“game-changing effect … in bringing the end of the new Cold War”—and that, as a result of “discussions with these high level contacts,” it is now possible that “a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.”40 Page adds at the close of his email that he opposes U.S. sanctions on Russia.41 For all its energy, the email does not address how—or by whom—a Trump-Putin meeting can be orchestrated.
Fortunately, within days of Page’s unusual email to senior Trump campaign staff, the campaign receives a job query from the very individual whose job on the campaign will ultimately be to set up exactly the sort of meeting Page has just proposed: George Papadopoulos.42 Papadopoulos’s broader campaign function, besides being one of Trump’s first five national security hires, will be to keep the possibility of a Trump-Putin meeting on the campaign’s radar at a time when the candidate himself has been told by his attorney Michael Cohen that—per the Kremlin-linked Felix Sater—meeting Putin can seal the $1 billion real estate deal Trump and Cohen have been secretly negotiating with the Kremlin for six months (see chapter 3).43 Cohen has communicated not just to Trump but also to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski that a trip by Trump to Moscow is critical to the project.44
Carter Page is an odd job candidate for the well-connected Cox—who claims to know Page from “business and political circles”—to endorse.45 Clovis’s “quick Google search” on Page fails to turn up what a standard pre-hire background check might well have uncovered, had either Clovis or Cox undertaken one: that just months before Cox provided him with an introduction to the Trump campaign, Page was wrapped up in criminal proceedings relating to the federal investigation of two Russian spies in the United States.46 During the course of this investigation, federal law enforcement determined that Page gave two Kremlin agents nonpublic information about the U.S. energy sector; the Mueller Report notes that when questioned, “Page acknowledged that he understood that the individuals he had associated with were members of the Russian intelligence services,” but said that he gave them nonpublic information anyway because, as he explained it to the special counsel’s office, “the more immaterial nonpublic information I give [to Kremlin agents], the better for this country.”47 In fact, after Page delivered the material to the two Russian spies, he “spoke with a Russian government official at the United Nations General Assembly and identified himself so that the official would understand” that he had previously given information to Kremlin agents; his purpose in making this disclosure to a Russian official so soon after being informed by the FBI that he had been dealing with Russian spies, or for that matter his purpose in calling himself an “informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin” in a letter to a publisher in 2013, will not be disclosed in the redacted Mueller Report.48 How or why Page found himself once again in contact with Kremlin agents just days after being hired by Sam Clovis for the Trump campaign is unknown, though the same phenomenon occurs almost immediately after Clovis hires Papadopoulos in March and—yet again—almost immediately after Clovis appears on a conference panel with Papadopoulos in July. It is clear that the men to whom Clovis gives access to the Trump campaign’s small national security shop very shortly thereafter are contacted by agents of the Kremlin (see chapter 4).
One of the senior Trump officials who receives Carter Page’s January 2016 email about a Trump-Putin summit is Michael Glassner, the Trump campaign COO; Glassner is likewise the recipient of George Papadopoulos’s job query, which he thereafter sends to Clovis via an intermediary, Joy Lutes.49 At the time Papadopoulos sends his query to Glassner in early February, he is working for a company at which Valdai Discussion Club member Joseph Mifsud is a senior employee. Clovis ultimately hires Papadopoulos for the same committee for which he has already hired Page: Trump’s national security advisory committee. The committee is the brainchild of two men, Jared Kushner and Valdai Discussion Club member Dimitri Simes (see chapter 3).50
Simes, the president and CEO of a pro-Kremlin conservative think tank, the Center for the National Interest (and a man Putin calls a “friend” at a Valdai Discussion Club event in 2013), will become active in the Trump campaign behind the scenes—indeed, the campaign’s informal go-to adviser on Russia—just a few days after Papadopoulos is formally hired by Clovis in early March.51 Within days of Simes becoming