Steele and Simpson expected to turn up information tying Trump to shady business operatives, accessing unsavory sources of money, or otherwise entangled in Moscow’s ubiquitous corruption. But from the start, the information that flowed back to Orbis from Steele’s network of sources was more fundamentally unnerving, alleging that the Kremlin had spent years cultivating Trump, not necessarily as a future presidential candidate but an influential American sympathetic to Moscow; that Russia was providing helpful information to the Trump campaign; and that Russian intelligence possessed compromising information on Trump and episodes of sexual perversion during his 2013 Miss Universe trip to Moscow.
Verifying some of the most salacious leads would prove elusive for legions of reporters and investigators for the next two years. But in some ways the most alarming report from Steele’s sources proved accurate and prescient: in one of the first entries of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” he warned that Russia was waging a covert influence campaign aimed at disrupting the 2016 election and defeating Clinton.
He also almost immediately came across disturbing information about Carter Page.
ONCE ON THE TRUMP TEAM, PAGE BEGAN GRANTING INTERVIEWS in which he presented himself as the campaign’s “Russia adviser.” He played up his business ties to Moscow and urged campaign officials to have Trump make contact with the Kremlin. His status with Trump earned him a speech invitation from the New Economic School in Moscow, a prestigious institution where Obama had once given a talk. In May, Page emailed others on the campaign to propose that Trump go in his stead “if he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit.”
In June, Page used his credentials as a member of the Trump campaign to attend an event at Blair House, a historic residence just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House where foreign guests of the president often stay. At a gathering for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Page startled the assembled foreign policy experts and academics by praising Putin as a stronger leader than Obama, and vowing U.S.-Russia relations would recover when Trump was in office.
In the ensuing weeks, Page had a flurry of interactions with campaign officials about his pending trip to the Russian capital. He sent emails submitting drafts of his speech and asking for feedback from campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, spokeswoman Hope Hicks, and J. D. Gordon, a former naval officer serving as a foreign policy adviser.5 At a dinner for members of Trump’s national security team at the Capitol Hill Club, a watering hole for Republicans, Page greeted Alabama senator Jeff Sessions and told him he was heading to Russia in a matter of days. The campaign maintained that he was going to Russia on his own, and not as a Trump representative. But organizers of the New Economic School event made clear that they were not necessarily interested in the independent opinions of Page.
“Carter was pretty explicit that he was just coming as a private citizen, but the interest in him was that he was Trump’s Russia guy,” said Yuval Weber, a Harvard professor who said he was with Page for much of his time in Moscow, and whose father, Shlomo Weber, was the rector at the New Economic School and had extended Page the invitation.
Page’s July 7 remarks in Moscow were astonishing. “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change,” he said. He cited the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Bernie Madoff scandal, and the collapse of Enron as evidence of irreparable cracks in the American system. Putin, by Page’s account, was a force for global enlightenment, fostering a system of international relations “focused on mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit and tolerance, and access to resources.”
Page kept the same campaign advisers apprised of developments on his trip in a series of emails. Relaying an apparent interaction with Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich—chairman of the board of the New Economic School—Page said Dvorkovich “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together.” In a July 8 email to Gordon and another campaign adviser, Tera Dahl, Page said he would “send you guys a readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislatures and senior members of the presidential administration.”
Manafort, meanwhile, moved to exploit his new position. Two weeks after being brought on as campaign adviser, he emailed his most trusted employee in Kiev, Konstantin Kilimnik, who, according to U.S. officials, also had long-standing ties to Russian intelligence. Citing his new connection with Trump, Manafort asked, “How do we use to get whole?”
The messages between Manafort and Kilimnik were written in deliberately cryptic fashion, but references to “OVD” made clear that one of Manafort’s top priorities was to find a way to settle accounts with Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, the Russian billionaire who had accused Manafort in a Cayman Islands court proceeding of taking money intended for the cable television properties in Ukraine as well as other investments, then failing to account for the funds. (In the messages Manafort and Kilimnik appeared to use the Russian delicacy “black caviar” as code for sums of cash.) A Manafort spokesman would later claim that the emails reflected an “innocuous” effort to collect debts owed by assorted Eastern European business associates. If so, Manafort seemed to go to significant lengths to obscure that legitimate purpose.
Deripaska has been among the Russian leader’s closest allies for years. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables described Deripaska in 2006 as “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and a “more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” His ties to Manafort went back almost as far. In 2005, Manafort sent a memo to Deripaska pitching the aluminum magnate on a plan to engage in lobbying and other activities to advance Russia’s interests in the former Soviet republics, according to an Associated Press investigation. As part of this effort, Manafort offered to lobby the U.S. and other Western governments to help oligarchs in Ukraine hold on to assets looted from the state, to extend his consulting work into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, and to help pro-Russian entities develop “long-term relationships” with Western journalists. Deripaska denied that he ever enlisted Manafort for such work, but acknowledged in a 2017 defamation lawsuit against AP that the two had business arrangements dating back to the mid-2000s.
On July 7, while Page was in Moscow and Trump was on the verge of securing the GOP nomination, Manafort sent another email to Kilimnik, asking him to relay a message to Deripaska offering secret updates from inside the campaign. “If he needs private briefings,” Manafort wrote, “we can accommodate.”
Despite his flimsy résumé, Papadopoulos was in some ways the most resourceful in cultivating contacts with the Kremlin. More than the others, he appeared to be doing so at the direct bidding of the Trump campaign.
Ten days after Trump introduced Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy,” the newcomer took part in a disjointed meeting of the Trump foreign policy brain trust at the still-under-renovation Trump Hotel in Washington. The session—the only known gathering of the group that Trump attended—was convened by Gordon, the campaign adviser, and presided over by the future president.
Photos of the meeting show Trump seated at the head of a table in a disheveled room with stacked dishes and poster-size photos of the Trump Hotel interior positioned on easels, presumably for those overseeing the final phases of construction. Trump was surrounded by at least ten advisers, including Sessions at the far end of the table. Page was not present. Papadopoulos, sporting a fresh haircut and a blue suit, was shown leaning forward attentively, his elbow resting on the black tablecloth. There is no record or transcript of the conversation that transpired. But witnesses