U. S. President Donald J. Trump is surrounded by people with close business and political ties to Russia, sparking a scandal in Washington that has dogged his administration. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for an independent prosecutor amid talk of impeachment.
Trump’s close ties to Russia are of grave concern in Ukraine, which lost its Crimean peninsula to the Kremlin’s military invasion in 2014. Kyiv has also been trying to expel Russia and its proxies from the eastern Donbas for three years, in a war that has claimed 10,000 lives. To do so, Ukraine counts on strong support from the West.
The record shows that, as a businessman, Trump did business with Russian oligarchs, while receiving support from an alleged Russian e-mail hack of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
One starting point of Trump’s Russia dealings is a $640 million loan that Trump took out in 2005 to finance the construction of a downtown Chicago condominium and hotel. As $340 million came due in November 2008, Trump was unable to pay, leading to speculation that he looked to Russia for a bailout.
That same year, his son, Donald Trump Jr., bragged that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of all our assets.”
Many believe that Russian and other oligarchs have targeted New York and Miami real estate, where Trump has major financial interests, to launder money.
The president has denied any connection to Russia. “I have no dealings with Russia,” Trump has said repeatedly.
Dmitry Rybolovlev
US real estate mogul Donald Trump (C) poses with Mixed Martial Art (MMA) heavyweight fighters US Josh Barnett (L) and Russia’s Fedor Emelianenko in New York on June 03, 2009 during a press conference to introduce a World MMA Championship which will take place between the two fighters. The upcoming fight is scheduled to take place on August, 1, 2009 in Anaheim, California. (AFP / Emmanuel Dunand)
Dmitry Rybolovlev earned his money by taking over Russia’s fertilizer sector, acquiring potash maker Uralkali in 1995. Rybolovlev eventually raised $1 billion from the firm through a London initial public offering for Uralkali in 2007.
He started looking to buy luxury properties around the world and hit upon Trump, who was selling a $125 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, called Maison De l’Amitie. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $95 million in July 2008, breaking a home sales record in the U.S. market.
The windfall couldn’t have come at a better time for Trump. In November 2008, Trump needed to pay $334 million to Deutsche Bank on the $640 million loan for his Chicago tower.
Kyiv-born Tetiana Bersheda, an attorney for Rybolovlev, is named in Ukrainian press reports as the daughter of former Ukrainian Ambassador to Switzerland Evhen Bersheda. She did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Rybolovlev dismissed any link, saying that Rybolovlev “has never met Donald Trump.” But on Nov. 3, five days before the U.S. election, Rybolovlev’s private Airbus 319 was registered as stopping in Concord, North Carolina, on the same day that Trump was there for a rally.
In 2010, as Bank of Cyprus was expanding because of its ties with Russian clients, Rybolovlev acquired a 9.7 percent stake in September through a British Virgin Islands-registered offshore.
Wilbur Ross
Rybolovlev’s involvement with Bank of Cyprus coincided with that of another Trump associate: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Ross served as the bank’s vice chairman starting in 2014, when his eponymous private equity fund WL Ross acquired a majority 18 percent stake.
Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg went in with Ross’s firm on the deal, taking a 5.5 percent stake in the bank. Ross was also joined as a vice chairman by Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent who is reported to have a close relationship to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The bank nearly collapsed in 2013 after making tens of millions in bad loans. The Kremlin is reported to have taken a direct role in bailout negotiations over the Bank of Cyprus in 2013.
Ross reportedly suggested another businessman to lead the bank after its bailout: Josef Ackermann, a Swiss banker who ran Deutsche Bank from 2002 to 2012, during which it allegedly laundered money out of its Moscow branch and lost but eventually regained Trump as a client. After being investigated, it paid out $630 million in a settlement with U.S. federal law enforcement.
Ross sold his fund in 2006, but remained its chairman until he joined the U.S. government.
Felix Sater
One former business associate that Trump has repeatedly denied knowing is Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who, apart from directing real estate fund Bayrock Group, spent a year in prison in the early 1990s after stabbing an acquaintance in the face with the stem of a margarita glass.
Sater is alleged to have connections to organized crime. After being released from prison, the New York-based businessman participated in a $40 million stock fraud scheme that wound up in a criminal conviction in 1998. Sater agreed to cooperate with the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency in Asia as part of his guilty plea, leading the government to seal the relevant court records of his conviction.
Sater joined Bayrock as a managing director in 2003 reportedly on the invitation of the firm’s founder, Kazakh developer Tevfik Arik.
Arif moved Bayrock’s headquarters into Trump Tower in New York City. Bayrock played a role in financing a number of Trump’s U.S. projects, including Trump SoHo in New York, and a Florida hotel and skyscraper.
Sater left the firm in 2007 after a New York Times article highlighted his alleged connections to the mob. But his presence has cast a shadow on the firm, with numerous lawsuits alleging fraud filed against the company. One lawsuit, filed by two former employees of Bayrock in 2010, alleged that the company was “covertly mob-owned and operated.”
Even Trump recognized the firm’s opaque ownership in a 2011 deposition.
“I never really understood who owned Bayrock,” Trump said.
Michael Cohen
In 2008, Trump acquired a mixed martial arts promotion company called Affliction Entertainment.
Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and a mixed martial arts fan, said that the Russians saw the growth of MMA as an opportunity to translate their strength in wrestling-related sports, like sambo, into cultural power on the world stage.
“When mixed martial arts began to break big on the market, they translated that sambo rank into being prominent MMA fighters, so a lot of these guys were already training in sambo,” Berman told the Kyiv Post.
As more people flocked to the sport in the late 2000s, Trump began to invest in Affliction. He installed Michael D. Cohen, his personal lawyer, as a chief executive to manage the firm.
Affliction brought in a Luhansk-born fighter named Fedor Emelianenko, who was managed by a firm called M1 Global. M1 is financed by Sergey Matviyenko, the multi-millionaire son of former St. Petersburg governor and Federation Council Chair Valentina Matviyenko.
Cohen remains Trump’s personal lawyer and was allegedly involved in a pro-Kremlin peace agreement involving Ukraine that the president’s associates wanted him to consider.
Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort was hired as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. He also served as an adviser to ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, helping him get elected in 2010.
Manafort is the focus of reports that Trump’s campaign coordinated with the Russian government to influence the American election in Trump’s favor. Manafort has denied working on behalf of the Kremlin. He has referred to his work for Yanukovych, in Russian exile since leaving power in 2014 on suspicion of mass murder and multibillion-dollar corruption, as trying “to bring Ukraine into Europe.”
Manafort came to work for Yanukovych after working for billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov in 2003. He also helped billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is in Austria awaiting extradition over charges in Spain and the United States, shop for New York real estate in 2008.
While working for Yanukovych, Manafort got involved in a deal with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in Odesa to buy out a local cable provider from a company whose executives were later arrested for separatist activity in 2014. But the deal went awry as $20 million vanished and Manafort stopped replying to Deripaska, according to court documents.
In June, the so-called “black ledger” of the Party of Regions was leaked, appearing to show millions of dollars in bribe expenses from the now-defunct political party. Manafort’s name appeared next to $12 million on the ledger, leading to his formal departure from the Trump campaign in August.
Michael Caputo
Michael Caputo, an American political consultant, worked for Volodymyr Lytvyn, the former parliament speaker and former chief of staff to ex-President Leonid Kuchma, on his 2007 campaign. Lytvyn’s campaign manager, Oleh Sheremet, was murdered in an unsolved case that year.
Caputo worked for the Trump campaign until June, when he was fired for triumphantly tweeting about former Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski’s ouster.
The PR manager started his career in Moscow in the 1990s, working for Russian President Boris Yeltsin as an advisor from 1994 to 1999, before being briefly hired by Gazprom in 2001 to improve Putin and the Russian government’s image in the United States.
Caputo said that he has not had any Eastern European clients since early 2015, and added that Sheremet’s murder – along with having a Ukrainian wife – had connected him to the country by “family and heart.”
Carter Page
During the campaign, Trump named Carter Page as a key foreign policy adviser.
Page, a former U.S. marine intelligence officer, worked for U.S. banker Merrill Lynch in Moscow in the 2000s. During that stint, he reportedly worked on projects involving Gazprom, though on a low level.
After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page set out to create an investment fund called Global Energy Capital. There, he partnered with Sergei Yatsenko, a former Gazprom executive.
Page, however, appeared to only succeed in becoming a talking head on Russian television, speaking out in support of Putin, Politico reported.
Page told Bloomberg last March that he saw a potential Trump administration as a chance to end sanctions on Russia over its war against Ukraine.
Rex Tillerson
Rex Tillerson has worked at two places: oil giant ExxonMobil and, as of last month,
as U.S. secretary of state.
Tillerson was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Feb. 1 in a contentious 56-43 vote.
The 64-year old Texan’s confirmation was met with criticism due to his 10 years at the helm of ExxonMobil, during which the company lobbied for the removal of U.S. sanctions against Russia over the illegal annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s war against the Donbas.
For Tillerson and ExxonMobil, the Ukraine crisis came at a uniquely unprofitable time.
ExxonMobil was in the midst of a joint venture with Rosneft to explore oil reserves north of Siberia, in the Kara Sea. In September 2014, the partnership discovered oil reserves amounting to more than 100 million tons of oil.
But ExxonMobil’s discovery came nearly simultaneously with the Obama administration’s decision to slap sanctions on sectors of Russia’s economy, meaning that the company had to call the project off. It received four licenses from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control to wind down its operations.
From there, Tillerson and ExxonMobil lobbied to end the sanctions regime, presumably so they could continue work on the oil deposit.
In the course of his business at ExxonMobil, Tillerson met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times, negotiating deals with both.
During his confirmation hearings, Tillerson denied that his experience in Russia affected him in any other way than making him into a solid negotiator.
But while under questioning from U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, Tillerson repeatedly demurred on questions of whether Putin – or his associates – had ordered the murders of journalists and stoked war in countries neighboring Russia.
“I don’t have information on that,” Tillerson replied.
Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn’s tenure as national security adviser was cut short on Feb. 13 after a scandal erupted over Flynn calling the Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak multiple times over a 36-hour period. The calls came as former President Barack Obama ejected Russian diplomats over interference in the U.S. election.
The New York Times reported that Flynn told Kislyak that the Trump administration would improve relations, urging the Kremlin not to respond to Obama.
A New Yorker profile argued that Flynn saw threats from the Middle East as more dangerous than that of Russia, leading him to advocate for a U.S. alliance with Moscow against ISIS and other Islamic radical groups.
In December 2015, Flynn went to Moscow for a dinner celebrating the anniversary of RT’s founding. Flynn received an undisclosed fee to speak at the event.
Flynn resigned after it was revealed that he lied to Vice President Michael Pence over his communications with Kislyak.
Jeff Sessions
The Russian ambassador made waves again in recent days, as the Washington Post revealed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. senator from Alabama, spoke with the Russian ambassador on two separate occasions during the campaign.
One instance took place at a meeting with more than a dozen other ambassadors. But a second meeting was private and took place in Sessions’ office.
A Sessions spokeswoman said that he met with Kislyak as part of his duties as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, no other members of the committee has reportedly spoken with the Russian ambassador.
During his confirmation hearing to become attorney general, Sessions denied that he had had any “communications with the Russians.”
Sessions is under pressure to nominate an independent special prosecutor to investigate Russian involvement in the U.S. election. “If there’s something there that the FBI thinks is criminal in nature, then for sure you need a special prosecutor,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, on March 1
