Agalarov, to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen that “videos” of Trump were indeed produced during that trip (see chapter 5), the possibility remains that Cambridge Analytica’s intelligence-gathering capabilities might have been used not only against Clinton but also to create—or, alternatively, to confirm or deny the existence of—compromising video or audio of Trump himself.384 Moreover, Nix’s reference to his subcontractors, some of which are Israeli business intelligence outfits, offering their politician marks “a deal that’s too good to be true” calls to mind Lana Erchova’s claim that Russian officials wanted to offer Trump “land in Crimea among other things.”385 Joel Zamel’s long-standing business relationships with Russian oligarchs connected to both Trump and Kremlin election interference would therefore have made either Psy-Group or Wikistrat valuable adjuncts in any effort by the Kremlin to entrap Trump or, far more likely, efforts by the Trump campaign to determine whether or not the Kremlin indeed had kompromat involving the GOP candidate.
As for George Nader’s many foreign connections—and his willingness to use them during the 2016 presidential campaign—the New York Times reports that, beginning in May 2016, while Zamel was working on social media and intelligence-gathering proposals for the Trump campaign, Nader “began making inquiries on behalf of the Emirati prince [MBZ] about possible ways to directly support Mr. Trump, according to three people with whom Mr. Nader discussed his efforts.”386 While the special counsel’s observations or conclusions as to non-Russian foreign aid flowing to the Trump campaign during the 2016 general election fall outside the scope of his April 2019 report, the New York Times notes that there are indeed “indication[s] that countries other than Russia may have offered assistance to the Trump campaign in the months before the presidential election,” adding that these “interactions are a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III” and that Mueller has “questioned numerous witnesses in Washington, New York, Atlanta, Tel Aviv and elsewhere about what foreign help may have been pledged or accepted, and about whether any such assistance was coordinated with Russia, according to witnesses and others with knowledge of the interviews.”387 The Times adds that according to two people familiar with the Trump campaign’s pre-election meetings with Saudi and Emirati emissaries, “the Trump campaign officials [who met with the emissaries] did not appear bothered by the idea of cooperation with foreigners.”388
According to the Mueller Report, any such information on multinational collusion gathered by the special counsel’s office would have been considered, in the words of the report, “foreign intelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission” and would have been “identif[ied] and convey[ed]” to the FBI rather than being included in Volume 1 of the report.389 For the purposes of detailing counterintelligence evidence, therefore, and especially evidence involving foreign governments other than Russia’s, the special counsel underscores that the report is merely a “summary”—missing not only redacted counterintelligence material and any counterintelligence material considered outside the narrow scope of the inquiry but also any material deemed unnecessary for the purposes of the summary.390 While the size of the special counsel’s underlying investigative case file is unknown, the Times proposes that “Mr. Mueller probably collected and generated hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages of paper during his investigation,” and the report itself notes that the special counsel’s office “issued more than 2,800 subpoenas … executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants; obtained more than 230 orders for communication records … obtained almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers; made 13 requests to foreign governments pursuant to Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties; and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, including almost 80 before a grand jury.”391
While the Mueller Report is silent on when Joel Zamel first encountered George Nader and MBZ, and how any of these three men came into the orbit of the Trump campaign, in advance of any future counterintelligence report derived from Mueller’s and more than a dozen other ongoing FBI investigations, reporting from across the world fills in many of the gaps in public knowledge on these topics.392 According to the Wall Street Journal, Zamel “began making contacts in the UAE” in 2014, so quickly “becoming close to the national security adviser [of the UAE]” that he was able to sign up the royal government in Abu Dhabi as one of his company Wikistrat’s “major clients.”393 Wikistrat, like Psy-Group an Israeli business intelligence outfit, did work for MBZ that included conducting “war-games scenarios for the government of the UAE,” though many Wikistrat employees at the time say that the identity of their