Psy-Group’s advisory board, as was Elliott Abrams, a man Trump has since named as his special envoy “to oversee U.S. policy toward Venezuela,” per the New Yorker.132 Gingrich forwarded Zamel’s May 2016 email to Jared Kushner; as already noted, Kushner’s family is close to Netanyahu, and it is Kushner who ultimately decides, over objections from both Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort, to hire Cambridge Analytica—a decision that may well have meant, too, hiring an Israeli business intelligence firm run by Zamel.133 Zamel, for his part, admired “Trump’s vocal support for Israel and his hardline views on Iran,” according to the New Yorker, saying in his email to Gingrich that ended up in Kushner’s in-box that Psy-Group could “provide the Trump campaign with powerful tools that would use social media to advance Trump’s chances. Zamel suggested a meeting in Washington to discuss the matter further.”134 Kushner thereafter discussed the idea with Brad Parscale, then Trump’s digital campaign director; subsequently, Rick Gates requested that Zamel send additional proposals to the campaign, which the Israeli business intelligence expert did in June.135
In June 2016, the same month Zamel sends three full-length social-media disinformation campaign proposals to the Trump team, the Israeli businessman meets with MBZ adviser George Nader—whom he has known for years, having been introduced by former Dick Cheney aide John Hannah—at the very economic forum in St. Petersburg that Felix Sater had been trying to get Michael Cohen to attend, and that Deripaska associate (and Russian deputy prime minister) Sergei Prikhodko had invited Trump to attend on two separate occasions. In St. Petersburg, Zamel tells Nader that he is “trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in support of Trump”—an entreaty strongly suggesting that the Trump campaign was willing to use Zamel’s work, but not to pay for it directly, and that Zamel had reason to believe Nader’s patron MBZ, for whom Zamel was already a consultant, would be willing to secretly do so.136 And indeed, according to the New Yorker, Zamel ultimately does ask Nader for “Nader’s Gulf contacts … [to] contribut[e] financially.”137
According to the Times of Israel, one of the three campaigns Psy-Group proposes to the Trump team in June 2016 in response to contact with multiple top campaign advisers suggests “us[ing] fake online profiles to bombard [targets] with messages” that appear to come from American voters and decry Trump opponents’ “ulterior motives or hidden plans.” Meanwhile, a second proposal solicited by the Trump campaign would use an identical strategy to “target female minorities … in swing states to push them toward Trump and away from Clinton.”138 A third proposal “sketche[s] out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions”—an idea that dovetails with the Kremlin’s effort to suppress Democratic turnout in November 2016 by exacerbating divisions between supporters of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein.139 These proposals, submitted formally to the Trump campaign in the spring and summer of 2016 under the code name Project Rome, are thus substantively indistinguishable from the interference the Kremlin was orchestrating during the general election.
That Psy-Group knows the activities it proposes to Gates and two other top Trump aides will have to be covert is confirmed by its proposals using code words for Trump and Clinton and discussing the need for “intelligence activities”—which the proposals explicitly contrast with “open source methods”—for the plans to come off properly.140 One plan even discusses using “clandestine means to build ‘intelligence dossiers’ on Clinton,” a strategy that mirrors the one the Trump campaign will accuse the Clinton campaign of using once the Steele dossier, which outlines serious allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, is published in January 2017 by BuzzFeed News.141 That Psy-Group knows its proposals are illegal appears to be confirmed by a subsequent Times of Israel investigation, which finds that Psy-Group “was reportedly told by an American law firm that its activities would be illegal if non-Americans were involved.”142 The top brass at Psy-Group, including Zamel himself, are all foreign nationals; moreover, the Times of Israel will note that in at least one other sphere—anti-BDS (boycott-divest-sanction Israel) campaigns—Psy-Group is working covertly overseas in a way that is “known to the Israeli government, and specifically the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.”143
According to an investigative report by the Daily Beast, Rick Gates and the two unnamed aides in Trump’s “inner circle” who solicit digital campaign ideas from Psy-Group are “very, very interested” in Zamel’s proposals, despite the campaign’s future protestations to the contrary.144 These