John McLaughlin, considering how the Hannah-Nader-Zamel nexus could come under scrutiny by Robert Mueller, will say in 2018 that “Mueller might be opening another front here. His mandate is to examine Russian collusion, but there’s the clause in his mandate that’s very open-ended—to the effect of, ‘and any associated matters.’ It could be a separate line of inquiry about efforts to influence the election by foreigners.”214 Significant to Mueller’s inquiry, certainly, and to any federal prosecutor to whom the special counsel referred any line of inquiry involving Hannah and Nader, would be the fact that, as noted by the Daily Beast, in 2016 Nader was “developing his relationship with … senior Saudi officials, which included Mohammed Bin Salman, the de-facto leader of the kingdom. Throughout 2016 and 2017, Nader met with the two Gulf leaders and developed strategy on how to work with the Trump campaign.”215 This observation must be coupled with one offered by Vox in April 2018: that George Nader’s “extensive personal ties to Russia” include the fact that he has “traveled to Russia, done business with Russia, and developed relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle at least as far back as 2012.”216 It is therefore little surprise that, as the Daily Beast reports, “Mueller has questioned Zamel about his role pitching top campaign officials on an influence operation to help Trump win the election—which could have broken federal election laws.”217
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On July 30, 2016, a senior Justice Department attorney, Bruce Ohr, meets with longtime friend and former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele.218 Steele tells Ohr that, according to his Russian sources, the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus believes that it has Donald Trump “over a barrel”—meaning that the just-nominated GOP presidential candidate has been compromised by blackmail material in the Russian Federation’s possession.219 At the same meeting, Steele tells Ohr that Trump national security adviser Carter Page is lying about his contacts with Kremlin officials during a conference earlier that month; Page says that he met no Kremlin officials in Moscow, but Steele’s Russian sources say that he did in fact do so.220 Steele’s sources will turn out to be correct, as it is revealed in the Mueller Report in April 2019 that Page met with both Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich and Andrey Baranov—a senior aide to Rosneft CEO and top Putin ally Igor Sechin—and then tried to hide these two meetings from U.S. media.221 At the time of the Ohr-Steele meeting, Steele is considered “a reliable FBI informant who [has] delivered credible and actionable intelligence” in past contacts with federal law enforcement.222
Page’s trip to Moscow in early July 2016 is, the Mueller Report will reveal, a significant event for the Kremlin and its agents. Officials at the New Economic School (NES) in Moscow, which hosts a lecture by Page during his trip, will later tell the special counsel that their “interest in inviting Page to speak at NES was based entirely on his status as a Trump Campaign advisor who served as the candidate’s Russia expert,” even though the Trump campaign will later claim Page’s travel was unrelated to the campaign.223 Prior to Page’s arrival, several Kremlin officials and associates will be made aware of Page’s impending lecture, including Maria Zakharova, the director of the Information and Press Department within the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary.224 Peskov declines to invite Page to the Kremlin itself, but within twenty-four hours of Page’s arrival in Moscow, he is introduced to Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich during the event at the NES.225 The deputy prime minister informs Page—just as the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, has done repeatedly during the same period in meetings with other Trump officials—that the Kremlin wants to “work[] together in the future.”226 Page’s Moscow meeting with Baranov, the head of investor relations at Russia’s state-owned oil company, leads to the two men discussing “non-public information,” per the Mueller Report, including information about Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who is both a former KGB agent and one of Putin’s top lieutenants—a “hard man” that British media outlet the Guardian calls “one of the most powerful figures of the Putin era.”227
When the Steele dossier, much derided by Trump allies, is published by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, it will correctly recount the details of both Page’s private meeting with the Russian deputy prime minister and his private meeting with Rosneft’s director of investor relations, the latter of which appears to have included