another member of Sessions’s team has contact with a Kremlin-linked Russian national. On July 15, 2016, Soviet-born U.S. businessman Sergei Millian—who will shortly “offer[] to serve as a go-between for a Belarusian author with ties to the Russian government and the Trump campaign”—contacts George Papadopoulos on LinkedIn.87 Just as Maltese professor and Kremlin agent Joseph Mifsud had contacted Papadopoulos mere days after Sam Clovis hired Papadopoulos in March 2016 (see chapter 2), Millian’s approach to Papadopoulos occurs shortly after the young Trump adviser has appeared on a conference panel with Clovis at the TAG Summit.88 Millian tells Papadopoulos that he has “insider knowledge and direct access to the top hierarchy in Russian politics,” and Papadopoulos agrees to meet him in New York City shortly after the convention.89 The two men ultimately have two meetings in New York, on July 30 and August 1; after the second, Millian invites Papadopoulos to Moscow to attend a September energy conference.90 Papadopoulos informs the campaign of his July 30 contact with Millian on the day it happens, as he does in other instances in which he has contact with a foreign national linked to the Kremlin—except, Papadopoulos will tell special counsel Robert Mueller, when Mifsud told him in April 2016 that the Kremlin had stolen Clinton emails—and is told on July 31 to hold off on further contacts with Millian because the press has begun connecting the Trump campaign with Russia far more than the campaign would like. Papadopoulos meets with Millian on August 1, anyway.91
On August 23, Millian sends a Facebook message to Papadopoulos—which Papadopoulos will insist to the special counsel’s office he has no recollection of—telling him that he wants to “share with [him] a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign.”92 Papadopoulos meets Millian twice more after this offer of campaign assistance, once in November 2016 and once at Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, apparently to discuss, among other things, a possible consulting partnership.93 The partnership—Millian’s idea—does not go forward.94
Less than six months after his fourth and final meeting with Millian, Papadopoulos will be approached in Tel Aviv by the founder of Terrogence, an Israeli business intelligence outfit dealing in digital marketing campaigns and intelligence services that could be considered “disruptive” technologies “instrumental” to those political campaigns willing to use them (see chapter 8). Millian is later revealed to be a key source—if an “unwitting” one—for much of the dossier compiled by former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in 2016 and published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed News.95
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Just as well-connected Israeli politicos and other key players in Middle Eastern politics have identified George Nader, Erik Prince, and Elliott Broidy as key U.S. political connections by the mid-aughts, so too have the Russians come to appreciate this same quality in Paul Manafort by the end of that decade. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that long after becoming Trump’s de facto campaign manager, and just days before being officially named his campaign manager on June 20, Paul Manafort finds himself at a meeting in Trump Tower with a cadre of individuals sent to the campaign by the Kremlin.
Two days before this infamous June 2016 meeting—on June 7—Manafort attends what Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani will later call a “strategy” meeting; also at the meeting are Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Rick Gates, and at least one other (unnamed) person. The four (or five) Trump campaign advisers discuss how to approach the impending June 9 meeting with agents of the Kremlin, including a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has promised the campaign, through a British music promoter named Rob Goldstone, “very high level and sensitive information” that would “incriminate Hillary [Clinton]” and is “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”96
According to two articles in Business Insider, one in 2017 and one in 2018, despite Trump Jr.’s 2017 testimony to Congress that he has “no recollection of documents being offered or left for us” by Veselnitskaya on June 9, in fact the Russian attorney “provide[s]” a “memo” to Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner on June 9.97 The New York Times has since published the memo the Kremlin agent gave to Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager at Trump’s home in New York City. According to the arguments advanced by the five-page, highly detailed opposition research document, “the main sponsor[s]” of the Democratic Party and “both Obama election campaigns” committed serious federal felonies in order to raise a fortune that ended up, in part,