his objection meets resistance from Denman and others, Gordon, according to Denman, picks up his phone, dials a number, and thereafter pretends, while arguing with Denman, to be on the phone with Trump campaign headquarters at Trump Tower in New York City—when in fact he appears to be getting his direction from a different source altogether, as he is actually on the phone with the office of his national security advisory committee supervisor, Jeff Sessions.74 Gordon, who had apparently lied to Denman about being on the phone with “candidate Trump,” will subsequently tell Mueller that not only Mashburn but Mashburn’s colleague in Trump’s policy shop, Rick Dearborn, “supported” Gordon’s position on the platform change—a claim Mashburn contradicts when he is confronted with it.75
The result of Gordon and Denman’s bizarre exchange is that the latter’s platform amendment proposal is defeated by, the evidence suggests, the machinations of Gordon and Sessions (the latter either directly or through a representative). Notably, Gordon and Sessions are the only two men involved in the platform dispute who are directly associated with Simes’s and Kushner’s national security advisory committee. Sessions in particular has, in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, been meeting and speaking regularly with Simes and other members of Simes’s think tank (see chapter 2). Sam Clovis, who hired some of the members of the national security advisory committee but is not one of its members, will later tell the special counsel’s office that “he was surprised by the [platform] change” Gordon orchestrated. Mashburn will be even more forceful, insisting that Gordon—and presumably Sessions, if indeed it was he who green-lit Gordon’s maneuvers in Cleveland—had “violated Mashburn’s directive not to intervene” in platform disputes.76
After Gordon’s July 11, 2016, actions at the Republican National Convention committee meetings, and his July 20 discussions with Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy conference, the Russian ambassador invites Gordon to his home.77 Gordon tells Kislyak that he will have to take a “raincheck” because of bad press involving alleged connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. Before he can make good on his “raincheck,” however, Gordon departs the presidential campaign for the Trump transition team.78
Having failed to set up a meeting with the number two national security adviser on Trump’s national security advisory committee, Kislyak tries instead for the committee’s chairman.79 This time Kislyak is successful at setting up a meeting, scheduling a get-together with Sessions for September 8 in Sessions’s office; September 8 is the day after Trump is slated to deliver, in Philadelphia, the second major foreign policy address of his campaign, and his first one post-convention.80
In Trump’s September 7 speech, written, as was his April 27 foreign policy speech, with input from the man who created the committee of which Sessions is the chairman, Dimitri Simes (see chapter 2), Trump states the following about Russia: “Putin has no respect for President Obama or Hillary Clinton.”81 It is a sentiment he might easily have deduced from Kislyak’s repeated private statements of support to his national security advisers in the weeks prior (see chapters 4 and 5).82
At Sessions’s office the next day, Sessions and Kislyak discuss Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, and Kislyak once again informs a top Trump campaign representative—having consistently done so since Trump’s first foreign policy speech in April—that the Kremlin is “receptive to the overtures Trump [has] laid out during his campaign.”83 Trump thereby receives feedback from pro-Kremlin sources immediately before and immediately after both his first and second major foreign policy addresses (see chapters 2 and 4). After the Sessions-Kislyak meeting on September 8, attended as well by two Sessions aides, Kislyak invites Sessions to come to his house alone to dine.84 Sessions does not follow up on the invitation, however, as the Trump campaign—having recently asked Manafort to resign due to his ties to Ukraine and Russia—is just days away from asking two members of Sessions’s committee, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, to resign as well, and for the same reason.85 While Sessions does not dine privately with Kislyak, his meeting with the Russian ambassador in his Senate office is itself a significant anomaly; though Sessions will later claim he met Kislyak only as a routine obligation of his role on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a CBS News poll taken of twenty of the committee’s twenty-six members in March 2017 will reveal that not one of the twenty had met with Sergey Kislyak even once in 2016.86
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Seventy-two hours before the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland,