Meet Putin’s top influencers behind Russia’s election attack on America
Part 2 of a 5 part series — Chapter 2; the Grand Old Putin Party.
The year after Dr. Edward Lozansky’s lobbying book was published, news of a meeting emerged publicly about a Washington influence organization involving recently sanctioned Kremlin-friendly oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a top Kremlin propagandist and the D.C.-based Center For The National Interest President Dimitri Simes.
One month after that meeting, the National Journal reported that longtime Republican insider Paul Manafort signed a contract to work for pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician Victor Yanukovych.
News of the meeting between Deripaska, Simes and Putin’s first “internet political technologist leaked to Russian-language news outlet Kommersant in December 2005 for a story entitled “Moscow’s Symmetrical Response”; an excerpt from Archive.org’s copy of the English language version of their report says:
Oleg Deripaska, RUSAL and Bazovy Element owner, arrived in the United States yesterday. Informed sources maintain that Mr. Deripaska is willing to bankroll a new think tank in Washington to focus on Russian issues.
Moscow hopes for a “well-disposed” approach of the institute to the Russian present-day life.
According to Kommersant, the Kremlin’s Gleb Pavlovsky and Soviet-emigre Simes, were the main players in the Russian government’s newest endeavor.
In fact, Dimitri Simes is a former Nixon foreign policy aide, and he told The Moscow Times in a report preserved inside Johnson’s List— itself a widely read newsletter website about Russia — that the creation of Putin’s state-run propaganda television network Russia Today (RT) was “a foundation” for the new think tank.
The think tank that resulted was most likely the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC).
At the same time, Paul Manafort’s political services became the lynchpin of efforts by Kremlin-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs like Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitryo Firtash to recapture the Presidency in Kiev, as well as being behind their government’s secret efforts to sway American foreign policy. Manafort’s efforts are now a main subject of Special Counsel Mueller’s prosecution of the former Trump Campaign Chairman, for failure to register with the US Department of Justice as a foreign lobbyist as required under the FARA act.
Last year, the AP reported that Oleg Deripaska began a consulting contract with doubly indicted former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, at the cost of $10 million annually.
Manafort’s project was pitched in June 2005 and started the following year in 2006.
Paul Manafort bought a Trump Tower condo that same year.
Rick Davis began running the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign in 2007, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) dismissed him, but brought him back after his campaign floundered.
Davis was Manafort’s partner.
Yet, Sen. McCain still rejected Paul Manafort due to his known role in Ukrainian politics, advocating Russia’s preferred position, which often clashed with America’s interests.
During that era, Manafort and Davis would twice introduce Senator McCain to Oleg Deripaska, attempting to help the Russian oligarch obtain a visa to visit America over the objections of the federal government’s Republican controlled executive branch.
By the time of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul Manafort met with and emailed the GRU-trained spy Konstantin Kilimnick in the spring and summer of 2016 — with whom he worked since 2005 as an agent of the pro-Putin Ukrainian Party of Regions — in order to pass messages to Oleg Deripaska in an effort to “get whole.”
Less than two weeks after Manafort’s last meeting with Kilimnick, a “black ledger” emerged from Ukraine detailing his foreign lobbying and consulting payments and he publicly retired from the Trump Campaign, but stayed in contact through his easy access via the Trump Tower condo that he bought in 2006 with Deripaska’s money.
During Trump’s presidential transition, Paul Manafort would re-emerge from his Trump Tower condo as a behind the scenes kingmaker.
Less than one year later, Special Counsel Mueller has put Paul Manafort in jail without bond for witness tampering, while awaiting trial for his secretive, unregistered Ukrainian lobbying for the pro-Kremlin Party of Regions
Story continues below:
The Center for the National Interest and the Valdai Club
Dimitri Simes would not become a formal member of the IDC, but the group he leads as CEO and President, the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), hosted numerous events with them, and hosted a crucial Trump Campaign event which has landed in the center of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of the 2016 election.
“Dimitri Simes was probably a plant from the beginning, says he came to America before anyone else came out which is very suspicious to begin with,” says the Swedish economist Anders Åslund, an Oxford trained economist who worked with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs advising former Russian President Boris Yeltsin from 1991–1994.
“You have a high profile disciple of the top international affairs institute in Moscow who is suddenly allowed to emigrate to the west. Then immediately, he links up with these “grandees” Nixon, Kissinger, Schlesinger and Scowcroft.
He jumped straight in to the top of the US Republican realist circle, a big circle of ‘really respectable people’ in which he has thrived.”
Åslund told us that Simes had a falling out with his parents over his pro-Kremlin politics, both of them famous Soviet dissident lawyers who famously revealed the existence of a Soviet oligarchy, and passed away in 2006.
He says they “basically condemned him.”
Dimitri Simes’ CFTNI and the Putin’s New York branch of the IDC would go on to hold many joint events. (Here are just three examples from CFTNI’s website, now found only in Archive.org, #1, #2, #3 in PDF)
In 2011, former President Nixon’s Foundation retracted his name from the CFTNI’s predecessor organization, the Nixon Center, because of Simes’ very public embrace of pro-Putin policies.
Dimitri Simes made an unusual appearance at the 10th Anniversary edition of the Valdai Club held in 2013 — which is on Vladimir Putin’s official website. What made it remarkable was the unusually glib public policy discussion on stage with the autocratic Russian President.
In fact, Simes is still listed today as one of the Valdai Club’s experts.
The CFTNI CEO endorsed Putin’s Syria policy on stage with world leaders just one week after Ketchum landed the Russian leader a PR coup with a New York Times op-ed story.
Simes began advising Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) the following year, just six months after Putin’s early 2014 invasion of Ukraine, alongside fellow CFTNI Board of Directors member, Ambassador Richard Burt, who is a registered foreign agent of Gazprom, Russia’s state-run gas monopoly.
Together, Simes and Burt published a forceful joint column entitled “The Republican Mission” which forcefully advocated support for “Sen. Rand Paul’s call for a formal declaration of war against the Islamic State.”
The Valdai Club later played a major role in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Trump election influence operation, involving foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, involving a Russian MFA-linked, mysterious Maltese professor.
Maltese Professor Joseph Mifsud ran a London for-profit college front company and dangled dirt on Hillary Clinton to Papadopoulos, only after learning of his role in the campaign in March 2016, which ultimately led to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign.
That is how the Valdai Club made American headlines in last year for the wrong reasons, when they held a hastily planned conference in London on March 24th, 2016, during the last American presidential campaign.
That’s where George Papadapolous met one of Valdai’s program directors, former MGIMO political science professor Ivan Timofeev, who has numerous links to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Timofeev went on to write multiple messages to he and his boss, Trump campaign Co-Chairman Sam Clovis, trying to setup meetings with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski and jailed former Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort both fielded and responded to Timofeev’s inquiries.
George Papadopoulos personally met with Donald Trump just one week later.
The campaign documented the Trump campaign’s national security team meeting on Instagram, and it was all hands on deck.
Just four weeks after that policy meeting, the Center for National Interest went on to host then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s first foreign policy speech — which George Papadopoulos and Richard Burt helped write — on April 27th, 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Dimitri Simes personally introduced Jared Kushner to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel meeting.
“I saw the Russian Ambassador the morning before the Mayflower meeting at the Cosmos Club and he was so excited to reveal that he was going to the Mayflower meeting to go listen Trump,” says Anders Åslund, currently a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“I’ve never seen him so excited as before this event. In no way did he make any secret of it,” says Åslund.
“On the contrary he boasted about it.”
The Wall Street Journal indeed reported, that the two men had a highly unusual private audience that night before the speech.
We made two requests to the Center for the National Interest for a copy of the complete guest list to the April 27th meeting at the Mayflower Hotel.
A low level staffer for the Center declined the first request and directed us to the US Secret Service.
The USSS responded to our FOIA request by stating there were no responsive records.
D.C. attorney and FOIA specialist Brad Moss explained that the federal public records law imposes a document delivery requirement upon request, but no requirement to retain records; so a savvy political operator would simply retrieve their written guest lists from the USSS to avoid disclosure.
When Patrick Simpson — co-author of this series — made an identical request to CFTNI for records of their guest list at the Mayflower, and about Dr. Lozansky’s involvement, the Center sent our query to the top of the organization.
“Mr. Lozansky and Russia House…were not involved in the April 27 event in any way,” replied CFTNI Executive Director Paul Saunders by email.
However, by late December 2017, George Papadopoulos would point to that Mayflower speech as a “signal to meet.”
On May 21st, 2016, the convicted former Trump foreign policy advisor emailed Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort’s top deputy, Rick Gates—who also became a cooperating witness with Mueller’s Special Counsel probe—asking to setup a meeting between the campaign and Putin.
Manafort responded that it needed to be someone lower level.
Barely six weeks after Trump’s Mayflower Hotel foreign policy speech in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. agreed to and organized a high-level meeting between the campaign and a Russian agent at Trump Tower.
Read more about the Trump Campaign’s foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel and the Trump Russia dossier here:
Sometime in the last year, the CFTNI hosted a joint event with Valdai Club’s program director and MGIMO Professor Andrei Shushentov, who had some very interesting observations about the 2016 election campaign.
Foreign directed campaign donations
Lozansky’s book explained that it’s not for the casual reader, but the goals sound a lot like what Putin accomplished in 2016. Here is another excerpt:
Revealing the really effective mechanisms of the influence of ethnic communities on the internal and especially foreign policy of the United States, the ratio of their activities to the national interests of their historical homeland, the author devotes work to the solution of a major historical task — to consolidate and organize the Russian ethnic minority in the United States for the multiple strengthening of its political influence.
The logical conclusion of this meaningful analysis is the project of creating a lobbying structure designed to promote rapprochement between Russia and the United States, filling the Russian-American relations with substantive and fruitful ties.
Much of this book is unusual even for the sophisticated reader.
This is primarily the material of the research itself, as well as conclusions and recommendations for practical politics.
The professor’s suggests that Russians who emigrated permanently to the United States — men like Len Blavatnik or Simon Kukes, who are US citizens today and under FBI investigation for their unusual political giving — and their companies, could provide a source of non-state sponsored funds to influence American elections.
In his book, Dr. Lozansky generally outlines certain categories of persons who should be groomed to help Russia influence American politics:
— Businessmen — Russia is a huge market for trade in goods and services. It’s a big opportunity.
— Politicians and International Experts — Russia can be a strategic partner in the fight against international terrorism. There are many members of Congress in this category.
— Religious groups — there are many different religious groups in America. They like to do humanitarian work. They may be interested in distributing religious literature in Russia or helping to fix-up churches.
— Russophiles — There are many people who appreciate Russian culture — music, ballet, literature, and the arts. Create arts programs in America.
— Slavists and political scientists — in American universities and research institutes there are many Slavic studies scholars, specialists in Russian language and literature, etc. to provide assistance.
Russian oligarchs and Soviet-born US Citizens facing Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation for campaign finance violations
Dr. Lozansky’s book is also a strategically important volume in light of Special Counsel Mueller’s recent focus — according to an ABC News report last year and more recent CNN report — that Special Counsel Mueller’s ongoing investigation is targeting over potentially foreign directed election spending to help the Trump Campaign in 2016.
Democratic Coalition co-founder Scott Dworkin first uncovered and publicized a link between naturalized Russian citizens and vastly increased political donations to the GOP, which he exposed publicly in a series of February 2017 tweets about Len Blavatnik.
University of Dallas Professor Dr. Ruth May documented the web of payments from Blavatnik in her stories in the Dallas News, which she later expanded to note the US citizen relatives of Russian oligarchs.
One potential Russian oligarch of interest would seem to be Viktor Vekselberg — a Russian oligarch with business ties to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at the Bank of Cyprus.
He donated to Trump’s inaugural committee, and was recently placed on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list.
In just the last month, Vekselberg’s ties to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen have been revealed. His company Renova’s US-based family office Columbus Nova — a company run by his cousin Andrew Intrater — paid $500,000 for Cohen’s services, which was dramatically revealed by Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Only two days after America’s intelligence community pointed the finger at Russia for interfering in America’s 2016 presidential elections, Vekselberg visited Trump Tower on January 9th, 2017, for a meeting with Cohen during the presidential transition.
CNN reports that the FBI is investigating Russian oligarchs and also investigating Soviet-born Americans such as Len Blavatnik, who have deep Russian ties, for allegedly making foreign-directed campaign donations, which is a crime.
Blavatnik’s conglomerate Access Industries owns Warner Music Group, a group of media companies and chemical corporations.
Last year, he was — albeit briefly — in a business partnership with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, when he bought part of the RatPac Dune Entertainment company right before the Trump appointee divested his stake last summer.
Len Blavatnik was also partners in a Russian oil company with Vekselberg via an investment vehicle called AAR (Alfa-Access-Renova) that yielded a nearly $7 billion profit for each man in 2013, when Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s largest state-run oil company Rosneft to buy their shares in the former company TNK-BP.
The deal only went down after British Petroleum (BP) hired Putin’s best friend from the East German Stasi was hired to broker the deal. As a result of that transaction, BP became the largest independent shareholder in Rosneft to this day.
Putin’s buyout supplied billions of dollars in cash to Blavatnik, who made very limited donations in the 2014–2015 election cycle — many to Democrats .
Len Blavatnik, his family and his company Access Industries proceeded to write over 5,000 checks in the 2015–2016 federal election cycle; an average of nearly 7 checks disbursed per day.
That torrid pace has continued into the 2017–2018 election cycle.
In the last year, Len Blavatnik has made major donations to the GOP’s legal defense fund which has paid for President Trump’s defense attorneys, in addition to giving significant funding both Democratic and Republican candidates in this year’s Florida gubernatorial race, a state where he has significant real estate holdings.
Supplemental Material
Relationship chart of the main people in Story 2:
The Trump Campaign’s relationship to the main people in Chapter 2:
The Grand Old Putin Party is a series of investigative reports co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.
