for WikiLeaks, at least six times writing stories for the formerly Bannon-led digital media outlet that are simply vehicles for the dissemination of DNC and other documents the Kremlin has stolen.329
CHAPTER 6
CSMARC, THE INCOGNITO PRINCE, THE SEYCHELLES, AND THE CHAIRMAN’S DINNER
November 2016 to January 2017
The presidential transition period is a time of secret meetings involving Trump agents, Emiratis, Russians, Israelis, and Saudis. These secret meetings occur at Trump Tower, in the Seychelles, at Trump inaugural events, and elsewhere. During the transition there are substantial revelations about ties between the Trump campaign and Israeli, Russian, and Saudi entities, including former Israeli intelligence officers, businessmen from Russia, and Saudi and Emirati death squad leaders. A clandestine Trump-Putin back channel—one focused on sealing a “grand bargain” in the Middle East—is conclusively established.
In 2016 and 2017—both before Donald Trump is elected president and after—anti-money-laundering specialists at his longtime bank, Germany’s Deutsche Bank, “recommend[] that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.”1 According to a May 2019 investigative report in the New York Times, the transactions by Trump and Kushner “set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity” and result in the internal production at Deutsche Bank of “suspicious activity reports” that the bank’s money-laundering experts believe need to be sent to the U.S. Treasury Department immediately.2 The financial transactions Deutsche Bank flags are of the sort that might threaten Trump’s candidacy for president if disclosed in the middle of an election cycle in which it is known, by June 2016, that Russian nationals are systematically attacking America’s election infrastructure in a way intended to benefit Trump—and in which Trump has repeatedly declared that neither he nor, to the best of his knowledge, anyone in his campaign has financial ties to Russia.3
What Deutsche Bank has discovered in Trump’s and Kushner’s financial dealings are “transactions … involv[ing] money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious … [and] a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner … [in which] money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.”4
The money-laundering specialist who flags the Trump and Kushner transactions for her superiors at Deutsche Bank, Tammy McFadden, will be terminated in 2018 after “rais[ing] concerns about the bank’s practices” with respect to potential acts of money laundering. McFadden will raise her concerns at a time when “Deutsche Bank … had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians” and federal regulators had ordered it “to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.”5 In 2016, however, when McFadden provides the first “suspicious activity report” to her superiors regarding Trump and Kushner—two men Deutsche Bank has, over the years, lent “billions of dollars to,” according to the New York Times—bank executives bury the report. The suspicious transactions, potentially indicative of money laundering, thereafter continue into 2017.
On April 15, 2019, just days before the release of the redacted Mueller Report, congressional Democrats issue a subpoena to Deutsche Bank demanding Trump’s banking records.6 Trump and his legal team move quickly to try to block the subpoena, though initial indications are that this effort is unlikely to be successful—with Trump failing to block the subpoena at the case’s first hearing, before U.S. District Court Judge Edgardo Ramos in late May 2019.7
* * *
At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of November 9, 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton calls Republican Donald Trump to concede the 2016 presidential election.8 Within twenty minutes, Vladimir Putin has had an emissary contact Trump to set up a phone call with the Kremlin.9 Putin’s emissary is Sergey Kuznetsov, an official from the Russian embassy in Washington.10 The message from Putin that Kuznetsov sends to Trump via email, after Kuznetsov’s phone connection—according to Hope Hicks—is too faint for the White House to make out what the Kremlin agent is saying when he calls at 3:00 a.m., is that Putin “look[s] forward to working with [Trump] on leading Russian-American relations out of crisis.”11 Hicks forwards the message from Putin to Kushner, who immediately contacts his longtime adviser on all matters Russia-related, Putin “friend” Dimitri Simes.12 According to Kushner, his main purpose in writing Simes is to find out the name of the Russian ambassador, though this information is readily available by typing “Russian ambassador” into a Google search.13
A few hours later, in the late morning of November 9, Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) director Kirill Dmitriev—who, according to the Mueller Report, has been “kept