Proof of Collusion, Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee

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Jul 21, 2023

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Introduction: A Theory of the Case
- Date: October 2018
Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps
- Dates: 1987 to 2012
Chapter 2: Trump and the Agalarovs
- Date: 2013
Chapter 3: Kompromat
- Date: November 2013
Chapter 4: The Campaign Begins
- Dates: 2013 to 2015
Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee
- Dates: January to March 2016
Chapter 6: The Mayflower Hotel
- Date: April 2016
Chapter 7: The Backchannels
- Dates: May to June 2016
Chapter 8: The Republican National Convention
- Date: July 2016
Chapter 9: The Hunt for Her Emails
- Dates: July to September 2016
Chapter 10: The October Surprise
- Date: October 2016
Chapter 11: The Transition
- Dates: November 2016 to January 2017
Chapter 12: The Firings of Flynn and Comey
- Dates: February to May 2017
Chapter 13: Testimony and Plea
- Dates: June to December 2017
Chapter 14: A Nation in Suspense
- Date: 2018
Afterword: The Death and Rebirth of America
- Date: 2019

Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee

January to March 2016

Summary

In the first 90 days of 2016, Donald Trump assembles a National Security Advisory Committee whose members surprise experts for their absence of qualifications.

Several of Trump’s new national security advisers have no relevant national security experience; others do, but are unknown to professionals in the field; and at least one Trump national security adviser expected to be placed on the committee—retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn—isn’t named at all.

A number of the new advisers are the subject of puzzling contacts with the Russians. One was recruited to be a Russian spy by the SVR RF (Russia’s foreign intelligence service) in 2013; another had been part of a secret plot to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels in 2013; another worked as an analyst for Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet RT in 2015; another will be approached by a Kremlin agent in Italy just two weeks after his engagement on the committee and be asked to serve as an intermediary between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, an offer the adviser immediately accepts; and yet another Trump national security adviser, Erik Prince—who, like Flynn, is a “shadow” adviser never formally recognized by Trump for reasons that are never explained—will secretly meet with a Kremlin agent in the Seychelles during the Trump Transition in early January 2017.

At the March 2016 meeting of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, one of its earliest hires intimates to campaign officials that he is “acting as an intermediary” for the Kremlin; he is thereafter be promoted to Trump’s speech-writing team. The committee’s chairman, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, will later be accused of giving false and misleading statements to Congress about secret meetings with the Russians, while its director, J.D. Gordon, will be accused of giving several false statements about changes he made to the 2016 Republican Party platform to benefit the Kremlin.

As Gordon will tell CNN in 2017, at the March 31, 2016 meeting of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., Trump personally ordered the committee to change the Republican Party platform at the July Republican National Convention in Cleveland in a way that, per the Washington Post, “gut[ted] [its] anti-Russia stance on Ukraine.” After Gordon successfully changes the party’s Ukraine plank at the convention he will say to CNN’s Jim Acosta that “this was the language Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March [at the Trump International Hotel].”

At the same March 2016 meeting, the Kremlin’s “intermediary” to Trump, new Trump national security adviser George Papadopoulos, reveals to the assembled group—which includes Trump himself—that he is working with the Russians to effectuate a Kremlin-Trump backchannel. Reports of what happens next vary, but three attendees at the meeting will later tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees that neither Sessions nor Trump offered any objections to Papadopoulos continuing to conduct clandestine backchannel negotiations with the Kremlin (with whom, as we have seen, Trump was at the time in active business negotiations as to Trump Tower Moscow, which stood to be the most lucrative build of Trump’s career).

When asked in 2017 about the March 2016 meeting and his response to Papadopoulos identifying himself as an active agent for the Kremlin, Mr. Trump, who had “recently boasted of having ‘one of the great memories of all time’”, per the Washington Post, replied, “I don’t remember much about that meeting.”

The Facts

In the three most critical months of the 2016 Republican primary season—after which all Republican presidential contenders except Donald Trump, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and Ohio governor John Kasich are eliminated—Trump puts together a national security team he calls his National Security Advisory Committee. The overwhelming majority of pre-election backchannel contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin will involve at least one member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, or both.

The pressure on Trump to build a national security advisory apparatus had increased exponentially once he won ten of the first seventeen GOP primaries and caucuses. He had come in second in four of the remaining seven, and in two of those—Alaska and Iowa—he missed the top spot by only 3 percent.

In mid-February, however, at a time when only two states have voted—Iowa, won by Ted Cruz, and New Hampshire, won by Trump—billionaire Thomas Barrack, a good friend of Donald Trump and of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, has lunch with an old friend of his, Paul Manafort. Manafort has spent years making millions “working for a corrupt pro-Russian political party [in Ukraine]” and “promot[ing] Russian interests” in former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Manafort tells Barrack that “I really need to get to [Trump]”, and makes an unusual offer to convince Barrack to help him: he says he will work for Trump for free, despite the fact that his usual fees for consulting work are in the seven figures and Trump and his campaign are purportedly flush with cash. Moreover, even though Trump has no particular reason to believe, at the time, that he will become the 2016 GOP nominee for president, Manafort quickly offers to also become his “convention manager” for the Republican National Convention—which is still four months away.

In October 2017, the New York Times will publish the “talking points” Manafort used in convincing Trump to hire him. They include: “I am not looking for a paid job”; “Position me as coming into the Trump campaign as ‘your [Trump’s] guy’”; “I live in Trump Tower”; and “When Black Manafort and Stone [Manafort’s old lobbying firm] worked for Trump, I managed the Mar a Largo [sic] FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] problem Trump had.”

Though Trump has known Manafort for many years, and knows him to be a well-paid lobbyist and consultant with clients around the world, he accepts Manafort’s unusual offer to work for free on a delegate-counting operation still months in the future—at a political convention his campaign may never reach. Trump’s comfort with Manafort, along with his friend Barrack’s recommendation, may have carried the day: the New York Times reports that Trump and Manafort “had some business in the 1980s” and since then “had brushed shoulders over the years”, with Manafort not only being one of Trump’s tenants but at one point doing work for Trump “clear[ing] noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.” The Times also notes that Manafort “touted his overseas work”—work he did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine—in convincing Trump to bring him aboard the campaign.

After joining Trump’s team on March 28, 2016, Manafort quickly becomes the de facto campaign manager for the entire Trump operation; his ascension to this role takes well under three weeks. By April 6, CNN is reporting that “Trump met . . . with GOP strategist Paul Manafort, a huddle that suggests campaign changes could be in the works. . . . Two knowledgeable sources say Manafort, who was recently hired by Trump to lead his delegate operation, is taking on an expanded role.” By April 16, Manafort is already “[laying] out a vision for the Trump campaign” at a campaign meeting. By April 18, just three weeks after Manafort’s hire, the campaign’s old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has already been reduced to a mere “body man and scheduler”, according to NBC News. How and why Manafort’s takeover of Trump’s presidential campaign happened as quickly as it did has never been fully explained, but Politico will report that Lewandowski was the victim of a “whisper” campaign by Manafort’s old lobbying partner and a longtime Trump friend, Roger Stone.

Manafort’s initial entreaties to Trump arrive at Trump Tower around February 29, 2016, the same day Trump receives an email from Rob Goldstone, Emin Agalarov’s publicist, on behalf of Aras Agalarov—as well as a letter from Agalarov himself. Goldstone’s note on behalf of Agalarov wishes Trump luck on Super Tuesday and lets him know that his campaign has not only the elder Agalarov’s “support” but also “that of many of his important Russian friends and colleagues—especially with reference to U.S./Russian relations.” The letter from Aras says, in part, “many people in this country who appreciated your statement that U.S. and Russia should work together more closely . . . follow with great interest your bright electoral campaign. . . . [And] we would like to wish you success in winning this major ballot and further reinforcing your undisputed status as the front-runner for the Republican nomination for [the] U.S. Presidential Election.”

In March 2017, five months before Manafort is federally indicted on “charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies”, then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer will say that Manafort played a “very limited role [in the 2016 Trump campaign] for a very limited amount of time” before walking back his false statement two days later. In August 2017, Trump himself will say of Manafort that he was with the campaign for a “very short period of time, relatively short period of time.” By August 2018, as the jury is deliberating after the close of evidence in the first of Manafort’s two federal trials, Trump will have eliminated the word “relatively” and be insisting simply that Manafort “worked for me for a very short period of time.” In Spicer’s 2018 book, The Briefing, the former Trump White House Press Secretary will contradict Trump on Manafort’s role, however (emphasis supplied):

Paul brought a much-needed maturity to the Trump campaign when it needed an experienced political professional operative. . . . [Before Manafort] there was no semblance of a campaign structure. . . . Paul immediately set up and staffed the political and communications operations necessary to take on the Clinton machine. The Manafort message was clear: Trump will be our nominee and our next president, and anyone who didn’t want to work to that end could spend the next four years in political Siberia.

The period between Manafort’s hire by Trump and the day Manafort quit the Trump campaign over his ties to pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine—August 19, 2016—lasts nearly five months. After Manafort leaves the campaign, he has multiple additional conversations with Trump by telephone and continues to advise Trump on the Russia investigation until at least January 2017.

Trump will repeatedly say that Manafort’s charges have nothing to do with his work as an adviser to the Trump 2016 presidential campaign or as its eventual chairman. But at Manafort’s August 2018 federal trial in Virginia, “[a] Chicago bank CEO who thought he was being considered for positions in President Trump’s Cabinet” will testify under oath that he “helped facilitate $16 million in loans to Manafort during and after the campaign.” The Washington Post will call Manafort’s trial “the prequel to the story of the Trump campaign’s multiple contacts with Russia”, given that Manafort worked somewhat suspiciously for “free” after years of working for millions on behalf of pro-Russian interests, and given that the bulk of the campaign’s contacts with Russian nationals came after Manafort’s March 2016 hire. It will later be revealed that Manafort was, at the time of his hire by Trump, “in debt to pro-Russia interests” by as much as $17 million, which may explain why in July 2016 he writes his old client, a Russian oligarch called Oleg Deripaska, through an intermediary to find out how he can use his supposedly pro bono work for Trump to “get whole.”

Around the time Trump begins discussions with Paul Manafort about hiring him, the Republican candidate for president decides—on March 3, 2016—to make Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, an early supporter, the chairman of his new National Security Advisory Committee. The committee already has one member, Carter Page, who in March 2016, unbeknownst to him or to anyone on the campaign, is being monitored by the FBI under a FISA warrant stemming from his 2013 interactions with Kremlin agents.

Page, who at the time works in a building connected to Trump Tower by an atrium (and is consequently a “regular presence in Trump Tower”, according to CBS News), “volunteers” to work for Trump in December 2015—the same month that Trump’s unofficial or “shadow” national security adviser Michael Flynn dines with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In early January 2016, Page meets with Sam Clovis, who hires him after a simple Google search—which, presumably, fails to reveal that Page was under suspicion of being a Russian spy in 2013 as part of a very highly publicized 2015 case involving Putin’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR RF. Page thereby becomes the first member of Trump’s national security team; he is soon joined by Flynn, acting as an informal adviser to the national security team, in February 2016.

Page’s engagements with federal law enforcement in 2013 involved FBI suspicions that he was an unwitting—or even a witting—Russian agent, having been identified by Russian intelligence agents in the United States as ripe for Kremlin recruitment.

In a 2015 court filing, a transcribed recording of a spy in Putin’s SVR intelligence unit included discussions of Page: “[Page] got hooked on Gazprom [the Russian natural gas giant] thinking that if they have a project, he could be rise up . . .” the spy said. “I also promised him a lot. . . . This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and [then] tell him to go fuck himself.” Court documents allege that Page agreed to and did provide documents about the U.S. energy business to the SVR. In August 2013, Page would boast in a letter to a publisher, “I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin”—despite having already been informed by the FBI that the Kremlin was actually seeking to recruit him as a spy against the United States.

Page will testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that he was a volunteer with an “unpaid informal [Trump] committee” from his January interview with Clovis until his late March announcement as a member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, making him the senior member of the latter committee by tenure—over the committee chairman, Sessions—by about two months.

According to the Washington Post, “As part of its broader investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the FBI continues to examine how Page joined the campaign and what conversations he may have had with Russian officials about the effort to interfere with the election—with or without the knowledge of Trump and his team—according to people familiar with the matter.” Investigators are asking, given that the SVR-linked Page suddenly appeared at Trump Tower asking for a job shortly after Flynn went to Moscow and dined with Putin, “Were Trump’s connections to multiple Russia-friendly advisers mere coincidence, or evidence of a coordinated attempt to collude with a foreign government?”

By late February 2016, as Manafort is preparing his pitch to Trump and Sessions and is days from being hired, Flynn has joined Trump’s national security team. His focus is on U.S.-Russia relations. Reuters writes in that month that “Trump is receiving foreign policy advice from a former U.S. military intelligence chief who wants the United States to work more closely with Russia to resolve global security issues, according to three sources.” Almost immediately after the Sessions hire, Trump national cochair Sam Clovis hires a young and inexperienced George Papadopoulos to be the third official member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee.

According to the plea documents in Papadopoulos’s October 2017 federal criminal case, on March 6, 2016, Clovis told Papadopoulos—at a time (apparently unknown to Clovis) that his boss was actively negotiating a major land deal with the government of Russia—“a principal foreign policy focus of the [2016 Trump] Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia”, echoing Flynn’s position on that question.

Papadopoulos will stay with the Trump campaign through Inauguration Day in 2017, working directly with Flynn during the presidential transition period.

Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, tells CNN that after his March 6, 2016, hire Papadopoulos “didn’t take any initiative on his own without campaign approval.” If so, it is likely that Papadopoulos’s mid-March trip to Italy, while ostensibly taken as part of his work with the London Center of International Law Practice (LCILP), was campaign-approved. This is the trip Papadapoulos will later lie about to the FBI when questioned about it in January 2017, according to his October 2017 criminal plea.

On his trip to Italy, Papadopoulos is approached by Joseph Mifsud—a Kremlin agent affiliated, like Papadopoulos, with the LCILP—on March 14, 2016. He thereafter meets, on March 24, with Mifsud, a deputy from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ivan Timofeev; and a woman introduced to him—falsely—as “Putin’s niece”, Olga Polonskaya, née Vinogradova. Papadopoulos emails Clovis immediately after this meeting to say that “Russian leadership [wants] to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump. They are keen to host us in a ‘neutral’ city, or directly in Moscow. They said the leadership, including Putin, is ready to meet with us and Mr. Trump. Waiting for everyone’s thoughts on moving forward with this very important issue.”

Clovis emails him back, “Great work.”

Papadopoulos’s primary Kremlin-agent contact, Joseph Mifsud, is a Maltese professor who had become interested in Papadopoulos when he “discovered” Papadopoulos was working for the Trump campaign. Mifsud “did not exhibit any special interest or expertise in Russia until 2014”, the New York Times noted. That year Mifsud hired a twenty-four-year-old Russian intern, Natalia Kutepova-Jamrom, who “introduced Mr. Mifsud to senior Russian officials, diplomats and scholars. Despite Mr. Mifsud’s lack of qualifications, she managed to arrange an invitation for him to join the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, an elite gathering of Western and Russian academics that meets each year with Mr. Putin.” Within a short time, Mifsud had become a regular pundit on state-run Russian television and was publicly arguing against America’s sanctions on Russia. The Times quoted him as saying to the Valdai Discussion Club in 2014, “Global security and economy needs partners, and who is better in this than the Russian Federation.”

Papadopoulos says that after he was hired by the campaign on March 6, but before his trip to Italy, he had a one-on-one phone call with Trump that neither Trump nor the campaign has ever disclosed. Papadopoulos later meets with Trump one-on-one on March 21, 2016—between his first meeting with Mifsud and his second—yet another contact between Trump and Papadopoulos that Trump and the campaign have never disclosed. At this March 21, 2016, meeting, Papadopoulos tells Trump about “his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin”, per Newsweek. After the meeting, Trump, still negotiating a land deal that he is well aware requires Putin’s approval, announces Papadopoulos as part of his National Security Advisory Committee, calling him an “excellent guy”—the only compliment that Mr. Trump publicly affords any of his five new picks for the committee that day.

Also named to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 21, 2016, is former Department of Defense inspector general Joseph Schmitz, who in 2013 had participated in an illicit, extra-governmental scheme to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels. Trump also names to the committee Walid Phares, a man who has falsely claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the Obama administration, lectures on the danger of “Sharia law” spreading across the United States, and is connected to the Center for Security Policy—an entity designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The final member of the Trump team’s first wave of appointees is retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, who at the time is best known for being the chief operating officer of the failed Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. When Michael Flynn is fired as national security adviser a year later, Kellogg will take his place temporarily until H.R. McMaster is appointed to the post.

But two men who have been advising Trump on national security behind the scenes, Flynn and Erik Prince—the latter the ex-head of infamous private security company Blackwater—aren’t named to the first iteration of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, nor will they ever be named to any pre-election iteration of it. Trump’s first appointment of Flynn to an official position (National Security Advisor), which comes nearly sixteen months after the retired general began advising the New York businessman, is an event made possible by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s involvement in the firing of transition chief Chris Christie—who had warned Trump about hiring Flynn and had refused to do so himself. Flynn and Prince will later be accused of secretly and illegally negotiating U.S. foreign policy with Kremlin agents.

On March 31, 2016, Trump convenes what he will later call a “very unimportant” meeting: the first-ever meeting of his National Security Advisory Committee. A picture of the gathering reveals twelve attendees besides Trump, with several new members of the committee who had not previously been announced. With the exception of retired major general Bert Mizusawa and retired navy rear admiral Charles Kubic, none of the new members will thereafter be reported as having significantly contributed to, or even actively participated in, the committee. Carter Page is absent from the meeting because, he says, he “had a previously scheduled meeting with some of the top U.S. military commanders many thousands of miles away from Washington”; a photograph from that day suggests that Page was at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Hawaii.

At the Trump International Hotel meeting, Papadopoulos tells Trump and his fellow committee members what he previously told Trump directly: that he is a Kremlin intermediary, and that he has been in contact with the Russians to try to create a Trump-Putin backchannel and set up a Trump-Putin summit. There are at least five different stories of what happens next. Committee director J.D. Gordon will say that Sessions shut down Papadopoulos immediately and told him never to raise the issue again. Committee chairman Sessions will say he “pushed back” on the suggestion and then the conversation moved on. Another attendee will say that Sessions said, “Okay, interesting”, and then moved on. Two other attendees will largely concur with that attendee, though instead of “Okay, interesting,” they will report hearing something along the lines of “Well, thank you. And let’s move on to the next person.” Gordon will also give an alternate version of the meeting in which not only does Papadopoulos get to speak for a “few minutes” about his Russian contacts, but there is then a wide-ranging discussion involving multiple members of the committee about the wisdom of Papadopoulos’s plan. The Daily Caller reports a slightly different version of the same events, with the wide-ranging discussion resulting in the unanimous decision of “attendees not to revisit Papadopoulos’ suggestion.” What is certain is that at least three witnesses insist Papadopoulos was never reprimanded, silenced, or rebuked by either Sessions or Trump. Trump’s exact reaction is disputed, however: one attendee says the future president had “no reaction”, while another says he “seemed flattered”; Gordon’s description of his reaction suggests simply—as CNN will later describe it—that Trump “did not dismiss the idea”; and the New York Times will report that not only did Trump “not say ‘yes,’ and . . . not say ‘no,’” but that he actually “listened with interest” to Papadopoulos and “asked questions.”

Papadopoulos himself will say that Trump “nodded his approval.”

What all agree on is that no one at the table contacts the FBI to inform the Bureau that the Russians are illegally trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign. And neither does Trump, even after he is explicitly warned—in his first national security briefing as a candidate in August 2016—that the Russians are trying to do just that. Though Trump had information on Russian efforts to infiltrate his campaign to offer his CIA and FBI briefers on that date, and may well have been asked by his briefers if he had any relevant information to report, there’s no evidence Trump volunteered any such knowledge or truthfully answered any queries on the subject he faced. Nor is George Papadopoulos fired by Trump on March 31; rather, Trump promotes him, giving him significant new responsibilities. First, Trump grants Papadopoulos the authority to act as a Russia policy adviser and spokesperson (despite Papadopoulos having only an expertise in Middle Eastern energy markets); second, Trump gives Papadopoulos the opportunity to help edit Trump’s first-ever foreign policy speech, with the date of that speech just four weeks away (see Chapter 6).

In August 2016, Papadopoulos will propose to the Trump campaign—specifically to the man who hired him, Sam Clovis—that he travel to Moscow to meet with Kremlin officials on Trump’s behalf. Clovis will tell Papadopoulos that, if he determines the trip is feasible, he should “make the trip.” The Washington Post will summarize the exchange in this way: “[Donald Trump’s] national campaign co-chairman urged a foreign policy adviser to meet with Russian officials [in August 2016] to foster ties with that country’s government.”

At the time of the Papadopoulos-Clovis email exchange, there was no doubt in D.C. and across the United States that Russian hackers were actively attacking America’s infrastructure. On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post had run a story whose headline read, in part, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC.” By July 2016, public discussion had already moved to accusations by the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that Russian government hackers were specifically working to help elect Trump, as evidenced by WikiLeaks releasing hacked emails only from the DNC and doing so during the Democratic National Convention.

Trump tells the New York Times his National Security Advisory Committee is made up of “very good” people “recommended” to him by “people I respect.” But the group, including its “shadow” adjunct Michael Flynn, includes three individuals who at some point will be suspected of being foreign agents: George Papadopoulos, suspected by Mueller’s investigators of being an Israeli agent in 2016; Carter Page, suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent in 2013; and Flynn, a confirmed unregistered Turkish agent throughout much of the presidential campaign—which the campaign knew pre-inauguration and didn’t reveal to anyone. What they and their peers on Trump’s new National Security Advisory Committee have in common, as summarized by the New York Times, is that “many on the team embrace[ ] a common view: that the United States ought to seek a rapprochement with Russia after years of worsening relations during the Obama administration. Now, however, their suspected links to Russia have put them under legal scrutiny and cast a shadow over the Trump presidency.”

Though not a member of the committee, Paul Manafort is nevertheless sent many of the most sensitive emails produced by committee members—including emails from Papadopoulos about setting up a Trump-Putin meeting in Moscow or somewhere in the United States.

In the two years before Manafort joins the Trump campaign, for part of his time on the Trump campaign, and for many months afterward, the FBI uses a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Manafort due to his suspected activities as a foreign agent for Russian and Russia-allied interests. As CNN will report, “Some of the intelligence collected [from the Manafort wiretap] sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.”

Annotated History

Almost immediately after the Sessions hire, Trump national cochair Sam Clovis hires a young and inexperienced George Papadopoulos to be the third official member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee. According to Papadopoulos’s October 2017 plea documents, on March 6, 2016, Clovis told Papadopoulos that “a principal foreign policy focus of the Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia”—echoing Flynn’s position on the question.

During the same two-week period that Michael Flynn became an official Trump adviser and Manafort told Barrack he had to “get to” Trump so he could offer his services for free as a convention manager, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, finalized its plans to support Trump’s candidacy by spreading discord and misinformation on American social media. In the two weeks after that, Trump hired Jeff Sessions; Manafort and Trump entered into discussions about Manafort coming aboard the campaign; and Clovis hired Papadopoulos, soon thereafter—it appears—sending him off to Italy, where Kremlin agent Joseph Mifsud would make his first contact with the young Trump adviser.

In late October 2017, Clovis, then serving as the Department of Agriculture’s senior White House adviser, withdrew his pending nomination to become the agency’s chief scientist. One ostensible reason was that the Washington Post had published the fact that he “has no academic credentials in science or agriculture”, but it is widely believed the real reason had to do with his role in the ongoing Russia investigation.

In May 2018, Clovis told the Washington Examiner that he had testified to the grand jury convened by the special counsel, been interviewed by Mueller’s investigators, and answered questions for the two congressional intelligence committees investigating Trump-Russia ties for a total of nineteen hours. He implied that one of the primary lines of questioning in each instance focused on his role as the liaison between the National Security Advisory Committee and the Trump campaign—as well as being the man who supervised the construction and composition of the committee. He denied any wrongdoing, however. “As far as I know”, he told the Examiner, “no one in the campaign lifted a finger to get to the 30,000 [Clinton] emails [Trump said were ‘missing’]. I don’t think it was in their interest. Anytime anybody approached me about oppo, I deleted it. Oppo research against Hillary Clinton? We had plenty of material. It’s not like it’s not a target-rich environment.”

Clovis’s comment perhaps inadvertently confirmed that he was approached multiple times via email or other methods about pursuing “oppo” (“opposition research”) on Hillary Clinton that involved her “missing” emails. But Clovis’s alleged lack of interest in the hunt for Clinton’s emails is in question. When Peter W. Smith, a GOP researcher and operative, was looking for assistance in finding Clinton’s emails, he listed Clovis—along with Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Trump’s shadow national security adviser Michael Flynn—as one of four Trump campaign officials who had explicitly endorsed and were supporting his effort. Jonathan Safron, a former Smith assistant, said Smith “spoke to him of knowing Clovis . . . and that he had seen Smith email Clovis about matters unrelated to Clinton’s emails. . . . [But] he does not know whether Clovis . . . ever replied [to those other emails].”

As of October 2017, Clovis was considered a “cooperative witness” in Mueller’s probe. Court documents released by the Department of Justice in October 2017 confirmed that Clovis hired Papadopoulos in March 2016 and thereafter knew Papadopoulos was talking to the Russians—yet took no action to change Papadopoulos’s status with the Trump campaign. Speaking to Politico, administration and campaign officials justified Clovis’s actions by saying Clovis had no foreign policy connections in early 2016, was under pressure to build a national security team for Trump, and therefore did virtually no vetting of any of his eventual selections. They offered no explanation for Clovis’s failure to terminate Papadopoulos after it was discovered that Papadopoulos had had clandestine communication with Kremlin agents, for his statement to Papadopoulos that Russia was going to be a top national security topic for Trump, or for his note of congratulations to Papadopoulos after the Trump adviser reported back to Clovis that he had now significantly advanced his clandestine negotiations with Kremlin agents.

In November 2017, Buzzfeed News, trying to determine “how [George Papadopoulos] was brought into the Trump camp’s orbit”, noted that in 2016 Papadopoulos had appeared on an Israeli energy conference panel alongside Yigal Landau, the CEO of Ratio Oil Exploration—an Israeli company then in a business partnership with Kamil Ekim Alptekin, one of Michael Flynn’s clients at the now-defunct Flynn Intelligence Group. Alptekin was in 2016 also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank with several hundred members—one of whom, Josef Mifsud, would eventually become Papadopoulos’ primary conduit to the Kremlin. Buzzfeed News further reported that Ratio denied any association with Alptekin, even though it had by then found “numerous documents, emails, photographs and bank statements showing a business relationship.”

Papadopoulos is also linked to Michael Flynn by the involvement of both men with Ben Carson’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, with both men again having acted as national security advisers.

Clovis’s attorney Victoria Toensing released a statement to the press on October 30, 2017, noting that, Clovis’s inaction on Papadopoulos notwithstanding, “Clovis did not believe an improved relationship with Russia should be a foreign policy focus of the campaign. Dr. Clovis always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump or staff. However, if a volunteer made any suggestions on any foreign policy matter, Dr. Clovis, a polite gentleman from Iowa, would have expressed courtesy and appreciation.” Toensing’s statement was in response to Washington Post reporting that Clovis had indeed not just failed to oppose Papadopoulos’s proposed trip to Russia as a Trump surrogate in the summer of 2016, but in fact “urged [him] to make the trip”, saying to Papadopoulos that if he determined the trip was feasible, “Make the trip.”

Also named to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 21, 2016, is former Department of Defense inspector general Joseph Schmitz, who in 2013 had participated in an illicit, extra-governmental scheme to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels.

Trump’s March 2016 decision to tap Joseph Schmitz to advise him on national security “confounded top experts” in the field, according to a report that month by the New York Times. Along with the appointments of Page, Papadopoulos, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, and Walid Phares (“regularly accused by Muslim civil rights groups of being Islamophobic and of fear-mongering about the spread of Sharia law [into the United States]”), Schmitz’s designation as a top Trump national security adviser “left some of the country’s leading experts in the field scratching their heads as they tried to identify [Trump’s] choices.”

The Times used the phrase “identify his choices” advisedly; most of Trump’s picks were so far off the radar of top national security experts that the experts simply had no idea who they were. Mike Green, a foreign policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Times that everyone in his orbit had to resort to Google to “see what they [could] find” on Trump’s selections. As noted in a March 2016 CNN article, at a news conference the day Trump announced his picks he called them a “very good team” and “a top-of-the-line team.”

A year before Trump announced his presidential run, and a little more than two years before Trump named Schmitz to his National Security Advisory Committee, Schmitz spearheaded a secret plot to use seventy thousand Russian military weapons to arm Syrian rebels. As reported by the Wall Street Journal in May of 2014, the CIA had to intervene directly to put a stop to Schmitz’s scheming. As part of Schmitz’s Russian-arms plot, he told U.S. officials that Erik Prince—a future Trump “shadow” national security adviser, as well as Schmitz’s former boss at Blackwater, where Prince was CEO and Schmitz the COO—could assist the United States in getting Russian arms to Syria. Schmitz’s close ties to Prince, who lives in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, offer some insight into why Trump may have selected Schmitz for his new national security team (and may explain how Prince could be kept abreast of what was happening on that team despite never being formally named to it). Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept called Schmitz an “enthusiastic fan” of Prince in a March 2016 interview with Democracy Now. Schmitz also had a tie to another member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, Walid Phares; Schmitz was at the time of his selection by Trump a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy (CSP), which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its anti-Islamic positions. CSP notes on its website that Phares has “spoken at several events organized by the CSP.”

The group, including its shadow adjunct Michael Flynn, includes three individuals who at some point will be suspected of being foreign agents: George Papadopoulos, suspected by Mueller’s investigators of being an Israeli agent in 2016; Carter Page, suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent in 2013; and Flynn, a confirmed unregistered Turkish agent throughout much of the 2016 presidential campaign—which the Trump campaign knew pre-inauguration and did not reveal to anyone.

In Summer 2016, Special Counsel Mueller threatened to charge George Papadopoulos with being an Israeli agent, according to Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante.

The allegation that Papadopoulos had been working as an unregistered Israeli agent stemmed from events that occurred before Clovis selected him for Trump’s campaign, Mangiante claimed. After his hire by the campaign and his revelation to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 31, 2016, that he was acting as a Kremlin intermediary, the campaign immediately sent him to Israel to discuss Trump’s Russia policy and other matters. Papadopoulos had by then long been in communication with Eli Groner, a top aide to Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu. Mueller’s team has made no statement on the Papadopoulos case besides their public filings, and they do not implicate Papadopoulos as an Israeli agent; Mangiante’s claims therefore can’t be further substantiated.

The Washington Post reports, however, that Papadopoulos “attended a series of energy conferences in Israel, including one held in April 2016, just days after he was named to Trump’s campaign.” According to coverage of Papadopoulos’s April 2016 visit to Israel in the Jerusalem Post, Papadopoulos told the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) that

Donald Trump would “overtly seek” serious engagement with Russia on a range of common concerns. Trump, says Papadopoulos, sees Russian President Vladimir Putin as a responsible actor and potential partner. . . . In particular, the US and Russia share a strong interest in combating the export of radical and violent Islam from the Middle East; to stop its spread into the Muslim republics on the borders of Russia, into Europe, and into the Baltics. Papadopoulos believes that Trump can ally with Putin this regard.

Given that Papadopoulos had joined the Trump campaign the month before as a nominal expert in Middle Eastern energy issues, and given that Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee had held only one meeting as of Papadopoulos’s trip to Israel, it’s unclear where his understanding of the Trump platform on Russia had come from by the first week of April. J. D. Gordon would later tell CNN’s Jim Acosta that Trump had laid out his vision for (at a minimum) the Russia-Ukraine crisis at the March 31, 2016, meeting of his National Security Advisory Committee, which Trump later called a “very unimportant” meeting despite it dramatically changing the GOP position on the ongoing military hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.

Papadopoulos’s first April 2016 meeting with Israeli nationals was held at BESA. There is at least some overlap between BESA and Joel Zamel’s Wikistrat—Zamel being the Israeli national who offered Donald Trump Jr. clandestine assistance, in the form of a domestic disinformation campaign to be deployed inside the United States, at an August 2016 meeting in Trump Tower set up by Erik Prince and attended by an adviser to the UAE crown prince, George Nader, as well as by Prince himself. For instance, a BESA publication on the ties between Israel and former Soviet republic Azerbaijan, by Alexander Murinson, notes that Murinson is both a senior researcher at BESA and a senior analyst for Wikistrat. The Daily Beast now reports that Wikistrat is “in Mueller’s sights”, in part because of Zamel’s attempts to recruit Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in 2014 or 2015 for a position on his firm’s advisory board and in part for another reason: because Wikistrat’s clients are governments and the firm is involved in “intelligence collection”, so it uses “in country. . .informants” for its work. The Daily Beast says that Wikistrat has “incredible access to top U.S. military and intelligence officials”, and the environment within Wikistrat has been described by a former employee, James Kadtke, as “more . . . than meets the eye”, “mysterious”, and on in which it is “clear these guys had intelligence backgrounds [and were] intelligence professionals, not academics or analysts. . . . They were using their experts for tacit information going on [sic] in various parts of the world.”

{Note (July 20, 2023): Joel Zamel and his clandestine activities on behalf of the 2016 Trump campaign are discussed in far more detail in the 2019 sequel to Proof of Collusion, the New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy.}

While in Israel, Papadopoulos was also on a panel with Ratio CEO Yigal Landau, whose close business associate, Kamil Alptekin, is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (an organization with a membership in the dozens or low hundreds, depending on which level of engagement one opts to consider: “expert”, “associated researcher”, “research group member”, or general member). As noted above, Papadopoulos had met another ECFR member, Joseph Mifsud, just three weeks earlier in Italy.

Simona Mangiante claimed in 2018 that while she was with Papadopoulos in Greece during one of their trips there in 2016 or 2017, “an Israeli person who came—flew to Mykonos just to discuss business—much money was offered to George in many directions . . . and everything was highly suspicious.” Following the Israeli’s offer of money to Papadopoulos, said Mangiante, he “invited [Papadopoulos] to Cyprus and Israel to discuss business.” Papadopoulos had been attending conferences in Cyprus annually and writing editorials about cooperation among Israel, Greece, and Cyprus on exploitation of the Leviathan gas field in the Mediterranean Sea a few dozen miles off Israel’s coast. Landau’s Ratio Oil Exploration is, according to Buzzfeed News, “one of several Israeli and US firms that are part of the consortium exploiting Leviathan.”

Mangiante claimed Papadopoulos didn’t take any money from the Israeli. However, in its recommendation for Papadopoulos’s September 7, 2018, federal sentencing, the Office of the Special Counsel revealed that Papadopoulos had received $10,000 from someone he believed was a foreign (non-Russian) intelligence agent and had kept it.

In a video of Papadopoulos published by the Times of Israel in June 2018, taken at a celebration the week of Trump’s inauguration, Papadopoulos is seen meeting and discussing policy with a well-known right-wing activist in Israel, Yossi Dagan, and apparently doing so as a representative of Trump’s political operation. Haaretz later confirmed that Papadopoulos was indeed speaking about Trump’s Israel policy, post-inauguration, as a Trump representative. “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship between the United States and all of Israel, including the historic Judea and Samaria”, Papadopoulos says in the video.

Since Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements in October 2017, his wife, acting as his spokeswoman, has said Papadopoulos has “reassessed his role” in aiding the Trump-Russia investigation, particularly after revelations that his drunken comment about Russia being in possession of stolen Hillary Clinton emails, made to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in a London pub, helped to justify the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign (“Operation Crossfire Hurricane”) and allegations that a Cambridge University professor named Stefan Halper, who had reached out to Papadopoulos in the summer of 2016, was connected to the Bureau.

In June 2018, Mangiante publicly asked Trump to pardon Papadopoulos. In August 2018, she claimed that Papadopoulos was planning to retract his guilty plea.

On September 8, 2018, Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison by Judge Randy Moss, who found Papadopoulos to be contrite. Prior to the sentence being handed down, Papadopoulos’ attorney, Thomas Breen, opined to Moss that “The President of the United States hindered this investigation [the Trump-Russia probe] more than George Papadopoulos ever did.”

In the sentencing memo Papadopoulos submitted prior to his sentencing hearing, he accused Trump of “nodd[ing] in approval” when Papadopoulos informed him that Putin wanted to set up a private meeting with him using Papadopoulos as an intermediary. According to the memo, Jeff Sessions also “appeared to like the idea and stated that the campaign should look into it.” In a September 2018 interview with CNN, Papadopoulos said Sessions was “enthusiastic” about the possibility of a Trump-Putin meeting during the 2016 campaign, saying to Papadopoulos and Trump on March 31, 2016—as well as to the assembled National Security Advisory Committee—“this is a good idea.”