governor, Trump alerts his many Twitter followers that “[w]hile I won’t be running for Governor of New York state, a race I would have won, I have much bigger plans in mind—stay tuned, will happen!”24 According to witnesses close to Trump whom Fox Business will interview in 2018, by 2014 Trump is fully “committed” to running for president, despite him falsely tweeting in February 2018 that he could not have colluded with any “Russian group … formed in 2014” because he “didn’t know” he was going to run for president until 2015.25
Trump’s earlier-than-acknowledged public commitment to run for president is presaged by an event that occurs in January 2014: Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen secretly pays an IT firm, RedFinch Solutions, to rig two online presidential polls in Trump’s favor.26 Trump will ultimately cheat the man he hired to cheat the two polls, one on the CNBC website and one on the Drudge Report; though Trump owes RedFinch $50,000 for fraudulently casting votes on his behalf in both polls, what Cohen gives the firm’s owner as payment is “a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 and, randomly, a boxing glove that Mr. Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter.”27 In January 2019, Cohen will confirm that Trump—who spent much of 2016 and 2017 decrying alleged voter fraud in the United States—“knew he [Cohen] was trying to have the [CNBC and Drudge Report] polls rigged. ‘What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of [Mr. Trump],’” Cohen will say.28
At around the same time that Trump tweets about his national political ambitions, a strange saga begins at the London Academy of Diplomacy, a small outfit described by the New York Times as a “for-profit continuing education program.”29 In 2014 the academy is run by an obscure Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud.30
That year, an attractive young Russian woman named Natalia Kutepova-Jamrom appears at Mifsud’s financially faltering operation with what the Times calls “an improbably impressive résumé.”31 It is unclear why Kutepova-Jamrom, who is fluent in four languages, has worked in the Russian government as a “legislative aide,” and thereafter worked for a state-owned newspaper in Russia, would want to apply for an internship at a nearly bankrupt for-profit academy in London—or indeed have anything at all to do with Mifsud, a man who has been described as a “snake-oil salesman” by a colleague.32 What is clear, however, is that the mysterious twenty-four-year-old has connections at the highest level of the Russian government, and that after becoming professionally acquainted with Mifsud, she begins “introduc[ing] Mr. Mifsud to senior Russian officials”; even more startlingly, she gains him entry, in October 2014, to one of the most exclusive think tanks in Russia, the “prestigious” Valdai Discussion Club, which the Times reports is an “elite gathering of … academics that meets each year with Mr. Putin.”33 Mifsud is even given “a speaking slot” at Valdai during his very first appearance there; he uses the occasion to argue for the dissolution of U.S. sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea earlier in 2014.34
It is quickly clear to at least one Valdai Discussion Club member that Mifsud does not belong there. His admittance to the group is “very, very strange,” according to James Sherr, a Valdai member, and “might suggest he does have connections.”35 Indeed, by the time Mifsud appears at Valdai in October 2014, he has already begun his ascent to becoming “a popular pundit with state-run news outlets in Russia, praising the country and Mr. Putin.”36
The 2014 Valdai meeting, at which Putin gives a lengthy address to the assembled 108 members of the club, is attended by another figure who, like Mifsud, is not just a club member but someone with “high-level Kremlin relationships” and a presence on state-run Russian media: future Trump campaign adviser Dimitri Simes.37
In December 2015, a former adviser to the Kremlin-owned natural-gas company Gazprom, Carter Page, asks Cox to help him get a job working for the Trump campaign.38 On Cox’s recommendation, Page is hired in January 2016 after Trump’s national co-chair, Sam Clovis, does, he claims, no more than “a quick Google search” on him.39 Just days after the Trump campaign brings Page aboard, its new hire sends an email to “senior Campaign officials” to tell them that, coincidentally, he has just “spent the past week in Europe” and has been “in discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin” who tell him they believe Trump can have a