the Kremlin representative tells Trump’s son-in-law that “we [the Kremlin] like what your candidate is saying.”83 After Trump’s speech at the Mayflower there is a private, unannounced luncheon attended by Simes, Kushner, and others, none of whose names are released to the press.84
Trump’s Mayflower address, delivered on April 27, comes a day after Mifsud tells Papadopoulos that the Kremlin is willing to assist the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Hillary Clinton.85 Papadopoulos is, at the time, part of the speechwriting team for the foreign policy speech Trump intends to give the next day. In the speech, Trump urges a détente in the form of a “deal” between the United States and Russia.86 Papadopoulos tells investigators he does not recall telling candidate Trump about Mifsud’s revelation before his speech at the Mayflower, but John Mashburn—who at the time is working alongside Rick Dearborn, the Mayflower event’s organizer, in the campaign’s policy shop—tells Congress that in fact he recalls receiving an email from Papadopoulos about the Kremlin having damaging information on Clinton and believes other senior Trump campaign officials received it as well.87 Papadopoulos himself will “waver” on whether he remembers Sam Clovis (the man who hired him and originally assembled Trump’s national security advisory committee, and who therefore would have been likely to receive any email Papadopoulos sent to Mashburn) getting angry at him for telling him about Mifsud’s disclosure.88 The day of Trump’s Mayflower speech, Papadopoulos writes one of his “newfound Russian contacts,” a colleague of Joseph Mifsud’s named Ivan Timofeev, to say that the speech is the “signal” for Trump and Putin to meet.89
On May 23, four days after Trump names the longtime Kremlin-linked public relations man Paul Manafort his campaign chairman—he will elevate him again, to campaign manager, on June 20—Sessions attends Simes’s and CNI’s Distinguished Service Award dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. CNI invites Sergey Kislyak to the event, and Simes’s deputy Paul Saunders creates a seating plan that places him next to Sessions, though stories vary as to whether Kislyak appears at the dinner or not.90 Simes’s attempt to again facilitate direct discourse between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin would not have gone unnoticed by either party, however. Indeed, Simes will invite Sessions to two further dinners after May 23, both of which are also attended by Richard Burt, whom Simes later petitions Trump to name U.S. ambassador to Russia.91 Burt, the former Russian Alfa Bank board member, is, in 2016, sufficiently known to the Kremlin that when Putin indicates to a man he has identified as one of his fifty most powerful and influential oligarchs, Petr Aven, that after the U.S. election Aven needs to contact the Trump transition team to protect Alfa Bank’s assets in the event of a new round of sanctions from the Obama administration, it is to Burt that Aven turns (see chapter 6).92
After Kushner and Simes’s conveniently timed March 2016 meetings, and the Mayflower Hotel event and foreign policy speech they coordinate, the two men have so many private meetings that the Mueller Report is unable to provide a date for each one, calling them simply “periodic” and indicating they include both “in-person meetings and phone conversations” that are often about directing the committee—Trump’s national security advisory committee—that “Simes had proposed.”93 Simes’s impossible-to-verify contention that he at one point told Kushner “it was bad optics for the Campaign to develop hidden Russian contacts” is belied by the fact that the campaign Simes was advising, which throughout its life span repeatedly took his advice on matters relating to Russia, had more hidden Russian contacts than any campaign for the presidency in U.S. history.94 Simes’s placement in the shadows of the Trump campaign policy shop obscures not only his level of access to the candidate’s son-in-law but also his course of advising, as noted by the Mueller Report, on the two topics that were the subject of all the campaign’s clandestine contacts with Kremlin agents: “what Mr. Trump may want to say about Russia” and “questions about Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea”—that is, sanctions.95
Most troubling, in the timeline of Trump campaign–Simes connections, are Simes’s attempts to peddle Russian kompromat to the campaign in advance of the first presidential debates.96 In mid-August 2016, Simes writes and speaks to Kushner of “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton and the Russian government,” claiming that the Kremlin is now “blackmailing” the Clintons.97 While Simes will claim to the special counsel’s office that his information