the sight of Simes and his co-host Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, chatting with Kremlin officials like Sergey Lavrov—the man the Steele dossier alleges coordinated Russian election interference in 2016, and to whom Trump boasted about firing FBI director James Comey over the Russia investigation in 2017—is surely unsettling to many.212
Lavrov’s appearance on Simes’s Kremlin-run talk show isn’t the first time the two men have sat down together since Trump’s election, however. In late February 2017, almost immediately after Trump finally fires his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Simes travels to Russia to meet with Lavrov.213 The two men discuss the ongoing Russia investigation being conducted by the FBI, including the danger that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak will be caught up in it. Simes is well aware that Kislyak will be named in the investigation, as he has facilitated the Kremlin agent’s contacts with the Trump campaign in the past.214 Within 120 days of the Simes-Lavrov meeting in Russia, Kislyak will be recalled to Moscow by Putin, putting him beyond the reach of special counsel Mueller.215
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In December 2015, Michael Flynn dines in Moscow with Putin, Putin’s spokesman and “de facto national security adviser” Dmitry Peskov, and Sergey Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff—two of whom (Putin and Ivanov) are under U.S. sanctions at the time. All three Russians are men who, just a few weeks later, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen will consider central to closing a Trump Tower Moscow deal.216 According to emails released to and summarized by international media, in January 2016 Cohen emails Peskov “to request a meeting either with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s then-chief of staff Sergey Ivanov or Peskov himself”; in a telephone response, Peskov’s office invites Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg economic forum in June 2016, an event at which Felix Sater (Cohen’s conduit to the Kremlin) says the Trump attorney may be able to meet, via Peskov’s introduction, Putin himself.217
Part of Sater and Cohen’s plan to secure a Trump Tower Moscow deal is to offer Putin a $50 million penthouse to entice him to approve the development—as his approval is essential to the Trump Organization proceeding with the deal with Russian businessman Andrey Rozov.218 As Sater tells Cohen across two November 3, 2015, emails, if Trump can close the Trump Tower Moscow deal after a meeting with Putin, Putin will be more likely to support his presidential candidacy, a premise that takes on a sinister cast in light of Sater’s proven access to Kremlin officials and the illegal hacking and propaganda campaigns the Kremlin has, by late 2015, already initiated. As Sater explains it to Cohen in November, if “Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon-cutting for Trump [Tower] Moscow,” Trump will be proving—not to American voters but to Putin—that, unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump “doesn’t stare down, he negotiates.”219 Sater adds that, as to the 2016 presidential campaign and the ongoing U.S.-Russia diplomacy that will necessarily succeed it, “Putin only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader.” As Sater, presumably searching for additional euphemisms for the dropping of sanctions on Russia, summarizes the philosophy that he believes both Putin and Trump share, “Business, politics, whatever … it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal.”220 In the United States, the sort of juxtaposition of business and politics Sater describes is often chargeable as bribery under 18 U.S.C. § 201; bribery is also one of the two enumerated impeachable offenses in the U.S. Constitution.221
Sater has an additional reason to urge Trump to please Putin, however: there are early indications that, due to the intended height of the tower Trump intends to build with Rozov, direct approval from the Russian government is actually needed as a matter of Russian law.222 This, as well as Sater’s proposed commingling of personal profit and presidential politics, may explain in part why Sater tells Cohen that the Trump-Kremlin negotiations over the Trump-Rozov tower are “very sensitive” and are being conducted, through Sater, with “Putin[’]s very very close people.”223 In one October 2015 email Sater is even more direct with Cohen, writing that “we need … Putin on board.”224 As for Trump’s views on the matter, the GOP presidential candidate expresses during his presidential campaign the same degree of comfort as Sater with the fusion of moneymaking and policymaking, telling his lawyer Cohen at one point that his candidacy is an “infomercial” for the Trump Organization with respect to potential new business clients—including, as by then would have been clear to