commercial while Finkelstein was a high-ranking member of Reagan’s marketing team.242 Finkelstein also worked directly for Trump in the mid-2000s, just a few years before the businessman trademarked the slogan “Make America Great Again” in November 2012.243 Trump’s 2012 registration of his future presidential campaign slogan offers corroborating evidence for the claim made by a top consultant of his at the time, Sam Nunberg, that Trump decided to run for president while watching the returns from the 2012 presidential election, having hired Nunberg (and Nunberg’s business associate Roger Stone) in 2010 “when he was thinking of running for president [in 2012].”244 At the very latest, Trump made his final decision to run for president on New Year’s Day in 2013, according to Stone, his longtime friend and adviser.
Orban was convinced by the Jewish Finkelstein and Birnbaum to “focus[] his entire re-election campaign on the imaginary threat [to Hungary] posed by Soros.”
Not only Putin but Trump as well picks up on the Finkelstein/Birnbaum-developed plan to make Soros an international pariah in the interest of electing populist, often bigoted right-wing politicians—or protecting autocrats from political fallout for their policies. As BuzzFeed News recounts, “Putin referred dismissively to Soros during a press conference with Trump in Helsinki. Trump even claimed that the demonstrations against Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh were sponsored by Soros.”246
As BuzzFeed News and many other news outlets have reported, in October 2018 a self-proclaimed Trump supporter sent a parcel bomb to Soros. Less than a week later, media reported that a man who killed eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue “saw himself as part of a fight against a Jewish conspiracy, which he believed was funding mass migration, and talked about the caravan and Soros on social media.”247 By joining Putin and Orban in demonizing Soros, a Holocaust survivor, Trump has arguably contributed to an international political environment in which the eighty-eight-year-old Hungarian American—who has no direct involvement in any political party—has repeatedly been falsely cast, usually in anti-Semitic terms, as a “puppet master secretly plotting to seize control” of various countries.248
As for whether interference by Zamel and Psy-Group in the 2016 election offers some additional evidence of involvement by the Israeli government, worth noting is a New York Times report confirming that Psy-Group is indeed “staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives.”
Many Israeli business intelligence firms identical to Psy-Group in their mission and the constitution of their employee base—former Israeli intelligence agents—are active outside Israel in covert activities. Black Cube, for instance, has been accused of attempting to interfere in elections in Hungary in support of Netanyahu’s friend and ally Viktor Orban.249 This interference involved secretly recording friends and allies of George Soros.250 Black Cube was accused of similar spying activities against the Obama administration during the period in which the administration was working to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.251 International accusations that Black Cube was connected to the Trump campaign and transition were apparently ubiquitous enough in 2018 that the company had to issue a statement insisting that it “has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran nuclear deal. Anyone who claims otherwise is misleading their readers and viewers.”252
CHAPTER 5
THE GRAND HAVANA ROOM, THE TRUMP-NADER MEETING, AND THE MIDDLE EAST MARSHALL PLAN
August 2016 to November 2016
As Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, makes a last-ditch effort to offer value to his former Kremlin-connected bosses via his work on the Trump campaign before being forced to resign, Trump’s son has a fateful meeting at Trump Tower with two foreign nationals that brings one of them, George Nader, into the campaign’s inner circle. Meanwhile, a cadre of enterprising Trump advisers is working in parallel to Manafort’s anti-sanctions efforts, joining their cause to those of the Red Sea conspirators in an all-encompassing geopolitical plan for the Middle East that will make them rich if Trump ends sanctions on Russia. In the midst of these plots, Trump and Flynn receive a classified security briefing that puts an end to any questions about Putin’s intentions.
On August 17, 2016, Trump, Flynn, and Trump’s transition chief at the time, Chris Christie, receive at the FBI field office in New York City the GOP candidate’s first classified national security briefing from U.S. intelligence agents. During the meeting, NBC News will later report, Trump is “personally briefed on Russia’s role in the [spring 2016] hacks by U.S. officials.”1 NBC notes, quoting “a senior U.S. intelligence official,” that during the briefing “the Russian government’s attempts to