evidence of illegal foreign campaign donations to the Democratic National Committee, “a cybersecurity firm and the DNC announce[] that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the DNC,” according to the Mueller Report.113 That the hack may have captured emails confirming the opposition research the Kremlin had already given Trump’s campaign is not lost on at least one June 9 meeting participant, indeed the participant least interested in and knowledgeable about politics, by his own admission: Emin Agalarov’s music industry manager, Rob Goldstone, who will tell multiple media outlets, “I know nothing about politics.”114 Goldstone nevertheless writes Emin “shortly after the DNC announcement” to make “comments connecting the DNC hacking announcement to the June 9 meeting”—an association almost certainly also made, as the Kremlin would have anticipated, by the experienced politicos working for the Trump campaign, especially the Kremlin’s own longtime flack, Paul Manafort.115
With respect to Manafort’s pre-election transmission of polling data to pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, the New York Times will note that at the time Trump’s campaign manager secretly ordered proprietary campaign information transferred to Kremlin agents, “Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.”116 CNN will report in August 2017 that federal “investigators became more suspicious of Manafort when they turned up intercepted communications that U.S. intelligence agencies [had] collected among suspected Russian operatives, discussing their efforts to work with Manafort to coordinate information that could hurt Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House.”117 And in 2019 the Mueller Report will reveal that Manafort’s order to Gates to share polling data with a man connected to Russian intelligence, Kilimnik, was a standing order, with Gates doing so “periodically … during the campaign.”118 As the report details, “Manafort instructed Rick Gates, his deputy on the Campaign and a longtime employee, to provide Kilimnik with updates on the Trump campaign—including internal polling data.… Manafort expected Kilimnik to share that information with others in Ukraine and with [Putin ally] Deripaska.”119
When the special counsel’s office approaches Deripaska deputy Victor Boyarkin to find out the extent of Manafort’s “coordination” with pro-Russian elements—whether it be the Kremlin, Russian intelligence, Kremlin-linked oligarchs like Deripaska, or pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs like Rinat Akhmetov—Boyarkin tells the special counsel to “go dig a ditch.”120 Both Boyarkin and Deripaska will be, by 2018, under U.S. sanctions, the latter explicitly because he does not “separate [him]self from the [Russian] state,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Meanwhile, Boyarkin’s former employer, the GRU, will be found to be the very Russian intelligence agency that, the Times reminds its readers, “was engaged in a full-fledged operation … to boost Mr. Trump” during the 2016 election.121 In an email to Manafort in mid-campaign, Kilimnik had called pleasing Boyarkin, and his boss Deripaska, his own and Manafort’s “biggest interest.”122
While Trump’s degree of knowledge regarding Manafort’s communications and coordination with a Russian oligarch and a former GRU agent during the campaign is unknown, this much is clear: Trump knew Manafort well when he hired him as his campaign manager. Manafort made his overseas work part of his job application to the Republican candidate in February 2016, and the State Department was immediately “alarmed” by Trump’s hire of Manafort because of Manafort’s “relationship to Russia”; in January 2018, NBC News reports that, in relation to the Mueller investigation, “Donald Trump is telling friends and aides in private that things are going great” in large part because “a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”123 What crime Trump may have committed involving Manafort as a co-conspirator that would allow Manafort to “flip and sell him out” goes unreported by NBC News, though it is known that Manafort met with Kilimnik to discuss the presidential campaign not only in May 2016 but also in early August 2016, doing so on this second occasion in the Grand Havana Room, a private club located at 666 Fifth Avenue—a building owned by Jared Kushner’s family business, Kushner Companies, and located a fifth of a mile from Trump Tower (see chapter 5).124 The meeting occurred soon after Kilimnik had met with Deripaska, with Kilimnik thereafter using Deripaska’s plane to fly to the meeting with Manafort.125 Manafort also met with Kilimnik in Madrid in either January or February 2017.126 Kilimnik has called