Michael Caputo’s favorite novel is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s and all the oddball characters who surround him. When the future Trump campaign official was living in Moscow in the 1990s, he moved to Patriarchs Pond, the novel’s setting, and scratched his apartment’s paint down to the color it was when Bulgakov wrote the novel in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and then repainted each room in the color it would have been then.

Today, Caputo thinks the book’s magical realism and interplay of greed, guilt, and politics captures the absurdity of our modern moment perfectly, and he has taken his own first-edition copy of the book into his closed-door testimonies before the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, earlier this month, to meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators. “I figure that’ll raise its resale value,” he says. “I’ll put it on eBay someday.”

Among the odd stories surrounding the colorful cast of characters orbiting the Trump campaign and the Mueller investigation, political consultant Michael Caputo—a one-time protégé of PR dirty trickster Roger Stone and former aide to Paul Manafort—likely doesn’t even crack the top dozen. In fact, his most memorable claim to fame on the Trump campaign may be that he’s the only person to have left the campaign under totally normal circumstances, resigning after an ill-advised tweet that celebrated the firing of Corey Lewandowski. (“Ding dong the witch is dead,” he wrote, accompanying the post with a photo of a pair of legs crushed by a house.)

Caputo has attracted the attention of Congressional and Justice Department investigators, but he says he’s also wrapped up in a burgeoning Russia-gate of his own, a brewing scandal driven by left-wing bloggers in possession of leaked documents he handed over to Senate investigators, an attempt to smear his latest Russian-linked business venture, a video website he describes as filling the gap “between Netflix and YouTube.”

He spoke to WIRED in an attempt to get ahead of looming rumors about the venture, Bond.PM, which declares itself “the future of entertainment powered by Blockchain.” Given his prominence in the Trump orbit and conservative circles, he says, “I expect to get a couple kicks in the nuts.” But he’s here to tell you that claims that there’s anything untoward about his new business are baseless—and his critics are simply trying to discredit him because of general anti-Russia bias. “I’m about to be roasted,” he says. “The reason the Senate is leaking is because I’m in business with Russians.”

Caputo’s business interests in Russia stretch back to the 1990s, when he lived there working on behalf of the US Agency for International Development and later advised then-President Boris Yeltsin. He also helped run “Rock the Vote Russia.” (“When the Clinton administration asked me to go meddle in the Russian election, I jumped at the chance,” he jokes.) Though he left Russia as Vladimir Putin took office, he has remained active in the region’s politics and business, including consulting for Gazprom. But more than business, he says he’s an aficionado of Russian art and culture, a child of the Cold War who fought Soviet Communism with the Contras and with his old boss, Jack Kemp.

Bond.PM—for which Caputo is listed as chief marketing officer—isn’t some sort of Russian plot, he says. It’s a startup that just happens to involve a lot of Russians.

The startup, which hasn’t launched yet, says its streaming platform aims to “take the middlemen out of the game” and connect video creators directly with an audience, allowing for crowd-investing and decentralized ownership enabled by smart contracts and its own cryptocurrency powered by the Ethereum blockchain. “This whole blockchain thing is so compelling to me—I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s such an interesting ride,” Caputo says.