the Middle East during the early years of America’s occupation of Iraq, another future Trump adviser, Elliott Broidy, is in the same place doing the same thing. In 2005, Broidy, described by the New York Times as a “Republican fund-raiser who is [also] a California-based investor with a strong interest in the Middle East,” founds a private security company called Circinus, which, like Prince’s Blackwater (later renamed Academi), “provides services to both United States agencies and foreign governments.”24 It is unclear whether Nader, who is working for Prince in the mid-aughts, crosses paths with Broidy at this point; what is certain is that the two men will be closely linked by the beginning of the Trump administration.
At approximately the same time Broidy is founding Circinus, he is also beginning what becomes a “long history” with onetime and future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israel’s Haaretz. In 2003, the outlet writes, “then-Finance Minister Netanyahu took credit for convincing the New York State pension fund to invest $250 million in [the Broidy-led] Markstone [Capital Group]”—a firm whose success is later found to have been partly the result of bribes Broidy paid to the New York State comptroller.25 Broidy will be convicted of a misdemeanor for these bribes in 2012.26 Nader eventually establishes “long-standing connections” with Israel through Broidy, according to the Middle East Eye, including being “sent” by MBZ “during the [2016 U.S.] presidential elections” to “meet Israeli officials to discuss how the two states [UAE and Israel] can cooperate”—a course of negotiation that raises the question of whether Israeli officials were the first to point Nader in the direction of a key Israeli figure in the Trump campaign’s orbit, Joel Zamel (see chapters 3 and 4).27 The result of all these intertwining connections is that by the time of the 2016 election, three men who will be among Trump’s foremost clandestine foreign policy advisers—Nader, Prince, and Broidy—all have longtime ties to the Israeli government and deep roots in Middle Eastern geopolitics.
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Donald Trump spends the 2000s augmenting his own existing ties to the Middle East. In 2005, for instance, he attempts to partner with a billionaire from the United Arab Emirates, Hussain Sajwani, to build two massive Trump-branded towers in Dubai.28 The project is ultimately unsuccessful.29
As the New York City businessman is building connections in Abu Dhabi, D.C. political consultant Paul Manafort is busy building connections in a former Soviet republic, Ukraine—a course of ingratiation and shilling that will lead directly to revelations, during the course of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference years hence, that not only implicate Donald Trump but also provide a window into how and why several foreign nations saw such promise in the 2016 Trump campaign.
Manafort begins his work as a flack in Ukraine by agreeing to consult for the Party of Regions, a pro-Russia political party funded in substantial part by Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian tycoon who is one of the richest men in the country.30 Manafort was working at the time for Akhmetov’s System Capital Management (SCM).31 During the Trump-Russia scandal following the 2016 presidential election, Manafort will be accused by special counsel Robert Mueller of secretly transmitting proprietary Trump campaign polling data to foreign nationals through a man “the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence,” Konstantin Kilimnik, with the evidence suggesting that Manafort intended this information to ultimately be seen by, among others, Akhmetov “and another Ukrainian oligarch” (see chapter 4).32
Manafort’s work for the Party of Regions—a political outfit “aligned with Moscow,” according to CNN—begins in 2005 and ends in 2012, a seven-year period during which Manafort, who in 2016 will offer to work for Donald Trump for “free,” earns $60 million for his services. Even after the Party of Regions payments cease, Manafort continues meeting with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politicians, including a 2014 meeting with Viktor Medvedchuk—a man who will ultimately fall under U.S. sanctions for his role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and who is so close to Putin that the Russian president is his daughter’s godfather—that takes place after Trump has made it known to GOP officials that he plans to run for president (see chapter 2).33
Most of Manafort’s Party of Regions work comes in support of Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Kremlin candidate for the presidency of Ukraine hobbled in significant part by the fact that he speaks fluent Russian but has “a hard time speaking Ukrainian.”34 A 2006 U.S. embassy cable describes Yanukovych as not only enjoying the backing of the Kremlin as Manafort