PART 2:
Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent who compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, is pictured in London on March 7, 2017. (Victoria Jones/PA/Associated Press)
Trump has repeatedly denied those allegations and denounced the dossier as “phony stuff” cooked up by Democrats to frame his campaign.
Millian has insisted that he is a victim of Trump’s enemies and the news media. He has said he was not a source for information that Steele collected.
“I want to say that I don’t have any compromising information, neither in Russia nor in the United States, nor could I have,” he said in a 2017 appearance on Russian television. “Without a doubt it is a blatant lie and an effort of some people — it’s definitely a group of people — to portray [Trump] in a bad light using my name.”
He has declined to answer detailed questions from The Post and other news organizations about his relationship with Trump or his activities during the campaign.
'The meeting will be strictly confidential'
Emails obtained by The Post indicate that Millian offered to help a Russian emigre seeking to rally support for Trump’s election.
The messages were exchanged between Millian and Morgulis, a Soviet-born author and theologian who broadcast Christian-themed radio programs into the Soviet Union after moving to the United States in the 1980s.
Now living in Florida, Morgulis leads a Christian ministry and serves as honorary consul of Belarus, Millian’s home country and a former Soviet state closely aligned with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Morgulis served from 2014 to 2018 on the coordinating council of a group called the Russian Community Council of the USA, according to Elena Branson, its chairwoman. She said the group is a nonprofit cultural enrichment organization for Russian emigres living in the United States. The Russian Foreign Ministry sometimes reimburses members who travel to conferences or other events, Branson said.
In a July 2016 email exchange, Millian told Morgulis that he would soon be meeting with Trump’s campaign and offered to pass along messages.
“The meeting will be strictly confidential, I won’t be able to invite you to it. If you want me to pass them any information, I will do it, and if they get interested, I will ask them to meet with you,” Millian wrote to Morgulis in Russian.
“Maybe the main thing for them is this,” Morgulis responded. “We can organize the Russian community to vote for Trump. If you are interested in getting 5 million people, I am ready to participate in this campaign, together with you.”
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The emails were provided to The Post anonymously by a person who claimed to represent a group monitoring Russian activities against Ukraine and declined to say how they were obtained. Morgulis confirmed their authenticity, saying he thought his private correspondence had been stolen.
Morgulis told The Post in an email that he is a Republican who supported Trump but that he never heard from anyone in the campaign about his proposal to organize the Russian-born community.
He said he has known Millian for about seven or eight years, since the younger businessman contacted him when he was living in Atlanta. During the campaign,
Morgulis said that Millian said he had become “close to the Trump campaign, since he knew someone in Trump’s group.” But Morgulis said he was skeptical that Millian had any influence on Trump’s operation.
“His political weight was too insignificant,” he wrote in Russian. “It was a character trait of Sergei’s that he liked to make himself out to be a more important person than he was in reality. . . . He is too weak a swimmer to catch any political crocodiles.”
After the election, Morgulis took credit in interviews with Russian media for helping to elect Trump by organizing Russian-speaking voters.
“I personally visited 11 cities in Florida, where I said that if you want our new president to be a homosexual . . . vote for Hillary,” he said
a July 2017 interview with the Russian government-funded outlet Sputnik, touting a false claim popular among some conservative conspiracy theorists. In the interview, he also said he had briefly met both Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Morgulis declined to comment on those claims.
Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, and Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, declined to comment.
'An enticing offer'
Around the same time he was in contact with Morgulis, Millian was also seeking to build a relationship with Papadopoulos, a young energy consultant and foreign policy adviser to Trump who had been urging the candidate to meet with Putin.
Papadopoulos had helped trigger the initial counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign when he told an Australian diplomat that a London contact relayed to him that the Russians had thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.
Papadopoulos said that he first heard from Millian on July 22, 2016 — the same day WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic Party emails.
In that note, Millian described himself as a Trump adviser and offered to help explain the U.S.-Russia relationship, Papadopoulos said.
The two struck up an online correspondence and met several times, Papadopoulos said.
Millian claimed to be a business associate of the candidate and told Papadopoulos that he had connections at Bashneft, a Russian energy company that he said was looking for American investors.
George Papadopoulos arrives at federal court for sentencing on Sept. 7 in Washington. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post)
By October, Papadopoulos said Millian approached him with an idea: He said he could get Papadopoulos a public relations contract with a New York firm connected to an unidentified Russian national. The job would pay $30,000 a month, Millian told him.
“It was an enticing offer,” Papadopoulos said. He said he was clear with Millian from the start that he would not work for any Russian under U.S. sanctions.
In the fall of 2016, Millian flew to Chicago, where Papadopoulos was living at the time, to discuss the proposal. The two met at the bar of the
Trump International Hotel.
Papadopoulos said that Millian seemed nervous during the meeting. He was pacing, sweating and wearing a scarf around his neck, even though they were indoors.
Then, Millian explained that the job would require Papadopoulos to continue to work for Trump after the election.
“He said, ‘You know, George, in Russia it’s very common for people to work both in the private and public sector at the same time,’ ” Papadopoulos recalled Millian telling him.
Papadopoulos said he knew the offer was unethical — and possibly illegal. “I told him, ‘Absolutely not,’ ” Papadopoulos recalled.
Later, Papadopoulos said he concluded that the meeting may have been a setup — perhaps, he thought, by the FBI, which he learned had arranged for one of its confidential sources, a Cambridge University professor, to meet with him that fall.
He said his suspicions were deepened over drinks during the inauguration at Russia House.
Millian, he said, was accompanied by a friend from Atlanta, a Moroccan American music producer named Aziz Choukri, who Papadopoulos said announced that Millian had been working for the FBI. Papadopoulos said Millian looked sheepish.
In an interview, Choukri said he recalled having drinks with Papadopoulos and Millian but insisted that he never said anything about the FBI. “I never mentioned that,” he said. “It’s a lie.’’
The Daily Caller first reported that Papadopoulos met with Millian and Choukri around the inauguration.
A week after the Russia House gathering, FBI agents showed up at Papadopoulos’s apartment in Chicago to question him about his contacts with Russians. Agents first told the young aide that they were primarily interested in his relationship with Millian, Papadopoulos’s lawyers have said.
In September, one week before Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI, Millian tweeted some news: He had launched a GoFundMe account to raise money to help him “protect our constitutional rights and fight against censorship!”
Titled “Friends and Enemies of Donald Trump,” the page featured the 2007 photo of Millian and Trump at the racetrack in Miami.
“The Fake News consortiums are active members of the Deep State who tread on our constitutional rights. Let us stand together to protect our Constitution!” he wrote in a long post.
“This page will serve as an assessment if the public is interested and ready to handle the truth no matter where it leads to from a first-hand account,” he continued.
The account carried a goal of raising $1 million. As of Wednesday evening, no donations had been recorded.
Alice Crites, Philip Rucker, Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky in Washington and Natalia Abbakumova and Anton Troianovski in Moscow contributed to this report.