interest in WikiLeaks’ releases of hacked materials throughout the summer and fall of 2016.”175 According to the report, by late summer the campaign “was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks,” with Trump somehow having a separate channel of information about WikiLeaks besides Manafort (whose conduit was Gates) as evidenced by Trump telling Gates, upon the completion of a phone call from an unknown party, that “more releases of damaging information would be coming” from WikiLeaks—an organization that Trump’s first CIA director and eventual secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, subsequently labels, after Trump is elected, a “hostile non-state intelligence service often abetted by State actors like Russia.”176
* * *
In late June 2016, Michael Flynn ends his consulting work with ACU Strategic Partners—work intended to bring together the governments of the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel—and begins consulting for an affiliated group, IP3/IronBridge, which is run by a former ACU adviser.177 By August 2016, IP3/IronBridge, in conjunction with Flynn, has produced a PowerPoint presentation for MBS’s father called “A Presentation to His Majesty King Salman bin Abdul Aziz.”178 That the IP3/IronBridge presentation—which, as with ACU’s work, focuses on multinational deals to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East—is intended to propose a new alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States is confirmed by the presence, in the PowerPoint slides, of official Saudi and American seals next to each other. As Flynn is by now widely known to be a top Trump adviser, the implication in the presentation cannot be missed: a Trump presidency means the possibility of a multibillion-dollar U.S.-Saudi alliance on nuclear energy. IP3/IronBridge produces the PowerPoint presentation during the same month that an emissary from the Saudi and Emirati governments, George Nader, is meeting with Trump Jr. at Trump Tower to offer the kingdom’s assistance in electing Trump Sr. president.179
IP3 officials will tell media in November 2017 that they never hired Flynn as an adviser and never paid him any money; their claims are contradicted, however, by Flynn himself, who reported on “various financial disclosure forms,” according to the Washington Post, that he had acted as a “consultant,” “board member,” and “advisor” to IP3.180 Given the numerous high-profile omissions from Flynn’s federal forms, the likelihood that he disclosed his role with IP3 merely out of “an abundance of caution,” as the company subsequently asserts, is remote.
Yet there is more direct evidence that Flynn remains closely involved with IP3 after June 2016. During the presidential transition, Flynn will tell Thomas Barrack that he should meet with IP3.181 Given that Flynn had previously worked on a “Middle East Marshall Plan” with ACU, it is telling that in November 2017 the Washington Post will report that—while Barrack was working on Trump’s transition team with Flynn—he became “interested in developing a Middle East ‘Marshall Plan’ to provide aid to poor regions of the Persian Gulf as a way to combat terrorism” (see chapter 5).182 The Post notes that “both the ACU and IP3 proposals … would require numerous governmental approvals to proceed,” underscoring the significance of key members of Trump’s presidential transition team working on Middle East plans of this scope and complexity.183
On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner attend a meeting at Trump Tower at which they have been promised they will receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton from agents of the Russian government. Among the Russian attendees at the meeting is Ike Kaveladze, a high-level employee for Aras Agalarov’s Crocus Group, which the Mueller Report notes “holds substantial Russian government contracts.”184 Trump Jr. and Kaveladze are already intimately acquainted, as according to the Mueller Report Trump Jr. was the “primary negotiator” for the Trump Organization and Kaveladze the primary negotiator for the Crocus Group when Donald Trump and Aras Agalarov were planning to build a Trump Tower Moscow in 2013 and 2014.185 The principals to that deal, Trump and Agalarov, had ultimately signed a letter of intent in January or February 2014, under the terms of which Trump would receive 3.5 percent of all sales related to the multibillion-dollar project.186 The Trumps and Agalarovs were in contact about the project both before and after Trump’s “soft” announcement of his national political ambitions in March 2014, with Ivanka traveling to Moscow to visit the site in February 2014 and discussions between the two parties on “‘design standards’ and other architectural elements” lasting well into the summer of 2014.187