he “fully support[ed]” Putin’s “tough stance” on the Syrian civil war.199
Within a few weeks of returning to the United States from his 2013 visit to Moscow, Trump is talking to New York state GOP politicos about his political ambitions. Chief among Trump’s advisers on his possible run for governor of New York is Ed Cox, connected to the board of Simes’s CNI through his sister-in-law and from having worked alongside honorary CNI chairman Kissinger; Cox will, oddly, become the first person in the New York State Republican Party to voice to his peers that he does not believe the governorship is the job Trump really wants.200 In March 2014, Cox meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the businessman’s political future; while the content of their conversation is unknown, within days of Cox leaving Mar-a-Lago Trump announces on Twitter that he has “much bigger [political] plans in mind” than the governorship of New York, and that readers should “stay tuned” because his new political plans “will happen.”201 It is Trump’s first public indication that he will eventually declare his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Trump communications adviser Michael Caputo will later say that, when Trump was deciding between the New York governor’s race or a run for the presidency, the man whose actions most clearly forced Trump down the latter path was the CNI-connected Ed Cox.202
Twenty-one months after his consequential meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Cox is responsible for Carter Page being the first hire for what eventually becomes (at Simes’s urging) Trump’s national security advisory committee.203 At the time Cox recommends Page, the energy consultant is less than a year removed from admitting to federal agents that he transferred nonpublic information about the U.S. energy sector to two men he knew were Russian spies. Page, like Cox, also has an evident connection to Simes’s center: like CNI board member Richard Burt, Page has for years been involved with Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom.204 Page and Burt end up not merely as Trump campaign Russia advisers but as two of the key writers and editors—along with Stephen Miller, George Papadopoulos, and Simes—of Trump’s Russia policy.205 While Page’s path to involvement in the Trump campaign runs through Ed Cox, Burt’s path, per Politico, runs through Manafort.206 The monthslong formalizing and public dissemination of Trump’s pro-Kremlin foreign policy that begins in March 2016 is therefore a joint effort of Simes, Kushner, and Manafort, with Burt and a small number of individuals on the national security committee Simes and Kushner conceived of in mid-March acting as executors of the policy: Sessions, Gordon, Page, and Papadopoulos.
When one of Simes’s key Kremlin contacts in the United States, Maria Butina, is arrested in Virginia in August 2018, the reaction of the Trump campaign’s trusted Russia adviser is telling.207 Within a matter of days, Simes, a man the Washington Post calls “the Washington expert most well connected in Moscow and whose organization [CNI] provides a unique link between the two cities’ elite,” leaves the United States for Moscow—and a job running a political talk show on a Kremlin-owned television network for a mid-six-figure salary.208 The sudden disappearance of the “native Russian” (as Bloomberg describes him) from the day-to-day operations of the Center for the National Interest catches his assistants and employees entirely unaware; per the Washington Post, “Many organization employees were shocked when, in mid-2018 … Simes decided to take a job co-hosting a prime-time news and analysis show on Channel 1, a major Russian television network that is majority-owned by the Russian government. The new job suddenly focused a spotlight on Simes’s ties to Moscow.”209 The Kremlin-funded, Moscow-based television program Simes now co-hosts is called Bolshaya Igra (The Great Game), a reference to the high-stakes, decades-long diplomatic cat-and-mouse game that the Russian Empire played with the West in the nineteenth century, with Russia’s ambition throughout being the establishment of an even larger empire than it already had—and the frustration of the British Empire’s similar designs.210 Numerous media outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, begin writing stories shortly after Simes’s show premieres in September 2018 indicating that Russia is, under Putin, “back in the ‘Great Game’”—but this time with the United States as its chief adversary.211 That Trump’s chief campaign adviser on Russia now runs the television edition of the Kremlin’s “Great Game” on behalf of Vladimir Putin can give no comfort to those who fear that Simes’s advice to the Trump campaign was given implicitly or explicitly at the Kremlin’s bidding. Indeed,