include contact with Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, the onetime Manafort boss who infamously said, “I don’t separate myself from the [Russian] state.”188 In 2005, when Deripaska, as part of his push to transform Western perceptions of Putin’s regime, approached Paul Manafort for this task, he also reportedly sought out Simes and the Nixon Center; in 1972, President Nixon had famously worked toward a long-term détente with the Soviet Union at a conference in Moscow—a conference also attended by Ed Cox and the honorary chairman of CNI during the 2016 presidential campaign, Henry Kissinger, who helps facilitate the first meeting between Kushner and Simes in March 2016.189 Simes, described in 2005 in Kommersant—Russia’s largest business daily—as “close to Vladimir Putin,” meets with Deripaska in 2005 at a time when, according to both the Moscow Times and Kommersant, the oligarch was considering whether to “bankroll a new think tank in Washington to focus on Russian issues,” with “Moscow hop[ing] for a ‘well-disposed’ approach … [to] Russian present-day life.”190 Deripaska’s—and Putin’s—evident hope in 2005 was that any resulting think tank would aspire to have the same effect as the public relations campaign for which Deripaska had just begun paying Paul Manafort. According to the Mueller Report, “A [Manafort & Davis Consulting] memorandum describing work that Manafort performed for Deripaska in 2005 regarding the post-Soviet republics referenced the need to brief the Kremlin and the benefits that the work could confer on ‘the Putin Government.’”191
According to Kommersant, the Kremlin’s proposed new think tank was the “brainchild of [Kremlin political consultant] Gleb Pavlovsky and Dimitri Simes”—and Pavlovsky, for his part, was interested in working with Deripaska.192 Simes, while approvingly citing as “background” for such a project the then developing plans for an English-language version of the state-owned RT (plans that called for, per Simes, “a 24-hour, English news channel funded by the Kremlin”), nevertheless expressed uncertainty about whether a Deripaska-funded think tank would be received as credible by the D.C. political establishment. That Simes was willing to discuss a new pro-Kremlin think tank with Kremlin agents in 2005 is clear, however: as the Moscow Times would report at the time, citing Deripaska by name as a potential funder of the project, “Plans are in the works to set up a Washington-based think tank that would be funded with Russian money and combat the U.S. perception of Russia ‘as a bad pupil,’ Kremlin-connected consultant Gleb Pavlovsky said Monday.”193 It is telling that Simes’s co-ideator in envisioning this prospective pro-Kremlin think tank (indeed, a man the Nixon Center actually contracted with for this purpose) was a “Kremlin-connected consultant” whom Simes’s think tank had “paid for … [along with] several other Russian political analysts to visit Washington in November [2005] for a research project.”194 Given Simes’s and Pavlovsky’s “closeness” with Putin at the time, Simes could have had no illusions about Pavlovsky—a man Vanity Fair has since called a “Kremlin political consultant and manipulator.”195 Pavlovsky has even bragged publicly about working with Putin in Russia on a “strategy” to get “everyone … thinking the way we want[] them to.”196
Whether or not the Kremlin’s imagined institute ever progressed beyond the ideation stage, that Deripaska was associated in international media as a possible patron for a pro-Kremlin Simes-Pavlovsky think tank project at the very same time the Russian oligarch was acting as Manafort’s patron for a pro-Kremlin public relations project is deeply troubling. Manafort would go on, a little over a decade later, to be Donald Trump’s campaign manager, even as Simes would, at the same point in Trump’s campaign—March 2016—appear in Trump’s orbit as the GOP candidate’s top behind-the-scenes adviser on Russia; moreover, Manafort is the Trump campaign official who “enlisted” CNI board member Richard Burt to “join Trump’s campaign and help[] draft his [foreign policy] speech” at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016.197 While it is unclear whether Simes ever developed, like Manafort, a long-term relationship with Deripaska, he clearly stayed in touch with Pavlovsky after 2005, inviting him to a conference hosted by CNI in 2008.198
In 2013, less than sixty days before Trump was to arrive in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant—an event during which Trump himself said he expected to meet with Putin, a meeting that he had been promised by his Russian business partner—Simes “graced the stage alongside Putin [in Russia] at the Valdai International Discussion Club, a conference … frequented almost exclusively by Putin apologists. At Valdai, Putin referred to Simes as his ‘American friend and colleague,’” and Simes, for his part, said