Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

246 Pages·2017·1.78 MB·English

by  Michael Isikoff

Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor.
Jacket photographs: Trump © Anadolu Agency/Contributor, Kushner © AFP
Contributor/Contributor, Manafort © Matt Rourke/Associated Press, putin © Mikhail
Svetlov/Contributor
Author photographs (on back flap): isikoff © Evan McGrath, Corn © Mary Noble Ours
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2875-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-2874-1 (ebook), 978-1-5387-1473-7
(international)
E3-20180222-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: “It’s a shakedown.”
1. “Mr. Putin would like to meet Mr. Trump.”
2. “We did not recognize the degree it would tick Putin off.”
3. “Are we here because Clinton texted us?”
4. “You don’t know me, but I’m working on a troll farm.”
5. “This is the new version of Watergate.”
6. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it.”
7. “He’s been a Russian stooge for fifteen years.”
8. “How the fuck did he get on the list?”
9. “If it’s what you say I love it.”
10. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”
11. “I have to report this to headquarters.”
12. “As for the Ukraine amendment, excellent work.”
13. “Next they’re going to put polonium in my tea.”
14. “We’ve been told to stand down.”
15. “He’s got me as the fall guy.”
16. “Does it even matter who hacked this data?”
17. “It also could be somebody sitting on their bed who weighs four hundred pounds, OK?”
18. “Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
19. “We’ve been ratfucked.”
20. “This is the real reset of the Western world.”
21. “We got a sinking feeling.… It looked like a season of Homeland.”
Afterword: “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Also by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
Notes
Newsletters
For Mary Ann and Zach
—M.I.
For Amarins, Maaike, and Welmoed
—D.C.
INTRODUCTION
“It’s a shakedown.”
D
onald Trump was suspicious from the start.
It was the afternoon of January 6, 2017, and for two hours, the president-elect had sat in a
conference room at Trump Tower and listened to the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community
brief him on an extraordinary document: a report their agencies had produced concluding that the
Russian government had mounted a massive covert influence campaign aimed at disrupting the
country’s political system and electing him president of the United States. Trump had controlled
his anger during this meeting—at times raising questions, expressing doubts, and clinging to the
idea that it might all be a lie, part of some Deep State plot to taint his defeat of Hillary Clinton
the previous November and undermine his authority as president.
When the spy chiefs—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA director John
Brennan, and National Security Agency director Adm. Michael Rogers—left the room, one of
them stayed behind. FBI director James Comey then handed Trump something else. It was a
two-page synopsis of reports prepared by a former British spy alleging that Trump and his
campaign had actively collaborated with Moscow. The memos claimed Russian intelligence had
collected compromising material on Trump that could be used to blackmail him, including a tape
of him engaging in sordid behavior with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. The FBI was not
giving him this information because it believed the reports, Comey explained to Trump. In fact,
the Bureau hadn’t confirmed any of the lurid details—and Comey told him that he was not
personally under investigation. But the material was circulating within the media and might
become public. The intelligence community, Comey said, merely wanted to provide him a heads-
up.
When Comey left, Trump was incensed. “It’s bullshit,” he told his aides. None of this was
true. The discussion turned to why Comey had gone through this exercise. Suddenly, it all made
sense to Trump. He knew exactly what this was.
“It’s a shakedown,” Trump exclaimed. They were blackmailing him. Comey—no doubt, with
the approval of the others—was trying to send him a message. They had something on him.
Trump had seen this sort of thing before. Certainly, his old mentor Roy Cohn—the notorious
fixer for mobsters and crooked pols—knew how this worked. So too did Comey’s most famous
predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, who had quietly let it be known to politicians and celebrities that
he possessed information that could destroy their careers in a New York minute.
Now, as Trump saw it, Comey and the rest were trying to do this to him. But he was not
about to let them.
Trump’s anger that day helped set the tone for one of the most tumultuous presidencies in
American history. His first year in office would be filled with fits of rage at his political enemies,
bizarre early-morning tweet storms, and repeated denunciations of the purveyors of “fake news”
who challenged his honesty, his competency, and even his mental stability. Much of this turmoil
related to the relentless investigations of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election—a subject that
infuriated Trump more than anything else. Russia had become a rallying cry for his tormentors—
the original sin of his presidency, a scandal that raised questions about both his legitimacy and
the nation’s vulnerability to covert information warfare. Yet Trump defiantly refused to
acknowledge Russia’s extensive assault as a real and significant event. In his mind, any inquiry
into the matter was nothing but an effort to destroy him.
The Russia scandal, though, dated back decades. For years, Trump had pursued business
deals in Russia, continuing to do so even through the first months of his presidential campaign—
and this colored how he would engage with the autocratic, repressive, and dangerous Russian
leader, Vladimir Putin. The Trump-Russia tale was rooted in the larger post–Cold War
geopolitical clash between the United States and Russia, a conflict that Moscow in 2016 shifted
into the cyber shadows to gain a strategic advantage.
With Trump unable or unwilling to come to terms with Putin’s war on American democracy,
it fell to government investigators and reporters to piece together the complete story—an
endeavor that could take years to complete. This book is a first step toward that. No matter how
Trump regarded the scandal, one thing was for certain: To prevent a future attack, the American
public and its leaders had to know and face what had occurred. A thorough accounting was a
national necessity.
CHAPTER 1
“Mr. Putin would like to meet Mr. Trump.”
I
t was late in the afternoon of November 9, 2013, in Moscow, and Donald Trump was getting
anxious.
This was his second day in the Russian capital, and the brash businessman and reality-TV star
was running through a whirlwind schedule to promote that evening’s extravaganza at Moscow’s
Crocus City Hall: the Miss Universe pageant, in which women from eighty-six countries would
be judged before a worldwide television audience estimated at one billion.
Trump had purchased the pageant seventeen years earlier, partnering with NBC. It was one of
his most prized properties, bringing in millions of dollars a year in revenue and, perhaps as
important, burnishing his image as an iconic international playboy celebrity. While in the
Russian capital, Trump was also scouting for new and grand business opportunities, having spent
decades trying—but failing—to develop high-end projects in Moscow. Miss Universe staffers
considered it an open secret that Trump’s true agenda in Moscow was not the show but his desire
to do business there.
Yet to those around him that afternoon, Trump seemed gripped by one question: Where was
Vladimir Putin?
From the moment five months earlier when Trump announced Miss Universe would be
staged that year in Moscow, he had seemed obsessed with the idea of meeting the Russian
president. “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in
Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump had tweeted in June.
Once in Moscow, Trump received a private message from the Kremlin, delivered by Aras
Agalarov, an oligarch close to Putin and Trump’s partner in hosting the Miss Universe event
there: “Mr. Putin would like to meet Mr. Trump.” That excited Trump. The American developer
thought there was a strong chance the Russian leader would attend the pageant. But as his time in
Russia wore on, Trump heard nothing else. He became uneasy.
“Is Putin coming?” he kept asking.
With no word from the Kremlin, it was starting to look grim. Then Agalarov conveyed a new
message. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s right-hand man and press spokesman, would be calling any
moment. Trump was relieved, especially after it was explained to him that few people were
closer to Putin than Peskov. If anybody could facilitate a rendezvous with Putin, it was Peskov.
“If you get a call from Peskov, it’s like you’re getting a call from Putin,” Rob Goldstone, a
British-born publicist who had helped bring the beauty contest to Moscow, told him. But time
was running out. The show would be starting soon, and following the broadcast Trump would be
departing the city.