just weeks before Papadopoulos met Flynn’s future client Alptekin.110
One clue about the missing $270,000 from the contract Flynn signed in August 2016 with Alptekin and an Israeli oil company—a contract signed at the same time Israeli Joel Zamel made a pitch at Trump Tower to create a social media manipulation campaign for Donald Trump for the final ninety days of the 2016 election—may come in the form of work Flynn business associate Jon Iadonisi did for Flynn during the same period Zamel was pitching to the Trump campaign. Iadonisi’s work for Flynn ostensibly related to Flynn’s efforts on behalf of the Turkish government; at the same time, however, Iadonisi was running an “under-the-radar project” for the Trump campaign now described as a “social-media project that involved video-content creative and ‘millennial engagement.’”111
The Trump campaign didn’t pay Iadonisi for his work at the time he did it, or even disclose the work Iadonisi was doing in campaign finance reports, as required by law (this despite Trump boasting in 1999 that “nobody knows more than me about campaign finance”). Instead, a month after the election the Trump campaign paid $200,000 to “Colt Ventures, a Dallas-based venture-capital firm that is an investor in VizSense, a social-media company co-founded by Iadonisi.”112 Michael Glassner, executive director of the Trump campaign committee, “declined to comment on why the payment went to a venture-capital firm and whether campaign officials were aware of the firm’s connection to VizSense and Iadonisi.”113 In May 2017, the Washington Post will report that the founder of Colt Ventures, Dallas investor Darren Blanton, “served as an adviser to Trump’s transition … [and] met frequently with Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon at Trump Tower during the campaign.… Colt also sent a report to Bannon about work done for the campaign.”114
As the co-founder of VizSense, Iadonisi—a former Navy SEAL who has done work with the CIA—was offering VizSense clients, in 2016, the means to “weaponize your brand’s influence” through “military-grade influencer marketing and intelligence services.”115 In a 2015 interview, Iadonisi said that VizSense “helps clients track online video performance and identify which social-media users drive the most traffic.” He compared VizSense’s technology with the capacity of Al Qaeda fighters who “were really good at making viral videos” that “catalyze” the opinions of those who see them.116
Throughout the 2016 campaign, the Flynn Intel Group and Iadonisi’s VizSense shared an office in Alexandria, Virginia. Flynn’s rental agreement for the space was with White Canvas Group, another Iadonisi-founded and -owned operation.117 According to the Justice Department, Iadonisi’s White Canvas was working with the Flynn Intel Group on the Gulen project while Iadonisi’s VizSense was working with the Trump campaign on its “under-the-radar” social media manipulation operation.118 The chief executive of White Canvas, Tim Newberry, was simultaneously the chief executive of Flynn Intel Group Cyber (FIG Cyber), a subsidiary of Flynn’s company.119 Missing Israeli monies paid to the Flynn Intel Group were therefore well positioned to end up in a VizSense social media manipulation campaign seemingly identical in its contours to the project being proposed (at the very same time) by Israeli social media guru Joel Zamel.120
That Iadonisi served in Iraq with Michael Flynn and shared an office with him, and that Zamel had previously sought to recruit Iadonisi’s officemate Flynn to work with Psy-Group, increases substantially the odds of an Iadonisi-Zamel connection or even partnership—especially given their common military experience and common interest in social media disinformation campaigns.121 Indeed, in describing itself as “deliver[ing] military-grade influencer marketing and intelligence services,” Iadonisi’s company VizSense offers up a corporate description also answered to by Psy-Group.122 According to the Washington Post, Flynn’s contract with Inovo describes Iadonisi, without name attribution, as “the head of Flynn Intel Group’s Special Operations Cyber Force” and a “former top security and intelligence official”—a description that may just as easily be applied to Zamel.123
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In December 2016, during the presidential transition, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, calls Jared Kushner. One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s former speechwriters had introduced Kushner to Dermer nine months earlier, in March 2016. During the December Dermer-Kushner call, Dermer tries to induce Kushner to violate the federal Logan Act (18 U.S.C. § 953) by asking to negotiate U.S. foreign policy with President-elect Trump—who is still a month from taking office—through his son-in-law.124 Specifically, Dermer asks Kushner “for the transition team’s help in blunting the work [at the United Nations] of the sitting President.”125 “Work” here refers to the Obama administration’s open-minded stance toward an Egyptian resolution at the United