whether he can travel to Russia to visit the headquarters of Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU.10 The GRU is, as the New York Times will report in January 2017, “the same agency that has since been implicated in interference in the 2016 presidential election.”11 In an August 2016 interview, Flynn will say of his 2013 visit to GRU headquarters, “I had a great trip. I was the first U.S. officer ever allowed inside the headquarters of the GRU. I was able to brief their entire staff. I gave them a leadership OPD [professional development class] and talked a lot about the way the world is unfolding.”12
In March 2014, just weeks after Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine—an action that leads to punishing international sanctions against Putin’s regime—Flynn “pushe[s] to maintain a dialogue with Russian military intelligence … making plans to meet with Russian officials [in late March 2014].”13 As reported by the New York Times, however, “When his [Flynn’s] superiors found out about his plans, they ordered the meeting canceled.”14 In October 2014, six months after Flynn is forced out of the DIA, his former employer informs him via letter that he is prohibited from receiving, without advance approval, any “consulting fees, gifts, travel expenses, honoraria, or salary from a foreign government unless congressional consent is first obtained.”15
Even as Flynn is exhibiting an unnatural fondness for the Russian military, and specifically Russian military intelligence, dramatic changes are afoot within the military of another country in which Flynn will shortly have a significant interest: Egypt. In July 2013, Egyptian minister of defense and commander in chief of the Egyptian armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, leads a coup of the government of Egypt’s “first freely elected president,” Mohamed Morsi.16 Within a few months, President Obama has halted military aid to Egypt—a decision that President Trump will reverse upon entering office—and between July 2013 and January 2017 “repeatedly criticize[s] the Egyptian government’s crackdown on political opponents.”17 According to a September 2018 Al Jazeera story, human rights groups estimate that el-Sisi’s government detains forty thousand political prisoners in its first sixty months of rule.18 In light of these and other troubling developments in Egypt, the Obama administration refuses, upon el-Sisi’s ascension to power, to participate in America’s formerly biennial joint military exercises with Egypt—and temporarily refuses, too, to return to Cairo several Apache helicopters that the Egyptians had sent to America for maintenance.19
* * *
In November 2013, Donald Trump travels to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. While there, he negotiates a lucrative deal for a Trump Tower Moscow with several Kremlin agents, including the Kremlin’s premier real estate developer, the head of a state-owned bank, and the Kremlin official in charge of building permits in Moscow—this last a Kremlin employee whom Putin has personally sent to the pageant in his stead. Social media posts tracking the event and discussing its aftermath, written by people who are with Trump’s entourage in Moscow, indicate that Trump spends much of his time in Moscow discussing presidential politics.20
Within a few weeks of his return to the United States from Moscow, Trump is telling officials in the New York State Republican Party that he intends to run for president. For instance, in December 2013, at a meeting of New York state Republican officials at Trump Tower, Trump makes “it clear he want[s] to run for president,” according to one attendee.21 Trump will later confirm this, saying of his many meetings in Manhattan with Republican officials who wanted him to run for governor of New York that “even then, what I really wanted to do was run for president.”22 The GOP officials seeking to convince Trump to run for governor are so aware of Trump’s ambitions in late 2013 that they even couch the governor’s mansion in Albany as a springboard to a 2016 White House bid.23 Among the state party officials in regular contact with Trump about his political ambitions is former president Richard Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox, a veteran politico who will become instrumental in the early staffing of the 2016 Trump campaign’s national security advisory committee—an intimate cadre of advisers under whose auspices most of the illicit Trump-Russia contacts eventually itemized by the Mueller Report occur (see chapter 4).
In March 2014, Trump finally ceases to hide what he has already indicated to his GOP allies in New York: that he plans to run for president of the United States. In the midst of his allies’ ill-fated efforts to draft him to run for