Ball of Collusion Read online

  CHAPTER THREE

  An Old Story: Beltway Consultants as Agents of the Kremlin

  ‘We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success.” So wrote Paul Manafort in 2005. He was writing to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum oligarch and close confidant of Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator. Manafort’s memorandum pitched Deripaska on a strategy to improve the image of Putin’s regime in the United States, Europe, and former Soviet republics.1

  He did not write these words as a clandestine agent of Russia. He wrote them as a political consultant. This distinction is a key to piercing the Trump–Russia “collusion” veil, to understanding the narrative’s foundational fallacy.

  As we’ve seen, for a quarter century prior to Donald Trump’s entry into the 2016 campaign, the bipartisan Beltway regarded collusion with Russia as a boon to world peace, global prosperity, and American security. Nirvana commenced when the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991. Suddenly, a gravy train roared through the badlands of “gangster capitalism,”2 the terrain of vast mineral and commodity wealth—the spoils of a fallen empire—that became available to the shrewdest and most ruthless bidders. In the aftermath, there emerged a marriage: On one side were fabulously wealthy Russian and Ukrainian “oligarchs,” many of whom had risen from nothing through alliances with organized crime chieftains and corrupt government officials. On the other side were well-connected American political operatives—lawyers and lobbyists tied to both political parties.

  It has been a perverse arrangement. It reeks of corruption. How much more unseemly does it get: One moment, a former director of the FBI is giving a speech in Moscow about how vital it is for Americans and Russians to align in the battle to “beat organized crime.” Then, in the blink of an eye, that same former top Fed—William Sessions, driven from office over a slew of ethical lapses—is a lawyer representing the Russian mafia’s “Boss of Bosses” in a $150 million racketeering scheme to defraud American investors?3

  Here’s what you need to remember: Most of this whoring is legal. “Unsavory but Legal” is a fact of Swamp life. The guys with their snouts in the trough are the same guys who write and enforce the laws, the benefits accruing as they glide between the “public service” and the private lobbying sides of the revolving door—the door between political office and political consultancy, between law enforcement and law evasion.

  Unsavory But Legal is to Washington what Semper Fi is to the Marines.

  On Capitol Hill, high-profile, low-impact, good-governance legislation is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Thus, technically speaking, there are some pertinent laws on the books, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a set of provisions dating to 1938. If taken seriously, FARA requires individuals who do advocacy work in the United States on behalf of foreign entities to disclose these relationships and activities to the Justice Department. Non-compliance is a felony, calling for up to five years’ imprisonment.4 But FARA is not taken seriously—or at least it wasn’t prior to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign. In the half century prior to the 2016 election, the Justice Department won a whopping three—count ’em, three—convictions, out of just seven attempts to prosecute FARA violations.5 Sparse as that is, FARA has been a prosecutorial juggernaut compared to the Logan Act, which—as we shall see—the Obama Justice Department and FBI also trotted out to justify investigating the Trump campaign. An almost certainly unconstitutional artifact of the late eighteenth century (in fact, a companion of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts), the Logan Act purports to criminalize foreign-policy freelancing by U.S. citizens. It has never resulted in a successful prosecution—there have been two unsuccessful indictments, the last one nearly 170 years ago.6

  But I digress.

  Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, influential Republican and Democratic elected officials, agency administrators, and political operatives have put on their lobbying hats to flack for Ukrainian and Russian billionaires and the partisan factions they patronize. Everyone knew the lobbyists were doing it. And everyone knew it was sleazy. But it was sleazy because the money was dirty, not because there was espionage afoot.

  The political consultants were cashing in on Washington’s utopian dream of installing a Western political order and free-market economies in the former Soviet empire. The Ukrainian oligarchs toward whom Republican consultants gravitated were leveraging Moscow against Kiev. There’s a salient distinction, though: The magnates were oft-time Putin allies, but that did not make them Kremlin agents. They did not want Ukraine to be dominated by Russia. The oligarchs, mostly concentrated in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, have always wanted their country to enjoy friendly relations with Moscow. Hostilities with a covetous and far more powerful neighbor is bad for business.7 Yet, the oligarchs want Ukraine to be independent. Really independent, as in federalized. They want to reign over semi-autonomous Ukrainian regions, persisting in their monopoly grips on key economic sectors. To accomplish this, they need to delay and limit Ukraine’s integration into the European Union, the strong preference of Kiev and western Ukraine, as well as of Western Europe and the United States.

  It has been a delicate dance. To thrive, the oligarchs have needed good relations with the West, too. That is why buying up Washington lobbyists (and no small number of EU political wizards) was essential. Let’s clarify what the “collusion” narrative distorts, though. Yes, it is true that the oligarchs’ interests frequently line up with the Kremlin’s obsession to prevent former Soviet satellites, and especially Ukraine, from going West. But the oligarchs are not the Kremlin. They have their own agenda, and it has often involved playing Europe against Moscow. The tycoons have governmental cronies and customer bases on both sides of the East–West tinder box. To keep the gravy train rolling, they must avoid being swallowed up by either.

  While Washington political consultants do the oligarchs’ bidding, the former make the latter salable by nudging them in a pro-Western direction. You do not have to be a Kremlin apologist (I most certainly am not8) to grasp the absurdity of the “collusion” narrative’s premise: namely, that being a lobbyist for Ukrainian oligarchs who prioritize good relations with Moscow is the same thing as being a clandestine agent of Russia.9 For the Obama Justice Department and FBI to have exploited the United States government’s national-security spying powers on such a risible pretext was to criminalize disputes over foreign policy—a politicization of investigative authorities, a gross abuse of power.10

  The tensions between Moscow and Kiev, between Russia and the West, make for a dynamic political context. Because of their clients’ shifting needs and transient preferences, the consultants have often found themselves on Russia’s side of some policy dispute or another. Regardless of whether one agrees with them, the consultants contend their work promotes good American relations with Moscow and eases Ukrainian tensions (and the Kremlin’s stoking thereof). Is this just a rationalization for cashing in? Well, there’s no shortage of that. Still, it cannot be gainsaid that these Russia–Ukraine tensions, left to fester, could explode into major war. At flashpoints, they have already have burst into significant hostilities.

  It’s complicated, and therefore ripe for distortion.

  Most Americans are not familiar with the fraught history and politics of Ukraine. They know little about the netherworld of Washington political lobbying for foreign interests—especially for despots and Mafiosi-turned-magnates. When Hillary Clinton lost an election, and it came time for her progressive sympathizers and Republican anti-Trump agitators to pin her defeat on Russian espionage, it was easy to craft a narrative that painted Trump political consultants who’d worked for Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs as Putin’s puppets. All that was necessary was for the rest of us to forget the last quarter-century, to develop amnesia about Washington’s projection of post-Soviet Russia as a political and business partner, an effor
t that Mrs. Clinton herself had been in up to her neck.11

  That sets the stage. Now let’s get to the villain out of central casting.

  The Lobbyist

  Paul Manafort was the very model of a well-connected GOP establishment operator and lobbyist. By the time he wrote the aforementioned 2005 memo to Oleg Deripaska, he had been in the political consultancy biz for three decades. He cut his teeth on the 1976 campaign of President Gerald R. Ford, as a twenty-seven-year-old convention floor manager helping the incumbent president stave off a grass-roots conservative insurgency, the primary challenge of Ronald Reagan. Not one to fuss over ideology, by 1980 Manafort was working for Reagan’s victorious campaign.

  With Republicans back in power, Manafort dove into the lucrative lobbying business with an array of fellow GOP consultants. These included his pal Roger Stone, a Nixon devotee who reveled in “the dark arts” of politics, and whose 1977 campaign to lead the Young Republicans National Federation was managed by Manafort.12 Over time, other Manafort partners included Charles Black and Rick Davis, Republican establishment stalwarts who worked as top advisors to GOP campaigns going back to Reagan and who eventually teamed up to run Senator John McCain’s unsuccessful 2008 White House bid.

  Manafort had been an adviser to the failed 1996 Republican presidential campaign of Senator Bob Dole, a McCain ally. With all these connections, it is unsurprising that McCain initially wanted Manafort to run the 2008 GOP convention. He thought better of it, though, because too much media attention had been drawn to Manafort’s sideline specialty: prettying up despicable foreign tyrants for American and Western consumption … and, of course, for financial aid. The consultant’s client list was a who’s who of global abominations: Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi of Angola, and so on.13 The Faustian bargain paid fabulously well.

  It was the same bargain that led him to Oleg Deripaska. In that, Manafort was far from alone. The gravy train was filled to capacity, though you’d never know it from the revisionist history painted after Trump’s 2016 victory.

  In the gangster capitalism era, Deripaska had cornered the Russian aluminum market. Besides concerns arising from his Kremlin connections, American national security officials harbored suspicions that Deripaska had amassed his fortune through the usual mafia methods—murder, extortion, kickbacks—even though his criminal record was spotless (not exactly a clean bill of health when it comes to insiders of corrupt regimes). He was accordingly denied a visa to come to the United States.

  Thus did Bob Dole go to work for Deripaska in 2003, well before Manafort entered the picture. The law firm at which the GOP former Senate leader and presidential standard-bearer had landed managed to rake in over half a million dollars—without being accused of espionage!—while persuading the State Department to lift visa restrictions against Deripaska. That was finally done in 2005, but by the next year, the travel ban was reinstated at the FBI’s insistence. At that point, the billionaire turned to Manafort’s lobbying partner, Rick Davis, to set up meetings with John McCain and other U.S. senators in a new attempt to get the visa renewed. Eventually, the FBI not only relented but, in 2009, actually recommended that the Kremlin-tied oligarch be admitted into the United States. The Bureau, you see, had calculated that Deripaska might be in a position help rescue Robert Levinson, an FBI agent believed to be detained in Iran. The effort failed, but Deripaska is said to have cooperated enthusiastically, even to have spent $25 million of his own money in the cause.

  If you’re keeping score, the FBI director at the time was Robert Mueller.

  The Spy

  By 2015, the former British spy Christopher Steele, who would later help both Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the FBI concoct the Trump–Russia narrative, was lobbying the Justice Department on Deripaska’s behalf, arranging meetings between the oligarch and such high-ranking anti-racketeering officials as Bruce Ohr (who would later become Steele’s conduit to the FBI, while Ohr’s wife collaborated with Steele on the anti-Trump dossier). Sure, Steele had been running M16’s Russia desk even as Putin’s regime murdered defector Alexander Litvinenko on British soil in 2006. By 2012, though, Steele had traversed the British version of the revolving door, seamlessly shifting to the highly remunerative private intelligence business. He gladly accepted a retainer to help Deripaska—often called “Putin’s oligarch”—defend against a lawsuit brought by a business rival, and, well, one thing led to another …

  Despite Steele’s touting of Deripaska as a potential informant for the United States, the Justice Department apparently lost interest when the magnate told investigators that (a) their notions about organized crime in Russia were all wet, and (b) although he had no love lost for Manafort, his swindling former business partner, their theory of Manafort as the linchpin of Trump–Russia collusion was “preposterous.” No matter: for Steele, it was on to the next thing. In 2017, he induced yet another D.C. lobbyist—Adam Waldman, Deripaska’s FARA-registered agent since 2009—to reach out on the oligarch’s behalf to Senate Democrats investigating Manafort’s role in the collusion caper.14

  Unsavory but Legal: that’s how close observers viewed the Washington pastime of lobbying for bad guys with Kremlin connections, at least before Donald Trump came along.

  The Journalist

  One of those close observers was Glenn Simpson, the investigative reporter who eventually collaborated with his friend Chris Steele on the anti-Trump dossier. Back in 2007, as McCain readied his presidential run, Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby (a journalist with longstanding Clinton ties through her Little Rock–based family), co-authored a Wall Street Journal feature: “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.”15 The meticulously researched report explored the work Manafort and such Swamp luminaries as Senator Dole, former FBI Director Sessions, and Haley Barbour (the former GOP chairman and Mississippi Governor) had done on behalf of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, politicians, and organized crime figures. In a follow-up report on McCain’s ties to Manafort’s lobbying firm, Simpson and Jacoby acknowledged that “working for foreign interests is legal, but it can be politically hazardous for lobbyists and the politicians they advise.”16 Ain’t that the truth!

  By 2016, Simpson was running the private intelligence firm Fusion GPS. He was not only being generously compensated to help defend Kremlin cronies who had been sued by the Justice Department over a Putin regime fraud scheme; he was being generously compensated to help the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party craft the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. How convenient that he’d be able to mine the collusion script right out of his stories for the Journal. All he needed to do was narrow the focus myopically on Manafort, and “evolve” his theme from grubby corruption to traitorous espionage.

  The Oligarchs

  In that 2005 memo to Deripaska, Manafort explained that he was “offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.” The consultant knew what he was talking about because he was already providing this same great service to Putin’s ally in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.

  Manafort’s path to Yanukovych ran through Ukrainian oligarchs who had gotten fabulously rich in the “gangster capitalism” era. The most important of these was Rinat Akhmetov, a mining oligarch who is the richest man in Ukraine. In the early 2000s, Akhmetov retained Manafort’s services to improve his image and that of his sprawling conglomerate. It has been alleged that he maintained organized crime connections when he amassed his fortune.17 In 2005, for example, a top minister in Ukraine’s economic crimes department was quoted in the Russian press asserting that Akhmetov “was the head of [an] organized crime group.” Akhmetov strenuously denies the allegation. He has apparently never been charged with a crime. His wealth, he maintains, was built through careful study and a daring investment strategy. A phalanx of libel lawyers and publicists guard this assiduously cultivated reputation: Akhmetov, the self-made Ukrainian philanthropist, parliamentarian, and patri
ot.18

  Following Ukraine’s 1991 declaration of independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, its history has been a struggle for economic and civil liberties against a legacy of statism and endemic corruption. Ukraine is tugged by the European Union on one side and, on the other, by a regime in Moscow increasingly jealous of Russia’s sphere of influence, particularly Ukraine and other former Soviet satellites. This struggle has been fought out domestically by Ukraine’s political parties. In this infighting, the now-defunct Party of Regions was prominent, and, among its well-heeled sponsors, Akhmetov had the deepest pockets. He hails from the Donbas region in the east, where he holds copious coal mining assets. The region teems with native Russians, who make up about 17 percent of Ukraine’s population. Donbas was thus a Party of Regions stronghold.19

  In a country where extraordinary wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, Regions claimed the loyalty of about a third of them, representing over $35 billion in assets.20 The party has been described by Volodymyr Horbulin, a pro-West Ukrainian statesman and governmental adviser, as a motley crew of “criminal and anti-democracy figures,” along with “progressive businessmen who wanted the party to become more modern and democratic.”21 Like other parties, Regions espoused Ukrainian nationalism. Its priority, though, was to forge a Ukraine that indulged and expanded the economic autonomy of its rich industrialists. That sat comfortably with the objective of cultivating friendly relations with Russia, Ukraine’s far more powerful neighbor to the east. It also put Regions in robust competition with Ukrainian parties that favored economic integration and deepening political cooperation with the EU, and even military alliance with NATO—precisely to rein in the oligarchs, mitigate Russian influence, and curb corruption (at least when the pro-Europe factions weren’t in power).