Boyarkin to pressure Manafort to square his debts with the oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin will tell Time in 2018, “and he was offering [in 2016] ways to pay it back. I came down on him hard.”59 Indeed, just two weeks after Manafort’s hire (a hire that occurs once Manafort tells Trump friend Thomas Barrack that he “really needs to get to” Trump), Manafort emails “his old lieutenant” Kilimnik asking him how he can “use” his “media coverage” as Trump’s campaign manager to “get whole” with Deripaska.60 In the ensuing 120 days, Manafort meets face-to-face with Kilimnik at least twice, once on May 7 and again on August 2, not long after the Republican National Convention; offers “private briefings” on the Trump campaign to Deripaska; transmits proprietary Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik with the aim of it reaching Deripaska, Manafort’s old boss Akhmetov, and another Ukrainian oligarch, Serhiy Lyovochkin; and, as the campaign’s overseer of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, helps orchestrate a change in the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform regarding the provision of arms to anti-Kremlin Ukrainian rebels—a change that delights both the Kremlin and pro-Russia elements in Ukraine.61 As to the last of these incidents, Kilimnik will tell associates in Europe just a few weeks after the convention that he played a role in the Republicans’ unexpectedly pro-Kremlin platform decision in Cleveland.62
The key Trump campaign executor of Kilimnik’s plan regarding the change to the GOP platform is J. D. Gordon, Republican senator Jeff Sessions’s deputy on Trump’s national security advisory committee—a body first conceived of by Jared Kushner and Dimitri Simes, the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for the National Interest (CNI), a conservative think tank that has consistently a pro-Kremlin viewpoint (see chapter 2). Both during and after the July 2016 convention in Cleveland, Gordon has substantial contacts with Russian nationals. According to the Mueller Report, on the third day of the convention, Gordon and Sessions both deliver speeches at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference.63 During Gordon’s speech, which Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak attends, Gordon argues “that the United States should have better relations with Russia.”64 The Mueller Report reveals that during Sessions’s speech Kislyak may have asked a question of the Alabama senator, who has been, since being hired by the Trump campaign in early March, the GOP candidate’s chief public-facing national security adviser.65 Gordon speaks with Kislyak after the event to tell him that he “meant what he said in the speech about improving U.S.-Russia relations”; Sessions also speaks with Kislyak after the event and likewise discusses “U.S.-Russia relations” with the Russian ambassador.66 At a reception following the event, Gordon has dinner with Kislyak, and they are joined by a fellow member of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Carter Page.67 Gordon and Kislyak speak for several minutes about U.S.-Russia relations, during which Gordon repeats to the Russian ambassador that “he meant what he said in his speech about improving U.S.-Russia relations.”68
Nine days before Sessions, Gordon, and Page interact with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference, Gordon participates in the Republican National Convention’s committee hearings to debate amendments to the party platform. Prior to the hearings, Trump’s policy director, John Mashburn—who will later testify to Congress that before the convention George Papadopoulos, another member of Trump’s national security advisory committee, told him of the Kremlin having damaging information about Clinton—explicitly orders Gordon to “take a hands-off approach” to the hearings.69 Gordon ignores Mashburn’s directive and furiously objects to a platform amendment proposed by delegate Diana Denman; the amendment would “include[] provision of armed support for Ukraine” against pro-Kremlin forces as part of the GOP platform.70 According to Mashburn’s subsequent congressional testimony, Trump “had not taken a stance on the issue,” and therefore Mashburn’s directive to Gordon that “the Campaign should not intervene” was intended to hold during discussion of the party’s stance toward the hostilities in Ukraine.71 Echoing Mashburn, Matt Miller, a campaign staffer working with Gordon at the platform hearings, will later say that he “did not have any independent basis to believe that this language [Denman’s proposed platform] contradicted Trump’s views,” and therefore he did not urge Gordon to get involved in a dispute with Denman, nor did he condone him doing so.72
Instead of remaining silent, however, Gordon—claiming to have heard Trump clearly articulate a position on Ukrainian rebels at a brief meeting in D.C. nearly four months earlier—feels “obliged to object to the proposed platform change and seek its dilution.”73 When