took multiple forms. Along with the military occupation, Russia spread pro-Russian propaganda about the ongoing conflict through its state-run outlets, including the television networks RT and Sputnik, as well as via Kremlin-linked bots and troll farms. The Russian government had been financially supporting Yanukovych’s regime; after the invasion of Crimea, the Kremlin also began funding separatist groups in an attempt to solidify its hold over the region.

The West, including the United States, retaliated against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine swiftly. Within two weeks of the invasion, the United States and several other countries sanctioned Russian state-backed institutions, including the energy giant Rosneft and the development bank Vnesheconombank, further angering Putin.

Two additional events may have contributed to Putin’s ire toward the United States and his decision to launch a campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. In 2012, the United States enacted the Magnitsky Act; the law permitted the U.S. government to sanction government officials implicated in human rights abuses, allowing a crackdown on Russian officials who were involved in torture and who sought to hide their money in the United States. By going after the very people on whose support Putin’s power depends and whom he promised to protect in exchange for that support, these sanctions represented a direct threat to Putin’s regime. As a result, the repeal of the Magnitsky Act has been the primary foreign policy objection for Russia and the Putin government; they have campaigned against both the law and its most visible proponent, the investor Bill Browder. Browder has suggested that Putin himself may have personally benefited from the financial crimes that led to the human rights abuses that in turn led to the Magnitsky Act’s passage—crimes the Kremlin denies happened in the first place.

Then, in May 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists leaked thousands of documents from a Panamanian law firm showing how wealthy and corrupt individuals use shell corporations to hide their money from authorities. The leak revealed, among other things, that one of Putin’s closest associates, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, owns a network of shell companies hiding roughly $2 billion, prompting speculation that Putin may have been using Roldugin to hide portions of his personal fortune. The Kremlin’s response to the leak was to attack the project, known as the Panama Papers, as “an undisguised paid-for hack job” against Putin; privately, however, Putin reportedly again blamed Clinton for the threat to his personal wealth and power.

Active measures: War by other means

Since 2014, Russia has escalated its confrontation with the West. The resulting strategy has been dubbed many things by different analysts: “hybrid warfare,” the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” “political warfare,” and “active measures”—this last one being a reference to the KGB term for political and information efforts that fall between traditional espionage and public diplomacy. One of the key pillars of this strategy is to use the openness of Western democracy to undermine governments from within, a goal achieved through three often simultaneous lines of effort, outlined in the following sections.

Cultivating fringe movements and leaders in foreign countries

In recent years, the Kremlin has supported—financially and otherwise—candidates, parties, and causes in several countries. The clearest example of a Kremlin-backed political movement in a Western democracy is France’s National Front party, whose leader Marine Le Pen rode a crest of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant fervor to a second-place finish in the country’s 2017 election; the party received loans of €11 million from the Kremlin-linked First Czech-Russian Bank in 2014. Le Pen not only continually praised Putin throughout her campaign but actually traveled to Moscow in March to meet with the Russian president. Her campaign also benefited from Russian hacking and release of emails from the campaign of her opponent, Emmanuel Macron. However, in part due to France’s moratorium on media coverage of candidates in the last 44 hours of an election, the leak appears not to have had its intended effect. Other European political movements with links to the Russian government include Brexit and its chief advocate Nigel Farage; the far-right German party Alternative for Germany; the Freedom Party of Austria, which signed a cooperation agreement with Putin’s party to act as an intermediary between Putin and Trump; and the Catalan independence movement, which has received significant support from Russian trolls, bots, and state television.

Russia has also supported multiple political movements in the United States. While most of the attention on the subject has gone to Putin’s support for Trump’s presidential campaign, there is also evidence that the Russian government has backed other fringe causes as well. For example, secessionist movements in both California and Texas have reportedly received office space, online support, and funding to attend conferences from sources with ties to the Russian government. Through the state-owned television station RT, Russia also provided the left-wing Green Party with a media platform during the 2016 election. Presidential candidate Jill Stein became one of the channel’s top commentators during the campaign and was prominently featured as counterprogramming to mainstream coverage of the presidential debates and election night. Stein has denied any knowledge of Russian interference but has only partially complied with government requests for documents related to her campaign.

The common thread in the groups that Russia supports is not discrete policy goals but rather Russia’s attempts to co-opt the movements in order to undermine democratic institutions and traditional sources of stability in the West. The European nationalist parties the Kremlin appears to support frequently argue against their countries’ membership in the European Union and NATO, both organizations Putin openly rejects; separatist movements threaten countries’ stability from within. Meanwhile, Jill Stein and the Green Party’s critique of American democracy—that the two-party system is inherently and irredeemably corrupt—fits nicely with Russia’s goal of ensuring Trump’s election in 2016.

Weaponizing the Russian oligarchy

As the Center for Strategic and International Studies report “The Kremlin Playbook: Understanding Russian Influence in Central and Eastern Europe” describes, the Russian government “has cultivated an opaque network of patronage across the region that it uses to influence and direct decision-making.” Under Putin, the Kremlin has developed a codependent relationship with the country’s oligarchs, many of whom accumulated their wealth through illegal or ethically questionable means after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The otherwise kleptocratic Kremlin allows these oligarchs to retain their wealth through the understanding that they will act on Putin’s behalf. Their duties in this regard range from elaborate displays of obeisance to, as “The Kremlin Playbook” explicates, developing corrupt financial relationships with politicians and businesspeople throughout Central and Eastern Europe to assist the Russian government in achieving its policy goals.

“The Kremlin Playbook” focuses mainly on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, many of which are or recently were emerging democracies and members of the Warsaw Pact. However, there are indications that the Kremlin has pursued similar strategies in the West as well. For example, Arron Banks, a British financier who was one of the biggest funders of the campaign for the U.K. to leave the European Union, reportedly received multiple lucrative business offers from Russian diplomats and businesspeople in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum. Banks has denied any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he was involved in a direct quid pro quo with Russia. His associate Andy Wigmore, who—according to leaked emailsacted as a conduit for Banks, has claimed his only communications with the Russian government came in his capacity as a representative of the government of Belize. However, their actions comport with both the means of Russian interference and the Kremlin’s broader goals of supporting nationalistic politicians and undermining the European Union. Underpinning the entire Trump-Russia scandal is Trump’s long business history with Russian oligarchs, which, as explored in later chapters of this report, raises the possibility that he may have been cultivated in the same way for years, if not decades.

Exploiting the online environment to sow discord and influence liberal democracies

The 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed the Kremlin using many of the cybertools that they developed to influence campaigns. State-run media, most famously RT and Sputnik, support the Kremlin’s favored candidate from platforms that, to those not aware of their provenance, are difficult to distinguish from mainstream news networks. Paid troll farms and bots spread and amplify messages on candidates’ behalf, purchasing advertisements on social media. And hackers supported by the Russian government illegally gain access to opposing candidates’ emails and other files and leak damaging information through cut-outs—or intermediaries—such as WikiLeaks.

Though the Kremlin tries to build plausible deniability into its techniques, such as by laundering leaks through third parties, and officially denies that it interfered in the 2016 election, it has in other ways been more upfront about its cyberoperations. For example, in February 2016, Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser on cybersecurity, gave a speech at the country’s national information security forum that, in retrospect, eerily presages how Russia pursued its influence campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Speaking to his Russian audience, Krutskikh reportedly said:

You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President Harry] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing. I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having “something” in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.

Whether Krutskikh was specifically alluding to Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election remains unclear. But a year after he made his remarks, it was clear to the U.S. intelligence community that the capabilities he was referring to in the “information arena” had, indeed, changed the geopolitical equation.

Manafort in Ukraine Few individuals could be better suited to orchestrate collusion with the Russian government than the second of Trump’s three campaign heads, Paul Manafort. After pioneering modern influence peddling, Manafort took his talents to Ukraine in the 2000s to work for the Kremlin-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych and his party, the Party of Regions. Manafort’s work for Yanukovych epitomizes the Kremlin’s strategy to influence politics in other countries. Manafort advised the party’s candidates to capitalize on divisive social issues, such as ethnic divisions that pit the country’s Russian-speaking eastern half against its Ukrainian-speaking west. Perhaps most importantly, Yanukovych and the Party of Regions ran against the West, pushing for Ukraine to become more closely aligned with Russia at a time when the European Union was rapidly expanding, and signing a collaboration agreement with Putin’s United Russia party in 2005. In the process, he developed close business and personal relationships with not just Yanukovych but also alleged Russian agents, most notably Konstantin Kilimnik, and oligarchs, such as Oleg Deripaska. On a tactical level, too, Manafort’s efforts typified Russia’s approach to exerting influence abroad. For example, Manafort convened a “Hapsburg Group” of high-profile businesspeople and politicians in Europe to lobby leaders in the West. Though the funding for these efforts came from the Ukrainian government, which in turn benefited greatly from funding it derived from the Kremlin and Kremlin-backed oligarchs, Manafort and his team set up front organizations to provide a veneer of plausible deniability. Working with friendly news outlets, they seeded misinformation about their opponents, accusing them of the corruption and Russia-friendly attitudes that were in fact endemic in the Party of Regions. Manafort was ultimately successful in securing Yanukovych’s election. Yanukovych subsequently stacked his administration with corrupt Kremlin cronies, who spent the next several years rebuking the West at every possible turn while pilfering millions from the country’s coffers. Their corruption and cronyism toward Russia, which frequently came in direct defiance of public opinion, ultimately led to massive protests in Kiev known as the Euromaidan Revolution. This in turn forced Yanukovych to flee the country for Russia—once again with help from the Kremlin—and Manafort to return to the United States, reportedly destitute after having lost his main patron.

Chapter 2: Bailed out by Russia

President Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from allegations of collusion by asserting that he has no business interests in Russia. That’s not for lack of trying: Trump’s efforts to establish a hotel in Moscow go back at least to 1987, when, according to his book The Art of the Deal, he discussed the possibility with the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. But the questions regarding the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russian government go beyond whether Trump has business dealings with Russia. It is just as important, if not more, to understand the many ways that Russia has business with Donald Trump.

That Kremlin-linked entities invested significantly in Trump’s properties over the years is not inherently nefarious. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, wealthy Russians have invested heavily in real estate in the West, while Americans were in turn encouraged to invest in Russia. However, in the context of a president under several investigations for his connections to the Kremlin, Russia’s outsize role in Trump’s reemergence from financial tribulations that nearly destroyed his real estate empire merit additional attention. What emerges is the story of a man indebted to Russia through the oligarchs that President Vladimir Putin helped create and now controls.

Upon taking office, Trump superficially distanced himself from the Trump Organization, ceding day-to-day control to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. However, he still owns and profits from the company, which gives him an ongoing stake in maintaining the relationships that make his company profitable, and leaked internal emails suggest he retains more control over the Trump Organization’s operations than he publicly acknowledges. Moreover, the relationships and transactions described below occurred long before his political career, at a time when both internal and external sources have described him as exerting almost unilateral control over the organization.

Individually and collectively, these relationships form the underpinning of the Russia scandal. The Kremlin has a long history of using compromising information, or kompromat, to exert leverage over businesspeople and politicians, both in Russia and abroad. As a result, the question of whether Trump is financially compromised goes beyond the simple question of whether he or his company is directly in debt to Russian banks—something the president denies but has yet to demonstrate by releasing his tax returns. The president’s myriad financial entanglements with individuals from Russia and the former Soviet Union may provide Russia with such kompromat, especially given the substantial evidence that Trump and the Trump Organization have engaged in questionably legal practices, many of which are outlined below. The Trump Organization has repeatedly denied, both in specific cases and in general, that it has acted illegally or unethically in its business practices.

This report does not intend to suggest that all of Trump’s clients and partners from Russia and the former Soviet Union are individually connected to the Kremlin—nor that each deal is individually corrupt or connected to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Instead, the goal is to highlight how dependent Trump’s company has been on Russian money, a fact he has repeatedly denied, and to explicate how those connections appear to have laid the foundation for what occurred in 2016. As such, this chapter explores the totality of those business dealings, ranging from projects whose financing comes from sources directly linked to the Kremlin to potentially corrupt dealings in Azerbaijan and Georgia to the allegations that some of Trump’s Russian and Soviet buyers and business partners have used his properties as vehicles for money laundering, all of which could have generated the type of compromising material the Russian government is known to exploit.

A note on Russian oligarchs

This chapter and the remainder of this report discuss in detail Trump’s various business relationships with Russian oligarchs as proxies of the Kremlin. This is because Russian oligarchs, many of whom are former Soviet officials or hold positions of power in former Soviet states where the Russian government still holds significant influence, are widely considered an extension of the Russian state. Still others are high-ranking executives at Russia’s state-owned companies, such as the oil-and-gas conglomerate Rosneft or Russia’s two state-run development banks, Vnesheconombank and Vneshtorgbank.

Putin has developed relationships with Russia’s business elite, both individually and collectively, in which he enables their accumulation of wealth in exchange for their assistance on his political projects; as a result, they are sometimes described as Putin’s “shadow cabinet.” Domestically, this often entails carrying out large-scale, but ultimately unprofitable, projects on behalf of the Russian state; for example, Arkady Rotenberg, a construction magnate (and Putin’s former judo partner) often considered a key member of Putin’s inner circle, is widely seen as having taken on construction of a bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula as an elaborate, and extremely expensive, display of fealty to the Kremlin. These oligarchs often act as unofficial envoys of the Kremlin’s foreign policy, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, where they form corrupt business relationships with elected politicians that they can then leverage toward accomplishing Russia’s goals abroad. Those who publicly oppose, or simply fail to comply with, Putin’s wishes often face severe financial repercussions; most famously, in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time Russia’s wealthiest man, was arrested for tax evasion, had his assets seized by the Russian government, and was forced to appear in court in a cage as punishment for his political opposition to Putin.

The result is a system where supposedly private citizens feel compelled to act on the government’s behalf and where the line between government officials and wealthy citizens becomes purposefully blurred. As such, it is important to scrutinize Trump’s business ties not only with the Kremlin proper but also with the many wealthy Russian and former Soviet individuals who participate in this dynamic—relationships that could compromise him in the same way as direct business with the Kremlin. In other words, if Trump has entered into a compromising financial relationship with Russian clients and partners—and overwhelming evidence documented below suggests he has—those relationships may have generated compromising material not just for the individuals involved but also for the Russian government. A more thorough exploration of this dynamic can be found in the Moscow Project’s February 2018 report “Cracking the Shell: Donald Trump and the Corrupting Potential of Furtive Russian Money.”

The early years: Trump businesses in trouble

Many of Trump’s businesses spent the 1990s on the verge of collapse. Abraham Wallach, who became the Trump Organization’s executive vice president for acquisitions in 1990, compared joining the company to “getting on the Titanic just before the women and children were moved to the lifeboats.” In 1990, the Trump Organization was reportedly $3.4 billion in debt, with Trump himself liable for more than $800 million. The next year, as several of Trump’s hotels and casinos reportedly accumulated millions in debt, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission concluded, “Mr. Trump cannot be considered financially stable.” In 1992, Trump defaulted on the debt of his airline, Trump Shuttle, turning it over to U.S. Airways.

In Trump’s own telling, his fortunes turned around in 1995, when Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, the company through which he owned and operated many of his properties in Atlantic City and elsewhere, held an initial public offering. In truth, Trump’s financial struggles continued. Contrary to Trump’s own lofty predictions—he mused to Vanity Fair’s Edward Klein that the IPO might raise $4 billion—he only managed to raise $140 million; meanwhile, according to his tax returns from that year, which remain the only one of Trump’s tax returns revealed to the public, Trump declared a loss of nearly $916 million. His businesses continued to struggle, with his casinos posting $66 million in losses by the end of 1996 and another $42 million in 1997.

As The New York Times uncovered in 2018, Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have survived the period without the financial support of his father, Fred Trump, who not only loaned his son millions of dollars to keep his struggling businesses afloat but also helped orchestrate massive, likely illegal tax fraud schemes to hide those transactions from authorities. Unfortunately for Trump, that safety net disappeared in the late 1990s, first when Trump and his siblings officially took over the family company in 1997 and later when his father died in 1999. But Trump’s financial struggles continued: his flagship companies declared bankruptcy in both 2004 and 2009, with Trump resigning from his position as head of the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009.

Compounding Trump’s financial problems was the Wall Street stigma his business failures attracted. The Guardian has reported that, in the 1990s, “Wall Street banks, which had previously extended him credit, turned off the tap.” According to The New York Times, bankers went so far as to coin the phrase “the Donald risk” to describe the widespread aversion to lending to Trump. In 2013, one banker told The Atlantic, “If a major institution in New York—whether it was a Chase or a Goldman or a law firm or something—wanted to have a building built . . . I can give you almost 100 percent assurance that Donald would not be on the list.”

The Russian-fueled comeback

So how, then, did 15 Trump-branded projects break ground between 1998 and 2012?

Given that Trump has defied decades of political tradition by assiduously refusing to release his tax returns, it’s difficult to truly get to the bottom of his finances. But the public record is more than enough to demonstrate that the answer, in part, lies with Russia.

With the collapse of the Russian economy in 1998, Russian oligarchs who had made their fortunes buying up formerly state-held assets now sought to stash their money in international real estate. The Trump Organization offered an appealing haven for several reasons, ranging from its ostentatious gold-plated aesthetic to its reputation for lax reporting standards. As a result, several Trump-branded projects from 1998 onward received significant financing from sources with ties to Russia, most notably the Bayrock Group, a real estate company headquartered in Trump Tower and founded by the Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official Tevfik Arif, and Deutsche Bank, one of the few major financial institutions to still lend to Trump and which paid $630 million in penalties in 2017 for involvement in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme.

Russia also provided many of the buyers for Trump-branded real estate. According to a Bloomberg investigation into Trump World Tower, which broke ground in 1998, “a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states.” Reuters, meanwhile, has reported that “at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.”

And the Trump Organization reportedly welcomed the clientele. For example, a 2013 article in The Nation about the influx of Russian money in Miami real estate noted that Elena Baronoff, a Russian American socialite once described on the cover of a Russian magazine as “the Russian Hand of Donald Trump,” operated a real estate company out of the lobby of the city’s Trump International Beach Resort that catered to Eastern European buyers. The New Republic has also extensively documented how the Trump Organization actively sought Russian buyers, so much so that the area around Trump Sunny Isles in Florida became known as “Little Moscow.” Though these transactions are not inherently suspect, they demonstrate that the Trump Organization was sufficiently aware of its reliance on Russian money to actively cultivate relationships with Russian clients.

Some of the individual deals have attracted attention, most notably the Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev’s 2008 purchase of one of Trump’s mansions in Palm Beach. He paid a reported $95 million for it—$53 million more than Trump paid for it four years earlier. The transaction has received scrutiny from investigators, particularly because, though Trump justified the price increase by claiming he had “gutted the house” and spent $25 million on renovations, there were few apparent alterations. Such rapid and unexplained increases in price are frequently cited as red flags for money laundering through real estate. According to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the transaction is one of several special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are investigating for “potential money laundering or other illicit financial dealings between the president, his associates, and Russia.” Rybolovlev drew additional attention for his behavior during the final months of the 2016 election, during which his private plane was spotted on separate days in Las Vegas and Charlotte within hours of Trump’s arrival in each city. A spokesman for Rybolovlev dismissed the incidents as a coincidence, and Trump has denied meeting Rybolovlev; a White House official described questions about their relationship as a conspiracy theory. In November 2018, Rybolovlev was arrested in Monaco on apparently unrelated charges of corruption, to which he pleaded not guilty.

Trump SoHo, which broke ground in 2007, typifies how the Trump Organization benefited from financing coming out of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Much of the project’s financing came from the Bayrock Group. Several reported funders of the project, including Arif, Tamir Sapir, and Alexander Mashkevich, hail from the former Soviet Union and have reported ties to the current Kremlin. Some have also faced allegations of corrupt and criminal behavior, ranging from money laundering to smuggling to involvement in a prostitution ring. For example, in 2009, Sapir pleaded guilty to illegally importing animal parts. Mashkevich has been repeatedly accused of bribery and money laundering on projects in Kazakhstan, and settled a case in 1996 without admitting guilt. The same can be said for some of the property’s clientele. For example, Viktor Khrapunov, who formerly served as mayor of Almaty, Kazakhstan, went on trial in July 2018 for allegedly purchasing condominiums in the building using money stolen from state coffers and laundered through a network of offshore shell companies while serving as the country’s energy minister. As of this writing, the case is ongoing, and Khrapunov has denied any wrongdoing.

The Russian connections

Perhaps the most notable connection emerging out of Trump SoHo involves the Russian American real estate developer Felix Sater, who formerly served as the managing director of the Bayrock Group. Sater, who served a year in jail in the 1990s for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass, became an FBI informant in Moscow after pleading guilty to involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian mafia; the records for the conviction have since been sealed. Sater joined the Bayrock Group in 2001 and helped secure financing for Trump SoHo, leaning heavily on sources linked to Russia. After leaving Bayrock in 2009, he retained an office in Trump Tower and received Trump-branded business cards identifying him as a “senior adviser to Donald Trump.” Sater has said he had a “friendly” relationship with Trump and met with him “numerous times,” although the Trump Organization has disputed his account.

Sater has been involved in at least two attempts to develop a Trump Tower Moscow. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization contracted with Bayrock to develop a high-rise in the Russian capital; it was reportedly far enough along in the process that a site was chosen before the deal ultimately fell through. More notably, Sater was involved in an effort to establish a Trump Tower Moscow during the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, eliciting a signed letter of intent from the Trump Organization in October 2015. In November 2015, Sater reportedly emailed Michael Cohen—his longtime friend and the Trump Organization’s lawyer—about the project, writing, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. . . . our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.” The deal ultimately fell through in July 2016.

Sater also provides an example of a business connection attempting to transition into the political realm. Along with the email to Cohen, which seems to suggest that Sater saw developing Trump Tower Moscow as part of a broader strategy to ensure Trump’s election, Sater was involved in an attempt during the transition to influence the administration’s policy on Russia. In January 2017, Sater and Cohen reportedly worked with the Ukrainian politician Andriy (sometimes transliterated Andrey or Andrii) Artemenko to deliver a policy proposal to incoming national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that would roll back sanctions against Russia. Under the plan, Russia would withdraw its troops from eastern Ukraine, while Ukraine would hold a referendum on whether to “lease” Crimea to Russia; in return, the United States would lift the sanctions it had placed on Russia after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Sater has repeatedly declined to comment on the matter, and there is no indication that the administration considered or acted upon the proposal.

Trump SoHo is far from the only Trump Organization project to derive funding from questionable Russia-linked sources. Another example is the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto, which in June 2017 dropped its affiliation with the brand and is now simply the Adelaide Hotel Toronto. The project, which broke ground in 2007, was so financially embattled that, as the Toronto Star described in October 2017, “every investor lost money on Trump Tower Toronto” except Trump himself. In 2010, facing mounting costs and a dearth of investment, the building’s developer Alexander Shnaider received a sudden windfall when a then-unknown investor purchased an $850 million stake in Shnaider’s steel company Zaporizhstal. In May 2017, The Wall Street Journal revealed the source of those funds: the Russian state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank (VEB). The Trump Organization has distanced itself from the project, claiming that, despite reports in 2012 that Trump had a minor ownership stake, the company “was not the owner, developer or seller” of the property, was not involved in the financing, and “did not hold” equity. Shnaider, meanwhile, has offered conflicting accounts as to how much of the money from VEB ended up in the project: His lawyer at first told The Wall Street Journal that $15 million from the sale went into the property, but Shnaider has since said he is “not able to confirm that any funds went into the Toronto project.”

The Trump Organization has also pursued multiple projects in former Soviet states. The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson has written extensively on developments in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Batumi, Georgia, where the Trump Organization has dealt with companies and oligarchs with extensive histories of corruption and ties not only to Russian entities but also, in Azerbaijan, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. These projects, Davidson argues, are worrisome not only because of the specific actors involved but also because they leave the president open to accusations of abetting corruption abroad and demonstrate the Trump Organization’s tendency to skimp on due diligence, which could expose Trump to prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Trump’s other business practices during the 2000s also raise red flags for corruption and financial crime. His relationship with Deutsche Bank—which, as noted above, was by the late 1990s the only major financial institution willing to lend to him—was remarkably contentious. In 2008, Trump defaulted on the $640 million loan he had received from Deutche Bank in 2005 to build Trump Tower Chicago. Deutsche Bank sued Trump and was seeking an immediate $40 million. Trump then countersued a group of lenders, led by Deutsche Bank, for $3 billion, alleging that the banks had played a role in causing that year’s financial crisis and were therefore responsible for Trump’s inability to repay his debts. Two years later, Trump and Deutsche Bank settled—after which Deutsche Bank, to which Trump still owed hundreds of millions of dollars, went back to lending money to Trump. According to Newsweek, Trump “paid back Deutsche with a massive lifeline—from Deutsche” and these Deutsche Bank loans “rescued Trump after the [2008] crash.” By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he reportedly owed Deutsche Bank $300 million.

That Deutsche Bank would continue to lend to Trump so soon after a contentious legal battle that stemmed from Trump’s inability or unwillingness to repay his debts has raised significant suspicions about the sources of these funds. Compounding these suspicions is Deutsche Bank’s ties to Russia. On January 30, 2017, the New York State Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank $425 million for violating New York’s anti-money laundering. The bank admitted to a massive $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme involving “mirror trades,” which moved money out of Russia to the West between 2011 and 2015. The investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has reportedly subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank.

Moreover, in the mid-2000s, the Trump Organization made a radical shift in its business model. For decades, Trump had built a reputation as the self-proclaimed “King of Debt,” borrowing heavily to finance his projects. That Trump was able to do so and stay financially solvent was a key part of his mystique, although, as The New York Times has revealed, it was more a function of his father’s largesse than Trump’s abilities as a businessman. However, in the mid-2000s, the Trump Organization began dealing in massive sums of cash, a move uncharacteristic not just for the company but also for large real estate developers generally. Dealing in cash can be not only risky but also difficult, as raising liquid assets for a company that deals mostly in real estate may require selling off properties, and potentially invites corruption by side-stepping due diligence and anti-money laundering requirements that loans and banks introduce. But for the Trump Organization, the decision may have actually facilitated its business practices: During the development of Trump SoHo, Eric Trump reportedly said that “the best property buyers now are Russians,” who “can go around without a mortgage loan from American banks, that require income checks and they can buy apartments with cash.”

For all of Trump’s protestations, then, there is ample evidence that the Trump Organization has repeatedly done business with Russian investors and clients. Trump not only did not deny this fact until he began running for president but actually spoke about it frequently, boasting of the amount of Russian money that flowed through his projects in numerous interviews. So, too, did his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. In 2008, Trump Jr. told investors in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” while Eric Trump reportedly told a golf reporter in 2014 that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Why it matters

As mentioned above, Trump is not the only real estate developer to have dealings with Russian individuals and entities. Aside from the questions about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Trump’s repeated lies about his involvement with Russia since he began running for president, those deals wouldn’t necessarily be suspicious.

But most real estate developers with extensive financial ties, and possibly debts, to a hostile foreign power do not then run for president; most presidents do not evince such unprecedented obeisance to a hostile foreign power; and most presidents do not require the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether the president’s campaign conspired with that nation’s government. As a result, Trump’s long history of accepting money from Russian investors and clients takes on additional significance as the beginning of his relationship with Russia and, given the allegations of corruption that swirl around Trump and his company’s business dealings, appear to form the potential underpinnings for Russian collusion in the 2016 election.

How Russia weaponizes money laundering and corruption One mainstay of Putin’s efforts to increase Russian influence abroad has been his weaponization of corruption. As the Moscow Project previously explored in the report “Cracking the Shell: Trump and the Corrupting Potential of Furtive Russian Money,” the Russian government and the oligarchs who frequently operate on its behalf pursue corrupt business relationships because they can be used as both a carrot and a stick. Powerful individuals can be induced to support the Kremlin’s line via offers of lucrative business deals; this can happen without targets’ knowledge that they are being cultivated, as they arrive at a positive opinion based on what they perceive to be the Russian government’s legitimate support for their business. But if these dealings cross into unethical or even illegal territory, Russia has generated “kompromat”—or compromising material—that it can use as leverage to force those individuals to act on the Kremlin’s behalf. Already, real estate is a popular vehicle for money laundering, as it provides numerous opportunities for the type of small-scale transactions frequently used to mask illicit flows of money. But Trump’s business practices leave him particularly vulnerable to this type of cultivation. Especially after his multiple bankruptcies, Trump has relied heavily on projects in jurisdictions notorious for their corruption, including in former Soviet states where Russian influence is still strong. The Trump Organization has developed a reputation for skimping on the due diligence that is designed to avoid financing from illicit or questionable sources. When asked about its partners’ unsavory connections—as, for example, when Adam Davidson of The New Yorker traced financing for the Trump Organization’s aborted project in Baku, Azerbaijan, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard—the company distances itself by claiming that, as a licensor, they have little or no role in the actual development. These practices, coupled with the Trump Organization’s shift in the last decade from financing projects through debt to dealing largely in cash, raises significant red flags for potential money laundering. As a result, Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while president leaves him vulnerable not only to conflicts of interest but also to compromise, should Russia—or another country in which he’s dealt with corrupt actors—seek to gain leverage over him.

Chapter 3: Cultivating an asset

Following its established playbook, Russia has increasingly interfered in the politics of traditional opponents throughout the West in the hopes of undermining democracy and stability from within. Donald Trump was a political novice with a longstanding public admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and a penchant for advancing conspiracy theories. He espoused isolationist policies and had potentially compromising financial relationships with Kremlin-aligned oligarchs. He also had few apparent scruples and was running against a woman Putin considers among his main adversaries. Trump was simply an ideal candidate for the Kremlin to back. There is also reason to suspect that Russia began cultivating Trump as an asset long before his campaign for president, a common tactic the Kremlin pursues with people it suspects may be useful in the future.

Trump’s political rise

According to journalist Luke Harding, the author of Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Russia has been interested in Trump since at least 1987, when Trump visited Moscow with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin. Harding has also reported on documents that reveal that Czechoslovakia spied on Trump in the 1970s and 1980s during his marriage to his Czechoslovakia-born first wife, Ivana Trump. According to Harding, the Czechoslovakian government specifically targeted Trump because of his high profile as a businessman and political ambitions. At the time, the Czechoslovakian government was known to have close ties to the KGB; it is unknown if they shared information on Trump specifically. As it relates to the 2016 election, though, the natural starting point for analyzing the relationship is Trump’s rise to political relevance in the early 2010s, largely as an outspoken—and outspokenly racist—crusader against President Barack Obama.

It is easy to forget that Trump initially supported Obama. In 2008, Trump—at the time a registered Democrat—praised Obama during the latter’s primary campaign, saying, “I think [Obama] has a chance to go down as a great president.” This praise continued into 2009, when he told Larry King that Obama was “totally a champion,” and 2010, when Trump wrote in his book Think Like a Champion that “Obama proved that determination combined with opportunity and intelligence can make things happen—and in an exceptional way.”

By 2011, however, Trump not only soured on Obama but was a leading proponent of the so-called birther movement. On March 23 of that year, Trump told the “Today” show he had “some real doubts” about Obama’s birthplace and had sent investigators to Hawaii to explore. On another “Today” appearance, on April 7, Trump again questioned Obama’s citizenship, falsely saying that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya, and she was there and witnessed the birth. He doesn’t have a birth certificate or he hasn’t shown it,” and that Obama had spent $2 million in legal fees “to get away from this issue.” Even after Obama released his birth certificate, Trump continued his birther crusade over the coming years, tweeting about Obama’s birthplace 73 times in 2012 alone. He only publicly acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States in September 2016, and then blamed Clinton for propagating the conspiracy theory—and, according to The New York Times, continued to privately question Obama’s citizenship.

How—and even whether—Trump came to believe Obama was born in Kenya remains unknown. Given that Trump was at the time flirting with running for president, some have suggested that he began espousing birtherism as a matter of political expediency, evincing a recognition that racism was a key tool for appealing to large segments of the Republican base. Regardless, Trump’s promotion of this conspiracy theory, and his concurrent political rise, would have been attractive to Russian intelligence. As described in Chapter 1, the Kremlin has a long and well-documented history of exploiting racial tensions in its efforts to influence politics abroad. Many of the European fringe parties Russia supports, such as France’s National Front, the U.K. Independence Party, and Alternative for Germany, employ thinly veiled or outright racist appeals. Russian bots and trolls on social media frequently aim to boost these tensions, as in January 2016, when Russian propagandists pushed false reports that German authorities had covered up evidence that a German teenager had been gang-raped by Muslim immigrants, and in June 2016, when they promoted a similar, and similarly unsubstantiated, story in Twin Falls, Idaho. Moreover, birtherism isn’t simply racist; it also fundamentally attacks American democracy, asserting that tens of millions of Americans were duped into electing an illegitimate president and suggesting a massive cover-up by the government and media.

Trump rode birtherism to political prominence in the early 2010s. He became an increasingly regular guest on Fox News and other conservative media outlets throughout the period, appearances that many analysts argue laid the groundwork for his presidential campaign. In early 2011, he publicly floated the possibility of running in the 2012 Republican primary; though some polls showed him as a strong contender, or even frontrunner, he ultimately chose not to run. Nevertheless, the 2012 election offered proof of his increasing influence within conservative politics, culminating in Republican nominee Mitt Romney actively seeking—and ultimately receiving—Trump’s endorsement, reportedly partly out of fear that Trump would launch a third-party candidacy. That such a famous American, with a hit television show, a massive Twitter following, a penchant for racist conspiracy theories, and a long history of friendly business relations with Russia, was gaining clout within the historically anti-Russia Republican Party would not have gone unnoticed in Moscow.

It’s likely no coincidence then that, according to the dossier compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, Trump began feeding Russian intelligence information around the same time. The dossier, citing four sources—two officials in Russia (a senior former intelligence official and a senior foreign ministry official) and two Russian expatriates—claims that Trump had a relationship with Russian intelligence for at least five years:

Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years. . . .

Source close to TRUMP campaign however confirms regular exchange with Kremlin has existed for at least 8 years, including intelligence fed back to Russia on oligarchs’ activities in US.

The dossier’s allegation that Trump was providing information on Russian oligarchs living in his properties fits not only with how intelligence services operate—they often begin with such simple requests that targets do not realize they have become intelligence assets—but also with Russia’s efforts to keep tabs on its oligarchs, as well as Trump’s own track record of surveilling his buildings. Trump and members of his campaign named in the dossier have broadly denied its veracity, although they have not mounted any significant effort to discredit its individual allegations.

The Miss Universe Pageant trip

Trump’s trip to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant provided another ideal opportunity for Russia to cultivate him as an asset and to create the connections the Kremlin could then leverage in 2016. In planning and executing the pageant, Trump met with several individuals who would ultimately resurface during his presidential campaign, including Rob Goldstone, the music producer who arranged the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower; Azerbaijani Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his pop-star son Emin, on whose behalf Goldstone reached out to arrange the June 9 meeting; and Ike Kaveladze, an executive in the Agalarovs’ real estate company, whose actions formed the basis of a 2000 Government Accountability Office report on Russian money-laundering tactics and who attended the June 9 meeting. (The report does not allege any illegal behavior by Kaveladze, who has denied any wrongdoing.) Trump filmed a cameo appearance in the music video for Emin Agalarov’s song “In Another Life” at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton and rubbed elbows with other members of the Russian elite, such as Herman Gref, Russia’s former minister of economics and trade and the current CEO of Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank.

The Steele dossier describes the trip as a critical juncture in Russia’s cultivation of Trump as an asset. It is on this trip, Steele alleges, that Russia obtained kompromat on Trump in the form of a compromising video. This allegation, among the more explosive in the dossier, has been neither conclusively corroborated nor conclusively disproven. Trump denies that the event occurred; his personal bodyguard Keith Schiller testified before Congress that he actually turned down an offer from a Russian individual to “send five women” to Trump’s hotel room. Though Schiller presented the story as exculpatory, he also said he only stayed by the door to Trump’s hotel room for part of the night, leaving open the possibility that the encounter may have occurred after Schiller left. The episode also comports with Russia’s known tendency to produce kompromat on visiting government officials and business elite, often by bugging their hotel rooms and orchestrating embarrassing sexual encounters.

It is not unlikely, in fact, that there may be many instances of kompromat on Trump based on years of doing business in the region. For example, as described in the first two chapters of this report, Putin has for the past several years exploited Russia’s oligarchs and their relationships with businesspeople and politicians in Western countries to advance the interests of the Kremlin. Trump’s tendency to court Russia-based financing for projects in not just the United States and Russia but also other former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, appears to have brought Trump into the orbit of many of the same oligarchs. The Trump Organization’s reputation for skimping on due diligence with regard to its clientele and business partners creates the possibility that one or more of his business partners may possess compromising information on his financial dealings along with the sexual kompromat described in the dossier.

Whether or not Russia obtained kompromat on Trump during the weekend of the Miss Universe Pageant, the trip clearly left Trump with a high opinion of Russia and Putin. In interviews and speeches during and after the trip, Trump boasted about his relationship with the country and its leader, alluding to receiving a gift from and speaking “indirectly—and directly—with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.” By the time he returned to the United States, Trump was primed for Russia to exploit him to undermine democracy in the 2016 election.

Carter Page In 2013, the FBI indicted three Russian nationals for spying in the United States. Among their illegal actions was an attempt to recruit Carter Page, at the time the founder and head of a New York-based investment firm called Global Energy Capital. Page later became a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. In court documents from 2015, the FBI revealed that it had succeeded in secretly recording conversations among the three Russian intelligence operatives, including one in which the spies discussed Page, identified only as “Male-1” in the resulting documents. Though one spy considered Page an “idiot,” he also said that Page’s “enthusiasm works for me;” another said that he would “feed [Page] empty promises” to continue their efforts. Two of the Russian nationals, who claimed innocence, avoided arrest thanks to diplomatic immunity; the third, who had entered the country as a private citizen, pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. The documents—including notes from an interview the FBI later conducted with Page—offer a window into Russian intelligence’s efforts to cultivate assets in the United States and elsewhere. As Page later described, the Russian operatives approached him with simple requests that did not set off any alarm bells, including asking for materials from a course on energy and politics he was teaching at the time. Upon being identified as “Male-1” in subsequent reporting, Page stressed that he only “shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents,” suggesting he still did not consider the interactions notable. One of the spies also suggested he could help Page land contracts through his connections with Russian trade officials. The pattern is, in other words, similar to what Steele’s sources say occurred with Trump: Russian intelligence agents apparently began by approaching with a request for information their target would not find unusual, then stepped up to offers of lucrative business opportunities accomplished through their connections to the government.

Chapter 4: The election

It is now apparent that there was no bright line separating the two campaigns to elect Donald Trump. Throughout his presidential campaign, members of Trump’s inner circle had secret conversations and meetings with numerous Kremlin-linked individuals, which they repeatedly lied about or failed to disclose. Though much about these contacts remains unknown, what is known provides strong evidence that the Kremlin and the Trump campaign were in continual communication.

A pro-Russia candidate

From the day he entered the race, June 16, 2015, Trump staked out a pro-Russia platform. Trump told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that his experiences with Russians in Moscow led him to believe that “you can get along with those people and get along with them well.” Over the course of the next month, Trump made similar on-air comments to Fox News’s Sean Hannity and in a speech at the City Club of Chicago. On July 11, he made his first direct reference to repealing sanctions when responding to a question from Maria Butina, a graduate student who the U.S. Department of Justice later identified as an alleged Russian agent. Butina also allegedly infiltrated the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups on behalf of the Russian government. (Butina has pleaded not guilty to the charges and, as of this writing, is in jail awaiting trial.) In a question-and-answer session with Trump in Las Vegas, Butina asked whether sanctions were part of his “foreign politics.” Trump replied, “I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin. . . . I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.” Trump went on to praise President Vladimir Putin dozens of times during the primaries, frequently pairing his praise with suggestions that, if elected, he would consider lifting sanctions on Russia.

These remarks stood out because they directly contradicted decades of Republican sentiment. Since the end of World War II, the Republican Party had actively staked out a hawkish position on Russia. The party’s previous presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, famously described Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Trump’s Republican opponents frequently attacked not only Putin but also Obama, whom they saw as having enabled Putin’s increased stature through Obama’s nonconfrontational foreign policy. Trump, on the other hand, repeatedly called for even greater deference to Putin and Russia, saying at a debate in November 2015 that he hoped to work with Russia to “knock the hell out of ISIS.”

What also makes Trump’s stance on Russia notable is that it was one of the few issues on which he remained consistent, despite there being no clear political rationale for doing so. During his campaign, Trump was both famously heterodox (for example, he repeatedly attacked free-trade agreements, long a linchpin of Republican economic policy) and famously difficult to pin down on any one position (for example, he promised he would both repeal the Affordable Care Act and protect Medicaid and Medicare, and frequently outright denied his own previous statements and policy positions). Even Trump’s noted affinity for autocratic leaders failed to account for his stance; for example, though he has praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his authoritarian ways, Trump has also repeatedly criticized—as well as directly antagonized—China on economic issues. As a result, his continual praise for Putin and Russia drew significant attention, even before reporting after the election revealed the extent of Russian interference and the dozens of contacts and meetings between Trump’s campaign and Kremlin-linked officials.

2015: Laying the groundwork

By the time Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, the U.S. intelligence community was reportedly already aware of the Kremlin’s interest in Trump. According to The Wall Street Journal, in spring 2015, “US spy agencies captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Mr. Trump, including Mr. [Paul] Manafort,” who would later serve as the second of Trump’s three campaign heads. In late 2015, U.K. intelligence agencies also reportedly spotted suspicious “interactions” between people in Trump’s orbit and Kremlin-linked individuals during “routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets.”

That Russia was in contact with Trump associates early on is especially notable considering that, at this point, the Trump campaign was reportedly largely a family affair. According to Forbes, when reporters visited the campaign’s headquarters in Trump Tower in November 2015, several months after Trump announced his candidacy, “there was literally nothing there. No people—and no desks or chairs or computers awaiting the arrival of staffers. Just campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, spokesperson Hope Hicks and a strategy that centered on Trump making headline-grabbing statements.”

Around the same time, Russia reportedly began the cyberattacks that would prove central to its influence campaign. According to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, that summer the Russian hacking group Cozy Bear began its first phishing operation targeting the Democratic National Committee. By September, the FBI knew of the attack and informed the DNC that Russian hackers had “compromised at least one computer.”

One contact between Trump’s inner circle and the Kremlin early in the campaign involved Trump’s business. The Trump Organization signed a letter of intent to license its name for a Trump Tower Moscow in October 2015. The next month, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen—one of the few individuals involved with the campaign from the beginning—and Cohen’s longtime friend Felix Sater, the Russian-American real estate developer, explicitly discussed the deal in the context of the election. On November 3, Sater, who has claimed ties to Russian organized crime and to the Kremlin, said the project would offer a chance for Trump to demonstrate his business acumen to the public. Sater then bragged, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. . . . our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.” In January 2016, Cohen reportedly emailed Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov to request help with the project. Peskov has said that he received the email but did not respond, and the project ultimately did not go forward.

March 2016: The campaigns gain steam

The first few months of 2016 saw Trump’s campaign build both momentum and connections to Russia. This period was marked by three major concurrent developments. First, Trump began to win in Republican primary contests, increasingly staking a claim as the prohibitive favorite for the nomination. Second, Russia became significantly more aggressive in implementing its influence campaign. And third, Trump’s campaign hired several individuals with conspicuous ties to Russia, many of whom would become key players in his campaign’s collusion with the Kremlin.

Russia escalates its online campaign

As Trump won primaries, Russia significantly escalated its hacking campaign. Having already penetrated the DNC, Russian hackers launched another phishing expedition on March 10, 2016, targeting Democratic operatives. It was during this round of attacks that, on March 19, 2016, Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta received the phishing email that would provide Russian hackers with access to his account and the emails they would later publish in the final month of the campaign through WikiLeaks—a known cut-out for Russian intelligence. (Podesta is the founder of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Center for American Progress.)

Hacking was not the only measure Russian agents took to support their candidate. They also implemented a multifaceted media campaign to boost Trump’s candidacy, an effort that became increasingly brazen in early 2016. According to the U.S. intelligence community’s January 2017 report, “Starting in March 2016, Russian Government-linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences,” such as the state-run news outlets RT and Sputnik.

Russia-linked figures join the campaign



In February, Reuters reported that the retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who in December 2015 sat next to Putin at RT’s annual gala in Moscow, was advising Trump. On March 21, in an interview with the editorial board of The Washington Post, Trump named his foreign policy team, led by then-Senator Jeff Sessions and including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. At the time, the announcement drew attention because few people had heard of Page or Papadopoulos; both have since become important figures in the Russia investigation. However, the FBI already had reason to believe Page was a Russian asset: In 2015, the bureau broke up a Russian spy ring that had attempted to recruit Page, and had one Russian agent on tape saying that Page’s “enthusiasm works for me.” Finally, on March 28, Paul Manafort, a longtime political operative who spent a decade working for a pro-Putin party in Ukraine, joined the campaign as an unpaid adviser. He would later serve as the second of Trump’s three campaign leads.

Campaigns in contact (March through July)

Between March and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July 2016, at least five individuals from the Trump campaign reportedly communicated with Kremlin officials or allies. According to the October 2017 guilty plea he signed, on March 14, 2016, George Papadopoulos met for the first of at least three meetings with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor and reported Russian intelligence asset. Mifsud later told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails” and introduced him to a woman identified in Papadopoulos’s plea agreement as “the Female Russian National,” whom Mifsud claimed was Putin’s niece, and Ivan Timofeev, who claimed to be an employee of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After Papadopoulos’s plea deal became public, Mifsud described the allegations as “baloney” and denied that he “spoke of secrets regarding Hillary Clinton,” but Mifsud appears to have disappeared since. Papadopoulos informed multiple senior campaign officials about the meeting, including Lewandowski and Trump campaign senior policy advisor Stephen Miller. He also discussed meeting Mifsud with the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who in turn informed U.S. intelligence officials; their conversation would ultimately become the inciting incident for the U.S. intelligence community’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

On April 11, Manafort reportedly emailed his former deputy, Konstantin Kilimnik, who was later named as a Russian intelligence officer by the Mueller investigation, starting a conversation in which Manafort appeared to offer to set up private briefings for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has alleged that Manafort owes him almost $20 million. Manafort’s lawyers have denied that this was the intent behind the emails, and dispute that Manafort owes Deripaska money.

On April 27, Trump gave a foreign policy address at the Center for National Interest at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where he called for warmer relations with Russia. Prior to the speech, then-Sen. Sessions met with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

In late May, Trump Jr. met with Aleksander Torshin, the deputy head of Russia’s central bank and a leading member of Putin’s United Russia Party, at an NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Torshin also played a key role in assisting Maria Butina, the Russian graduate student who, as previously mentioned, allegedly infiltrated the NRA and other conservative groups on behalf of the Russian government.

And in June, the Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn fielded an email from a West Virginia-based Republican operative named Rick Clay offering to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin; according to CNN, “the Trump campaign appears to have rejected the meeting request.”

The June 9 meeting: Collusion at Trump Tower

The most famous meeting between the two campaigns took place on June 9, 2016. The roots of the meeting go back to July 2015, one month after Trump announced his candidacy. That month, Rob Goldstone, a music producer and publicist who first become acquainted with the Trumps during the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013, emailed Trump’s assistant asking whether Trump “would welcome a meeting with President Putin.” According to The Washington Post, “there is no indication that Trump or his assistant followed up on Goldstone’s offer,” and Goldstone’s attorney declined to comment.

Goldstone had more success when, on June 3, 2016, he sent an email to Trump Jr. with the subject line “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential” in which he offered to set up a meeting regarding “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. responded, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” On June 7, 2016, the pair set up the meeting for June 9.

The meeting occurred on June 9, 2016, at 4 p.m. in Trump Tower. Attending on behalf of the Trump campaign were Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort; representing Russian interests were Goldstone, the lawyer and Magnitsky Act opponent Natalia Veselnitskaya, the real estate executive and suspected money launderer Irakly Kaveladze, and the lobbyist and former counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, along with a translator. According to the Trump campaign, the group discussed “adoptions,” believed to be code for the discussion of the American sanctions bill known as the Magnitsky Act because Putin’s response to the Magnitsky Act was to ban America adoptions of sick and disabled Russian orphans.

Taken together, these contacts demonstrate the overlap between the two campaigns to elect Donald Trump. By the end of June, at least eight individuals involved with the Trump campaign—George Papadopoulos, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and Rick Dearborn—reportedly had contacts or meetings with at least 13 Kremlin-linked individuals: Joseph Mifsud, the “Female Russian National,” Ivan Timofeev, Sergey Kislyak, Felix Sater, Rob Goldstone, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin, Irakly Kaveladze, Konstantin Kilimnik, Aleksander Torshin, Vladimir Putin, the individual who emailed Rick Dearborn, and, potentially, Oleg Deripaska. Though it is unknown how directly each individual was engaged in the Kremlin’s effort to support Trump, both the number of meetings and contact and the high level of many of the participants on both sides offer key evidence of the two campaigns’ willingness to collude.

The world takes notice



At least eight countries reportedly passed information to U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election between the time of Trump’s announcement and his nomination. According to The New York Times, the FBI launched its investigation into the matter after Papadopoulos drunkenly mentioned his meetings with Mifsud to the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who passed the information back to his government, which passed it to the U.S. intelligence community. Other countries sharing intelligence reportedly included the United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and “one of the Baltic States,” which in April 2016 reportedly gave CIA Director John Brennan “a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.”

Meanwhile, in June, the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele began compiling his dossier on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which appears to allude to some of the contacts that were not yet public knowledge. In his first report, Steele wrote that two sources—a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow”—told him that “the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON.” Steele also noted that “the Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia,” but that the offers did not pan out.

July: Quid pro quo at the Convention?

July saw more meetings and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia and marked a turning point not only because Trump officially secured the Republican nomination for president but also because Russia began to implement its digital strategy.

On July 7, Carter Page traveled to Russia to speak at the New Economic School in Moscow. According to the Steele dossier, during the trip Page met with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Putin’s and the head of the Russian state-run energy company Rosneft, and Igor Divyekin, the head of the lower house of the Russian legislature. Page denied these meetings occurred; however, according to his own congressional testimony, after the speech Page met with Russia’s deputy prime minister, Arkady Dvorkovich, and Andrey Baranov, the head of investor relations at Rosneft. The next day he emailed another of Trump’s advisers, J.D. Gordon, a longtime Republican operative, about “incredible insights and outreach . . . from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here.” Page later testified that he communicated with multiple Trump campaign officials in advance of his trip, including then-Sen. Sessions, Gordon, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and spokeswoman Hope Hicks, to receive approval.

Page’s Moscow trip features prominently in the Steele dossier. According to Steele, the Russian officials with whom Page met “raised with PAGE the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia,” to which Page “reacted positively . . . but had been generally non-committal in response.” The dossier also says the Rosneft executives with whom Page met offered him “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return” for lifting sanctions, and that Page “confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.” Page has denied the allegations, calling the dossier “dodgy,” but acknowledged that he did meet with Russian officials while in Moscow.

A week later, during the debates over the GOP’s official platform, the Trump campaign reportedly requested a change that represented a major divergence from Republican norms—and that seemed to manifest the campaign’s pro-Russia stance. Prior to the 2016 election, Republican politicians had almost universally attacked the Obama administration for refusing to provide lethal weapons assistance to Ukraine. Language calling upon the government to do so was reportedly included in a draft of the official GOP platform.

But during the debates over the platform, which lasted from July 11 to July 15, 2016, that language was softened, from offering “lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine’s Armed Forces” to merely calling for “appropriate assistance.” The platform committee reportedly made the change at the behest of J.D. Gordon.

Initially, the Trump campaign dissembled about the change. Speaking on “Meet the Press” on July 31, Trump’s then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort said the change “absolutely did not come from the Trump campaign.” The same day, Trump told ABC that his campaign was behind the change, but denied having been personally involved in the decision. Gordon, too, offered conflicting accounts, disputing that he played a role before acknowledging he had pushed the platform committee to change the language.

Since then, it has become clearer that the Trump campaign was behind the change. Page, who had just returned from Moscow, reportedly emailed Gordon and other campaign advisers praising their work on changing the amendment, and several other Republican operatives involved in the platform committee have since corroborated reports that Gordon led the effort to change the platform. Gordon was also one of three members of the Trump campaign, along with Sessions and Page, to reportedly meet with Russian ambassador Kislyak at the Convention on July 20.

DNC hack and release

After the RNC, Russia began implementing one of the major planks of its digital strategy. On July 22, WikiLeaks published the first batch of what would become a steady stream of emails it had stolen from Democratic operatives, revealing messages acquired from the Democratic National Committee’s servers. The leak seemed orchestrated to disrupt the Democratic National Convention, which began three days later in Philadelphia. The leak included emails from the committee’s chairwoman, congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), and other operatives in which they seemed dismissive toward Senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. The emails fueled outrage among Sanders supporters who felt the national Democratic Party had unduly influenced the primary process toward Hillary Clinton, leading to protests during the convention and to Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s resignation.

By the convention’s end, consensus was growing that Russia was behind the leaked emails. On July 26, U.S. intelligence sources told The New York Times that they had “‘high confidence’ that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee,” although they had not yet determined whether the hacks were “intended as fairly routine cyberespionage . . . or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.”

Trump not only cast doubt on the intelligence community’s assessment but called upon Russia to do more. In a July 27 press conference, Trump said that blaming Russia was “a total deflection,” adding, “it’s probably China, or it could be somebody sitting in his bed.” He then urged Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to the ongoing scandal regarding Clinton’s private email server, continuing, “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” According to the special counsel’s 2018 indictment of the 12 Russian hackers who allegedly stole emails from John Podesta and the DNC, they attempted later that night to infiltrate Clinton’s private email server. Though the campaign claimed the comment was a joke, Trump doubled down the next morning, tweeting, “If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!”

The general election: Operationalizing collusion

Individuals associated with the Trump campaign reportedly continued to interact with Kremlin-linked individuals throughout the final months of the campaign. It is now known (as of October 29, 2018) that there were at least 71 contacts and 21 meetings between the two groups, involving at least 11 Trump officials and 20 Russians. Additionally, despite having access to the intelligence community’s growing consensus that Russia was trying to interfere in the election, Trump continued to question whether Russia was behind the hacks, including during all three presidential debates and in a September 8 interview with Russia’s state-run propaganda channel RT.

Meanwhile, Russia escalated its campaign on Trump’s behalf, often in ways that strongly resembled the Trump team’s own strategies. Many of Russia’s tactics, including stealing and leaking private communications and attempting to hack private companies, are illegal; others, such as funding armies of online bots and trolls to spread dissent and disinformation, might be legal—if atypical—if conducted by American citizens, but not when carried out by a foreign government.

Russia’s most direct contribution to Trump’s campaign was hacking and releasing emails from Trump’s opponents, which effectively gave the Trump campaign an unmatched “opposition research” capability. Trump eagerly embraced WikiLeaks during the campaign, publicly mentioning the website 164 times in the final month of the campaign alone.

Even at the time, there was evidence that people in Trump’s orbit had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans. Roger Stone, a Republican operative with a self-professed reputation as a “dirty trickster” and a long history of informally advising Trump, publicly stated multiple times in August that he was in contact with not only WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange but also the Russian hacker who claimed credit for stealing the emails. One of Stone’s statements that especially stands out came on August 21, when Stone tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.” The tweet seemed to presage WikiLeaks’s publication of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, which Podesta himself did not know had been hacked until WikiLeaks began to leak them. Reporting by The Wall Street Journal suggests that Stone, through an intermediary, had increasingly specific contacts with WikiLeaks. In emails between Stone and his longtime associate, the conservative radio host Randy Credico, Stone appears to allude to emails that have not yet been released, and even suggests rollout strategies for future releases. Stone continues to dispute reports of foreknowledge of the WikiLeaks dumps during the campaign, and at one point even preemptively denied a report on the subject. However, Mueller’s team has reportedly obtained emails in which Stone and an associate not only passed information to the Trump campaign regarding WikiLeaks but also claimed credit for upcoming revelations.

Reporting since the election has revealed that others associated with the Trump campaign also communicated with WikiLeaks or Russian hackers during the campaign. The closest to Trump was his son Donald Trump Jr., who received a direct message from WikiLeaks on Twitter on September 20. The two exchanged several messages during the final month of the campaign, including one in which WikiLeaks suggested Trump contest the results of the election if he lost. Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, the data firm Jared Kushner hired to run the campaign’s digital operations, also reportedly contacted WikiLeaks in June 2016 about assisting with the dissemination of the hacked emails. Both sides have confirmed that the outreach occurred. Assange has said that WikiLeaks received, but rejected, the offer. Additionally, the Republican donor Peter Smith told The Wall Street Journal in June 2017 that he had independently organized a team to try to establish contact with Russian hackers to obtain Clinton’s emails during the campaign. Finally, George Papadopoulos apparently knew before anybody else that Russia had the Clinton campaign’s emails, having heard about them from Mifsud in April.

The clearest evidence that WikiLeaks and Russia were working on Trump’s behalf came on October 7, 2016. That afternoon, at 4:03 p.m., The Washington Post published the explosive “Access Hollywood” tape, behind-the-scenes footage from 2005 in which Trump bragged about groping women without their consent. Just 29 minutes later, WikiLeaks began publishing the contents of Podesta’s email inbox. Whether there was explicit coordination between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks remains unknown. Nevertheless, the move seemed to demonstrate Russia and WikiLeaks’s intent to help the Trump campaign: It is hard to imagine WikiLeaks timing the release on a Friday afternoon right after the biggest bombshell of the campaign unless the organization was actively trying to distract from The Washington Post’s story.

Second, the Kremlin provided communications support. As the intelligence community’s January 6, 2017, report documents, Russia used networks of online bots and trolls, as well as state-run media such as RT America and Sputnik, to aggressively promote Trump’s candidacy from almost the moment he announced he would be running. Russian bots and trolls allegedly helped tilt the online discourse in a pro-Trump direction throughout the campaign (and, even as social networks try to combat their influence, reportedly these bots and trolls retain the ability to steer conversations through hashtags and trending topics).

To supplement its online campaign, the Kremlin also reportedly purchased advertisements on social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. Though Facebook initially denied that its platform had been used to spread disinformation, it later revealed that Kremlin-linked companies spent at least $150,000 during the election on promoted posts, prompting a cascade of revelations showing how Russian-produced content across a variety of social networks reached millions of users. While most of the content was confined to the internet, some of the ads promoted real-world events, including an anti-refugee rally in an Idaho town where Breitbart News falsely claimed the local government was covering up a horrific crime spree by Muslim refugees.

The resemblance between the Kremlin’s campaign and the official Trump campaign’s online strategies goes beyond mutual support for Trump. The Russian companies purchasing advertisements reportedly used targeting techniques that strongly resemble those that Cambridge Analytica frequently touts. Cambridge Analytica has denied allegations that it colluded with Russian actors. In the weeks leading up to the election, both reportedly heavily targeted the Midwestern states that ultimately proved essential for Trump’s victory, despite political analysts’ doubts that he could win there. Both also specifically sought to depress turnout for Clinton among voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary by resurfacing wedge issues such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and, in the Kremlin’s case, by promoting Sanders and the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. Members of Trump’s digital operations team bragged about their turnout-suppressing campaign mere days before the election.

These similarities raise the possibility that the campaigns shared not only a superficial strategy but also underlying data behind the decisions. The sophistication of Russia’s social media campaign suggests that they had inside help: Not only did the Kremlin reportedly mirror and amplify the Trump campaign uncannily well, it also displayed a level of insight far above what could be expected from a foreign observer—it was, after all, above that of most domestic analysts. Indeed, Steele noted in July 2016 that there was an “extensive conspiracy between campaign team and Kremlin,” with “exchange of information established in both directions.”

A February 2018 indictment of 13 Russian operatives and three Russian companies that allegedly carried out the online propaganda campaign indicated a much broader and more sophisticated operation than was initially revealed. According to the indictment, the Russian operatives and companies cumulatively spent more than $1 million per month on not just the ads but also real-world events and outside consulting on how best to deploy their online strategy. They also reportedly conducted outreach with other pro-Trump groups, including one local field office, although the indictment does not mention if there was additional coordination with higher-level members of the Trump campaign.

Beyond the contacts between individuals linked to the two campaigns, they may have been able to trade information without having to meet face-to-face or exchange emails. On October 31, 2016, the journalist Franklin Foer wrote in Slate about a mysterious online connection between the Trump campaign and a Russian bank. According to Foer, a cybersecurity expert noticed in late July that a Trump Organization server appeared to be communicating with one at Alfa Bank, a Russian financial institution with links to the Kremlin. Though some experts suggested the communication could be spam, none was found to have been transferred between the two servers. In March 2017, CNN reported that the FBI and cybersecurity experts “continue to examine” the connection; however, it remains a mystery why the servers were communicating and what, if any, information was exchanged. The Trump Organization has denied “sending or receiving any communications from this email server.”

Additionally, the Kremlin appears to have assisted with the financing of the campaign. All campaigns need money to support their efforts. It is why campaigns desperately fundraise. Russia has been known to provide financial backing to nationalist politicians, as it did with Le Pen’s campaign in France in 2017. Though the opacity of America’s campaign finance system makes definitive proof hard to find, there are at least three indications that Russia financially supported Trump as well.

First, according to the indictment of 13 Russian operatives involved in bot and troll farms, the Kremlin spent millions of dollars not only directly purchasing advertisements on social media but also paying for consulting and the labor of its agents. This money effectively subsidized the Trump campaign, which was otherwise known as a remarkably small, ill-organized team that seemed to otherwise spend surprisingly little to support its own efforts.

Second, Trump, according to his disclosure forms, spent $66 million of his own personal fortune to fund his campaign. Beyond the fact that, as described above, much of that personal fortune likely derives from financing and customers from Russia and other former Soviet countries, questions remain as to how Trump, whose money is largely tied up in illiquid assets such as real estate, was able to generate that much cash to spend. The Kremlin may also have found other ways to secretly route money into Trump’s coffers—or those of organizations that supported him. For example, the National Rifle Association spent an unprecedented $30 million to support Trump. Since the election, the organization has revealed that it received $2,512.85 in contributions “from people associated with Russian addresses.” However, Senate Democrats claimed in an interim report on their investigation that the NRA had received, and failed to disclose, significantly more from Russian sources.

Third, investigators are reportedly probing several suspicious transactions during the campaign by Kremlin-linked figures. According to multiple reports by BuzzFeed News, these i