involved in advising the campaign, he and Jared Kushner agree that Trump must create a national security advisory committee of foreign policy experts.52 By March 21, Trump has announced both Papadopoulos and Page as among the first five members of his national security advisory committee.53
Despite Dimitri Simes, Michael Flynn, and Erik Prince eventually becoming the Trump campaign’s most trusted national security advisers—and the advisers with the most direct access to members of Trump’s inner circle—none are ever publicly named to any Trump campaign national security or foreign policy advisory committee. Instead, they operate in the shadows, with their actions and advice not revealed to American voters until well after the 2016 election. As Politico will note of Simes in particular, “the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser” despite his repeated contacts with senior campaign officials on the subject of Russia, with whom Simes laid out plans for a “new beginning” in several policy memos sent to Jeff Sessions and Kushner.54 That Simes is never acknowledged by the Trump campaign, but is mentioned in the Mueller Report 134 times, tells the complex story of a campaign looking to hide many of its most relied-upon foreign policy and national security assets from public view.55 As Politico observes, “Trump made a point of publicly announcing a foreign policy advisory team in mid-2016, [but] his campaign never openly discussed Simes’s quiet role.”56
Even among “people who know Simes” there are some who consider him, per Politico, “at best a mysterious—and at worst alarming—player in Washington’s foreign policy community … [a man] who cloaks his true agenda in Washington”; Simes’s agenda is described by one former top Pentagon official, Michael Carpenter, as “completely pro-Kremlin.”57 Even a longtime friend of Simes’s, Leslie Gelb, will acknowledge to Politico that there are many people in Washington who (in Gelb’s opinion unfairly) suspect Simes of being “a secret Russian agent.”58 Whether Jared Kushner knew any of this when he recruited Simes as a Russia adviser for the Trump campaign in March 2019 is unclear; what is clear is that the concerns of the members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment are not without basis. For instance, during the 2016 presidential campaign, not long before Simes began advising the Trump team in developing a pro-Kremlin foreign policy agenda, the CNI president was repeatedly asking a Russian alleged spymaster, Alexander Torshin, for help with a complex financial issue in Russia—a course of negotiation that could have put Simes deeply in debt to the Kremlin in advance of his work advising Kushner and, through Kushner, Trump.59 According to private text messages Torshin sent to Kremlin operative Maria Butina months after Trump began running for president, Simes was “pressuring” and “appealing” to him to be his “helper” in dealing with the Russian Central Bank to resolve an issue involving tens of millions of dollars and a possible interruption of funding to the CNI.60 Though Torshin at first rebuffed Simes—because of the “threat” Torshin believed helping Simes in the way Simes demanded posed to Torshin’s “reputation”—once the CNI director became the Trump campaign’s Russia whisperer six months later, one imagines the Kremlin coming to a very different conclusion. If it had previously been unclear to Torshin whether helping Simes was in his interest, after Simes’s elevation to an informal advisory role within the Trump campaign it might have seemed to Torshin, as well as to his supervisors in Moscow, that any risk was worth the benefit of being on the right side of Simes’s ledger of favors.
Certainly, the Kremlin had made this decision with respect to its handling of Simes by September 2018, when it decided to pay him roughly half a million dollars a year to work as a talk-show host for Kremlin-funded media—a Moscow-based job the Trump campaign’s oft-relied upon Russia adviser still holds.61 When Simes first entered into negotiations for this extremely profitable position within Russia’s state apparatus is unknown; what is clear is that, as Politico reports, Simes “did use the opportunity [to advise the Trump campaign] to influence the campaign’s posture toward Russia … [using] the brash billionaire [Trump] as a vehicle to drive the GOP toward his longtime project of improving U.S. relations with Moscow”—an ambition Simes was determined to pursue “despite Putin’s ongoing election interference.”62
There is already some evidence that Simes anticipated a quid pro quo from Torshin during the presidential campaign, as he aggressively pursued assistance from Russia’s Central Bank via Torshin while “arrang[ing] meetings for Torshin with U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials”—an indication