adding that, when it comes to the media’s understanding of Simes’s role in American and Russian politics, “we only know the tip of the iceberg.”74
The Mueller Report calls Simes’s CNI “a think tank with expertise in and connections to the Russian government” and explains that, in addition to the contacts with the Trump campaign already noted, Simes had “various other contacts” with the chairman of Trump’s national security advisory committee, Jeff Sessions, during the 2016 campaign, even making Sessions a member of CNI’s “board of directors … and advisory council.”75 The result of Sessions’s acceptance of this position is that three close Trump advisers on Russia—Simes, Sessions, and Richard Burt, already a CNI board member at the time of Sessions’s elevation—are part of “a think tank with … connections to the Russian government” even as they are advising Trump on Russia policy during the 2016 presidential campaign. Sessions goes on to have numerous contacts with Russian officials during the campaign, even as his friend Simes continues to be known for, per the Mueller Report, his “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials” and his center’s “unparalleled access to Russian officials and politicians among Washington think tanks.”76
If what is already known of Simes’s advisory role on the Trump campaign is concerning, so too is the timing of his contacts with its senior staffers. Simes’s first contact with Jared Kushner is on March 14, 2016, the day the Kremlin first makes contact with George Papadopoulos through Joseph Mifsud. Simes’s second contact with Kushner comes on March 24, the day MBZ meets Putin in the Kremlin—the two men having just discussed “friendship and co-operation” between the UAE and Russia in a phone call eleven days earlier—and the day the Kremlin makes its second contact with Papadopoulos, with Mifsud this time introducing him, in London, to the mysterious “Olga Polonskaya,” who presents herself as Vladimir Putin’s “niece.” Simes’s third contact with Kushner comes on the day Trump’s national security advisory committee meets for the first time, during which meeting Simes and Kushner speak of—apropos of the day’s main event—Simes’s advice, apparently already accepted by the campaign, that “the best way to handle foreign-policy issues for the Trump Campaign would be to organize an advisory group of experts to meet with candidate Trump”; seventy-two hours later, Simes’s CNI publishes an article predicting, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the moment, that the Saudi royal family will “eventually soften its anti-Assad approach and diplomatically engage with Russia.”77 Simes also meets with Kushner on August 17, the same day Kushner’s father-in-law has his first classified national security briefing—a briefing that warns the campaign about its possible infiltration by Kremlin agents.78
Three days after the DNC publicly announces, in mid-June 2016, that it has been hacked by the Russian government, Simes sends Sessions’s deputy, J. D. Gordon, a memo urging the campaign to embrace “a new beginning with Russia.” The memo references a recent Simes-Sessions meeting—whose timing with respect to the announcement of the DNC hack is unknown—and proposes an initiative Trump would shortly adopt: the narrowing of his original national security advisory committee to a “‘small and carefully selected group of experts’ to assist Sessions with the Campaign.”79 Consistent with this advice, from mid-June 2016 onward the group advising Trump on national security and foreign policy issues is composed entirely of men who would thereafter have meetings with Russian nationals: Jeff Sessions, J. D. Gordon, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, professor and political pundit Walid Phares, Michael Flynn, and Erik Prince.80 There is no record of any other individuals—including any individuals originally appointed to Trump’s national security advisory committee in March 2016—being involved in advising Trump on national security issues after Simes urges Trump to winnow down his team of national security advisers.
Simes, former Gazprom adviser Page, and Papadopoulos—along with CNI board member and former Gazprom lobbyist Richard Burt—help Trump adviser Stephen Miller shape, write, and edit Trump’s first major foreign policy address in April 2016, even as CNI board member Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, is organizing the Mayflower Hotel event at which Trump will deliver the speech.81 Simes even offers input on the location of the speech, the logistics of the speech, and the roster of individuals who will be invited to the intimate pre-speech VIP reception—one of whom, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Simes invites to the speech personally.82 At the VIP event, another brainchild of Kushner and Simes, Simes introduces Kislyak to Trump, and Kushner and Kislyak have a conversation during which