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Trump and Miss Moscow: Report Examines Possible Compromises in Russia Trips
Trump and Miss Moscow: Report Examines Possible Compromises in Russia Trips
The Senate committee report says that President Trump may have had a relationship with a Russian beauty pageant winner. But investigators say they “did not establish” that Russia had compromising information on Mr. Trump.
By Michael S. Schmidt
Aug. 18, 2020
A section in the bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee presented potentially compromising information that the Russians may have on President Trump and could use against him as leverage.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Two decades before he ran for president, Donald J. Trump traveled to Russia, where he scouted properties, was wined and dined and, of greatest significance to Senate intelligence investigators, met a woman who was a former Miss Moscow.
A Trump associate, Robert Curran, who was interviewed by the Senate investigators, said he believed Mr. Trump may have had a romantic relationship with the woman. On the same trip, another Trump associate, Leon D. Black, told investigators that he and Mr. Trump “might have been in a strip club together.” Another witness said that Mr. Trump may have been with other women in Moscow and later brought them along to a meeting with the mayor.
Mr. Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time.
Mr. Curran is an American photographer whose work hung in Mr. Trump’s SoHo hotel. Mr. Black is a founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management.
The allegations about Mr. Trump were included in the fifth and final volume of a bipartisan report released on Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which presented potentially compromising information that the Russians may have on Mr. Trump and could use against him as leverage.
But at the same time, the committee cast some doubt on the significance of the allegations, saying investigators “did not establish” that the Russian government actually had compromising information on Mr. Trump. The report also said there was no evidence the Russians had sought to blackmail Mr. Trump or others working for his 2016 presidential campaign.
The report justified the inclusion of the salacious details about the president as necessary to understand the threat of a possible foreign influence operation or whether misinformation was spreading that could harm the American political process. The details were in a section of the report about the Russian art of “kompromat,” or disseminating damaging information to discredit a rival or an enemy, which can pose a national security threat by targeting American officials.
Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that he wanted to let the section about whether Mr. Trump was potentially compromised by the Russians speak for itself.
“On that subject, I would simply say Americans should read the report and make their own conclusions,” Mr. Warner said.
The White House denounced the report on Tuesday. “After a special counsel, numerous other committee investigations and four prior reports from this committee, the Senate intelligence report affirms what we have known for years. There was absolutely no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. Mr. Deere called the report part of “a never-ending, baseless conspiracy theory peddled by radical liberals and their partners in the media.’’
There are longstanding questions about the president’s affinity for Russia, which intervened in the 2016 campaign to help Mr. Trump, according to American intelligence agencies, a special counsel investigation and the current Senate Intelligence Committee report. Mr. Trump has called it all a hoax, publicly accepted President Vladimir V. Putin’s word that Russia did not interfere and pushed policies helpful to Mr. Putin and his government.
This month, Mr. Trump rejected warnings from the American intelligence agencies that Russia is trying to help him win re-election in 2020.
“Collectively, the allegations raised a potential counterintelligence concern, that Russia might use compromising information to influence the then-presidential candidate’s positions on relations with Russia,” the report said. “The committee sought, in a limited way, to understand the Russian government’s alleged collection of such information, not only because of the threat of a potential foreign influence operation, but also to explore the possibility of a misinformation operation targeting the integrity of the U.S. political process.”
The report released Tuesday provided one of the most detailed official accounts of Mr. Trump’s time in Russia. Over dozens of pages in the nearly 1,000-page document, the report said that a Marriott executive told committee investigators that after Mr. Trump traveled to Russia in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant the executive overheard two colleagues who worked at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow discussing video footage that they said showed Mr. Trump with women in an elevator at the hotel.
Similar accusations have arisen before. A dossier of largely unverified information compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia claimed that during Mr. Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow there was video of him with prostitutes in his Ritz-Carlton hotel room. A person Mr. Steele relied on for that information later told the F.B.I. that the allegation was just a rumor he was passing along.
The Ritz-Carlton, the Senate report said, is a “high counterintelligence risk environment” that has “at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests’ rooms and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities.”
The Marriott executive told the committee that one of the colleagues he overheard discussing the footage from the Ritz-Carlton said the video showed Mr. Trump “with several women” in the elevator, whom the colleague “implied to be ‘hostesses.’”
The executive said that the colleagues were discussing how to deal with the recording. But as they went back and forth about the matter, they moved to a more private place where it was more difficult to hear the conversation.
The committee interviewed the two colleagues who said they did not recall seeing the recording.
“The committee was not able to resolve these discrepancies,” the report said.
The report also said that a Trump associate, David Geovanis, an American businessman based in Russia who was in Moscow for the 1996 visit, continued to discuss Mr. Trump’s relationship with the former Miss Moscow after the president’s inauguration in 2017. According to the committee report, Mr. Curran, the photographer and a friend of Mr. Geovanis, told Senate investigators that he had asked Mr. Geovanis, “What exactly happened … did they hook up, or whatever?’’
Mr. Geovanis responded, Mr. Curran told the investigators, with “Yeah, well, I saw them again the next day and they were together, so.”
Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
A version of this article appears in print on
Aug. 19, 2020
, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Senate Report Examines Possible Compromises in Trump’s Moscow Trips. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Complete coverage of Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
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Opinion | The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.
The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.
“Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 19, 2020
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple.
Who is Oleg Deripaska? What’s the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence — the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups — has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It’s no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago.
A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The Senate committee’s report isn’t telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp’s actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case.
It’s also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that “Russiagate” is a “bogus” scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of “sabotaging the presidency.” That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation’s intelligence community, Mr. Mueller’s team, the Justice Department’s inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president “did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”
The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.
The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military’s hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place.
Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn’t already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: “This is what collusion looks like.” Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that “we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.” That is to insist that up is down.
But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have.
And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was “almost certainly” one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators’ report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik.
There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations.
Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country’s efforts to skew the election.
On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president “showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.” He added, “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re-elect a man who received a foreign government’s help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...df6bcc-e31a-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html
Hard evidence at last that shreds Trump’s lies about a Russia ‘hoax’
President Trump. (Anna Moneymaker/Bloomberg)
Opinion by
David Ignatius
Columnist
August 20, 2020 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
As Democrats accelerate their drive to defeat President Trump in November, they have a potent new weapon in a report by a Republican-led Senate committee that chronicles the “grave counterintelligence threat” posed by the extensive contacts between Trump’s former campaign chairman and a Russian intelligence operative.
The final volume of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation arrives late in the game. Still, it offers the detailed accounting of how Russian spies worked with the Trump team that former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should have given the country last year. It offers raw material for the wide-ranging impeachment inquiry that the House of Representatives should have conducted.
Here at last is hard evidence — certified by GOP committee leaders and published this week — that shreds Trump’s false claims of a Russia “hoax” or “witch hunt.” Let us never hear that glib dismissal of fact again. From now on, the simple answer to Trump is: “That’s not what Senate Republicans found.”
In 2019, The Post's editorial board argued the president tried to manipulate the justice system, wrongdoing that Congress must not let go. (The Washington Post)
The document is 952 pages, stuffed with obscure names and details, and few will read much of it. But as someone who has spent four years examining arcane aspects of this story, I can summarize the findings that make the report so powerful.
The most important is that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman for much of 2016, had repeated secret contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, bluntly described in the report as a “Russian intelligence officer.” Manafort had worked with Kilimnik since 2004, and shared detailed, sensitive information with him before, during and after the campaign.
We knew that Manafort had worked with Kilimnik, but the scope of their interactions, as laid out in the report, is astonishing. In page after page, the report describes how Manafort communicated secretly with Kilimnik, shared internal Trump campaign data with him, discussed plans that would advance Russia’s interests in Ukraine and took other questionable actions.
As the report describes it, Manafort was determined to obscure his relationship with Kilimnik. Pressed by Mueller about his contacts with him, Manafort “lied consistently,” the report says. He used encrypted communication devices, secret meetings and private code words to obscure his actions. This relationship, says the report, was “the single most direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
The Senate investigators even gathered information “suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian military intelligence agency’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election” — the assault on Democratic emails that was the centerpiece of the Kremlin’s election-meddling campaign.
Kilimnik wasn’t the only Russian intelligence conduit to Manafort and the campaign. Another was Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whom Manafort has known since 2004. The Senate report describes Deripaska as “a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services” who “has managed and financed Kremlin-approved and -directed active measures campaigns, including information operations and election interference efforts.”
A shocking finding was that the Kremlin sought to use this network even after the election to hide its dirty work. Read this passage and consider what it tells us about Trump and his apologists: “The Committee observed numerous Russian-government actors from late 2016 until at least January 2020 consistently spreading overlapping false narratives which sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference.”
One goal of this coverup was to “promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” the Senate report says. Sound familiar? It should. This lie has been voiced repeatedly by Trump and his defenders. Participants in the deception included Manafort, Kilimnik, Deripaska and others, the Senate report says — but the real purveyor in chief of the disinformation operation was Trump himself.
Russian operatives used their Trump contacts for favors large and small. Kilimnik pressed Manafort to support a pro-Russia peace plan for Ukraine in August 2016 and did so again after Trump’s election. In Montenegro, well before Russia’s October 2016 coup attempt, Manafort helped Deripaska advance Moscow’s interests there.
The report includes hundreds of pages of other damning information. One particularly vivid passage describes Trump’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin when he was hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in November 2013. “I am a big fan of yours,” Trump had cooed back in 2007 in a congratulatory letter.
As the pageant approached, Trump went into overdrive. In a June 26, 2013, letter, he invited the Russian dictator to attend as a “guest of honor” and added a handwritten note in his distinctive block letters: “THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN!” For the next three years, Trump’s family and fixers tried unsuccessfully to build his cherished “Trump Tower Moscow” with the help of Putin cronies.
“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams, our second president. And the facts of the Trump team’s interactions with Russian intelligence are clearly documented here. As the Senate report stresses, this is a counterintelligence problem — a matter of combating Russian spies. The bipartisan report has revealed this story in extraordinary new detail: Read it and weep.