that as Simes was facilitating Torshin’s access to federal banking institutions, he might have thought it reasonable to expect Torshin to do the same for him with respect to banking institutions in the Russian Federation.63 According to National Public Radio, both the Kremlin operative Butina and her handler Torshin had wanted access to top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve—access they received, with the help of CNI, in April 2015—to initiate an “unofficial channel of diplomacy,” as Butina would later call it.64 As for the role of Simes’s CNI deputy Paul Saunders in setting up the meetings, Saunders will concede in May 2019 that CNI wanted to facilitate Kremlin contact with influential American officials because “we were about a year into U.S. sanctions on Russia following their annexation of Crimea, [so] we thought it would be interesting for Americans to hear from a Russian central bank official about the status of the Russian financial system” under the new sanctions regime.65 Saunders’s confession casts doubt on Simes’s claim—already belied by his actions in linking up the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak and Richard Burt (see chapter 3)—that neither he nor CNI ever sought to put anyone in the Trump campaign in touch with agents of the Russian government. This was, in fact, exactly the sort of interlocution his organization had already sought and achieved with respect to Torshin, Butina, and several U.S. government officials, including undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs Nathan Sheets and Federal Reserve vice chairman Stanley Fischer.66 According to the NPR report, CNI had originally sought to get Torshin and Butina an audience with Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, settling for Fischer only when Yellen “passed on the meeting.”67 That the CNI donor Simes was ostensibly seeking Torshin’s assistance on behalf of appears to have had no knowledge of Simes’s efforts—“There’s no evidence that [former AIG CEO Maurice “Hank”] Greenberg requested the outreach [to Torshin] or was even aware of it”—adds yet another troubling dimension to Simes’s contacts with Torshin during the presidential campaign.68 After Simes’s clandestine lobbying of the Kremlin ostensibly on his behalf, Greenberg makes the decision to have his philanthropic foundation cut “much of its support” for CNI; its current level of aid is approximately 4 percent of what it was previously.69 A Greenberg spokesman says the former executive is simply “scaling back his commitments to focus on his company and philanthropy”—the latter a category to which the foundation’s donations to CNI appear to no longer belong, in Greenberg’s view.70
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Simes will profoundly influence, from behind the scenes, the four most controversial components of candidate Trump’s foreign policy agenda: his stances toward Putin, Russian election interference, the Kremlin’s military adventures in Ukraine, and U.S. sanctions against Russia. From March through Election Day and beyond, Simes “provide[s] counsel … regarding Russia” to the campaign and transition, including, at a minimum, the following: helping, in April 2016, to “draft Trump’s CNI-hosted foreign policy speech,” in which “Trump called for an ‘easing of tensions’ with Russia”; “advising Trump on ‘what to say about Russia’” during the summer of 2016; sending a policy memo with “several policy recommendations” to the head of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Jeff Sessions, in June 2016; sending another “Russia policy memo” directly to Jared Kushner in August 2016; “peddl[ing] alleged compromising information to Jared Kushner on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia” in mid-2016, including information that “the Russian government had tapes of Bill Clinton having phone sex with Monica Lewinsky”; setting up yet another meeting between Sessions and the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Kislyak, after the election; and “recommend[ing] for administration jobs” certain “longtime associates” during the presidential transition, including former Gazprom lobbyist and Russian Alfa Bank board member Richard Burt.71 In his August 2016 memo to Kushner, Simes directly addresses Putin’s top policy goal—the dissolution of the sanctions regime established by the U.S. government after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea—by making “suggestions [to Trump] about how to handle Ukraine-related questions.”72 According to his colleagues at CNI, Simes believed his role on the Trump campaign to be a broad one, trying “to take Trump’s intuitions [on Russia] and turn them into something coherent.”73 Russian American historian Yuri Felshtinsky, who co-wrote a book with Alexander Litvinenko—the London-dwelling Russian-intelligence defector the Kremlin assassinated using radioactive tea in 2006—has observed “the peculiarity of Simes’s high-level Kremlin relationships and … his ability to address Putin directly at high-level public forums, like at the Valdai International Discussion Club,”