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Over the past several months, we have shown, step by step, not only how Russia attacked the 2016 election to install Donald Trump in the White House but how the Kremlin spent years laying the groundwork to ensure that Hillary Clinton would never become president. It was a campaign that began long before Trump came down the golden escalator, stretching back to roughly 2008, when Russian intelligence first identified Clinton as a geopolitical threat. As we have also outlined, the cultivation of Trump began long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, stretching back at least to the mid-1980s and possibly even earlier.

So in the summer of 2016, as Trump was getting ready to accept the Republican nomination in Cleveland and his eldest son, son-in-law, and campaign manager were meeting with Russian operatives in Trump Tower to collect promised dirt on Clinton, the framework of Russian election interference had already long been in place.

When the now-infamous June 9th meeting on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower unfolded, it told the Kremlin everything it wanted to know: the Trump campaign was willing to accept help from the Kremlin. For Moscow, the meeting was a test that the Trump family passed with flying colors.

If Americans know nothing else about Russian election interference, know this: the Trump family never reported their collaboration with representatives of a hostile foreign power to the FBI. Instead, they surreptitiously worked with Russians to advance their own interests, against their fellow Americans.

As the summer wore on, the American public did not know that a Kremlin-linked delegation had already walked into Trump Tower offering to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — but Moscow did. What Russia watched in the weeks that followed was a campaign that continued operating as if nothing unusual or dangerous had happened. Trump’s advisers traveled, corresponded, and entertained further contacts with Kremlin-linked figures without hesitation, and no internal guardrails emerged to slow or redirect them. To Moscow, this behavior was confirmation that the door opened in early June had not been closed, questioned, or scrutinized. The Trump campaign was moving deeper into sharing critical information with Russia just as the Kremlin was accelerating a broader effort to shape the American political landscape in Trump’s favor.

What unfolded after the Trump Tower meeting did not resemble the orderly narrative that investigators would later attempt to reconstruct. It was, instead, a web of overlapping contacts, quiet reciprocities, and unspoken signals, in which Russia intensified its hacking and disinformation operations, while Trump’s advisers sent back unmistakable signals through direct outreach, encouragement, or a series of telling omissions.

This coordination became especially clear in late July, when Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had spent more than a decade advancing Kremlin interests across multiple countries, began transmitting internal polling data and strategic insights to Konstantin Kilimnik, a seasoned Russian intelligence officer who was one of his longtime associates. In doing so, Manafort provided the Kremlin with a detailed map of how the Trump campaign viewed the race, which constituencies were persuadable, and where targeted influence operations would have the greatest impact.

That same month, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, traveled to Moscow to deliver a speech that closely reflected Russia’s geopolitical narratives, then met with officials connected to Rosneft and the Kremlin’s foreign-policy apparatus. Russian intelligence would have viewed these conversations as further signs that the campaign’s advisers welcomed a closer strategic relationship. As Page moved through Moscow’s political circles, another Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, continued pushing for a Trump–Putin meeting, sending repeated updates to senior officials about his contacts with Russian-linked intermediaries. The senior leadership of any normal campaign would have immediately shut down these contacts and alerted the FBI at once.

The Trump campaign did no such thing.

The most dramatic signal, however, arrived on July 27, when Trump stood before cameras and issued a live broadcast cue to a hostile intelligence service: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” The campaign would later insist it was a joke, but Moscow took it as a prompt. Within hours, Russian military intelligence officers attempted, for the first time, to penetrate Clinton’s personal servers.

As the election moved into its final stretch, the call and response — some explicit, some subtle — accelerated into a full-spectrum convergence. Russia carried out its hack-and-leak operation, WikiLeaks timed its releases to inflict maximum political damage, and Trump and his surrogates incorporated the stolen materials into their rallies, interviews, and social media messaging. All this took place with such speed that the line between a foreign intelligence operation and the campaign’s own communications strategy effectively disappeared.

Day after day, Trump invoked the hacked emails as if they were authentic revelations rather than documents stolen and likely altered by a hostile actor. His allies, most notably Roger Stone, teased forthcoming drops with a show of insider knowledge that reinforced the growing sense of alignment. In the last month of the campaign alone, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times.

Later investigations revealed just how high up this coordination might have gone. Trump was apparently personally aware of the leaked emails before they were public. Rick Gates, the former deputy chairman of the Trump campaign, said that, “by the late summer of 2016, the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”

Yet, when reporters later asked him about the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” distancing himself from an operation he had openly relied upon throughout the campaign.

Trump’s victory did not end this pattern, but simply pushed it into a new phase. In Moscow, Trump’s victory did not require any new assessment, because the Kremlin had spent decades observing his overtures, noting his admiration for Soviet and Russian leaders, and tracking his long-standing desire for major business deals in Russia — all of which underscored that he viewed its government not as an adversary but as a close partner.

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By the time the ballots were counted on election night, the Kremlin saw a president-elect whose worldview consistently cast Russia in a favorable light, whose positions weakened the U.S.-led international order, and whose inner circle had already shown a willingness to entertain contacts that would have set off immediate alarms in any other political campaign. As Clinton conceded and members of the Russian Duma literally toasted Trump’s victory with champagne, congratulatory notes circulated throughout the Kremlin. Kilimnik wrote to Manafort that they now had a chance to “get whole” — a phrase that referred not only to the millions Manafort owed to a Kremlin-aligned oligarch but to a broader geopolitical realignment that Trump was expected to usher in.

It was during the transition period that the true nature of the Trump-Kremlin relationship came into focus. The same patterns that had defined the campaign now evolved into direct attempts to reshape U.S. foreign policy even before Trump was sworn in.

On December 29, Michael Flynn, Trump’s designated National Security Adviser, held secret calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, urging Russia not to retaliate for the new sanctions the Obama administration had levied on Russia for its election interference. Flynn assured Kislyak that Trump would revisit the sanctions as soon as Trump was inaugurated. Putin responded immediately by declining to retaliate against the United States, publicly praising Trump, and signaling to the world that Russia believed it had secured an unprecedented level of influence in the White House.

Flynn was not the only Trump advisor secretly backchanneling to the Kremlin. Weeks earlier, Jared Kushner had suggested to Kislyak that they establish a covert communications channel using Russian diplomatic facilities — a proposal so extraordinary that even Kislyak, a veteran operative who had been deeply involved in Russia’s election interference, seemed briefly taken aback. In trying to set up this clandestine arrangement with the Russian ambassador, Kushner was clearly attempting to shield his discussions with the Kremlin from U.S. intelligence.

This was not Kushner’s first communication with Kislyak. He had spoken to him several times prior to the election, as they apparently discussed the sanctions the Obama administration had placed on Russia for its illegal annexation of Crimea. This would have been another signal that Trump’s inner circle would conduct conversations with a representative of a hostile foreign power without notifying the FBI.

Against this backdrop, Kushner also held a separate meeting in December with Sergey Gorkov, the Kremlin’s chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a state-controlled development bank that has long served as a financial vehicle for high-priority Kremlin projects. The meeting with Gorkov, a graduate of a Russian security services academy, quickly became a focus of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.

In addition to discussions about setting up a covert communications channel, Kushner, Flynn, and Kislyak also talked about arranging a meeting between a Trump representative and a “Russian contact” in an unidentified third country in another attempt to move sensitive communications beyond the reach of American intelligence. A week before Trump’s inauguration, Blackwater founder Erik Prince traveled to the Seychelles to meet Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and one of Putin’s key political emissaries, to establish a back channel between Trump’s inner circle and the Kremlin. The session was brokered by the United Arab Emirates.

Dmitriev — who is now the Kremlin’s handler for Trump fixers Steve Witkoff and Kushner as they push a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian surrender plan — serves as a reminder that these channels did not end in 2016 but evolved into an ongoing, collaborative relationship. A decade ago, these contacts were behind closed doors. Today, they are all out in the open.

By the time Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017, Russia was ecstatic to see a man it had long viewed as a tool of its worldview sworn in as president. The Kremlin appeared confident that Trump’s actions would shape American foreign policy around Russia’s strategic interests. The earliest months of the administration confirmed this expectation. Trump resisted enforcing congressionally mandated sanctions against Russia, questioned the value of NATO in ways that rattled America’s allies, and repeatedly expressed admiration for Putin. He reframed the annexation of Crimea as something Ukrainians might have “wanted.” He not only publicly cast doubt on the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, but actively attacked those agencies and sought to hinder their investigation — aligning himself with Kremlin narratives at a moment when Russia continued carrying out operations to fracture Western unity and undermine the transatlantic alliance.

No moment captures the culmination of this trajectory more starkly than May 2017, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the official directly overseeing the counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference. The very next day, the president welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kislyak into the Oval Office and barred the American press from attending, instead allowing Russian state media — known for serving as Kremlin intelligence assets — to photograph the meeting. Trump openly boasted to his Russian guests about what he had done the day before. “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump crowed. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. I’m not under investigation.”

In the same meeting with the Russians, Trump disclosed highly sensitive intelligence information concerning ISIS that U.S. officials later confirmed had been provided to American intelligence by Israel — a breach so significant that American intelligence officials scrambled to contain the damage. Once again, Trump chose Russia over even America’s closest allies.

And so the operation that began with the Kremlin’s years-long campaign to prepare the American political landscape to wound Hillary Clinton and elevate Donald Trump unfolded largely as planned. It has revealed itself not as a chain of disconnected events but as a single, continuous narrative arc: a pattern of receptivity, opportunity, and convergence through which a hostile foreign power found in Trump someone who consistently advanced the Kremlin’s geopolitical objectives — often at the direct expense of the alliances and institutions that had anchored American leadership for generations.

There should be no question that Russia interfered — strategically, methodically, and repeatedly — to elect Trump in 2016. Their bet paid off in ways that would have once seemed inconceivable. Just last week, nearly a decade after the events this series has described in painstaking detail, the White House released its National Security Strategy memo, which outlines the Trump administration’s view of the United States and its role in the world. The document gives the Kremlin every single thing it has long wanted — a United States disdainful of Europe and NATO, seeking closer alliances with despots and kleptocrats, and resuscitating “spheres of influence,” where great powers have the right to control the destinies of weaker nations in their neighborhood.

In response, the Kremlin’s spokesperson remarked that Trump’s worldview is “largely consistent with our vision.”

It is an open question whether Trump could have gotten elected without Russian assistance, but there is certainly no question that Russian assistance made it much easier for him to get elected. Time and again, the Kremlin acted as Trump’s most powerful wingman, an extrajudicial superpac that pretended not to coordinate with the campaign while doing everything in its power to seed the ground for his candidacy and put it over the top. The reordering of the post-war world order — indeed, the end of the Pax Americana — is Russia’s reward for running the most successful intelligence operation in modern history.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our Active Measures series as much as we have enjoyed writing it. Our goal was to establish conclusively that Russia did, indeed, interfere in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Despite what the president has repeatedly said and despite legacy media’s failure to hold him to account when he says it, there is no doubt that the Kremlin conspired with Republican-aligned groups, with Trump’s aides and family members, and possibly, with Trump himself, to make him the president of the United States.

They did not do this out of kindness. They did it because they expected a return on investment — and, as the last decade has shown, they got it.

If you missed any chapters, you can catch up on the whole series here.

We wish you a peaceful end to a tumultuous year.

Julie and Olga

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We began writing this series many months ago, when Donald Trump once again claimed that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election. Since his return to the White House, Trump administration officials — from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Attorney General Pam Bondi — have cast doubt on the assessment that the Kremlin engaged in active measures to help Trump win his first presidential race.

The media has dutifully transcribed these Trumpian efforts to rewrite history, with a New York Times headline blaring that “C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote,” before noting in a much smaller subhead, “But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.”

Meanwhile, Gabbard alleged this summer that the Obama administration had “directed the IC [intelligence community] to create a new intelligence assessment that detailed Russian election meddling, even though it would contradict multiple intelligence assessments released over the previous several months.” She then issued a referral to the Justice Department, which included a memo titled “Intelligence Community suppression of intelligence showing ‘Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure.” Bondi has reportedly convened a grand jury to examine Gabbard’s complaints in pursuit of indictments.

All of this is, in a word, bullshit. As we have painstakingly documented over and over, Russia did interfere in 2016 to help Trump win — using every weapon at its disposal to achieve its aims. Time and again since coming to power, Trump has repaid the favor.

Americans still cling to the idea that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was a digital nuisance — a handful of hackers, some social-media trolls, and a cascade of stolen emails that embarrassed a campaign but didn’t “really” matter. It is a comforting narrative. It is also catastrophically wrong.

What unfolded in 2016 was not improvised, nor was it opportunistic. It was the modern execution of a political-warfare doctrine that Russia inherited from the Soviet Union and spent decades refining: active measures — a strategy designed not to persuade voters but to destabilize societies, corrode institutions, and destroy the shared reality on which democracy depends.

Over many months, we have laid one truth bare: Russia did not just interfere in an American election. It weaponized a century of accumulated expertise against a fractured nation that never imagined it could be manipulated at scale.

Soviet intelligence did not view information as a supplement to statecraft; it viewed it as a weapon. By the mid-20th century, K.G.B. operatives were running disinformation campaigns across the globe, planting forged documents, inventing conspiracy theories, funding extremist groups, and manufacturing narratives to fracture Western alliances.

Consider just a few examples: The K.G.B. spread the false claim that the C.I.A. assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It pushed the lie that the Pentagon created AIDS. It planted anti-American conspiracy stories in foreign newspapers designed to boomerang back into domestic discourse.

The objective was constant: undermine trust in American institutions and deepen internal divisions.

The Soviet Union collapsed — but the doctrine did not.

After 1991, Russia retained the same security services, many of the same personnel, and nearly all of the old strategic worldview. Vladimir Putin — a career K.G.B. officer — brought that worldview directly back into the Kremlin.

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But something else changed: the internet. And then social media. And finally, algorithmic amplification of outrage.

Suddenly, tactics that once required front groups, forged typewriter ribbons, or sympathetic foreign journalists could be deployed from a keyboard in St. Petersburg. A fake persona could reach millions. A forged narrative could go viral. A stolen email could dominate a news cycle — and then another, and then another.

Russia understood that the United States had entered an era in which identity politics, partisan media, and algorithm-driven outrage had created a perfect laboratory for active measures.

To start, the Russians did not simply approach Trump and his family. They seeded the ground to make selling him more fertile, from infiltrating the National Rifle Association to co-opting prominent evangelical figures to softening up susceptible Republican senators. The goal was to prime the Republican infrastructure to be receptive to a figurehead who would, in turn, carry the Kremlin’s water.

Modern Russian influence campaigns are built for the long haul. They do not begin with an election but with identification — locating political figures, business leaders, or public figures whose vulnerabilities or ambitions make them promising targets.

Some are cultivated directly. Others are monitored quietly, with kompromat collected for future use. Many are studied for years before any overt action is taken.

Donald Trump fit the ideal profile.

For decades, Trump sought business deals in Russia. He spoke admiringly of Putin, derided NATO, undermined American alliances, and attacked the American intelligence agencies tasked with identifying Russia’s activities. Russian oligarchs bought units in his buildings, helped him flip real estate at massive profit, and created opportunities for him in Russia, even as Soviet leaders and their Russian successors dangled a Moscow Trump Tower as an incentive. His financial ties — opaque, global, and difficult to map — created a fertile ecosystem for the kind of leverage Moscow has perfected since Soviet times.

To the Kremlin, he represented not a recruit but an accelerant — a candidate whose instincts aligned perfectly with Moscow’s long-standing goal of weakening Western unity.

None of this conclusively proves that Trump has ever been an active Russian asset. But Russian intelligence does not need direct coordination — it needs opportunity. It needs a figure whose rise would weaken NATO, undermine European alliances, inflame American polarization, and leave the United States inwardly focused and externally paralyzed.

From Moscow’s vantage point, Trump was long-term strategic terrain worth preparing. So when the 2016 campaign began, Russia did not start from zero. It moved from cultivation to execution.

By 2016, that plan was fully operational.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rewrite history, the outlines of Russia’s 2016 operation have been established by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, the U.S. intelligence community, and independent researchers. It concluded that Russia engaged in undeniable tactics designed to harm Hillary Clinton and help Trump win the White House.

Among its tactics was the Russian military intelligence hacking of Democratic targets. The GRU stole emails, curated them, and timed their release for maximum political damage. This reflected classic K.G.B. practice: turn private discord into public weaponry.

Meanwhile, Russian troll factories impersonated Americans by the thousands, creating fake accounts that posed as Black activists, Christian conservatives, immigration hardliners, veterans, and Antifa organizers. Their purpose was not to persuade anyone to love Russia. It was to make Americans hate each other.

Throughout all this, American media became a force multiplier, as major news outlets — even after acknowledging the material came from a foreign intelligence operation — covered each tranche of stolen Democratic emails obsessively. Kremlin-engineered narratives became front-page news within hours each and every day in the months leading up to the election.

The objective was not just the vote. It was a dismantling of the entire American experiment, both domestically and internationally.

The most damaging misconception about 2016 is the fixation on whether Russia “changed the outcome.” This question misunderstands the nature of what the Russians successfully achieved.

The point was not just to elect Trump but to destabilize the conditions under which elections occur. Russia sought to inflame social and racial tensions, undermine trust in the media and our election infrastructure, delegitimize law enforcement and intelligence agencies, convince Americans the system is rigged, and push the country toward a crisis of shared reality.

On these metrics — the only ones that matter — Russia’s operation succeeded spectacularly.

The aftermath was not a debate about cybersecurity. It was a national fracture so deep that millions of Americans now reject basic facts as partisan propaganda.

That is not an accident. It is the intended effect of political warfare.

Imagine if a foreign adversary had detonated a small explosive in every major American newsroom, every campaign headquarters, every political organization, every individual computer and phone. We would call it an act of war.

Russia did something more effective: it detonated doubt. It exposed how easily U.S. media can be manipulated, how eagerly political operatives will amplify foreign disinformation if it harms their opponents, and how little resilience the American system has when under informational assault.

Instead of confronting the scale of the attack, the country talked itself into amnesia. It was debated whether the operation mattered and minimized the threat. It allowed political actors to treat a hostile foreign intelligence service as just another partisan ally.

We are now entering an era in which deepfakes can fabricate speeches, A.I. can generate entire social movements, and disinformation campaigns can be launched with little more than a script. Rather than debate whether the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election, we should be ever more vigilant — because Russia did not retire the playbook after 2016.

And America — more divided, more distrustful, and more algorithmically manipulated than ever — is even more vulnerable.

When future historians examine this period, they will not ask whether Russia changed a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. They will ask how the world’s most powerful democracy allowed itself to be psychologically infiltrated by a foreign adversary whose tactics have been publicly documented for one hundred years.

They will ask why America refused to accept what was plainly true:
Russia’s 2016 operation was not a one-off. It was the predictable, preventable climax of a century of political warfare aimed at us.

Unless the United States confronts this truth with the seriousness it demands, 2016 will not be remembered as an attack.

It will be remembered as a dress rehearsal.

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Last week, we wrote about Donald Trump’s first major foreign policy address as a presidential candidate, which was organized by allies of the Kremlin and quickly aligned his candidacy with Moscow’s strategic ambitions. This week, we turn to the infamous meeting at Trump Tower between members of the Trump family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, and Kremlin intelligence operatives on June 9, 2016.

Even now, this meeting is such a sore spot for the Trumps that they routinely bring it up. In a recent discussion with Megyn Kelly, Trump Jr. joked, “Guys, if you knew what was going on in that campaign, like we couldn’t collude to order a cheeseburger. Okay. So like, relax… slow your roll.”

Donald Trump Jr.’s jocularity is a convenient smokescreen for something much more serious: while Russia was running a sweeping influence operation to help Trump win the presidency, his inner circle took a meeting at Trump Tower with emissaries linked to the Kremlin after being told by an intermediary that the offer was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Simply put: the Trump Tower meeting was a moment when senior figures in an American presidential campaign signaled that they were open for business if a hostile foreign power wanted to help them win.

As we have documented for many months, the Trump Tower meeting was not the whole story of Russian election interference. But it encapsulated that interference in the highest relief: high-level campaign officials, Russians with ties to the Kremlin and hostile intelligence services, an intermediary’s promise of “very high level and sensitive information” on Hillary Clinton — and a reply from Donald Trump Jr. that will go down as one of the most damning sentences in American political history: “If it’s what you say I love it.”

The path to that 25-minute gathering on June 9, 2016, runs straight through Trump’s long-running pursuit of business and celebrity in Russia.

The email landed in Donald Trump Jr.’s inbox just after 10 a.m. on June 3, 2016.
Rob Goldstone — the British music publicist who had shepherded Emin Agalarov through the corridors of Trump’s Miss Universe pageant three years earlier — was writing with what he called an “extraordinary” offer.

“This is obviously very high-level and sensitive information,” Goldstone typed, “but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. read the message, absorbed what it implied, and fired back the line that would become the most famous sentence of the 2016 election.

“If it’s what you say I love it.”

As we detailed in an earlier chapter, Trump took the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013 in a deal with Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch Aras Agalarov, a real estate developer close to the Kremlin, whose son Emin was an aspiring pop star. That episode set the stage for what would happen three years later.

To Trump, the Agalarovs were useful contacts. They opened doors. They made him feel like a statesman in a country whose approval he seemed to covet.

But the Kremlin was watching Trump, too — and had been for a long time.

By early 2014, U.S.–Russian relations had cratered after Putin’s annexation of Crimea. American sanctions followed, including the Magnitsky Act, a law deeply loathed inside the Kremlin because it named and punished Russian officials connected to the death of accountant-turned-whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. The oligarch class wanted those sanctions gone.

The Agalarovs — wealthy, ambitious, and plugged in — understood Moscow’s priorities. They were the type of intermediaries Putin’s orbit often relied on: people who could operate in the worlds of celebrity, business, and politics simultaneously.

For all these reasons, as the 2016 election heated up and Trump’s campaign surged, that long-ago Miss Universe partnership suddenly mattered again.

As we have documented throughout this series, the Kremlin’s priority was to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign in order to ensure that the woman Vladimir Putin blamed for his domestic problems did not ascend to the highest office in the land. The American public would not learn the full scale of Russia’s 2016 interference until after the election, but in June 2016, most of Russia’s activities to subvert the American election were well underway.

Inside Russia, the strategy was clear: help Trump win by exploiting vulnerabilities and finding relevant channels.

One channel, as it turned out, ran straight through Trump Tower.

Goldstone’s June 3 email did not arrive out of nowhere. Emin Agalarov, he told Trump Jr., had asked him to reach out to the Trumps. A Russian prosecutor, Goldstone wrote, was offering “very high-level and sensitive information” that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Within hours, Trump Jr. looped in two other men: Kushner, his brother-in-law, who by then had become a senior campaign adviser with wide-ranging authority and an eagerness to explore nearly any foreign contact; and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, who carried with him years of work for pro-Kremlin figures in Ukraine.

Trump Jr. proposed a meeting at Trump Tower within days.

A few days later, the cast of characters that would populate one of the election’s most infamous episodes began to assemble in New York.

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On June 9, Trump Jr. moved briskly through the marble lobby of Trump Tower up toward the meeting room where he would greet the Russian delegation. Joining him was Kushner, who did not yet know that he would later pursue a secret backchannel with the Russian ambassador using Russian communications systems just six months later.

For his part, Manafort had spent years working for Ukrainian strongmen and oligarchs aligned with Moscow. In the shadows of Kyiv and Moscow, he had managed elections, shaped propaganda, and developed deep connections to Russian-linked intelligence networks. To Moscow, Manafort wasn’t an unknown quantity. His longtime partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, was, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a Russian intelligence officer. Manafort was deeply in debt, to the tune of at least $10 million, to Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska.

The star of Goldstone’s pitch was a Moscow-based lawyer described in the email as a “Russian government attorney.” Natalia Veselnitskaya was, in reality, a private lawyer — but hardly a random one. She had spent years lobbying against the Magnitsky Act and represented a Russian company, Prevezon, accused of laundering proceeds from the fraud Magnitsky uncovered. One of her longtime clients was the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service and the successor to the KGB.

Several years later, U.S. prosecutors would indict Veselnitskaya for obstruction of justice in the Prevezon case, alleging that she secretly worked with a senior Russian prosecutor to craft a misleading submission to the court.

In short: the supposed “private” lawyer at the center of the meeting had worked with Russia’s main domestic intelligence service and with the Russian Prosecutor General’s office.

Veselnitskaya did not come alone. Joining her was Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer. Radio Free Europe profiled him in 2016 as a “gun-for-hire” who had long worked the “shadowy corners” of Washington lobbying for clients from the former Soviet Union.

Accompanying them was Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a Georgian-American executive and vice president at the Agalarovs’ Crocus Group. Years before the 2016 campaign, a congressional investigation had scrutinized Kaveladze for allegedly setting up hundreds of shell corporations and bank accounts in the United States that moved billions of dollars in suspect Russian and Eastern European funds. He denied wrongdoing and was never charged.

Kaveladze would later claim, through his lawyer, that he attended the Trump Tower meeting as Aras Agalarov’s representative, “just to make sure it happened” and to interpret if needed. His translation services were hardly required, because Veselnitskaya also brought along Anatoli Samochornov, a U.S. citizen who had long worked as a professional interpreter, including as a contractor for the State Department.

Also present was Goldstone, the British publicist whose email set the whole thing in motion. Goldstone later told Senate investigators that he understood he was offering “dirt” on Clinton and was hoping for a “smoking gun.”

In the background, though absent from the room, loomed the Agalarovs. Emin Agalarov, the pop singer whom Goldstone represented, and Aras Agalarov, the oligarch who had partnered with Trump on Miss Universe, were the bridges that connected Trump’s world to this ostensibly “independent” Russian lawyer.

According to later investigations, the meeting on June 9 lasted roughly 20–30 minutes. By all accounts, it did not deliver the kind of kompromat on Clinton that Trump Jr. had been promised. Instead, Veselnitskaya pivoted quickly to a familiar theme: the Magnitsky Act, her lobbying campaign against it, and the Russian government’s desire to see those sanctions lifted. She framed this in part through a convoluted narrative about supposed Democratic donors involved in tax fraud in Russia.

Akhmetshin later told reporters that Veselnitskaya brought a document alleging “violations of Russian law by a Democratic donor” and left the papers behind with the Trump team.

Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort all insisted that they found the meeting a waste of time. Kushner reportedly emailed an aide from the room asking for a reason to leave. Manafort, according to notes released by investigators, appeared disengaged — though his notes referenced “donations” and “RNC,” among other items, suggesting he heard enough to jot down politically relevant points.

But the most important part of the meeting is not whether Veselnitskaya’s pitch was boring. It is that senior Trump campaign officials walked into a conference room expecting material from the Russian government to help them win an American election — and never once called the FBI.

The Senate Intelligence Committee later highlighted the Trump campaign as “eager to accept help from a foreign power” and concluded that Manafort’s role, in particular, created “opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on” the campaign.

If the Trump Tower meeting were truly the trivial encounter Trump Jr. and others have long claimed it was, they would have had no problem disclosing it from the start. They did not.

The meeting only came to light when Kushner filed a revised security clearance form in April 2017, and even then, the details remained secret. In July 2017, The New York Times broke the story that Trump Jr. had met with a “Russian lawyer with Kremlin connections” who was offering damaging information on Clinton. Trump Jr. initially put out a statement claiming the discussion had been “primarily” about the adoption of Russian children — an issue linked to the Magnitsky sanctions.

Robert Mueller’s investigation and subsequent reporting filled in a key detail: President Trump personally dictated that initial, misleading statement from Air Force One, casting the meeting as a benign talk about adoptions rather than a response to an overture of Russian government assistance.

Within days, as news reports revealed that Goldstone’s email had explicitly framed the meeting as part of Russia’s support for his father, Trump Jr. changed his story again, releasing the full email chain himself and admitting that he had gone into the meeting expecting opposition research on Clinton.

Mueller later examined whether the President’s efforts to shape that public narrative amounted to obstruction of justice. Ultimately, he did not charge Trump but he did document multiple instances in which Trump directed aides not to disclose the full story and tried to keep the emails from coming out, moves that he treated as potentially obstructive depending on whether they were intended to mislead investigators as well as the press.

The Russian side treated the encounter as part of a broader, Kremlin-linked lobbying effort to roll back sanctions that were personally painful to Putin and his circle. Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya were already working to discredit the Magnitsky Act and were screening an anti-Magnitsky film in Washington days after the meeting.

The fact that these same people walked into Trump Tower, through channels built on Trump’s business and vanity projects in Russia, signaled to Moscow that the campaign was both reachable and receptive.

The Russian operatives in this meeting were not operating in a vacuum. Months earlier, Manafort began sharing internal polling and strategic insights with Kilimnik, his former partner and Russian intelligence officer. That information flow continued even as he was meeting with the Russian delegation at Trump Tower. Less than two months later, Manafort handed over detailed internal polling data, battleground-state targeting information, and the campaign’s strategic roadmap to Kilimnik, allowing Russian intelligence to better target its own interference operations.

From Putin’s vantage point, the Trump Tower meeting had been a small gamble with a large reward. It showed the campaign’s willingness to engage and demonstrated that the lines between politics, business, and personal ambition in Trump’s world were porous and exploitable. It validated the Kremlin’s bet that Trump’s inner circle lacked the discipline, caution, or experience to resist overtures from foreign intermediaries.

Even if the meeting itself yielded little, it gave Russia exactly what it needed: a signal.

By the time the meeting became public, Russia had already achieved its aim. Emails had been hacked, social networks flooded, American voters targeted, Clinton damaged, and Trump elected.

The June 9 meeting was not the centerpiece of the operation. It was something else: the moment Russia learned once more that the door was open and that the Trump family was receptive to its overtures.

Chapter 17

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Last week, we wrote about Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into whether anyone connected to Donald Trump’s campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election attack, and how Carter Page, with his long trail of Kremlin entanglements, further deepened those suspicions. This week, we turn to Trump’s first major foreign-policy address. It was organized by Dmitri Simes, who would later be charged with funneling Kremlin funds and signaling an openness to Moscow, while quietly aligning Trump’s candidacy with Moscow’s strategic ambitions.

On April 27, 2016, in the gilded ballroom of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump delivered what would become one of the most consequential foreign-policy speeches of the 2016 campaign — an address that, in retrospect, reads as an early, unmistakable articulation of a worldview aligned with the strategic objectives of Vladimir Putin. Before an audience of diplomats, policymakers, and Beltway insiders, Trump unveiled a sharply defined “America First” doctrine that repudiated decades of bipartisan consensus on alliances, embraced a transactional understanding of global commitments, and signaled a willingness to reset relations with Russia at a moment when Moscow was illegally occupying Crimea, waging a bloody war across eastern Ukraine, intervening militarily in Syria to support Assad’s atrocities and crimes of aggression, and actively attacking the U.S. election to install Trump.

The event was hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank led by the Russian-born foreign-policy operative Simes, whose proximity to the Kremlin had long been an open secret in Washington and who had for years served as a soft-power channel for Moscow’s operations. Sitting in the front row was Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States and one of the central figures in the Kremlin’s influence operations, a man whose mission in Washington extended far beyond ceremonial diplomacy and whose presence at this event would later take on significance as the full scope of Russia’s 2016 attack came into view.

The idea for Trump to deliver a formal foreign-policy address in Washington did not come from the campaign’s policy staff but from its innermost circle. Trump’s son-in-law and close advisor, Jared Kushner, later told investigators that the event had been his idea and that he had overseen every stage of its planning, from the initial outreach to the Center for the National Interest to the final layout of the room. In late March 2016, he contacted Simes to ask whether CNI would host the speech. Simes — long viewed in Washington foreign-policy circles with quiet unease because of his deep ties to Moscow — agreed immediately. Within days, he and Kushner were in steady contact, discussing both the logistics of the event and the themes Trump should emphasize.

CNI, publisher of The National Interest, had spent years promoting a brand of foreign-policy “realism” that aligned with the Kremlin’s strategic goals. Simes himself had appeared with Putin at the 2013 Valdai Club forum in Russia, where he praised Putin’s “tough stance” in Syria and spoke about the possibility of a new opening in U.S.- Russia relations. Now, that worldview was poised to find a powerful new vehicle in the presidential candidate preparing to take the stage at the Mayflower. The Mueller investigation later detailed Simes’s direct interactions with Kushner throughout the campaign, including instances where Simes provided Kushner with Russia-related talking points for Trump to use.

By early April, the think tank was no longer simply offering to host the speech but helping shape it. Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy aide, provided an initial outline, and in parallel, Carter Page offered feedback on an early draft of Trump’s foreign-policy remarks. From that point forward, Simes, CNI Executive Director Paul Saunders, and CNI advisory board member Richard Burt reviewed the evolving drafts, returning detailed revisions that emphasized themes long associated with the Kremlin’s preferred framework for U.S. relations, including the need for a “new beginning” with Russia. Burt — a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who at the time was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for Nord Stream 2, the controversial Gazprom-linked pipeline that would deepen Europe’s energy dependence on Moscow — later acknowledged that he had helped craft Trump’s address and that portions of his draft survived into the final text. The fact that individuals with direct financial and political ties to Russian interests shaped the content of a major presidential candidate’s first foreign-policy speech is not speculative, and the Mueller investigation cemented it in the public record.

The logistics behind the event followed the same deliberate pattern. CNI had initially planned to hold the speech at the National Press Club, but as media attention intensified, Kushner demanded a larger and more controlled venue. Simes proposed the Mayflower — a hotel steeped in Washington political history — and Kushner agreed. On April 25, Saunders booked both the grand ballroom and an adjoining room for a VIP reception. The guest list, curated by Simes and his team, blended Trump loyalists with select Washington insiders, foreign ambassadors, and longtime CNI associates — a mix that included Senator Jeff Sessions, chairman of Trump’s newly formed National Security Advisory Committee, former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, conservative activist Grover Norquist, several House members, and ambassadors from Italy, Singapore, the Philippines, and, most notably, Russia.

That the entire operation ran through Simes only heightened its significance. For decades, officials in Republican and Democratic administrations had viewed Simes with quiet concern, noting his unusually close relationships with Russian officials and oligarchs, and his pattern of advancing policy positions that tracked with Moscow’s strategic objectives. Those concerns proved well-founded.

The VIP reception that preceded the speech was equally revealing. One week before the event, Simes personally invited Kislyak and assured him he would have an opportunity to meet Trump. Kislyak was not a peripheral diplomatic figure but one of Moscow’s most seasoned operatives – a diplomat whose Washington portfolio intertwined ceremonial duties with political influence and intelligence objectives. His mission in 2016 was to assess the U.S. political landscape, cultivate relationships, and report potential openings to Moscow. When Trump entered the reception room, the organizers formed a receiving line. Sessions introduced Trump to members of Congress; then Simes took over, personally introducing CNI’s selected guests, including Kislyak. The exchange was brief and cordial, but Kislyak listened intently, and moments later told Kushner, “We like what your candidate is saying… it is refreshing,” a clear signal that Moscow understood Trump’s message and viewed it favorably.

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What would eventually emerge from U.S. intelligence assessments showed that these interactions were not the benign diplomatic pleasantries Sessions and others later portrayed. According to U.S. intercepts reported in 2017, Kislyak told his superiors in Moscow that he and Sessions had discussed campaign-related matters during this same period – including Trump’s positions on issues central to Russia, from sanctions policy to the future of U.S.-Russia relations. Those intelligence reports contradicted Sessions’s repeated public denials that he had ever discussed campaign topics with Russian officials. U.S. officials told The Washington Post that Kislyak was known for accurately relaying his conversations to the Kremlin, and his descriptions reinforced what the Mayflower encounter already suggested: even seemingly brief exchanges with Trump’s advisers carried substantive political meaning for Moscow.

There is no evidence of a private or substantive Trump–Kislyak conversation that day. Everything occurred in public view. But Russian operations do not depend on secrecy when a target has already shown clear receptivity. By the time the Mayflower event took place, Trump had repeatedly signaled positions favorable to Moscow, and Kislyak would have recognized that the groundwork for cultivation was already in place. Kislyak did not need a clandestine meeting; he needed to watch Trump’s speech, assess his posture, and report back that the candidate’s worldview was already closely tracking with the Kremlin’s preferred restructuring of the international order.

Trump’s speech itself confirmed that alignment. Reading from a teleprompter, he delivered a sweeping condemnation of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, attacked NATO allies for insufficient defense spending, and warned that the United States might no longer uphold its commitments if allies did not pay more. Then he pivoted to Russia, declaring that the United States and Russia were not bound to be adversaries and that an easing of tensions was “absolutely possible.” He spoke of shared interests, suggested a reset, and insisted that the “cycle of hostility” must end. In Moscow — where analysts were following Trump’s public statements very closely — this articulation of a new reset was a strategic gift.

What followed in the immediate aftermath of the Mayflower speech reveals with remarkable clarity how Moscow interpreted the signals emanating from Trump’s campaign. On the very same day that Trump delivered this foreign-policy address — an address that Russian officials would have understood as a public overture — George Papadopoulos sent emails to senior campaign officials describing the speech as “great” and urging them once again to pursue a meeting between Trump and Putin, a proposal that aligned perfectly with the Kremlin’s ongoing attempts to open channels into the campaign and underscored just how rapidly the campaign’s Russia-related outreach accelerated. At the same time, Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin were already deep into a years-long infiltration campaign inside Republican political circles – an operation that began in 2014, accelerated through 2015 with their NRA-focused outreach, and by the spring of 2016 had become an active, well-established channel in Moscow’s broader influence objectives.

What this moment underscored was how clearly the signals emerging from the Trump campaign aligned with influence efforts Russia had been cultivating for years. In July 2015, those signals were already unmistakable. That month, Butina, publicly presenting herself as a gun-rights activist while operating at the direction of senior Kremlin and intelligence officials, asked Trump whether he would maintain sanctions on Russia. His response, that sanctions “would not be necessary” and that he would “get along” with Putin, offered the clearest public indication yet that he was open to the reset Moscow sought.

That same year, The National Interest, published by Simes’s organization, gave Butina a platform to amplify her message as she expanded her outreach inside Republican circles, reinforcing an influence channel already well underway. And in June 2015, she delivered her most explicit public overture when she authored an article for The National Interest titled “The Bear and the Elephant,” arguing that Russia’s interests were naturally aligned with those of the Republican Party — directly echoing the message she was privately relaying to Moscow. Also, news reports would later reveal that CNI arranged meetings for Butina with senior U.S. economic officials, including at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve – efforts that paralleled her covert penetration operation.

From there, Kislyak’s role only grew. In the weeks following Trump’s election victory, he met Kushner at Trump Tower, where Kushner asked about establishing a secure, secret backchannel using Russian diplomatic facilities – a proposal that alarmed U.S. intelligence officials who intercepted Kislyak’s communications with Moscow. At the same time, National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn was speaking with Kislyak repeatedly, including on December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration imposed sweeping new sanctions and expelled Russian operatives in response to the Kremlin’s election interference. Flynn urged Kislyak not to retaliate, signaling that the incoming administration would take a far softer line. Russia complied, a move that immediately drew the attention of U.S. counterintelligence. Flynn later lied to the FBI about his calls with Kislyak, concealing the extent of the transition team’s engagement with Moscow.

Also that December, Kushner, Flynn, and Kislyak discussed arranging a meeting between a Trump representative and a Kremlin-linked “Russian contact” in a third country. In early January 2017, that concept materialized when Erik Prince — acting as an unofficial emissary for the Trump transition – traveled to the Seychelles to secretly meet Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s messenger, bag man, and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, in what U.S. officials later described as an effort to establish a secret communications conduit outside the reach of American intelligence agencies. This Seychelles channel mirrored the same objectives raised in Kushner’s earlier Trump Tower meeting.

The most extraordinary moment came months later, on May 10, 2017. One day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, he hosted Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office. The meeting was closed to American media and only open to TASS, the Russian-run news agency long used as a cover for Russian spies. Photographs released by TASS showed Trump laughing with Lavrov and Kislyak.

Accounts later revealed that Trump not only told the Russians that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him with respect to the Russia investigation and referred to the former FBI director as a “nut job,” but also disclosed highly classified Israeli intelligence about ISIS operations during the same Oval Office meeting — an extraordinary breach that stunned U.S. and allied intelligence services. To have Russia’s top diplomat and its Washington operative inside the Oval Office under those circumstances, with American journalists barred and only Russian state media present, was unprecedented.

Last September 2024, long after the Mayflower event had faded from the news cycle, the Justice Department unsealed two federal indictments against Simes and his wife, Anastasia, charging them with laundering money and violating U.S. sanctions to benefit Channel One Russia, the Kremlin’s flagship propaganda network. Prosecutors alleged that the couple received more than one million dollars in compensation – including a Moscow apartment stipend, a driver, and personal staff – in exchange for their services. By the time those charges were announced, Simes and his wife were already living in Russia, safely outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

The Mayflower speech, on its own, did not establish a conspiracy. Yet it stood as another unmistakable Russian connection, a moment in which Trump articulated a foreign-policy worldview that Moscow greeted with clear satisfaction, prompting operatives such as Kislyak and Butina to reinforce their ongoing efforts. His remarks, shaped in part by the Kremlin-aligned Simes, conveyed that a warmer U.S.–Russia relationship would be welcome should Trump win. Moscow received that message clearly and proceeded to increase its operations to help ensure that a Trump victory would become a reality.

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Last week, we examined how a minor Trump campaign advisor named George Papadopoulos inadvertently triggered the federal investigation into Russian campaign interference. This week, we turn to Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into whether anyone associated with Donald Trump’s campaign interfered in the 2016 election, and the role that one Kremlin-connected Trump advisor played in both furthering the investigation and giving MAGA a predicate for casting doubt on its validity.

At the heart of the spectacular, contentious story of Operation Crossfire Hurricane is Carter Page, who came to symbolize the collision of national-security oversight, political campaigns, and foreign election interference. A foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Page charted a path from Moscow energy consultant to campaign insider to subject of intensive surveillance. His role in the 2016 election raises profound questions about how the United States manages foreign influence threats and preserves trust in its intelligence institutions.

Page was not a household name when Trump introduced him as a foreign policy adviser in March 2016. He was a Naval Academy graduate and energy consultant who had spent years around Russia’s oil and gas world — three years at Merrill Lynch in Moscow in the mid-2000s and then as the founder of Global Energy Capital. Even prior to joining the campaign, Page had long advocated against Russian sanctions, which the United States had levied after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. While working in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, he developed a close relationship with executives at Gazprom, the Russian energy giant in which the Kremlin eventually took a majority stake.

The FBI had Page on its radar as a target of Russian intelligence years before 2016. In 2013, Page crossed paths with Russia’s SVR (foreign intelligence services) recruitment team operating in New York. Prior to Trump’s campaign and long before Page went to work for him, the FBI unsealed a complaint that quoted one of the Russian intelligence officers, Victor Podobnyy, describing “Male-1” (who turned out to be Page) as someone the Russians thought they could string along for information. So little did the Russians respect Page that Podobnyy said of Page, “he’s an idiot but maybe we can use him.” Page conceded that he shared material with Russian intelligence but insisted it was not sensitive.

In August 2013, Page bragged in a letter that, “Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda.”

By the time Trump named his national security team, Page’s profile — energy deals, a soft spot for Moscow, and a history of contact with Russian operatives — was a feature, and not a bug, of the characters circling the campaign. In July 2016, Page flew to Moscow to speak at the New Economic School. Page used the trip to deliver a friendly-to-Kremlin talk, ducked U.S. policy questions, and worked the Moscow scene as a self-styled Russia hand. During the speech, Page went out of his way to praise Vladimir Putin as a “stronger leader than President Obama,” a formulation that Russian state media amplified as evidence that Trump’s advisers were sympathetic to the Kremlin’s worldview.

While in Moscow, Page met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. (Page would later claim that he met with Dvorkovich as a private individual and not in his role as a member of the Trump campaign — a distinction without a difference.) The meeting, occurring as Russia’s election-interference campaign was already underway, added to American counterintelligence concerns that Moscow might be cultivating contacts within Trump’s orbit.

In the weeks after his Moscow trip, Page also crossed paths with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland — a brief encounter he later downplayed, but one that nevertheless reinforced the FBI’s growing concern that Russian officials were methodically targeting Trump campaign officials.

That same month, the FBI opened the investigation into Russian election interference, titled Crossfire Hurricane, after receiving information from Australian intelligence counterparts that Papadopoulos had bragged to one of its nationals about Russia having dirt on Hillary Clinton. The Justice Department’s inspector general later documented that agents soon opened “sub-files” on four Trump-linked figures — Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Page — based on specific concerns tied to each.

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The decision to open the investigation was essentially straightforward: the FBI, under the leadership of then-Director James Comey, judged that a hostile foreign power, Russia, may have been seeking to penetrate a U.S. presidential campaign and that the Bureau’s counterintelligence mandate required investigation. In plain terms, Crossfire Hurricane sought to answer a simple question: were individuals associated with the Trump campaign coordinating with Russia’s interference efforts — wittingly or unwittingly? It was not, at first, a criminal probe of the campaign per se, but a counterintelligence investigation aimed at identifying foreign agents or foreign intelligence relationships.

Crossfire Hurricane came at a moment when America’s electoral system was under assault. As we discussed in previous chapters, the U.S. intelligence community already knew Russia was waging an information war by July 2016. Hackers tied to the GRU had stolen Democratic National Committee data; fake online personas — “Guccifer 2.0,” “DC Leaks,” and, later, WikiLeaks — were releasing it in timed bursts to hurt Clinton and help Trump.

Against that backdrop, the FBI’s duty was clear: find out whether any Americans were serving as conduits for Russian efforts. To understand why that mandate mattered, recall the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation. It had been faulted for failing to “connect the dots.” By 2016, the Bureau’s culture rewarded aggressive, preventive action against national security threats. Russia’s interference was a textbook trigger for that instinct.

Crossfire Hurricane was not initially a criminal probe but a counterintelligence one. Its goal was to identify possible foreign-influence operations, not to secure indictments. The Bureau used traditional techniques: informants, interviews, and surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Agents were supposed to determine whether campaign advisers were wittingly cooperating with Russia or merely targets of manipulation.

In October 2016, the Bureau sought its first FISA warrant — on Page. That decision, justified by existing intelligence but poorly executed in paperwork, would later dominate headlines and obscure the rest of the investigation.

According to Russian media reports, Page returned to Moscow in December 2016, after Trump’s victory, for another round of meetings with Kremlin-linked figures and appearances on Russian state television, where he criticized U.S. policy and again discussed a reset with Moscow. During that trip, Page admitted that he met with a Rosneft official and bragged about his connections to Trump:

“I did have the opportunity to meet with an executive of Rosneft, and I think unfortunately it’s a great example, where this recent deal, which Glenn Corp in Qatar was able to move forward with, unfortunately, United States actors were constrained, and I think there’s a lot of ways where, you know, a lot of the impact of sanctions has really affected individuals from the U.S. side much more so than we’ve seen in Russia.”

Page became the focal point of public controversy because the FBI obtained four FISA applications — an initial application plus three renewals — to surveil him between late 2016 and 2017. Later, the Justice Department Inspector General’s report catalogued significant inaccuracies or omissions in those applications, including the failure to disclose that Page had earlier been approved as an “operational contact” for the CIA between 2008-2013.

One error crossed into illegality. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email from the CIA to state that Page was “not a source” when the original document said that he was. Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying the email and, in 2021, received probation. The FISA Court responded with a rare public rebuke, calling the Bureau’s conduct “antithetical to the heightened duty of candor owed to the court.”

The Bureau’s botching of the Page investigation left some questions unresolved about his relationship with the Kremlin and what it meant for the Trump campaign. It remains unclear how Moscow ultimately assessed his value and whether any material he provided was used operationally in light of the 2013 counterintelligence operation where he was swept up. It is also an open question of whether Page’s July 2016 Moscow trip — and another post-election trip in December 2016, where he again met Kremlin-linked contacts — advanced Russian outreach beyond casual encounters.

Page later told the House Intelligence Committee that his Moscow meetings were limited to a brief, informal conversation with Deputy Prime Minister Dvorkovich and an “investor relations presentation” from Rosneft executive Andrey Baranov, insisting there was “no substantive content” and denying he had met Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. But U.S. intelligence agencies had already opened a probe into whether Page had, in fact, met with senior Russian officials during the trip, including Sechin — who reportedly raised the issue of U.S. sanctions — as well as Igor Diveykin, a former Russian security official believed to have overseen election-related intelligence tied to the U.S. election.

Later investigations, including the Mueller and Senate Intelligence Committee reports, documented extensive Russian interference and many links to Trump-world, but Page was not charged, and the Senate’s sharpest counterintelligence findings focused elsewhere. Left unresolved is whether Page’s behavior amounted to exploitable unwittingness or something more, which the public record has never substantiated.

Chapter 15…

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Last week, we delved into Russia’s inside man, Paul Manafort, and the role he played in aligning Russian interests with the Trump campaign’s internal strategy — delivering sensitive polling data to a Russian intelligence operative and opening a covert channel for Kremlin operations. This week, we turn to another figure in the early stages of Russia’s direct outreach to the Trump campaign: George Papadopoulos — a minor campaign adviser who became a conduit between Trump’s circle and the Kremlin’s network of operatives, cutouts, and influence brokers.

By the time George Papadopoulos officially joined Donald Trump’s ragtag foreign policy team in early 2016, he had spent months hovering on the fringes of the campaign — desperate for recognition, relevance, and a foothold in Trump’s inner circle. His resume was thin, more aspirational than substantive, marked by a master’s degree from a little-known London program, a stint at the Hudson Institute that ended without distinction, and a brief role on the Ben Carson campaign, while living in London. But what Papadopoulos lacked in credentials, he made up for in eagerness, and it was precisely this combination that made him an ideal early target for Russian operatives probing access points to Trump’s orbit.

Months before Papadopoulos’ official appointment, he had begun reaching out to Trump campaign officials through a series of persistent emails — first to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in July 2015, and then to Michael Glassner, the campaign’s executive director. Rebuffed several times, he didn’t let up. By February 2016, he had shifted his base of operations from the then-defunct Ben Carson team to a position at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), a shadowy organization with dubious academic legitimacy and unclear funding, whose affiliations would later raise questions about its ties to Russian-linked actors operating under the cover of academia.

In March 2016, after months of lobbying, Papadopoulos finally received the call he’d been waiting for: Sam Clovis, Trump’s national campaign co-chair and chief policy advisor, invited him to join the campaign as a foreign policy advisor. The offer came with minimal vetting and no clear oversight. And within a week, Papadopoulos was in Rome, participating in meetings arranged through his position at LCILP, including one that would later fundamentally alter the trajectory of the investigation into Russian election interference.

It was during this Rome visit that Papadopoulos first met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic with deep ties to Russian institutions, including the notorious Link Campus University — a private Italian school with a roster of visiting lecturers that included European intelligence veterans and Kremlin-friendly officials. Mifsud portrayed himself as a facilitator of international dialogue, but his actions revealed a different agenda. He expressed keen interest in Papadopoulos’s new campaign role and, within days, promised to introduce him to individuals with direct access to the Russian government.

When Papadopoulos returned to London, the relationship intensified. On March 24, he met again with Mifsud, who had returned from Moscow, and this time was accompanied by a Russian woman introduced as Olga Polonskaya, aka Olga Vinogradova. Mifsud introduced her to Papadopoulos as “Putin’s niece,” a claim that was entirely false but carefully calculated to suggest proximity to the Kremlin. Over breakfast at a London hotel, Mifsud and “Polonskaya” pitched the idea of setting up a meeting between Trump and Russian officials, ideally even Vladimir Putin himself. The woman, whose real background remains murky, promised assistance in coordinating the logistics.

But the real turning point came in April 2016, during yet another London meeting between Papadopoulos and Mifsud. It was there that the professor dropped a proposal that would later become central to the Mueller investigation: the Russians, he said, had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — in the form of thousands of emails.

The timing was critical. Although Russian cyber intrusions into Democratic networks had already begun — Cozy Bear in 2015 and Fancy Bear earlier that March — the public was still unaware of any email breaches. As we detailed in our earlier chapter on Cozy and Fancy Bear, these intrusions laid the groundwork for Russia’s larger operation, quietly exfiltrating data while probing for vulnerabilities across the DNC and other targets.

Mifsud’s disclosure came before the first leaks appeared and well before the press or U.S. intelligence had publicly acknowledged the scope of the cyberattacks. Whether Mifsud was directly controlled by Russian intelligence or serving as a cut-out remains unresolved, but the prior knowledge he displayed suggests access to sensitive Kremlin operations. His hint about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton would be echoed in multiple overtures that followed — from the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June to Roger Stone’s backchannel contacts with WikiLeaks and Russian hackers — each a separate prong in the same coordinated effort to funnel stolen material into Trump’s orbit. (We explored this campaign of information warfare in more depth in several of our earlier chapters, including on WikiLeaks.

Rather than distancing himself from what was clearly an overture by a hostile foreign power towards an American presidential campaign, Papadopoulos leaned in. He emailed Trump campaign officials repeatedly, touting his Russian contacts and promoting the idea of a Trump–Putin meeting. On March 31, 2016, Papadopoulos attended the infamous foreign policy meeting in Washington, held at the Trump Hotel, where he was seated just a few spots away from Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. The event, designed in part to generate press coverage, featured the campaign’s newly announced foreign policy team. When it was his turn to speak, Papadopoulos mentioned his background in energy and then raised the prospect of arranging a meeting between Trump and Russian officials — stating that his contacts in London had conveyed that Putin wanted to meet with Trump and that he could help broker the introduction.

Accounts of the response varied. Papadopoulos recalled that Trump “nodded” at the idea, while campaign adviser J.D. Gordon said that Trump appeared receptive. Papadopoulos interpreted Sessions’s reaction similarly, believing the then-Senator was supportive of the outreach. But other campaign staff present, including Gordon in a later interview, said Sessions pushed back, although their accounts of how strongly — or why — differed. What is clear is that no one in the room issued a forceful rejection or raised concerns about the national security implications of such a meeting. The proposal hung in the air, and it was another moment that captured the Trump campaign’s persistent willingness to entertain foreign overtures, even those tied to America’s adversaries.

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Throughout the spring and early summer of 2016, Papadopoulos remained in regular contact with Mifsud and his Russian interlocutors. In April, he was introduced via email to Ivan Timofeev, a program director at the Kremlin-backed Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), one of Moscow’s key diplomatic soft power platforms. While Timofeev’s initial outreach was couched in academic language — positioning himself as a scholar facilitating “track-two” dialogue — it quickly escalated into discussions about arranging contacts with high-level Russian officials, including representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Behind the scenes, Timofeev was in regular contact with Russian government colleagues, updating them on the progress of the outreach and seeking guidance.

But Timofeev’s influence extended beyond RIAC. He also headed a program at the Valdai Discussion Club, a Kremlin-directed initiative that gathers academics, think tank experts, and former policymakers for curated discussions with top Russian officials, culminating in a personal audience with Putin. While framed as intellectual exchanges, Valdai has long served as a tool of Russian statecraft—a soft power operation designed to shape elite opinion abroad, legitimize Kremlin propaganda, and quietly draw foreign influencers into Moscow’s orbit. Papadopoulos, in this context, was not merely engaging with a curious academic. He had stepped into a tightly choreographed influence campaign, managed by Kremlin-linked intermediaries who specialized in laundering geopolitical objectives through the language of “diplomacy, research, and dialogue.”

Simultaneously, Russia was pursuing yet another route into the campaign. In June 2016, Rick Dearborn — a senior Trump aide and former Senate chief of staff to Jeff Sessions — received an email from Rick Clay, a West Virginia Republican and former military contractor, proposing a meeting between senior Trump officials and Russian representatives. Clay said the request came from a friend who had encountered Russians through Christian organizations, and he pitched the meeting as a chance to discuss “shared Christian values.” Clay was vague, unable to provide names of the Russians or even the friend making the request, whom he described only as someone who split his time between Alaska and Pennsylvania.

Dearborn’s memo and the Clay outreach were not anomalies—and revealed just how exposed the Trump campaign was to infiltration, how easy access was, and how, with little effort, soft influence could exploit ambition, ideology, or ignorance. But one of the most pivotal moments in the timeline didn’t arrive via encrypted emails or official backchannels. It surfaced, instead, over drinks at a London wine bar, where Papadopoulos, eager to impress, divulged to Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer that Russia had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton — a casual disclosure, fueled by alcohol and self-importance, that would eventually spark a formal tip-off to U.S. intelligence and trigger the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference.

It was May 2016, and Papadopoulos was still presenting himself as a rising player with Kremlin ties — positioning his connections with Mifsud and Timofeev as credible diplomatic channels, even as his movements and communications were closely tracked by Russian intermediaries. Papadopoulos had become, wittingly or not, an ideal test case — an unvetted volunteer whose overtures offered Moscow a low-risk opportunity to make inroads with the Trump campaign. He wasn’t central to the plot, but he was useful, an ambitious self-promoter whose eagerness and access opened the door to counterintelligence investigations into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and whether that attack was aided from within.

Papadopoulos was arrested on July 27, 2017, at Dulles International Airport as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The arrest stemmed from Papadopoulos’s false statements to the FBI during a January 2017 interview, in which he lied about the timing, nature, and extent of his contacts with individuals tied to Russia. Papadopoulos later pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal investigators and cooperated with the special counsel’s office. He was sentenced in September 2018 to 14 days in prison, fined $9,500, and ordered to perform community service. Trump pardoned him in the waning days of his presidency in December 2020.

For his part, Mifsud—the Maltese professor who first dangled the promise of Russian “dirt” on Clinton — vanished from public view not long after Papadopoulos’s arrest. Despite multiple international efforts to locate or question him, Mifsud has never reappeared, fueling speculation that he was either silenced, protected, or disappeared by the very forces that had once deployed him.

By the time the stolen Democratic emails began surfacing on WikiLeaks and the Australians relayed Downer’s tip to their American counterparts, the Kremlin operation was already well underway. Papadopoulos had, in a moment of unguarded self-importance, revealed that yet another person inside the Trump campaign knew in advance that Russia possessed politically sensitive material targeting Clinton. His disclosure, delivered casually over drinks, provided the first concrete indication that overtures from Moscow had reached the campaign and had been met with interest. That exchange in London marked the opening breach in a broader influence operation — one engineered for plausible deniability and structured around intermediaries—as with many of Russia’s operations.

From the moment he entered Trump’s orbit, he was treated as an asset of interest—an opening into not just the campaign’s foreign policy team, but into the deeper vulnerabilities of an American political system ill-equipped for the sophistication of information warfare and foreign subversion.

As scrutiny mounted, Trump’s inner circle scrambled to downplay his role, dismissing him as a low-level “coffee boy” with no real access. This was belied by Trump’s own words about Papadopoulos when he announced his foreign policy team, at which point he bragged about him and called him “an excellent guy.”

Papadopoulos’ paper trail told a different story: one of repeated outreach, sustained contact with Kremlin-linked intermediaries, and a campaign structure so chaotic and eager to win that even marginal figures could become unwitting conduits for hostile foreign influence.

And yet, years later, Papadopoulos reemerged — no longer as the so-called “unwitting” operative, but as an active participant in the same propaganda ecosystem that had once supposedly manipulated him. Over the past several years, Papadopoulos has reinserted himself into the Kremlin’s global influence network through a series of new collaborations, including with Igor Lopatonok, the pro-Kremlin filmmaker best known for his partnership with Oliver Stone on Ukraine on Fire and other Russian-sponsored disinformation films. Lopatonok also works alongside Viktor Medvedchuk, a sanctioned Ukrainian oligarch, Kremlin proxy, and close Putin ally (so close that Putin is godfather to his daughter), who has long served as a key conduit for Russian intelligence operations. In Ukraine, he built sprawling propaganda networks and led a pro-Russian political party; across Europe, he orchestrated messaging operations designed to undermine NATO, erode trust in democratic institutions, co-opt European officials, and legitimize Russia’s genocidal war. Today, he is living in Moscow, tapped by the Kremlin as the leader of the pro-Russian Ukraine bloc in exile.

It was through this ecosystem that George Papadopoulos reemerged, pushing familiar Kremlin narratives about NATO expansion, U.S.-funded “biolabs” in Ukraine, and the moral collapse of the West. The content is funneled through RT affiliates and Telegram channels tied to Russian state media, Medvedchuk’s disinformation infrastructure, and intelligence-linked cutouts, designed to cloak psychological operations in the language of journalism.

By 2024, Papadopoulos appeared on the editorial board of Intelligencer, a pro-Kremlin media platform run by former Trump aides and right-wing influencers with deep ties to Russian state media and intelligence-adjacent figures. The site became another vehicle for laundering Russian disinformation into the U.S. information ecosystem, targeting conservative audiences with stories about election fraud, anti-vaccine conspiracies, and Kremlin lies on Ukraine. Its board included not only Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiante, but also Igor Lopatonok.

Mangiante, who once attempted to distance her husband from his Russian contacts, has fully embraced her role in Russia’s operations. In early 2024, she traveled to Belarus to sit down with Andrii Derkach, the sanctioned Russian GRU agent who was involved in Russia’s 2020 attack on U.S. elections in their effort to damage then-candidate Joe Biden. Their interview was published and amplified across Russian Telegram channels and fringe right-wing networks, offering a new platform for Derkach’s lies and injecting them directly into the American right’s media bloodstream.

The Intelligencer board itself became a rogue’s gallery of Kremlin-aligned figures and Trump loyalists: Olga Ravasi, the Serbian-American operative who chaired “Serbs for Trump,” now runs a PAC targeting Balkan-American voters with anti-NATO messaging; Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s personal attorney, hosted his own show on Kremlin-adjacent TNT Radio; and board member Anna Soroka, who previously advised the illegally Putin-appointed leadership in occupied Luhansk, Ukraine. Behind the scenes, the site was shaped by George Eliason, an American who has lived in occupied Eastern Ukraine and works with Russian military intelligence, including back-channel correspondence with GRU-linked officials.

Whether Papadopoulos understood the full scope of the network in which he is now embedded is beside the point. He has become another bridge connecting fringe U.S. political movements with Kremlin disinformation pipelines, laundering state-sponsored narratives under the guise of “independent” commentary. From Moscow to Los Angeles, from Derkach to TNT Radio, Russia recycled compromised figures from 2016 and gave them new relevance in 2024.

Papadopoulos is no longer a “coffee boy” or a useful idiot, and has evolved into something far more dangerous: a willing operative amplifying Russian disinformation operations. What began in London with a drunken night out did not end there. It metastasized into a growing media presence, pro-Russian messaging, and a permanent infrastructure of compromise. George Papadopoulos, eager for relevance and immune to reflection, has proven just how easily a democracy’s weaknesses can be exploited from within.

Chapter 14

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Last week, we explored how fixers and intermediaries exploited Donald Trump’s thirst for a Russian real estate expansion to further entangle him in Moscow’s web. This week, we turn to Paul Manafort, the campaign manager who brought the Kremlin directly into the heart of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Manafort’s entry into the 2016 Trump campaign seemed like a routine hire: a seasoned Republican operative, with decades of experience in Washington, brought in to impose order on a chaotic campaign. Yet what followed revealed something far more troubling — a nexus of foreign influence, hidden debts, and secret data exchanges that ultimately exposed how deeply Russia was entangled in Trump’s campaign operations.

Manafort had spent his career moving through the corridors of Republican power. He advised presidential campaigns for decades and had cultivated an image as a pragmatic strategist, a man who could win by understanding both voters and the power brokers who backed them.

Behind that polished facade, however, Manafort launched his career as a central figure in Washington’s notorious “torturers’ lobby.” In the 1980s, he orchestrated lucrative influence campaigns for some of the world’s most brutal dictators — Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Jonas Savimbi in Angola. Together, they sold access to the Republican power elite, laundering the reputations of regimes steeped in corruption, torture, and murder — all in exchange for millions in fees.

Domestically, Trump was one of their first clients in 1980. In 1979, Roger Stone met Donald Trump through lawyer Roy Cohn, who also introduced Trump to Paul Manafort around the same time. The following year, Stone, Manafort, and Charles Black founded Black, Manafort & Stone, one of Washington’s first major political lobbying firms. One of their first clients was Trump, who hired them to handle federal matters related to his growing casino and real estate ventures, including dredging permits for the Trump Princess yacht, FAA height waivers for his skyscrapers, and Treasury regulations affecting casino cash transactions. Stone managed the account while Manafort offered strategic advice, establishing a relationship of mutual benefit that would resurface decades later in national politics.

By the turn of the century, Manafort’s focus shifted overseas to Russia. Alongside his partner Rick Davis, he began working for oligarchs, autocrats, and shadowy intermediaries whose political goals aligned with Russia’s objectives. Through their firm, Davis Manafort Partners, the pair built an extensive network across Eastern Europe and in countries once under Soviet control — nations Moscow was actively trying to draw back into its sphere of influence. Much of their work was financed by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and part of Putin’s inner circle, whose vast business empire frequently served the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic agenda. In Russia, oligarchs are not truly independent; their fortunes exist at the pleasure of the state, and their survival depends on advancing the Kremlin’s objectives.

Manafort had spent decades selling access and influence in Washington, and now he was selling political strategy to Kremlin-linked authoritarian leaders seeking legitimacy, money, and access to the West. His work in Ukraine began around 2003, when Deripaska and British financier Nat Rothschild brought him in to advise clients of interest to the Kremlin. Around this time, Manafort began relying on his new associate, Konstantin Kilimnik. Their partnership would soon become one of the most consequential relationships in modern political history, linking Manafort’s Western consulting machine to the Kremlin’s networks of influence.

One of their first assignments involved aiding a pro-Russian former KGB general and former Georgian Minister of State Security, Igor Giorgadze, in an effort to return from exile in Moscow and regain political influence in Georgia after the country’s pro-Western Rose Revolution. Giorgadze had been accused of orchestrating a 1995 assassination attempt on Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, and his return would have reinstalled a loyal Kremlin operative inside Georgia’s government. Manafort’s firm helped draft a strategy to rehabilitate Giorgadze’s image and smooth his return, while Rothschild’s business ventures in Georgian vineyards were leveraged as pressure points against Tbilisi. The plan ultimately failed when Georgia’s new leadership refused to yield to Moscow’s demands.

In 2005, Manafort and Kilimnik surfaced in Kyrgyzstan after the Tulip Revolution, where, according to subsequent investigative reporting, they worked to strengthen Russia’s position — most notably by promoting the closure of the U.S. military presence at Manas air base. It was the second time Manafort appeared in a post- “color revolution” country, and in both cases his mission aligned with Moscow’s goal of rolling back U.S. influence.

From that point forward, Manafort’s work consistently advanced Russian interests across Europe. In Montenegro, he advised on Deripaska’s political and business operations during the 2006 independence referendum, helping the oligarch secure control of the country’s aluminum industry and maintain Moscow’s leverage even as the small Balkan state drifted toward the West. Russia’s interest in Montenegro was strategic, and the Kremlin viewed the country as a vital foothold on the Adriatic and a potential barrier to NATO expansion. A decade later, that same obsession would culminate in a failed coup plot orchestrated by Russian intelligence operatives, who attempted to overthrow the pro-Western government and assassinate the prime minister to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO.

But it was in Ukraine that Manafort made his deepest mark — arriving in late 2003 to prepare Viktor Yanukovych’s campaign for the 2004 presidential election, when the Kremlin was determined to secure a loyal government in Kyiv.

In the 2004 presidential race that followed, Yanukovych’s rival, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned with TCDD dioxin in an attack that became a global scandal. Declassified U.S. intelligence later concluded that Russian intelligence orchestrated the poisoning. Manafort had arrived a year before the attack and would go on to reengineer Yanukovych’s image, setting the stage for Yanukovych’s eventual return to power.

Manafort was brought into Yanukovych’s orbit through a joint arrangement between Deripaska and Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch and key financier of the pro-Kremlin Party of Regions. His mission was to rehabilitate the party’s image after the Orange Revolution — a popular uprising that had exposed Yanukovych’s electoral fraud and deepened Ukraine’s divide between Western-leaning and Moscow-aligned factions. Manafort’s assignment went well beyond conventional campaign strategy: he reshaped Yanukovych’s messaging to appeal to Western sensibilities, teaching him to speak the language of democracy and reform while quietly advancing policies that would bend Ukraine toward Russia.

Through a mix of American-style political advertising, microtargeting, and narrative reframing, Manafort helped engineer Yanukovych’s comeback and eventual election to the presidency in 2010. American prosecutors later revealed that Manafort was paid tens of millions of dollars through offshore accounts and shell companies for this work — payments largely funded by oligarchs whose business empires depended on Russia’s economic and political favor.

By the time Manafort began rebuilding Yanukovych’s image, Kilimnik had joined him full-time. A Russian intelligence operative educated at the Defense Ministry’s Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a school known for training officers of Russian military intelligence, and a staffer at the International Republican Institute in Moscow, he was dismissed in 2005 after reportedly leaking internal information while freelancing for Manafort — a move that confirmed what many colleagues already suspected about his ties to Russian intelligence. Among Moscow insiders, he was known as “Kostya, the guy from the GRU,” a nickname that reflected his military intelligence career.

Yanukovych’s Party of Regions functioned as Moscow’s most reliable political instrument in Kyiv, advocating for closer economic integration with Russia and resisting NATO expansion. Manafort’s advice — polishing Yanukovych’s authoritarian instincts into populist packaging — helped the Kremlin reassert influence in a country it regarded as part of its historic sphere. Manafort’s Ukrainian political work included efforts to undermine former prime minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, whose imprisonment during Yanukovych’s presidency became an international scandal condemned by both the European Union and the United States. In effect, Manafort exported American campaign technology to reinforce an authoritarian regime aligned with the Kremlin, advancing Russia’s geopolitical aims under the guise of democratic consulting.

In 2005, Manafort pitched Deripaska a strategy memo outlining how he could advance Russia’s interests by influencing politics and media in former Soviet republics and the United States, promising to “greatly benefit the Putin government.” Within a year, Deripaska agreed to pay Manafort roughly $10 million annually for this work, routed through offshore entities. Their partnership extended beyond political consulting: they collaborated on investment ventures in Ukraine, Montenegro, and Cyprus, where Manafort helped Deripaska pursue privatization deals and energy infrastructure projects that dovetailed with Russian geopolitical objectives. Deripaska’s business empire, rooted in raw materials, state contracts, and Kremlin patronage, provided a financial lifeline for Manafort, who accumulated millions in debt to Deripaska-linked companies by 2016.

This consulting relationship effectively placed Manafort at the intersection of Ukrainian domestic politics and Russian strategic interests. Working through Western operatives, including former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer, Manafort’s team built a transnational PR machine that placed favorable stories in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and European publications sympathetic to Moscow’s viewpoint. Documents later obtained by The Guardian revealed that between 2011 and 2013, Manafort approved a clandestine “black ops” campaign directed by Friedman through FBC Media, designed to smear Tymoshenko and rehabilitate Yanukovych’s image in the West. The operation included ghost-written op-eds, a fake think tank — the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics — social media manipulation, and anonymous briefings, including to outlets like Breitbart, attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting Tymoshenko’s release.

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These covert information operations blurred the line between journalism, lobbying, and propaganda. Friedman and Sager coordinated closely with Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, and longtime intel agent Kilimnik to manage messaging, payments, and media placements. Around the same period, Friedman helped construct the so-called Hapsburg Group, an informal coalition of former European leaders secretly paid through offshore accounts controlled by Manafort to lobby U.S. policymakers on behalf of Yanukovych and his Kremlin-aligned government.

According to filings by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and reporting by The New York Times, Friedman served as the conduit between Manafort and prominent figures such as former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and former European Commission President Romano Prodi, arranging op-eds, meetings, and trips to Washington while concealing Ukraine’s sponsorship. In 2018, when Manafort attempted to contact Friedman via WhatsApp to coordinate testimony, prosecutors cited the outreach as witness tampering — prompting a judge to revoke Manafort’s bail. These intertwined “dark media” and lobbying operations exposed the full reach of Manafort’s network: a fusion of Western public relations craft, Kremlin-aligned financing, and covert political influence that would later echo in Russia’s broader information warfare operations.

The relationship between Manafort and Deripaska, one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, reveals how money, influence, and political access further penetrated the Trump campaign. Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, played a key role during the 2016 election.

Manafort’s arrival in Trump’s campaign came during a period of turmoil. The candidate’s unpredictable behavior and organizational chaos had alienated experienced operatives. Trump’s advisors wanted someone who could navigate the complexities of convention politics and delegate counts. Manafort, who had once managed the same types of battles for Reagan and Gerald Ford, seemed an ideal fit. By June 2016, he was not only Trump’s convention manager but his campaign chairman, presiding over messaging, budgeting, and strategy. The problem was that Manafort’s expertise came with baggage — a trail of offshore accounts, foreign clients, and opaque financial arrangements.

As Manafort assumed control of Trump’s campaign, his entanglements with Deripaska should have raised dozens of red flags. By 2016, Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska had deteriorated into a multimillion-dollar liability that placed Manafort in a precarious and compromised position.

Court filings, Cypriot financial records, and reporting show that Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort International, had entered into joint ventures with Deripaska beginning around 2007, including the “Pericles Emerging Markets” fund, which was supposed to invest in telecommunications and infrastructure projects in Eastern Europe. When the ventures collapsed amid the 2008 global financial crisis, Deripaska accused Manafort of mismanaging tens of millions of dollars and of “disappearing” with his investment.

By 2014, Manafort allegedly owed as much as $17 million to Deripaska and to companies linked to him — a debt that remained unresolved when Manafort became chairman of Trump’s campaign two years later. Those close to Manafort later claimed that he was desperate to “get whole” with Deripaska, a man widely seen as both volatile and deeply connected to Putin’s inner circle.

Deripaska had a reputation for ruthless business tactics and was barred from entering the United States because of alleged organized crime ties. Against that backdrop, Manafort’s decision to reach out to Deripaska through his associate Konstantin Kilimnik — offering private briefings on the Trump campaign — reads less like diplomacy and more like self-preservation. Whether driven by fear, opportunism, or financial desperation — or all three — Manafort’s efforts to re-establish favor with a Kremlin-aligned oligarch while managing a U.S. presidential campaign created a situation that intelligence officials later described as a “grave counterintelligence risk.”

Manafort’s continued relationship with Kilimnik was equally troubling. Kilimnik had longstanding ties to Russian intelligence services, an assessment formally confirmed by the Treasury Department, which in 2021 labeled him a “known Russian intelligence agent.” Yet, Manafort maintained a close professional and personal relationship with him for over a decade. When Manafort joined Trump’s campaign in 2016, Kilimnik stayed in regular contact through encrypted communications and in-person meetings, effectively linking the campaign’s inner workings to a figure deeply enmeshed in Russia’s political apparatus.

During the 2016 campaign, this relationship evolved into a channel for the transmission of sensitive information from the campaign to the Kremlin. Manafort instructed his deputy, Rick Gates, to share internal Trump campaign polling data and strategy information with Kilimnik. At a meeting at the Grand Havana Room in New York on August 2, 2016, Manafort provided Kilimnik with the Trump campaign’s internal polling of battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. These were not random metrics. They were precisely the states later targeted by Russian social media interference operations. A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report later described Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” underscoring the risk that confidential campaign data was likely used to calibrate Kremlin-backed influence efforts.

There were other moments when Manafort’s presence appeared to align the Trump campaign with Moscow’s objectives. During the Republican National Convention, delegates proposed a platform plank calling for the United States to provide lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine to help resist Russian aggression. The proposal was abruptly softened, and explicit support for arming Ukraine disappeared from the final language. Multiple witnesses later said that Manafort’s team, through his deputies, had signaled their desire to avoid offending Russia. The adjustment symbolized a larger shift in tone — a major party was softening its stance toward a foreign adversary even as that adversary was interfering in the election.

By August 2016, the weight of Manafort’s foreign entanglements could no longer be contained. The New York Times uncovered evidence that he had received tens of millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian sources, hidden through offshore accounts and shell companies. A “black ledger” found by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau detailed secret cash disbursements to Manafort from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. As the revelations mounted, Trump’s campaign faced growing scrutiny over whether its chairman was compromised by his financial relationships. On August 19, 2016, Manafort resigned, ending his formal role but not the questions surrounding his conduct.

Manafort’s financial and political channels also intersected with organized crime networks. U.S. diplomatic cables described how gas magnate Dmytro Firtash — a business associate of Manafort and ally of Yanukovych, whose indictment was filed by U.S. prosecutors in Chicago — acknowledged needing Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich’s permission to enter certain businesses. Firtash operated as a Kremlin proxy and trusted lieutenant to Mogilevich, serving as a conduit between Russian intelligence, organized crime, and Ukraine. Mogilevich, a top Russian mafia boss who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for over a decade, epitomized the fusion of Kremlin-linked finance, organized crime, and political power. He lived openly in Moscow under the protection of Russian security services, while Firtash and Manafort worked in tandem to channel Kremlin influence through Ukraine’s Party of Regions — a network where corruption, politics, and espionage converged.

The subsequent investigations — first by the FBI, then by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and finally by the Senate Intelligence Committee — peeled back layers of deceit and self-dealing. Prosecutors charged Manafort with tax evasion, bank fraud, and failing to register as a foreign agent. Court filings revealed that even after his indictment, Manafort continued to communicate with Kilimnik, discussing “peace plans” for Ukraine that would effectively legitimize Russian control over Crimea — plans that aligned neatly with Moscow’s aims.

For his part, Kilimnik passed the campaign polling data he received from Manafort to Russian intelligence services. American intelligence officials noted that Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaigns, led by Yevgeni Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, focused heavily on the same states Manafort’s data had covered. The overlap suggested coordination at the level of target selection and narrative framing.

What makes the Manafort episode so consequential is not simply the possibility of collusion but the ease with which the Kremlin was able to infiltrate the highest echelon of the Trump campaign. The American campaign system, built on private data analytics and minimal disclosure requirements, offers few safeguards against foreign infiltration. Manafort’s position gave him access to sensitive strategy, internal polling, and donor networks — all without a formal security clearance or vetting process. The Trump campaign’s disregard for standard protocols created an opening that foreign interests could exploit through the very currency that Manafort understood best: information.

The aftermath of Manafort’s fall exposed the frailty of accountability. He was convicted of financial crimes unrelated to direct election interference and later received a “full and complete” pardon from Trump. The core counterintelligence questions — the sum total of what exactly he shared, with whom, and to what effect — remain unanswered. Yet even the public record leaves little doubt that a senior Trump campaign official passed proprietary data to a man linked to Russian intelligence in the middle of a Russian election interference campaign. That should have been a political earthquake. Instead, it became one more episode absorbed into the chaos of the Trump years.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded its five-volume investigation in 2020, its language was sober but damning: Manafort’s relationship with Russian-connected individuals “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” It was the bipartisan consensus of an investigation that had sifted through millions of pages of evidence and testimony. Yet the political response was muted. By then, the lines between scandal and governance had blurred; outrage had become ambient noise.

Still, history will likely view Manafort as one of the central figures who allowed foreign interests unprecedented proximity to a U.S. campaign. His case illustrates the vulnerabilities of the modern political system, where consultants with global clients can move effortlessly into domestic elections, and where campaign data — the lifeblood of persuasion — can slip across borders under the guise of business as usual. The polarization that later engulfed the United States mirrored what Manafort had already engineered in Ukraine, turning civic divisions into strategic weapons to serve Russia’s strategies. It is a cautionary tale not only about 2016 but about the future: the next campaign, the next strategist, the next malign foreign actor whose influence hides in plain sight.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign, promising to professionalize it. Instead, he professionalized its corruption. Behind the rallies and slogans, he brought with him the logic of oligarchic politics — a worldview in which power is transactional, borders are porous, and truth is negotiable. In that sense, his presence was perfectly suited to the candidate he served. The tragedy for American democracy is that, for a brief and consequential moment, those values guided a campaign that would soon guide the nation.

Chapter 13

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Last week, we explored how the Kremlin probed America’s election systems, testing the infrastructure and its defenses. This week, we turn to the men who built the bridge between Donald Trump’s business empire and the Russian state — the fixers, intermediaries, and oligarchs who transformed Trump’s decades-long so-called real estate fantasy into a geopolitical vulnerability.

Decades before Russian hackers targeted the Democratic National Committee or breached America’s voting systems, Donald Trump’s business had already become deeply entwined with a web of shady Russian financiers, organized crime figures, offshore networks, and power brokers whose fortunes and loyalties were tied to the Kremlin’s orbit of influence. What would later be remembered as the story of Trump Tower Moscow was, in truth, never a simple story of a proposed skyscraper or an unrealized real estate venture. It was a story of how a private pursuit of profit merged almost imperceptibly with the geopolitical designs of a foreign power, revealing the extent to which Trump’s personal ambitions had intersected with Russia’s strategic objectives and how this entanglement would, over time, reverberate across the 2016 election and alter the trajectory of global politics.

At the heart of this deal were two men whose lives revealed the intersection of business, corruption, politics, and covert power behind Trump’s dealings. Felix Sater was a Soviet-born dealmaker who moved between organized crime, intelligence circles, and global finance. Michael Cohen was Trump’s loyal lawyer and fixer, whose work went far beyond contracts or negotiations.

In the fall of 2015, as Trump stood on campaign stages promising to “Make America Great Again,” Sater was once again working in the shadows to secure a Trump skyscraper in the heart of Moscow — a skyscraper to be financed by a sanctioned Russian bank and approved by the Kremlin. A decade earlier, in 2005, Sater had pursued a similar attempt through his firm, Bayrock Group, partnering with Russian and Kazakh financiers to propose an earlier Trump Tower Moscow project that ultimately failed to materialize. That attempt established the blueprint he would later revive: using Kremlin-connected banks, politically exposed investors, and offshore entities to bridge Trump’s brand with Russian state power.

Sater was no ordinary developer. Born in the Soviet Union and raised in Brooklyn, he was a convicted stock swindler who reinvented himself as both a real estate executive and a purported government informant, navigating the gray zones where business, intelligence, and organized crime overlapped. From his office on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower, his firm, Bayrock Group, functioned as a financial clearinghouse for Russian and Eurasian wealth seeking entry into Western markets. Its investors included figures later accused of fraud, embezzlement, and racketeering, and its capital moved through a network of offshore vehicles and shell companies registered in places like Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Delaware. Bayrock’s deals were frequently financed by money of dubious origin—funds tied to oligarchs, sanctioned bankers, and networks long scrutinized by anti-corruption investigators for laundering state and criminal proceeds. Within that ecosystem, Sater’s value to Trump was clear: he could deliver the capital, the connections, and the political access that only those operating in Moscow’s corrupt world could provide.

Bayrock’s partners formed a cast drawn from the murkiest edges of the Russian and Eurasian elite. Its founder, Tevfik Arif — a Kazakh-born former Soviet commerce official—had built his fortune in the chaotic privatizations of the 1990s and was later arrested in Turkey on suspicion of organizing a prostitution ring aboard the Savarona, the country’s presidential yacht, once used by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Atatürk and reserved for state functions under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Though the charges were dismissed, the episode underscored the kind of company Bayrock kept. Another partner, Tamir Sapir, a Georgian-born oil trader who had once done business with Soviet ministries, counted former KGB and Russian energy executives among his circle and had been an early financier of Trump properties in New York.

Internal correspondence and court filings revealed that Bayrock received funding through offshore entities linked to Cyprus and Iceland — jurisdictions long associated with laundering Russian state and criminal proceeds. In 2007, Bayrock attorney Julius R. Lauria reportedly secured a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects from FL Group, an Icelandic firm backed by Russian and Eurasian investors allegedly “in favor with” Vladimir Putin. The firm was listed in Bayrock’s own materials as a “strategic partner,” alongside Alexander Mashkevich, the Kazakh-Israeli metals magnate once charged in a Belgian corruption case involving illicit payments to secure business access in Kazakhstan, a case later settled without admission of guilt.

In 2013, former Bayrock finance director Jody Kriss alleged in a lawsuit that these partnerships masked tax evasion and money laundering through Trump SoHo, a development already under federal scrutiny for opaque financing. Together, the Icelandic capital, the Kazakh connection, and the offshore web around Bayrock revealed a single pattern: Russian-aligned wealth using Western real estate as a conduit for influence, funneling of illicit funds, and concealment.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, Sater began arranging trips and introductions in Russia for Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., advancing his long-running effort to secure Trump’s place in the Moscow skyline. During a 2006 visit, he later boasted, Ivanka toured the proposed development site and was brought inside the Kremlin, where, according to his account to BuzzFeed News, she asked if she could sit in Vladimir Putin’s chair. A security guard, caught off guard, reportedly asked if she was “crazy,” but Sater joked, “What is she going to do, steal a pen?”—and claimed the guard eventually relented. Ivanka sat behind Putin’s desk and spun twice in the chair.

Sater said he had arranged the visit through a Russian billionaire associate who sent cars to pick up the Trumps, framing the trip as a discreet introduction to Moscow’s elite. The visit was part of Sater’s calculated campaign to fuse Trump’s business ambitions with the networks of oligarchs, state financiers, and officials whose consent was required for any project of consequence in Russia—a system where access was currency, and proximity to power was the true measure of success.

In September 2015, Sater approached Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, with a proposal he claimed would finally make Trump’s decades-long dream of building in Moscow a reality. The following month, he volunteered to Cohen that he would be meeting with Putin about the project and urged Cohen to reach out to Russian officials as well. By October 28, the same day that he took the stage at a Republican primary debate, Trump signed a Letter of Intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow with I.C. Expert Investment Company, a Moscow-based developer run by Andrei Rozov.

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In a Nov. 3, 2015, email to Cohen, Sater wrote, “Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” he continued. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

The plan envisioned a 120-story glass tower rising from the Moscow skyline—the tallest building in Europe—financed by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that functioned as an extension of Russian state power, covert financing, and geopolitical influence.

VTB was no ordinary lender. Under the leadership of Andrey Kostin — a former Soviet diplomat and trusted Kremlin insider — the bank functioned as a central instrument of Russia’s state finance and foreign policy, serving as a conduit for government-directed capital and influence. Sanctioned by the United States in July 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, VTB’s access to Western financial markets was sharply curtailed. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the U.S., European Union, and United Kingdom imposed comprehensive blocking sanctions, freezing the bank’s assets, banning dollar and euro transactions, and cutting it off from the SWIFT payment system. Kostin himself had already been sanctioned in 2018 for his role in advancing the Kremlin’s political and economic agenda. In practice, VTB operated less as a commercial institution than as a financial arm of the Russian state — an extension of Moscow’s geopolitical goals that financed projects aligned with Putin’s strategic aims.

In December 2015, Sater informed Cohen that VTB would be issuing the invitations and financing, noting that “Kostin will be at all meetings with Putin so that it is a business meeting not political.” To advance the process, Sater asked Cohen to provide copies of his and Trump’s passports, explaining that a contact in Moscow, Evgeny Shmykov, whom Sater later testified had previously worked for Russian intelligence, needed the information to expedite visas through VTB. Cohen replied by sending a scanned copy of his passport to facilitate the process. Sater told Cohen that approval from the highest levels of the Russian government was imminent and that the project would move forward once it was secured.

As the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations advanced, a secondary network of intermediaries emerged around Sater and Cohen, each with their own connections to Russia’s political and financial elite. The formal partner on paper was Rozov, a relatively obscure Moscow developer whose company, I.C. Expert Investment, signed the Letter of Intent with the Trump Organization. Behind Rozov, however, stood a rotating cast of figures with deeper ties to the Kremlin. Among them was Dmitry Klokov, a former Russian energy executive and government spokesman who privately offered Cohen access to “high-level contacts” within Putin’s circle—a proposal Cohen initially rebuffed but which later drew scrutiny from investigators. Another was Yevgeny Dvoskin, a Russian banker and convicted gangster with known ties to the FSB (Russia’s security services), to help with logistics and promised that Cohen could meet senior Russian officials at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

By January 2016, Cohen had reached directly into the Kremlin, emailing Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, to request “assistance” with the project. Peskov’s office replied, and a call followed — a direct line from Trump’s private business to the Kremlin established in the middle of the presidential campaign. Cohen later lied to Congress, claiming the talks ended in January, but they continued well into June 2016, the same month Russian military intelligence began releasing hacked Democratic Party files through WikiLeaks.

In May 2016, Cohen texted Sater that he would travel to Russia before the Republican National Convention and that Trump would follow after securing the nomination. “My trip before Cleveland. Trump once he becomes the nominee,” he wrote — a revealing admission that the Moscow project remained active even as Trump was closing in on the presidency.

Publicly, Trump told voters he had “nothing to do with Russia—no deals, no loans, no nothing.” Privately, his lawyer was negotiating with a sanctioned state bank and appealing to the Kremlin for approval of a venture worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which would have been stamped with Trump’s name and even featured a spa named after Ivanka Trump. The contradictions were staggering. The structure of the deal itself blurred the line between business and politics. VTB, sanctioned by the United States and acting as a Kremlin cutout, served the same dual function as so many Russian intelligence operatives: a vehicle for advancing state interests under commercial cover. Dvoskin’s role added the shadow of organized crime, while hovering around it all were Aras and Emin Agalarov, the father-and-son developers who had years earlier brought Trump into Moscow’s elite circles.

Both the Mueller investigation and the Senate Committee concluded that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations created a channel of Russian leverage. Cohen’s false testimony to Congress concealed this reality and aligned with Trump’s denials. Sater’s boasts of access to Putin reinforced the perception that Trump’s ambitions depended on Kremlin goodwill. And for Moscow, aware of these contacts all along, the opportunity was evident: Trump’s private business interests could be transformed into political leverage. The Moscow project acted as an influence vector—a mechanism through which the Kremlin could shape or exploit Trump’s behavior.

Cohen later testified that Trump “never expected to win” the presidency and viewed the campaign as a branding exercise—a chance to elevate his global profile and expand his business footprint. Whether the tower was built or not was irrelevant. The negotiations themselves placed Trump’s inner circle squarely within Moscow’s sphere of influence at the exact moment Russian intelligence was executing its election attacks.

The financial machinery behind Sater’s world followed patterns long familiar to investigators of Russian money flows: anonymous partnerships, layered ownership structures, and offshore vehicles designed to move capital through Western real estate. Bayrock had funded projects through opaque channels linked to Russian and Kazakh oligarchs, many with connections to organized crime. Investigations by many outlets traced millions in Bayrock-related transactions to shell companies used in cross-border laundering schemes. These flows mirrored the architecture of Russian active measures, where financial opacity serves as both a shield and a weapon.

The Kremlin did not need to bribe Trump. It only needed to ensure that his businesses operated within the same global networks that underpinned Russian influence.

As Cohen and Sater pursued financing from VTB and approval from Putin’s office, other Trump associates were developing their own connections to Moscow. Paul Manafort offered private campaign briefings to Putin’s crony Oleg Deripaska and shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence operative. Ike Kaveladze, the Agalarovs’ representative, shuttled between Moscow and New York, maintaining a parallel communication channel. Meanwhile, Roger Stone stayed in touch with WikiLeaks and the GRU persona “Guccifer 2.0,” acting as an informal liaison between Russian intelligence and the campaign’s information strategy.

Each of these relationships—financial, political, and covert—fed into the same network of corruption and control that underpinned Russia’s 2016 election attack.

By the time the Trump Tower Moscow project quietly dissolved in June 2016, the Kremlin had already achieved something far more consequential than a building contract. It possessed leverage. Moscow knew Trump’s company had sought its favor during the campaign, knew that Trump had lied about it, and knew that it had further pulled him into its web.

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Over the last several weeks, we explored the ways in which the Kremlin weaponized America’s digital infrastructure and a stolen cache of emails to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. This week, we turn to how Russia probed our election systems for vulnerabilities ahead of the 2016 election and what it meant for that race and for future elections.

In 2016, Russia did far more than leak emails and stoke social media chaos. Beneath the surface, its military intelligence quietly probed the plumbing of U.S. democracy — scanning voter databases, probing election vendor systems, and penetrating local election offices. That reconnaissance, far more than a technical spectacle, created a strategic advantage: it crystallized Moscow’s influence operation, sharpened its political timing, and magnified its ability to manipulate perception. The Kremlin understood that in a deeply polarized election, perception could be as decisive as reality — and Russia leveraged what it learned to help elect Donald Trump, while sowing mistrust in the very backbone of our electoral system.

Russia’s intrusion into U.S. election infrastructure was unprecedented. According to a subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee report, Russian-affiliated cyber actors “scanned systems in all 50 states, attempted intrusions on multiple localities, and in a small number of cases penetrated voter registration databases.” The effort was covert, patient, and methodical — a test run across a patchwork of jurisdictions, each with varying defenses and isolated oversight.

Concurrently, the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, and the SVR, Russia’s successor to the KGB, orchestrated the hacks into Democratic Party systems and coordinated information operations via cutouts such as WikiLeaks.

The probing and the leaking were two halves of a carefully integrated strategy: map vulnerabilities, harvest data, then weaponize the findings. The GRU’s and SVR’s cyber units provided the intelligence, Russian influence operatives deployed the political messaging, and in the center of it all, the Trump campaign, far from denying access, primed the ground to exploit it.

The GRU’s election intrusion branch operated under the authority of the Russian General Staff, which ultimately reported to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and, through him, to Vladimir Putin. The campaign was not a rogue operation by hackers but a state-directed intelligence mission. In that sense, the hack-and-probe endeavor was no incidental assault — it was a form of modern warfare. Russia did not seek to overtly commandeer the vote count in 2016, which would have invited detection and retaliation. Instead, it probed, it poked, and it catalogued weak points.

The Kremlin’s hybrid playbook linked its technical probes to its psychological operations. While GRU units scanned election systems, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg flooded social media with divisive content, voter-suppression memes, and fabricated stories designed to erode confidence in the process itself. Together, they functioned as complementary arms of a single operation — one mapping the electoral backbone of American democracy, the other manipulating the information space that surrounded it. Russia was testing these tactics simultaneously in the United States and across Europe, refining tactics that would be used to influence elections and referendums worldwide.

Then, it layered a propaganda campaign and timed email dumps to stress fracture trust — and determine weak spots for future campaign operations.

While much of the country argued about what constituted fake news, Russia’s military intelligence quietly mapped the machinery of American elections. It scanned, phished, and breached voter databases and vendors, then used the fruits of that reconnaissance to sharpen an influence operation with one aim: to help elect Trump and poison confidence in the process itself. The hack-and-leak theater grabbed attention. The infrastructure probing, which was much less public, prepared the ground. Together, they formed a pincer movement against U.S. democracy.

The basic playbook looked like this: the Kremlin scanned state and local systems for exposed services and known vulnerabilities in websites and databases tied to voter registration, e-pollbooks — the digital versions of the voter check-in list used at polling places — and election management. Those systems varied wildly in maturity and defensive posture, a fragmentation that attackers could exploit.

Russia took advantage of both the gaps between federal and state systems and the limits on what federal agencies are allowed to do domestically. The U.S. intelligence community is designed to focus on foreign threats, with only the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security authorized to coordinate cybersecurity efforts inside the country, sometimes by working with state and local officials. But state election authorities — who are ultimately responsible for running elections — were neither adequately warned nor equipped to defend against a sophisticated attack from a foreign government.

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In the late summer and fall of 2016, the DHS and FBI did issue warnings about potential cyberattacks, but those alerts were too vague and often failed to reach the right officials. While the notifications included lists of suspicious IP addresses for state IT teams to monitor, they lacked the context or urgency needed to make election administrators understand that this was not a routine cybersecurity alert but a targeted threat from a hostile power.

At the same time, officials across various levels of government argued over whether it was wise to publicly disclose evidence of foreign interference. Some feared that issuing warnings would backfire — feeding public doubt about the security of U.S. voting systems rather than reassuring voters.

The Russian operations exposed serious weaknesses in America’s election infrastructure. Cybersecurity at the state and local levels was inadequate, and voter registration databases were far less secure than they should have been. Many jurisdictions were still using outdated voting machines, some of which lacked paper backups — making them especially vulnerable to tampering by a determined adversary.

Like burglars in the night, Russian intelligence tested the locks to see which ones were less secure than others. In Illinois, intruders siphoned voter data (including personal details) for hundreds of thousands of records; in other states, they rattled doorknobs and tested response times. Officials later acknowledged at least one instance of data manipulation that was detected and corrected. Even where exploitation failed, the mapping itself was valuable.

A top-secret NSA report, later published by The Intercept, detailed how Russian military intelligence compromised a U.S. election vendor — widely reported as VR Systems — and then sent spear-phishing emails to local election officials just days before the vote. Breaching a vendor was just one entry point; it was many, multiplied across jurisdictions that rely on the same software and support.

VR Systems, the Florida-based election vendor targeted in the GRU operation, provided software used in multiple states, including Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. A breach of one vendor meant potential access to dozens of counties and jurisdictions, exposing a structural weakness in America’s decentralized election system. The attack demonstrated how privatized infrastructure and fragmented oversight created systemic risk far beyond the initial point of compromise.

In fact, President Barack Obama was so concerned about Russian attempts to hack election infrastructure in 2016 that he publicly claimed after the election to have warned Putin against engaging in it.

“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the DNC hack] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself,” Obama said at a December press conference. “So in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process.”

That was not true. The leaked NSA report found that Russian tampering continued into October, and Putin, of course, understood that there would be no serious consequences if his man ended up in the White House. That was proven true when Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak about sanctions conveyed a willingness to reset relations even as the U.S. was sanctioning Moscow for the interference.

Intelligence assessments later underscored that in 2016, the Kremlin’s operators mostly looked rather than overtly flipped votes. But instead of diminishing the threat, this should be considered Russia’s attempt to clarify the strategy. Moscow was building a blueprint for how to do worse later, while sowing enough confusion to reduce confidence in 2016 and beyond.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, repeatedly met with his longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer, and shared internal polling and strategy. At the same time, Russia was probing and mapping election systems in states and counties that the Trump campaign would have considered crucial to its electoral prospects. The Senate called Manafort’s relationships with Kremlin-aligned figures a “grave counterintelligence threat,” an extraordinary phrase in an official report.

Russian election infrastructure probing still mattered for several reasons, even if there is no evidence that it overtly flipped votes.

First, it augmented targeting. Access to voter database fields, including addresses, dates of birth, and voter history, can enhance micro-targeting and suppression efforts by hostile actors — especially when paired with hacked campaign analytics or internal polling flowing, in part, through people like Manafort to a Russian intelligence officer. Even rumors of database compromise can depress confidence and turnout in competitive precincts.

Second, it enabled disruption at key choke points. Election management systems, such as e-pollbooks, are brittle during peak periods. A single vendor compromise, or even a well-timed outage at a county, can generate lines, provisional ballot confusion, and news coverage that feeds a narrative of utter chaos. The NSA-documented spear-phishing of local officials through a vendor’s compromised systems was a blueprint for precisely that kind of scalable mischief.

Third, it amplified the information war. The hack-and-leak campaign achieved its maximum effect because trust in systems was already weakening. If someone can convince enough Americans that the process is corrupted, the truth of any given claim matters less. This shifts politics from persuasion to nihilism — exactly the terrain an authoritarian adversary prefers. The Senate report’s stark conclusion that neither the federal government nor the states were adequately prepared for the threat fed that cynicism.

Russia did not need to change a single vote in 2016 to damage American democracy. It needed to show that it could touch the system and then make us argue about what that meant. The debate made us less certain of our democratic institutions and further divided us — just as the Kremlin intended.

The probing of voter databases and vendors was a force demonstration. The hack-and-leak campaign was the narrative accelerant. Trump’s campaign didn’t have to run the operation to benefit from it; it just had to be willing to ride the wave–and it was.

Russia’s probing of our election infrastructure was a stress test the Kremlin passed — and it remains an open question as to whether the United States did. With Tulsi Gabbard, one of the Kremlin’s favorite Americans, currently serving as the Director of Intelligence, we have no way of knowing whether the 2024 election was also a probe — or an exploit.

Last week, we explored how the Kremlin’s hackers struck at the heart of the Democratic Party, stealing a vast cache of data that was weaponized to tilt the 2016 election toward Donald Trump. This week, we examine the networks, platforms, and private actors that shaped the digital infrastructure on which Russia would later launch its most extensive and successful intelligence operation since the Cold War.

Years before the first phishing email reached Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and long before Russian intelligence exfiltrated a single document, a series of parallel developments was quietly taking shape beneath the surface. Western tech executives were actively cultivating strategic relationships with the Kremlin, opening channels that would prove significant in the years to come.

In London, a British data firm was constructing a psychological profiling machine on a scale never before seen, blending commercial design with techniques drawn from military and behavioral science. At the same time, Russian intelligence services were institutionalizing their influence apparatus, transforming ad hoc online operations into a disciplined, state-backed infrastructure designed for long-term political interference and hybrid warfare. And surrounding it all, transnational oligarchic financial networks were embedding themselves into companies and platforms that would soon play decisive roles in reshaping politics and societies across the West.

Among the companies in this emerging nexus were Cambridge Analytica and its parent, SCL Group — entities positioned at the intersection of data, power, and influence.

SCL, Cambridge Analytica, and the Ownership Web

Behind Cambridge Analytica was SCL Group, a British psychological-operations outfit that specialized in behavioral profiling and strategic communications. For years, SCL operated in the shadows of the defense and intelligence world, taking on military and government work that fused data science with influence operations. Internally, its executives described their work as “psychological warfare” — the application of influence techniques to shape perceptions and behavior at scale. What distinguished SCL was not only the nature of its work but the structure of its ownership: the company’s shares and board representation were, at points in time, linked to London financiers whose networks overlapped with figures operating in or adjacent to Kremlin-aligned financial networks. Its founder, Nigel Oakes, grew up mingling with British royalty and once said of his business practices, “We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler... We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level.”

Julian Wheatland, later Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, joined SCL’s board as a representative tied to Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz — controversial Iranian-British property tycoons and former investors in SCL whose opaque offshore structures and aggressive financial schemes had long drawn scrutiny in London’s energy and finance circles. The brothers later became embroiled in a scandal involving the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube, which they hired during a legal battle with the UK Serious Fraud Office. Black Cube operatives posed as investors and journalists to infiltrate the investigation — a covert operation that exposed the Tchenguiz network’s willingness to deploy espionage tactics to protect its interests. Black Cube would later surface again in the United States, targeting journalists, including the journalist Ronan Farrow, in an effort to discredit his investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct.

The Tchenguiz brothers overlapped with figures close to Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian gas intermediary and Kremlin operative whose business empire controlled a critical junction between the state-controlled Russian natural gas giant Gazprom and Europe. In London, Firtash’s associates were tied to Tchenguiz-controlled entities and Firtash’s Group DF.

U.S. authorities long viewed Firtash as a conduit for Kremlin influence. In an April 2018 letter, Senator Roger Wicker described Firtash as a “direct agent of the Kremlin,” alleging that he was using proceeds from “ongoing corruption” to delay his extradition to Chicago, where he has been under federal indictment since 2014. Firtash has been repeatedly identified in U.S. court filings and intelligence assessments as a mafia-aligned oligarch embedded in Kremlin operations, operating at the intersection of political influence, energy monopolies, and organized crime. He was also a longtime partner of Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign manager during the 2016 election.

Firtash resurfaced during the 2020 election, when Trump’s operatives sought damaging information on Joe Biden and his son Hunter from Russian intelligence operatives, in an effort to discredit him during the election. Rudolph Giuliani’s team reached out to Firtash’s network, signaling that legal assistance in his U.S. extradition case might be possible in exchange for information on the Bidens.

From this network, Cambridge Analytica was spun off in 2013 as SCL’s American political arm, where at one point it was headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas – the same address that houses Rupert Murdoch’s empire, including the headquarters of Fox News. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the firm emerged from conversations between SCL Group director (and later CEO of Cambridge Analytica) Alexander Nix, Breitbart News Executive Chairman (and later Trump campaign strategist) Steve Bannon, and Republican megadonor Robert Mercer, who supplied the funding and political backing to bring SCL’s psychological profiling methods into U.S. elections. By 2014, Cambridge Analytica was active in dozens of congressional and state races. And by 2016, it had shifted its focus from working for Ted Cruz to Donald Trump, embedding itself inside the Republican campaign apparatus just as the presidential race intensified.

Mercer’s investment — and Bannon’s strategic interest — then transformed Cambridge Analytica from a niche operation into a central pillar of Republican campaign infrastructure. Whatever the internal disputes over which datasets or models ultimately powered the Trump campaign apparatus, Mercer’s money and Bannon’s strategic direction embedded the firm inside the party’s machinery just as the 2016 race intensified.

Zuckerberg, Milner, and Yandex

The story of how Russian networks penetrated the digital platforms that would later be weaponized for election interference also runs through Facebook.

In 2011, Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev reportedly met on the sidelines of the e-G8 forum in Deauville, France. During their 2012 meeting in Moscow, Medvedev recalled the earlier encounter, saying: “You said you felt a little unusual in this company. In any case, we had an interesting discussion, although not about every issue. That meeting was a long time ago, at least according to the modern pace of life – over a year ago in fact. I can tell you that Russia has been busy since then. You probably know that apart from oil, gas, gold and diamonds, Russia also has an IT industry.”

In October 2012, shortly after Facebook went public, Zuckerberg traveled to Moscow for a highly publicized visit. His first stop was Medvedev’s residence at Gorky. The two posed for photographs, and Zuckerberg presented Medvedev with a gray T-shirt printed with his Facebook URL. Behind the smiles, Medvedev urged Zuckerberg to open a Facebook research center in Russia and cautioned him against poaching Russian engineers. The timing was notable: the Kremlin had just weathered the largest wave of protests since the 1990s, many of which were organized through Facebook. Rather than banning the platform outright, Russian officials moved to cultivate influence with its leadership. According to Medvedev’s press office, the two men even joked about Facebook’s importance in the upcoming U.S. presidential campaign — an exchange that, in hindsight, foreshadowed the platform’s role in the 2016 election.

During the same trip, Medvedev’s press secretary said that Medvedev and Zuckerberg would also discuss Russian-based startups, and that Deputy Prime Ministers Vladislav Surkov and Arkady Dvorkovich were expected to attend. Surkov was the Kremlin’s chief political engineer, responsible for creating fake opposition parties and constructing the parallel reality that underpins Putin’s authoritarian system, while Dvorkovich would later reappear in 2016, reportedly meeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page during his Moscow trip.

These were not isolated encounters but part of a sustained channel between Facebook leadership and Kremlin power brokers. By the time Russian operatives began exploiting Facebook’s advertising systems and algorithms, Moscow had already spent years cultivating these relationships.

As the Kremlin pushed to project its economic power abroad, Russian oligarchs and state-linked financiers began pouring money into U.S. tech companies. Yuri Milner, a Russian venture capitalist with longstanding ties to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, used his investment company DST Global to embed Russian capital deep inside Silicon Valley. A former World Bank analyst, Milner rose to prominence through Mail.ru, one of Russia’s largest internet companies, and became closely involved in the Kremlin’s “modernization” initiatives during Medvedev’s presidency, which sought to align state-backed capital with emerging tech sectors.

In 2009, DST invested $200 million in Facebook, securing nearly a 2 percent stake and positioning Milner as a key foreign player in the company’s growth. Two years later, in 2011, DST bought shares in Twitter on the secondary market. Part of that funding came from VTB, a state-controlled state bank deeply intertwined with Russian intelligence and later sanctioned by the United States over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion of all of Ukraine.

Milner’s financial reach extended into Trump’s orbit as well. In 2015, one of his investment vehicles funneled $850,000 into Cadre, Jared Kushner’s real estate startup — a move later revealed as part of a broader Kremlin-linked financing scheme that channeled Russian state-backed capital into major U.S. tech firms and Trump’s inner circle.

Around the same period, Facebook struck a deal with Yandex, Russia’s dominant search engine, and granted it privileged access to Facebook’s “Friend Finder” API, giving it a direct line into the platform’s user network data. Shortly after the deal was struck, Yandex confirmed that it was handing confidential information to the FSB, including data on donors to Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption site. By 2014, as Russia was waging information warfare against Ukraine during the EuroMaidan protests and preparing to invade Ukraine, Facebook expanded the partnership, granting Yandex access to its “firehose” of public data for users in Russia, Ukraine, and other CIS states — an unfiltered stream of posts, likes, and activity. By extending this level of access to a Kremlin-compliant company already cooperating with Russian security services, Facebook effectively gave Russian intelligence unprecedented visibility into regional and cross-border social networks at the exact moment Moscow was building the digital architecture of its disinformation and influence operations.

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Inside the Cambridge Analytica Operation

While oligarchic capital and platform structures were being shaped in London and Silicon Valley, Cambridge Analytica was quietly assembling a psychological targeting system designed to plug directly into the heart of Western elections.

In 2013, Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan launched thisisyourdigitallife, a personality quiz app that harvested data not only from users but also from their entire Facebook friend network. Under Facebook’s permissive API rules at the time, this single app vacuumed up information from tens of millions of profiles — including likes, location data, relationship graphs, and personality traits inferred from online behavior. Kogan passed the full dataset to Cambridge Analytica, which used it as the raw material for its psychographic models.

The firm then fused this Facebook data with state voter rolls, consumer marketing databases, property records, credit files, and the Republican National Committee’s voter files. Using machine learning, Cambridge Analytica classified individuals along the “OCEAN” personality model — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism —assigning psychological scores that could predict how specific people would respond to different kinds of messages. These models didn’t just segment voters demographically but mapped their emotional triggers.

In practice, this meant Cambridge Analytica could identify whom to target, and how. Voters flagged as anxious were fed ads emphasizing threats and security; those identified as conscientious received messages highlighting law and order. More volatile segments could be nudged with provocative cultural content. All of this fed into automated microtargeting workflows that pushed tailored messages across Facebook, Google, YouTube, and programmatic ad exchanges. Campaign strategists could now reach voters at an industrial scale with psychologically tuned messages invisible to the broader public.

The company first tested these techniques in support of Ted Cruz, running granular experiments in early primary states to measure how different psychological appeals affected behavior. When Cruz faltered, Cambridge Analytica pivoted to Donald Trump’s campaign. It embedded staff inside Trump’s digital headquarters, integrating its psychographic models with the RNC’s voter data systems. Steve Bannon, then the company’s vice president, ensured that its psychological profiling methods became central to the campaign’s strategy.

Behind the scenes, Cambridge Analytica’s technical work was supported by AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm closely linked to SCL. AggregateIQ built much of the software infrastructure, including voter data platforms and targeting tools used not just in the U.S. but also in Brexit campaigns. These tools enabled campaigns to upload raw voter data, score individuals psychographically, and deploy tailored messaging at scale with little oversight.

Mercer’s money and Bannon’s backing transformed Cambridge Analytica from a niche consultancy into a core component of the Republican campaign machine. Whatever internal disputes persisted over which datasets or models ultimately powered Trump’s digital operation, the firm’s techniques—mass data integration, psychographic modeling, and precision behavioral manipulation — became baked into the party’s playbook.

Sam Patten had long operated in the same circles as Paul Manafort, who spent more than a decade advising pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politicians, including Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych, the former president. Patten and Manafort collaborated on projects for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, where Patten served as a political consultant and Konstantin Kilimnik —described by U.S. authorities as a Russian intelligence operative — functioned as Manafort’s right-hand man in Kyiv. Also, in the early 2000s, Patten worked in Moscow, along with Kilimnik. This same network of operatives would later be directly involved in Trump’s 2016 campaign through data operations, political consulting, and influence operations.

In February 2015, Patten and Kilimnik co-founded Begemot Ventures International, a Washington, D.C.–based consulting firm. The company’s work and networks overlapped with Cambridge Analytica’s ecosystem, effectively bridging foreign political operations and U.S. data infrastructure. Patten was a “trusted senior consultant” to SCL Group and reportedly performed various services for Cambridge Analytica. Patten would later plead guilty to funneling $50,000 in foreign money from a Ukrainian client into Trump’s inaugural committee.

By 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s data operation and Facebook’s ad infrastructure had fused into a single targeting machine inside the Trump campaign, as Facebook became embedded within the campaign’s digital core. Under aide Brad Parscale’s direction, the campaign built its media nerve center, “Project Alamo,” in San Antonio. There, staff from Facebook, Google, and Twitter worked side by side with the campaign’s team. Facebook’s role went far beyond offering advice; it embedded employees who actively optimized ad strategies in real time, helping the campaign fine-tune messaging and target audiences with surgical precision.

As The New Yorker reported, Parscale approached Facebook as a weapon — leveraging the platform’s reach and data infrastructure to maximum political effect. Trump’s team embraced this synergy far more aggressively than Clinton’s, conducting thousands of A/B tests per day and funneling real-time feedback back into Cambridge Analytica’s models. The campaign used “dark posts” — microtargeted Facebook ads that were invisible to anyone outside their target groups — to suppress turnout among likely Democratic voters and motivate key Republican segments in battleground states.

By the final stretch of the 2016 race, Cambridge Analytica’s apparatus was running at full capacity. Its psychographic models were integrated with Facebook’s ad systems, Trump’s voter files, and the RNC’s data infrastructure. Parscale’s team pushed out thousands of ads, Cambridge Analytica refined the psychological hooks, and Facebook’s embedded staff optimized delivery for maximum impact. The combined system was built to locate emotional pressure points, exploit them, and do so invisibly — utilizing the data of more than 50 million unsuspecting Facebook users.

Leaked internal documents later revealed that Cambridge Analytica operated in 68 countries, applying the same toolkit of psychographic profiling, algorithmic targeting, and voter manipulation across the globe. It functioned as a private political intelligence and influence apparatus — an outsourced psyops capability for hire, built to weaponize data at scale. Even after the scandal broke and the company formally collapsed, its methods endured, absorbed into mainstream campaign playbooks and replicated by other actors worldwide.

Russia’s Fingerprints and WikiLeaks

Cambridge Analytica’s orbit repeatedly intersected with Russian interests. Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who operated as an outside contractor for SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica through his company Global Science Research, harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles via his personality quiz app. He held an affiliation with St. Petersburg State University and received Russian government grants to study social networks. Kogan has denied sharing data with Russian authorities, but the overlap raised clear counterintelligence alarms.

In 2014 and 2015, executives from Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL met with officials from Russian oil giant Lukoil. Whistleblowers later said these meetings were not focused on energy, but on U.S. political influence techniques and voter data. Lukoil’s leadership, including CEO Vagit Alekperov, maintained close ties with oligarch Aras Agalarov, who hosted Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Lukoil’s vice president attended that event and was in the VIP section.

By June 2016, as Russian military intelligence prepared to weaponize the DNC and Podesta email troves through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix reached out directly to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, offering help to “organize” the material. Assange confirmed the outreach but said that he declined the overture. After the election, a Cambridge Analytica director visited Assange in February 2017, while Brittany Kaiser, a director at the firm who visited Assange while he was ensconced at the Ecuadorian embassy, claimed that she quietly channeled cryptocurrency and donations to WikiLeaks.

Taken together, these overlapping channels formed a dense transnational network linking Western data operations, Russian intelligence cutouts, oligarchic capital, and WikiLeaks — the distribution channel for material hacked by Russian intelligence. As we detailed in Chapter 9, WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in laundering hacked information into the American political mainstream, amplifying Moscow’s operation through the veneer of transparency. The Senate Intelligence Committee would later describe Cambridge Analytica’s links to Russian-linked entities, including Lukoil and WikiLeaks, as presenting “counterintelligence concerns” for the United States.

Prigozhin’s Translator Project

While Cambridge Analytica was building its psychological targeting engine in the West, Russian intelligence was assembling its own operational arm in St. Petersburg — one designed to weaponize social media platforms.

In April 2014, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — financed and controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Concord group — created a new department known internally as the Translator Project (Проект Переводчики). Its mission was to conduct covert information operations in foreign languages, focusing primarily on the United States.

The Translator Project operated through Glavset LLC, a Concord front company at the same address as the IRA. Mikhail Bystrov oversaw the project, Maria and Robert Bovda led English-language teams, and Elena Khusyaynova managed budgets and logistics. Strategic direction flowed up to Prigozhin, who personally approved major content themes.

Between March and August 2015, the project recruited 80–90 English-speaking staff, trained in American slang, race relations, and current events. Internal manuals instructed employees to “act as if you live in America,” refining their ability to mimic authentic U.S. voices and avoid linguistic giveaways.

By 2015, the Translator Project was targeting U.S. audiences directly. Trolls operated coordinated accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, using VPNs and proxy servers to mask their location. Internal IRA memos outlined key narratives: racial tensions and police shootings, anti-immigration themes, pro-gun and nationalist messaging, anti-Clinton and anti-Obama attacks framed through corruption and weakness, and “traditional values” paired with anti-LBGTQ rhetoric.

Fake pages launched during this period—including Blacktivist, Heart of Texas, Secured Borders, and Being Patriotic — would later become some of the most viral assets of 2016. By December 2015, English-language content from IRA trolls reached three to four million Americans per week through organic engagement alone.

Concord accountants began submitting monthly reports titled “U.S. election project” as early as May 2015, detailing ad buys, VPN infrastructure, and reconnaissance trips to U.S. cities to collect intelligence. Internal correspondence captured Prigozhin boasting that his “information soldiers” could “enter any foreign conversation.” U.S. intelligence later confirmed that by mid-2015, Translator Project content was already testing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton narratives—months before Trump announced his candidacy.

The Translator Project provided a structured, well-funded framework for Russia’s online influence operations. By the time GRU hackers breached Democratic Party networks, the psychological battlefield had already been mapped and seeded. As we outlined in Chapter 7, the Internet Research Agency marked the point where Russia’s domestic disinformation apparatus evolved into a global offensive weapon aimed squarely at the American electorate.

By mid-2016, three operations had locked into place, distinct in structure but increasingly synchronized in their effects. The Kremlin’s campaign was fully operational: IRA troll operators were saturating U.S. social media with divisive and anti-Clinton narratives while GRU hackers quietly penetrated Democratic networks, exfiltrating politically sensitive material and staging it for release. Inside Trump Tower and in San Antonio, Cambridge Analytica’s psychological targeting engine was wired directly into the campaign’s core, fusing harvested Facebook data, RNC voter files, and psychographic models into a precise and strategic influence weapon. And looming over it all, Facebook’s advertising systems provided the amplification channels that allowed each of these efforts to converge with remarkable efficiency.

These were separate operations moving in parallel, but they began to function like components of a single machine. Russian intelligence stole and weaponized information; troll farms seeded narratives and probed cultural fault lines; Cambridge Analytica microtargeted voters with psychological precision; Facebook’s algorithms drove the content into millions of feeds, invisibly and at scale; and WikiLeaks acted as the laundering channel, injecting stolen material into the political mainstream under the guise of transparency. What took shape was a fused ecosystem — state power, private influence operators, social media platforms, and information cutouts aligning to wage a coordinated operation to get Trump elected and into the White House. By the time Russian intelligence breached the DNC, the battlefield had already been mapped, the infrastructure assembled, and the vectors of exploitation blown wide open.

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Last week, we explored how the Kremlin used its cut-out, WikiLeaks, to launder stolen emails and bolster Donald Trump’s campaign. This week, we turn to Russia’s cyber-attack that made those leaks possible.

In 2016, Moscow’s hackers began carrying out cyberattacks that pushed their campaign of political sabotage into the very core of American democracy. They had already tested these methods in Ukraine — which served as a laboratory for Russia’s hybrid war playbook, from political capture and information warfare to cyberattacks and election interference — and had refined them further across Europe, targeting elections and referendums with growing sophistication. By 2015, Russia’s intelligence services had fixed their sights on the Democratic Party, probing its defenses and preparing the ground for intrusion. Their objective was clear: to prevent Hillary Clinton, long regarded by Putin as a formidable adversary, from ever setting foot in the White House. And now it was America’s turn. Russian intelligence moved from preparation to testing and finally to execution, breaking into the Democrats’ servers and unleashing a theft that would produce a vast cache of data and secrets and set the stage for an unprecedented leak-and-disinformation operation to shape and change the outcome of the 2016 election.

Shortly after Trump rode down his gilded escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy, and long before most Americans were paying attention to the presidential race, Russian intelligence operatives were already inside the Democrats’ networks. In July 2015, hackers tied to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, quietly infiltrated the Democratic National Committee. This unit, known as Cozy Bear, or APT29, specialized in long-term espionage — slipping into networks quietly, stealing intelligence methodically, and remaining undetected for months at a time. Cozy Bear had already been linked to earlier intrusions against the White House, the State Department, and foreign ministries across Europe.

The following spring, a second team from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, broke in as well. Known as Fancy Bear, or APT28, this unit was far more aggressive, operating with the mindset of an offensive strike force. Fancy Bear had already carried out disruptive operations in Europe, including the 2015 breach of Germany’s Bundestag and cyberattacks on French television. In Ukraine, between 2014 and 2016, the group seeded a legitimate Android app used by artillery forces with its X-Agent spyware, enabling Russian forces to track Ukrainian units in the field and gain a battlefield advantage.

By April 2016, both groups were dug into the DNC’s servers — Cozy Bear cataloguing intelligence with patience, Fancy Bear moving more brazenly, planting malware, and siphoning off data at will.

Cozy Bear’s hallmark was patience. Investigators concluded that Cozy Bear operated quietly – mapping systems, maintaining persistence, and collecting intelligence over many months, rather than immediately exfiltrating masses of data. That slow, careful approach is characteristic of espionage-style operators whose goals are information collection and long-term access rather than dramatic, attention-grabbing disruption.

On the other hand, Fancy Bear’s activity in spring 2016 was more aggressive and tactically visible: spear-phishing campaigns, credential harvesting, and the deployment of custom malware families and drop-tools that allowed quicker access and data staging for exfiltration. This group’s methods and targeting patterns—particularly toward political and defense-related email accounts—fit a profile of operators conducting targeted intrusions with a faster tempo, which in this case coincided with data exfiltration that ultimately surfaced publicly through personas such as “Guccifer 2.0” and through the Kremlin’s selected publication channel, WikiLeaks.

Fancy Bear’s methods were deceptively simple. In March 2016, GRU officers sent out spearphishing emails disguised as routine Google security alerts. One of those fraudulent messages reached Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. With a single click, the hackers unlocked his entire Gmail archive. Other campaign staffers and volunteers fell into the same trap, handing over opposition research, strategy documents, and private communications. Similarly, GRU operatives broke into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which shared part of its network with the DNC. By late spring, they were moving through Democratic servers with ease, planting malware and pulling out thousands of files.

The breach finally came to light on April 28, 2016, when DNC staff spotted strange activity on their servers. In fact, the FBI had tried warning the DNC about suspicious activity months earlier, but the alerts never translated into action — a lapse later flagged as a serious counterintelligence failure. Now, with the compromise undeniable, the party called in CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm, to investigate. By June, the intruders had been kicked out. But before vanishing, the hackers staged one last raid, siphoning off hundreds of gigabytes of data to GRU-controlled servers.

As former FBI Director James Comey later testified, the Bureau first warned the DNC about a suspected Russian intrusion in September 2015 and continued contacting a DNC IT contractor through early 2016. But the FBI never obtained direct access to the DNC’s physical servers; instead, once the DNC hired CrowdStrike in spring 2016, the FBI worked through the firm, receiving forensic images and indicators rather than imaging the machines itself. Comey alleged that the FBI had made “multiple requests” for access that were not granted. Part of the reason may have been political: in July 2015, the Bureau had opened up an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

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The DNC might have been suspicious that the massive counter-intelligence breach that Comey was now warning about was a predicate for the FBI to access its email servers in order to build the case against Clinton. Here, the Kremlin had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. It had ginned up social media chatter about Clinton’s alleged criminality to such an extent that it had penetrated right-wing media and Republican talking points, forcing the FBI to open an investigation into her use of a private email server. That act, in turn, made Democrats deeply suspicious about Comey’s motives, denying the Bureau direct access to their servers and ensuring that the Russian hack could go on for months before the DNC did anything about it.

Stealing the data was only phase one; the core Kremlin operation was to weaponize it — to reshape, repackage, selectively leak, and in some cases fabricate or alter material before release, disseminating it into the mainstream of American politics as an instrument to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and tilt the scales toward Trump. To accomplish this, Moscow constructed layers of disguise, building cut-outs that could stand in for the Kremlin while concealing its fingerprints, false fronts designed not only to launder the origin of the leaks but to muddy the trail so thoroughly that when the documents finally surfaced, Russia would have the luxury of plausible deniability, insisting that it had nothing to do with carrying out a multi-faceted attack on the U.S. election to get Trump elected.

But for Moscow, the operation also had another purpose. The hackers who had tunneled deep into the Democrats’ servers were never meant to remain invisible operators in the shadows, content with espionage in the traditional sense. Their theft was only the opening phase of an operation designed to be weaponized — hacked material repurposed for influence operations and reintroduced into the public sphere under fabricated identities that simulated grassroots dissent and carried the mystique of rogue actors. In June 2016, one of those identities appeared in the form of DCLeaks, a website packaged as a collective of American hacktivists exposing corruption, but in reality conceived and directed by the GRU, its content scripted inside Russian military offices and its targets chosen with precision for maximum disruption.

Only days later, after CrowdStrike publicly identified Russia as the culprit, another persona emerged — “Guccifer 2.0.”Claiming to be a lone Romanian hacker, “Guccifer” insisted that he had personally broken into the DNC and produced stolen files as proof. In reality, the persona was a GRU officer operating under a false flag, communicating in broken English and hiding behind a fabricated identity.

Both DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were fabrications engineered inside Russia’s psychological operations units (GRU units 26165 and 74455), designed to give the stolen material a veneer of authenticity while affording Moscow plausible deniability. From these fronts, the data began to flow outward — at times in carefully measured drips to handpicked reporters, and at other moments in wholesale transfers to WikiLeaks, which would time its releases for maximum impact depending on the electoral calendar.

In parallel, “Guccifer 2.0” carried out communications with U.S. figures and outlets: he exchanged direct messages with Trump confidant Roger Stone, fed material to Jared Kushner’s New York Observer, and passed stolen documents to a Florida GOP operative and a congressional candidate. As we noted last week, these contacts unfolded amid WikiLeaks’ rising role as the Kremlin’s preferred cut-out to disseminate the hacked material — and in the same broad window when Paul Manafort was alleged to have visited Julian Assange in London.

On July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks dumped nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails into the public sphere. The release landed with precision timing, detonating on the eve of the Democrats’ showcase in Philadelphia. The fallout was immediate, with protesters filling the streets, furious Bernie Sanders supporters accusing party officials of tilting the primary to Clinton, and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign before she could gavel the convention to order. What should have been a week of unity turned into a spectacle of division, as television screens across America replayed images of chaos inside and outside the convention hall.

Trump and his allies seized on the leaks as proof that the system was “rigged,” weaving them into his campaign’s central narrative of betrayal and corruption. Cable news ran wall-to-wall coverage of the DNC’s internal fight, overshadowing Clinton’s effort to present herself as the steady alternative to Trump’s volatility. Moscow had delivered a propaganda victory: it had fractured the Democratic Party on the eve of its most important moment and fed Trump a narrative that would echo through the campaign trail.

But the biggest surprise was still to come. The Kremlin was holding back its most potent weapon, timed for maximum disruption in the final weeks of the race: the October surprise, courtesy of Moscow.

On October 7, 2016, only hours after the release of the Access Hollywood tape threatened to sink Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks began publishing John Podesta’s emails. Day after day, thousands of messages were released, dominating headlines and drowning out Trump’s scandal. Though the emails contained no single devastating revelation, they provided endless material for Trump’s attacks and spawned conspiracy theories like “Pizzagate.” The timing was no coincidence: Russia had staged its October surprise to maximum effect. Trump himself embraced it eagerly, and in the final month of the campaign, he mentioned WikiLeaks more than 160 times, telling rally crowds repeatedly, “I love WikiLeaks” and using the stolen material as a central theme of his closing argument.

That same day, U.S. intelligence officials publicly accused the Russian government of directing the hacks and leaks to interfere in the election. But their statement was lost in the noise of Trump’s scandal and the Podesta releases, which bookended the intelligence warnings on October 7. The Kremlin had manufactured so much informational chaos that even an extraordinary warning from American intelligence went under the radar. And Moscow’s efforts were not limited to cut-outs like WikiLeaks or fabricated personas like Guccifer.

If the goal was to create dissent in the Democratic base and suppress enthusiasm for Clinton’s candidacy among Sanders’ supporters, Russia could not have been more successful. One of the revelations in the WikiLeaks Podesta data dump was the role that high-ranking officials had played to tilt the field for Clinton.

In March 2016, during the Democratic primaries, Donna Brazile was serving as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee while also working as a CNN political commentator. At that time, Wasserman Schultz was still DNC chair. The Podesta revealed that Brazile had shared debate and town hall questions with Clinton’s campaign in advance, including one about the Flint water crisis before the CNN Democratic debate in Flint on March 6, 2016, and another on the death penalty ahead of a CNN/TV One town hall on March 13, 2016.

The leaks became public in October 2016, when WikiLeaks released the hacked Podesta emails. Initially, Brazile denied the allegations, but after Trump’s first inauguration, she admitted in an op-ed that she had shared the questions, calling it a mistake. By then, she had already stepped in as interim DNC chair after Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the Democratic National Convention and had served in that role for the remainder of the 2016 campaign.

The episode left lasting damage, deepening mistrust between the Democratic Party’s establishment and its progressive base. Into this void stepped Kremlin tool Jill Stein, who attracted a sizeable number of Sanders supporters – enough to sway the election against Clinton in key swing states.

Meanwhile, investigators later found that the Kremlin’s hacking operations were not limited to the Democratic Party. Russian hackers did in fact breach some Republican targets in 2016, though not on the scale of the Democratic National Committee intrusions, and the material was never made public. Russian cyber actors collected limited data from Republicans and Republican organizations, including old domains of the Republican National Committee, but not the current RNC network – perhaps to use as kompromat down the road, but certainly not to leak publicly. In Congressional testimony, Comey confirmed that while there was evidence of intrusions into some Republican accounts, “there was not the same kind of release of material” that occurred with the Democrats. This asymmetry reinforced the assessment that Russia’s operations were designed to damage Clinton and boost Trump.

The Kremlin also did not hesitate to use Americans to do its dirty work. John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach County deputy sheriff, first gained notoriety under the online persona “BadVolf,” where he doxxed and published confidential Florida records. That campaign drew FBI scrutiny and a search of his home in March 2016.

Weeks later, Dougan donned a wig, drove to Canada, and fled to Moscow, where he received asylum. From Russia, he claimed to have helped create DCLeaks, but domain and hosting records contradict his account, and U.S. indictments and intelligence assessments attribute the operation to GRU officers, not to him. From Moscow, Dougan also pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy, one of the most corrosive conspiracies in modern political history, while boasting that he possessed Epstein-related material from his Palm Beach years. (Those claims remain unverified.)

It was after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that Dougan resurfaced as a key propaganda asset. Investigators tied him to more than 150 fake “local news” sites and AI-driven content farms, including outlets like DC Weekly and the Chicago Chronicle, which funneled Kremlin talking points into English-language media and laundered them into Western feeds. By 2024, Dougan had turned his attention squarely back to U.S. politics. Documents reviewed by European services and U.S. reporters linked his network to Russian intelligence facilitators — including contacts around GRU Unit 29155 and Moscow think-tank intermediaries — and traced his role in seeding deepfakes and fabricated stories, notably anti-Kamala Harris content. In effect, Dougan tested out Russia’s advanced AI operations, moving from the 2016 hack-and-leak playbook to an AI-amplified propaganda network aimed at shaping the 2024 election.

Russia’s cyberattacks during the 2016 election extended well beyond leaks and disinformation. GRU operatives probed election systems in more than twenty states, breaching voter databases in Illinois and Arizona and stealing hundreds of thousands of voter records. They also targeted election software vendors and county officials, testing vulnerabilities in the very machinery of American democracy.

In July 2018, the Mueller investigation led to the indictment of twelve GRU officers for their roles in the DNC, DCCC, and Clinton campaign hacks. The indictment detailed how Russian military units stole the data, laundered it through DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, and funneled it to WikiLeaks. It even traced Bitcoin payments used to rent servers and buy infrastructure. Mueller concluded that Russia’s active measures were “sweeping and systematic” and personally approved by Vladimir Putin. (The indictment specifically tied the operation to the GRU’s Unit 26165 and Unit 74455–Fancy Bear, or APT28; earlier probes had identified the quieter SVR-linked Cozy Bear, or APT29, as the first to infiltrate the DNC in 2015.)

The Kremlin’s hack proved devastatingly effective. It fractured the Democratic Party, fueled Trump’s message, and sowed distrust in America’s electoral process. It also set a precedent that in the digital age, a foreign power could reach into the heart of a democratic election, steal secrets, and weaponize them in real time. This was espionage fused with psychological warfare and a template that would be repeated in future elections around the world.

Chapter 9…

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The 2016 presidential election unfolded amid a torrent of Russian information operations that blended traditional leaks, cyber-intrusions, and hyper-networked media dynamics. At the center stood WikiLeaks, an organization that had been founded a decade earlier to publish secret documents in the public interest but was now releasing politically explosive caches stolen from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. Those email dumps had outsized media and agenda-setting effects in the election season’s most compressed, high-attention windows.

The GRU, Russian military intelligence, hacked the materials and used WikiLeaks as a distribution channel. Tracing how WikiLeaks got there — and how its money, methods, media savvy, and the political ecosystem amplified its content — helps explain how Russia influenced the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.

The Australian hacker Julian Assange positioned himself as a radical transparency activist who believed secrecy was the currency of power. In 2006, he helped launch WikiLeaks, which quickly became famous for publishing large troves of secret material, including a cache of State Department emails that shook the diplomatic world. Years before the 2016 U.S. election, Assange had already cultivated high-visibility relationships with Russian state media and with figures working in or around the post-Soviet information space. These links mapped a consistent arc: Assange had access to Russian outlets, a controversial “accredited” collaborator with deep roots in Moscow named Israel Shamir, and a shared media agenda that U.S. intelligence later described as collaboration between RT, the Kremlin’s international broadcaster, and WikiLeaks.

In January 2012, while under house arrest in Britain and fighting extradition to Sweden, where he had been charged with rape, Assange struck a deal to host a weekly talk show, The World Tomorrow, on RT. RT’s editor-in-chief and Kremlin mouthpiece, Margarita Simonyan, claimed that the program “fit” RT’s brand and declined to disclose Assange’s pay, but there is no question that Assange was now on the Kremlin’s payroll, even if the disburser was RT.

The show began airing that spring. The arrangement did more than offer Assange airtime and money; it placed him inside the Kremlin’s flagship media ecosystem and aligned his profile with RT’s editorial line.

U.S. intelligence would later characterize RT as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet” and note that the channel “actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.” Meanwhile, Assange's ties to the Kremlin kept growing. In 2013, after Edward Snowden copied and gave journalists a large cache of classified American documents, WikiLeaks sprang into action to help Snowden. Assange bragged that WikiLeaks paid for Snowden’s lodging in Hong Kong, his flight out, and offered legal support. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks aide, escorted Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow. Harrison claims she and Snowden intended to continue on to Latin America, but when that did not pan out, she stayed with Snowden in the airport’s transit zone for almost six weeks until Russia granted him temporary asylum. (Twelve years later, Snowden continues to live in Russia and became a Russian citizen after taking an “oath of allegiance” following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)

In August 2013, RT’s Simonyan visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was holed up and fighting extradition. The next month, RT’s Russian-language site published a story announcing that RT was “the only Russian media partner of WikiLeaks in Russia” and had “received access to new leaks of secret information.” In late 2014, Simonyan claimed she visited Assange in London again. What they discussed remains unclear, but what is certain is that Assange had spent the preceding years hurting America’s relationship with its allies by publishing leaked documents from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. It would not be the last time he would harm Clinton.

In 2015, Assange took part remotely in RT’s 10th-anniversary events in Moscow, a gala notable for the presence of Vladimir Putin and Western political figures, including Michael Flynn and Jill Stein. Secret visitor logs reviewed by The Guardian show that during June–July 2016 — just a month before WikiLeaks published the hacked DNC emails — Assange hosted multiple RT figures at the embassy in London, including RT’s London bureau chief and one of its anchors.

Simonyan was not the only Kremlin tool to visit Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in the years after he went on RT’s payroll. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who had spent the preceding years working for Kremlin-aligned interests in Ukraine, allegedly visited Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy on multiple occasions, including in the spring of 2016 as he was joining Trump’s team as campaign manager. Manafort denied the meetings, and WikiLeaks dismissed the reports as a “hoax”, but documents from Ecuador’s intelligence service listed “Paul Manaford [sic]” among Assange’s visitors.

Then there was WikiLeaks’ relationship with someone who went by the name “Israel Shamir” — a shadowy Russian–Swedish writer, antisemite, and Holocaust denier. Reporting by The Guardian described Shamir as “in charge of handling Moscow cables” for WikiLeaks and noted that he invoiced the group for “journalism,” while also alleging that he served as the organization’s spokesperson or conduit in Russia. Shamir, who also went by the aliases Jöran Jermas, Adam Ermash, Izrail Schmerler, Vassili Krasevsky, and Robert David, was a propagandist for Belarus and Russia while working with Assange.

WikiLeaks had first made its mark in 2010, when it published around 250,000 U.S. State Department cables that caused tremendous embarrassment for both Hillary Clinton’s State Department and foreign governments. It released the first batch of the State Department files on November 28 of that year. On November 29, Assange drafted a “letter of authority” to the Russian Consulate in London, which he signed the following day, empowering “my friend, Israel Shamir,” to drop off and collect Assange’s passport, “in order to get a visa,” from the Russian consulate in London. On Nov. 30, 2010 — the date of Assange’s letter asking Shamir to get him a Russian visa — Interpol issued a Red Notice seeking Assange’s arrest for the Swedish rape allegations.

Shamir later told Russian News Service radio that he had personally gotten Russia to issue a visa for Assange, but that it had come too late to get him out of the Swedish rape investigation. Russia, Shamir said, “would be one of those places where he and his organization would be comfortable operating.” In response to whether Assange had friends in the Kremlin, Shamir smiled and answered, “Let’s hope that’s the case.”

This would not be the last time that Assange would allegedly try to escape to Russia. By 2017, Assange’s connections with Moscow had grown so close that Russian diplomats discussed a secret plan to extract him from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and fly him to Moscow. The plan, described in documents obtained by The Guardian, ultimately collapsed, but it underscored how far the Kremlin was willing to go to protect a partner who had become central to its information warfare against the West.

Investigations also documented Shamir’s role handling WikiLeaks’ Russia and post-Soviet cables: he took Moscow-related cables that WikiLeaks had published, sought to sell stories to Russian outlets, and met senior officials in Belarus, where state media boasted of a “Belarus dossier.” Interfax described him as WikiLeaks’ “Russian representative.” The unredacted usage of the material risked aiding Belarus’s KGB against opposition activists. Assange later played down the relationship between himself and Shamir, saying WikiLeaks worked with many regional journalists. Still, Shamir’s efforts to get Assange to Russia immediately after the publication of the cables underscored their closeness.

In the wake of the State Department cable leaks, major payment processors, including PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and financial intermediaries, refused to process WikiLeaks donations. WikiLeaks needed to pivot quickly in order to gain revenue.

That pivot was cryptocurrency. WikiLeaks became an early high-profile adopter, accepting Bitcoin donations and at times touting the massive appreciation of those holdings. Independent crypto trade press has estimated WikiLeaks’ very large cumulative BTC receipts over the years, underscoring how the blockade inadvertently helped bootstrap WikiLeaks’ crypto pipeline.

Whether the Kremlin or any of its cutouts used crypto to help funnel money to WikiLeaks is unclear, but there is no question that Moscow did authorize payment to Assange when RT acquired rights to broadcast Assange’s interview show, The World Tomorrow. In this way, Assange continued to profit from his relationship with Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 Clinton email leaks.

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The first Russian intelligence attempt to hack into the DNC began in 2015. Russia-linked APT29 – known as “Cozy Bear” and tied to Russia’s SVR – gained access to DNC servers in the summer of 2015, just as Trump was announcing his candidacy. The second Russian unit, APT28 – known as “Fancy Bear” and tied to the GRU – arrived in April 2016. In August, the FBI notified the DNC of the breach. That fall, Russia-linked phishing attempts sent spam to Clinton’s private account in the hopes of accessing her campaign.

By mid-2016, two GRU units penetrated Democratic targets (DNC, DCCC, and senior Clinton staffers) using spearphishing and malware, exfiltrating a trove of documents and emails. The operation used online personas — “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0” — to stage and launder the releases. The Guccifer 2.0 persona reached out to WikiLeaks and transmitted encrypted instructions to access an archive of stolen DNC files in mid-July 2016. In its indictment of the GRU officers responsible, the Department of Justice later characterized WikiLeaks as encouraging both receipt and the strategic timing release of “Hillary-related” material.

Three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments from top DNC officials, ensuring maximum political shock just as Democrats gathered to unify after a bruising primary season. The emails showed that the DNC, which was supposed to be neutral in the Clinton-Bernie Sanders primaries, had taken action to favor Hillary. The leak was designed to create tension with Sanders supporters even as the Clinton campaign was attempting to consolidate Democratic support in advance of the November election. The DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned within 48 hours of the WikiLeaks publication, a direct and highly visible consequence of the leaks

In September of 2016, as it was leaking information to harm Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks also reached out to Donald Trump Jr. via direct message on Twitter. In messages that lasted for months, it asked him for Trump’s tax returns, urged the Trump campaign to reject the results of the election as rigged on Election Day, and, after the election, requested that Trump demand that Australia appoint Assange as its ambassador to the United States – a move that would have presumably rewarded him for his role in helping Trump get elected.

On October 7th, the Trump Access Hollywood tape dropped, signaling a near-death knell for his campaign. Hours earlier, U.S. intelligence agencies had issued a joint statement publicly attributing the dissemination of hacked Democratic emails by WikiLeaks to “Russian-directed efforts,” warning that Moscow was conducting an ongoing attack on the American election. That very afternoon, WikiLeaks began releasing the emails it had hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in daily batches, creating a drumbeat that dominated Twitter and repeatedly reset news cycles. The serialized approach, such as #PodestaEmails2 and #PodestaEmails3, proved algorithmically potent. Analysis of Twitter’s Trending Topics found Podesta-related hashtags trended 1,917 times and stayed on U.S. Trending lists every day in the 30 days before Election Day, a striking agenda-setting feat.

Ecuador, which had housed Assange for years, now found itself supporting a fugitive who was very much harming the campaign of a woman who could become the next president of the United States. It cut Assange’s embassy internet access on Oct. 15–16, long after the publication of the first leaks, but that made no difference. WikiLeaks’ pre-arranged contingency plans kept the releases flowing.

The DNC emails were exactly the kind of gossipy catnip that the Kremlin knew American media could not resist. They showed staffers speaking disparagingly of Sanders during the 2016 primaries and discussing tactics inconsistent with the neutrality expected out of the DNC in a primary. News organizations highlighted the most damaging highlights and internal friction. The immediate political effect, including Wasserman Schultz’s resignation at the convention’s outset, gave the leaks a dramatic arc and ensured blanket coverage. In parallel, Clinton’s campaign began publicly attributing the hack to Russia, priming the larger interference narrative that would grow throughout the fall.

The Podesta cache contained thousands of mundane campaign emails punctuated by a trickle of newsy nuggets (snippets from Clinton’s closed press Goldman Sachs talks; staff infighting; oppo tidbits) that could be repackaged into daily stories. Crucially, the format of release — daily batches with numbers and hashtags — was perfectly tuned for social media and cable programming. The timing — kicking off on the very day the Access Hollywood tape dropped — also functioned as a counter-programming tool that took attention away from Trump’s misogynistic words and reframed conversations. Though nothing in the Podesta emails was even remotely as explosive as Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comments, the Kremlin understood that American media could not resist waiting for and covering the next dump with baited breath, just in case it revealed something salacious.

Chief among the gossip-mongers was The New York Times, the paper of record. In just six days, the Times ran as many email cover stories, derived from the GRU hack, as it did on all policy issues in the 69 days before the election. That is precisely the window when the Podesta serializations dominated. The Trump Access Hollywood tape did not receive even remotely that amount of coverage – just as the Kremlin intended.

Both The New York Times and right-leaning media and social networks served as the perfect useful idiots for this particular Kremlin operation. They formed a pipeline that could ingest a daily email morsel and re-broadcast it at scale, often with conspiratorial inflection. The effect was not merely the existence of leaks but the structured, sustained amplification across aligned outlets and social graphs.

What’s more, Assange and WikiLeaks cynically exploited the leaks to imply that they came from inside the Democratic House. In the early morning of July 10, 2016, a 27-yearold DNC staffer named Seth Rich was shot in the back in Washington, D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood. From the outset, D.C. police treated the case as a likely attempted robbery – one of several in the area that summer – though no suspects were immediately identified. The Metropolitan Police Department posted its customary reward and appealed for tips.

Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, soon joined the fray. On August 9, he appeared on the Dutch TV program Nieuwsuur. Asked about risks to WikiLeaks’ sources, he volunteered Rich’s name and then, when pressed whether Rich was a source, said that WikiLeaks never commented on sources – a ploy to falsely insinuate that Rich had provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails. That same day, WikiLeaks’ official accounts announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s murder. The bounty pushed the fringe conspiracy about Rich and the leaks into mainstream conversation, exactly as the Kremlin intended.

Later that month, Assange discussed Rich again in a Fox5 DC interview, reinforcing the idea that there was something murky about the murder and WikiLeaks’ sources while again refusing to state anything verifiable. The clip was then recycled across social media, helping churn the conspiracy further.

Assange kept promoting the Rich conspiracy even as he understood the timeline of his murder did not line up with WikiLeaks’ receipt of the emails. As he well knew, the GRU, using the “Guccifer 2.0” persona and other cutouts, provided WikiLeaks with the stolen DNC materials after Rich’s death. “Guccifer 2.0” emailed WikiLeaks an encrypted archive of DNC files on July 14, 2016 — four days after the Rich murder — and WikiLeaks acknowledged receipt before publishing on July 22. Assange’s public insinuations about Rich came while WikiLeaks was still courting the GRU cutout. In fact, WikiLeaks was working to obtain files from “Guccifer 2.0” even as Assange floated the Rich conspiracy on air and long after Rich had already died.

Whatever Assange’s role in working directly with Russian intelligence, there is no doubt that the Rich conspiracy theory was a direct Kremlin operation, seeded by Russian foreign intelligence — the SVR — three days after Rich’s murder. An SVR “bulletin” on July 13 fabricated a lurid tale: Rich was supposedly killed by a “Clinton hit squad.” That claim was then picked up by fringe websites and, later, by Russian state-aligned online networks, forming the first traceable instance of tying Rich’s death to a political plot.

From there, the rumor migrated into the U.S. political and media ecosystem. Russian troll accounts, such as @TEN_GOP, boosted variations of the claim, while American conspiracy influencers pushed it further. By 2017, Fox News and Sean Hannity were promoting a version alleging Rich leaked the DNC emails – coverage Fox later retracted but for which Hannity never apologized. As a result, Rich’s family was battered by online harassment even as it grieved his death.

The 2016 WikiLeaks leak had all the hallmarks of a brilliant Russian active measure. It underscored how well Russian intelligence understood American media, knowing that even the dullest details in Podesta’s emails would make it to the front page of The New York Times over and over. It was understood that the Times, having served as Stalin’s useful idiots in the 1930s, could be deployed that way again. It also understood that right-wing media was so desperate to believe Clinton was at the head of a murderous cabal that it would spread the Rich conspiracy to absolve the real culprit – the Kremlin – of any wrongdoing.

Today, Julian Assange is living in freedom in his native Australia. It is unclear whether he is still in touch with the Kremlin figures with whom he swayed the 2016 election to help Trump win.

Chapter 8…

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Last week, we traced how the Kremlin’s troll factories penetrated American media and flooded the information space with memes, posts, and comments designed not only to erode trust in democracy but to actively shape the 2016 election, amplifying hatred of Hillary Clinton, boosting Donald Trump, and deepening the polarization of Americans. And over the past chapters, we continued returning to Russia’s use of hybrid tactics, where propaganda, disinformation operations, business ventures, covert espionage, and religious and cultural display are woven together into a single arsenal of influence.

This week, we turn to Donald Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, an event that appeared at first glance to be little more than another glittering parade of models and celebrities in a long line of Trump-branded productions, but which in reality operated as one of the most consequential staging grounds for the Kremlin’s deeper cultivation of Trump — laying the networks that would later be weaponized in the 2016 election. For Trump, the Moscow pageant was a global branding opportunity, a chance to reassert the fading glamour of his name on an international stage and a personal platform for his ego. For the Kremlin, it was something more – precisely the kind of spectacle the Kremlin could use to cultivate leverage.

Trump’s Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA contests were never just pageants. Behind the dazzling stage lights and television cameras stood a long trail of allegations and controversies: former contestants and staff described exploitation and humiliating treatment, including claims that Trump entered dressing areas while women were undressed, behavior he also discussed in a 2005 Howard Stern interview about going backstage “as the owner of the pageant.” In multiple accounts, women from the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants stated that he walked in on them during rehearsals or while they were changing, with contemporaneous reporting by major outlets documenting the claims. Pageant insiders also alleged that contestants were crudely sorted based on appearance and that ownership engaged in demeaning conduct, further eroding the brand’s reputation.

But for Russia, the meaning was altogether different. The Kremlin saw the pageant as a chance to bring an American celebrity to Moscow whose obsession with building a tower in their capital had stretched back decades, cultivate him through oligarch intermediaries who already operated at the intersection of politics, security services, and organized crime, place him in an environment where kompromat could be gathered effortlessly, and bind him through business promises and flattery to Kremlin-linked officials and businessmen whose reach extended far beyond the world of construction and entertainment. What unfolded over the course of that weekend in November 2013 was a convergence of Kremlin-owned oligarchs and mobsters seated side by side with political technologists and social media propagandists, all circling around a man whose personal ambitions aligned perfectly with Moscow’s strategic interests.

Trump’s Early Soviet Courtship

Trump’s Russia story does not begin in Moscow in 2013. It starts much earlier, when he married Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovak émigré whose family remained under the eye of the Státní bezpečnost, the StB security services.

Ivana Zelníčková’s journey to the West is also mysterious. She grew up in a small town far from the capital city, Prague, living in industrialized housing. She would have been forced to learn Russian for over a decade, and she was indoctrinated, like every other child growing up in the Soviet bloc, with pro-Soviet and Communist propaganda.

A competitive skier, she married Austrian ski instructor Alfred Winklmayr in 1971 in order to obtain Austrian citizenship and travel freely without formally defecting. After their divorce, she moved to Montreal, Canada, where she worked as a ski instructor, took night classes at McGill to learn English, and began modeling, including doing promotional work during the 1976 Summer Olympics. That same year, a modeling job brought her to New York City, where she met Donald Trump. They married in 1977.

Zelníčková never officially defected, like Czech tennis star Martina Navratilova or Czech film director Milos Forman – both of whom were persona non grata to the Czech authorities once they left. Still, it was highly unusual, to say the least, for someone who was living in the West to travel back and forth freely to visit the family she left behind.

For the StB, Ivana’s marriage to a rising American developer offered an unexpected window into the social world of New York’s elite. Declassified archives reveal that Ivana’s father, Miloš, was an informant and dutifully reported on Trump’s travels, his business ventures, and even rumors of his political ambitions in the 1980s. The StB routinely monitored all communications, including opening their letters, tapping all calls, and monitoring Ivana’s visits back home. By 1988, StB files noted that Donald was already considering a run for president and warned that any misstep by Ivana could carry “incalculable consequences” for her husband’s future. Notably, the StB files on Ivana are incomplete – either because they were lost in the chaotic collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia or because they were purposely destroyed, as most of its files were.

The KGB, too, had begun to take notice as early as the 1970s. Reports from the StB in Prague were quietly transferred to the KGB’s local station, giving Moscow a fuller picture of Trump. By 1987, the courtship moved into the open when Trump and Ivana were invited to Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by then-Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Dubinin. (Dubinin laughably claimed that the first place he wanted to see when he landed in New York as the consul-general to the United Nations was Trump Tower. He claimed he walked into the building to look around on his way in from the airport, demanded to see the owner of such an impressive structure, and was immediately ushered in to meet with Trump – even before arriving at the Soviet mission to the U.N., he was sent to run.) The Trump visit to the Soviet Union was stage-managed by Intourist, the state travel agency that was a front for the KGB, which orchestrated every stop on the Trumps’ itinerary.

The Trumps were put up at the National Hotel, just steps from Red Square and long known as one of the most heavily surveilled hotels in Moscow, where foreign guests were routinely monitored and their rooms bugged. From there, he was ushered through luxury hotels and prime real estate sites along the Moscow River, shown where a tower bearing his name might rise — even though the prospect of a Trump-branded skyscraper in the heart of the Soviet Union was, at the time, little more than a fantasy, an almost laughable one.

Trump returned to New York and within weeks purchased full-page ads in major American newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe — in which he declared that America was being exploited by its allies and accused Japan and Saudi Arabia of “taking advantage of the United States.” A few years after he returned, he gave an interview to Playboy where he accused then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev of allowing Russia to become “out of control.” He added, “That's my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.” Trump compared China’s authoritarianism favorably to Gorbachev’s. “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak ... as being spit on by the rest of the world…” At the time that Trump was denouncing the United States as weak and an international laughingstock, the president of the United States was Ronald Reagan.

In an interview with Larry King barely two months after he returned from Moscow, Trump continued his attack on NATO. “I've always felt that NATO and West Germany, I mean, we have all those troops over there – I feel that they should pay their way. And I will single them out, but there are many other countries, and – taking tremendous advantage of this, including NATO. If you look at the payments that we're making to NATO, they're totally disproportionate with everybody else's. And it's ridiculous.” These were arguments long familiar to the Soviet Politburo, which had spent decades denouncing NATO as its primary adversary, and Soviet leaders must have been excited to hear their propaganda, almost word for word, echoed back by Trump.

He continued to echo Soviet propaganda in the years that followed. In a 1988 speech at Lehigh University, Trump told the audience, “I mean, not our enemies, forget about our enemies. Russia, we don’t deal with them that much. These countries, our friends, are making billions and billions of dollars and stripping us of our dignity, our economic dignity. We’re a debtor nation, we’re a poor nation.” He went on to recount a story about a successful New York real estate broker who had arranged for him to meet a Japanese investor, using the anecdote to underscore his claim that Japan was profiting at America’s expense. “I have tremendous respect for the Japanese,” Trump added, even as he framed them as an example of allies exploiting the United States. All of this was music to the KGB’s ears.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Trump kept chasing deals in Moscow. He toured development sites, dined with Russian officials and mafia figures, and inked preliminary agreements for luxury towers that never materialized. Meanwhile, his finances increasingly relied on buyers and investors from the former Soviet Union. Oligarchs parked hundreds of millions in Trump condos as Bayrock Group, run by Soviet émigrés with mob ties, became a Trump partner.

In 2008, Trump sold his Maison de l’Amitie property (which caused the rift between him and Jeffrey Epstein) for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire who paid nearly double the market value. This was nearly 144% more than Trump had spent nearly four years earlier to acquire it in a foreclosure sale from under Epstein. Both of Trump’s adult sons boasted about how Russian money was keeping the Trump Organization afloat, with Donald Trump Jr bragging that, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” Meanwhile, Eric Trump confided in golf writer James Dodson that, “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” At least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought about $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida. Many of these buyers were tied to state construction firms, investment banking in St. Petersburg, or other businesses with connections to Russian elites. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, claimed that she sold about 65 condos in Trump World in New York to Russian investors.

By the late 2000s, it was unmistakable that Russian capital had become a lifeline for the Trump Organization.

Moscow 2007: Vodka and Lenin at Crocus Expo

Trump’s first serious entry into Aras Agalarov’s world may have come in 2007, when he flew to Moscow to launch Trump Vodka at the Millionaire’s Fair. The event was staged inside Crocus Expo, the sprawling exhibition center owned by Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer whose Crocus Group built malls, concert halls, and residential towers across Russia. Agalarov was known in Moscow as Vladimir “Putin’s builder” and maintained very close ties to him, cultivated through years of Kremlin state contracts and public endorsements. Agalarov was not merely another wealthy businessman, but a trusted member of Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs, a man whose projects often doubled as showcases for the Kremlin. Alongside him was his son Emin, a pop singer who used his celebrity to move fluidly between Russia’s elite business circles and the broader cultural stage, and who would later become central to the Trump relationship.

The event was a surreal display of post-Soviet capitalism, where Lenin’s face — the very symbol of Soviet communism — flashed across giant screens in Trump’s vodka ad and the O’Jays “For the Love of Money” played as the ad’s soundtrack. Oligarchs paraded through exhibition halls dripping in luxury. Whether Agalarov and Trump met formally that evening remains unclear, but the overlap was obvious: Crocus provided the venue, Agalarov presided as host, and Trump positioned himself amid Moscow’s elite, eager to graft his brand onto a world that fused political power, criminal capital, and gaudy displays of wealth. The vodka venture soon collapsed, but six years later, the Agalarovs appeared or reappeared in Trump’s orbit in Las Vegas.

2013: The Miss Universe Pageant

Donald Trump acquired the Miss Universe Organization in 1996 and used it as a forum to pursue his other business ventures. The Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas in June 2013 brought Trump directly into the Agalarovs’ orbit. Aras Agalarov and his son, Emin, traveled to Nevada as VIP guests. Over dinner, they offered Trump what he had chased for decades: a Moscow project.

The Agalarovs agreed to bankroll the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, committing $20 million to stage it at Crocus City Hall and positioning Trump for both a profitable show and the recognition he had long sought from Russia’s elite. That same weekend, Trump and the Agalarovs partied together at The Act, a notorious Las Vegas nightclub infamous for its sexually explicit performances. Among the recurring skits at The Act were performances in which semi-nude women simulated urination onstage and a fictional prostitute being strangled. The club would later be shuttered by Nevada regulators for lewd acts, but that night, it was the backdrop to a celebration of their new partnership. For Trump, the fusion of pageant glamour, Moscow’s promises, and late-night indulgence marked the start of a relationship that would soon carry him across the world and into Putin’s den.

Trump was giddy in advance of the trip, tweeting, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” He wrote a personal, typewritten letter to Putin asking him to attend the pageant and adding a handwritten postscript that suggested he was looking forward to seeing “beautiful” women while in Russia.

To the Russian president, a former KGB spy who knew how to reel in a prospect, Trump showing his hand about his priorities – whether Putin’s attendance at Miss Universe or beautiful women – would have presented a golden opportunity. In short order, Putin declined to attend the pageant, which Aras Agalarov later said was a decision the Russian president made “at the last minute.” Agalarov added, “That was a very complicated situation then, because I promised Trump he would meet Putin,” which sounds exactly like what it was – an opportunity to reel Trump in further, dangle the ultimate shiny object in front of him, and then rip it away to keep him coming back for more. Instead, Putin sent Trump a Russian lacquered box and a “friendly” letter, which was nothing more than a pat on the head. “So he was leaving with very warm feelings,” Agalarov said of Trump’s departure from Moscow. “He was very happy.”

Around the time of the Miss Universe pageant, Putin awarded Aras Agalarov the Order of Honor, one of Russia’s highest state decorations. The timing was deliberate and signaled that the Kremlin was rewarding him for his handling of Trump in advance of the pageant, while signaling to Trump that Agalarov was in good favor with the Russian president. Notably, Putin did not mention Agalarov’s name in a speech at the awards ceremony, despite naming other prominent recipients like actors and sports stars, but Agalarov would likely have made Trump aware that he was receiving this important honor from a man Trump was desperate to meet.

In November, Trump arrived in Moscow aboard the private jet of Phil Ruffin, the Las Vegas casino magnate who had been his partner since the 1990s, and whose fortunes had long been tied to Trump’s own precarious businesses.

The weekend that followed was staged with precision. Every guest list, dinner, and moment of spectacle was designed as a performance of power. At Nobu, one of Moscow’s most exclusive restaurants, Aras Agalarov hosted Trump with all the gravity of a state function. Around the table sat Herman Gref, the chief executive of Sberbank and a former minister under Putin, whose presence alone conveyed that Trump’s ambitions in Russia were now being entertained at the highest levels of the Kremlin. Beside them were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, Trump’s New York partners who had long moved Russian capital into Manhattan real estate. Over sushi and sake, they sketched the outlines of a Trump Tower Moscow, with Crocus City Hall serving as both the venue for Miss Universe and the imagined foundation for a new skyscraper along the Moscow River. Days later, Sberbank announced a $1.3 billion loan package for Crocus, a gesture widely understood as a Kremlin endorsement. The message the Kremlin was sending Trump was unmistakable: after decades of failed attempts, his Moscow tower was at last being discussed at the highest levels with oligarchs, bankers, and Kremlin insiders.

Trump himself boasted about people he met in Moscow during a 2015 appearance on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals and top-of-the-government people. I can't go further than that, but I will tell you I met the top people,” Trump said.

At Crocus City Hall, the spectacle unfolded in a way only Moscow could stage. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith performed, vodka magnates sponsored the pageant, and the audience, filled with Russia’s oligarchs and political fixers, turned the pageant into something closer to a Kremlin court gathering than a beauty contest. Trump reveled in the attention, later boasting that “all the oligarchs” had been there. He probably believed that they were. Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhunov, wanted in the United States for running an illegal gambling and laundering ring out of Trump Tower, sat openly in the VIP section, untouchable in Moscow and feted as part of Russia’s criminal elite. Rob Goldstone, the British publicist for Emin Agalarov, worked the press and maneuvered Trump into a cameo for one of Emin’s music videos. Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, the Crocus executive flagged years earlier for suspicious transfers of Russian money through American banks, oversaw logistics and ensured Trump’s movements were tightly managed. Yulya Alferova, a young “business aide” close to the Agalarovs, photographed Trump’s every step, tweeting accolades about Trump both in real time and later.

Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, the hotel notorious among diplomats and businessmen for its blanket surveillance, a place where every room was said to be wired with cameras and microphones. The pageant dazzled onstage, but the real performance was offstage: a tableau of Russian power in its purest form, where the boundaries between business, politics, and organized crime dissolved, and where hosting Trump became proof of the Kremlin’s ability to entice and entangle him further.

For Trump, the arrangement was about securing legitimacy. The Agalarovs offered more than a platform for Miss Universe; they opened the door to the influence that defined Russia, a system where oligarchic capital, state authority, security services, and criminal networks operated as one. By financing the event, Aras and Emin Agalarov demonstrated that they were prepared to deliver to Trump the prestige and approval he had pursued in Moscow for decades – and that they could even deliver the notice of the Russian president, whom Trump deeply admired.

For the Kremlin, Trump was an obvious asset: a television star somewhat past his peak but still drawing over 5 million viewers each week on The Apprentice; a gaudy American businessman obsessively peddling conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth; a high-profile figure who praised Putin at every turn, and fixated on a Moscow deal that could exist only with Kremlin approval.

The cast around that weekend would later resurface in Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. Goldstone, who orchestrated the Moscow press blitz, would email Donald Trump Jr. about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in 2016, opening the channel for the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Kaveladze, who managed Trump’s Moscow logistics, was at that meeting too. Even the Ritz itself became the locus of later allegations that Russian intelligence had sought to gather compromising material on Trump.

Yulya Alferova

Orbiting Trump in Moscow was Yulya Alferova, a young businesswoman close to the Agalarovs who helped stage the Miss Universe pageant and chronicled his every move on social media. “Mr. Trump is already in Moscow. And as usual, every hour is business meetings,” she wrote, framing his visit as a whirlwind of high-level encounters rather than pageant preparations. Another post observed that he was “talking again and again about Obama,” a detail that portrayed how carefully she was listening and documenting.

Two months later, her tweets took on a sharper edge. “I’m sure @realDonaldTrump will be great president! We’ll support you from Russia! America needs ambitious leader!” she declared in January 2014, long before Trump had hinted at a campaign publicly.

It was not the language of casual enthusiasm, but the posture of someone signaling with intent, and her associations reinforced that impression. She appeared at events with Maria Butina, the Russian operative who infiltrated conservative networks in the United States, and was photographed with Alexander Torshin, the Kremlin official who served as Butina’s handler. Her placement as the organizer of Miss Universe seemed more than a coincidence. She moved from staging the pageant to publicly forecasting Trump’s rise, while appearing in the same circles as other Kremlin intelligence assets like Butina and Torshin. Taken together, she had all the hallmarks of an influence agent.

Artem Klyushin and Konstantin Rykov

Artem Klyushin, Alferova’s husband, was no ordinary businessman with contracts from Russia’s government, who had previously “worked’ for Aras Agalaov. Years earlier, a photograph placed him inside Putin’s immediate entourage at a public event, close enough to suggest possible ties to the Federal Protective Service, the elite unit responsible for guarding Russia’s leadership. In Russia, such access was never random, and those near Putin are heavily vetted and trusted.

In 2014, barely a year after promoting and attending the Miss Universe pageant, Klyushin was playing a central role in Russia’s information war. He had worked as an aide to Ilya Kostunov, who ran a Kremlin-backed training school in St. Petersburg funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the indicted oligarch behind Russia’s troll farms. The school churned out young operatives trained in politics, media, and social media manipulation—the pipeline for Russia’s next wave of influence agents.

Klyushin was a close associate of Konstantin Rykov, the Kremlin’s “godfather” of internet operations. Rykov had pioneered the “web brigades,” early paid trolls who flooded forums and social media with fake voices to bury dissent and manufacture consent. By the late 2000s, he was Putin’s digital enforcer, transforming the internet into both a propaganda channel and a surveillance grid. By 2013, when Trump landed in Moscow, Rykov was already testing the tactics—bots, sock-puppet accounts, coordinated networks—that would later be deployed at scale against the West.

The overlap wasn’t just speculative. The Senate Intelligence Committee explicitly named “Artem Klyushin, Konstantin Rykov, and Associates” among Kremlin-linked social media operatives, warning of Klyushin’s role as a bot developer.

Rykov later bragged openly about running online operations to boost both Trump’s campaign in the United States and Marine Le Pen’s in France. He registered trump2016.ru and marinelepen.ru, pumped out memes and polling data, and hosted election events in Moscow attended by Klyushin and other Kremlin operatives. Among those in his orbit was Anton Korobkov-Zemlyansky, a pro-Kremlin bot developer and social media operative who had previously worked with Klyushin on Russia’s information operations in Ukraine, while targeting other foreign countries, including the United States. Zemlyansky was eventually banned from Twitter after issuing an online death threat against a U.S. official in Moscow, a move that only triggered more threats from his associates. The same gatherings drew in operatives like ultranationalist Maria Katasonova, Duma hardliner Aleksey Zhuravlev, and Jack Hanick, the former Fox News producer who later helped build Konstantin Malofeyev’s Tsargrad TV.

When Trump won, Rykov was congratulated by Kremlin insiders. “We are waiting for the victory of Le Pen,” one message to him read. After Le Pen lost in 2017, Rykov admitted to a journalist that his digital support for her “did not work out the same way that it did with the U.S. President.”

Klyushin and Rykov embodied the Kremlin’s digital war machine—a fusion of propaganda, botnets, and psychological manipulation that blurred into cybercrime. And they were already in Trump’s orbit in 2013, as Moscow was hosting Trump’s pageant.

From Miss Universe to the Presidency

The Moscow pageant lasted only a weekend, but its effects reverberated for years. Trump left Russia having signed a letter of intent with the Agalarovs for a Trump Tower Moscow, a project that had eluded him for decades but now seemed within reach. In the months that followed, Emin Agalarov traveled to the United States, Ivanka Trump visited Moscow, and Rob Goldstone maintained steady contact to ensure the channel remained open. The project ultimately collapsed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea brought sanctions that cut off financing and access; yet, the relationships continued, waiting for the right moment to resurface in more consequential ways.

By 2016, Trump was the de facto Republican presidential nominee. A month prior to the Republican convention, Goldstone reached out via email to Donald Trump Jr. on behalf of Emin Agalarov. Goldstone wrote that Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika had met with Aras Agalarov that morning and had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” The offer was presented as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” with both Aras and Emin Agalarov helping to facilitate. Goldstone proposed a meeting that he said could provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton and her dealings with Russia.”

Don Jr.’s reply came quickly: “If it’s what you say I love it, especially later in the summer.” Less than a week later, he, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were meeting at Trump Tower with Goldstone and a roster of Kremlin and Soviet intelligence-connected operatives, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, Crocus Group executive Ike Kaveladze, and interpreter Anatoli Samochornov. Multiple attendees had notable links to the Kremlin or Russian security circles. Veselnitskaya was a longtime lawyer for Russia’s FSB who closely coordinated with Chaika’s office. By his own admission, Akhmetshin said that he had served in a Soviet military counterintelligence unit before becoming a D.C. lobbyist and was, at the time of the Trump Tower meeting, working on Capitol Hill to roll back Russian sanctions. Kaveladze, of course, was an employee of the Agalarov’s who had met and partied with Trump at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow less than three years earlier.

No one from the Trump campaign disclosed the meeting at the time. It only came to light over a year later after Trump had already been elected, when the New York Times reported on it, prompting Don Jr. to release his email chain with Goldstone. Those emails showed he eagerly accepted an offer of “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” This contradicted repeated denials by Trump campaign officials that they had contacts with Russians.

The Trump Tower meeting became a central focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination. The episode was cited as clear evidence that Trump campaign figures were receptive to Russian outreach. Even though no “dirt” on Hillary Clinton was delivered that day — the conversation shifted to Russia’s dislike of the Magnitsky Act sanctions — the optics of senior campaign officials welcoming Russian contacts raised questions about how Russian efforts to co-opt Trump began even before he announced his candidacy.

Trump’s Miss Universe spectacle in Moscow – and his relentless pursuit of real estate and approval from Putin and his oligarchs – made him the ideal target for the Kremlin. By 2016, Trump was no longer the outsider pleading for Putin’s attention but the chosen Republican presidential candidate in Russia’s most sweeping foreign influence operation since the Cold War. It was a campaign built to implode America from within and leave it unrecognizable. Less than a decade later, the Kremlin appears to have succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

Thank you to everyone who joined Julie Roginsky and me for our ongoing conversations and series on Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. If you missed it live, you can watch it here. And thank you as well to all who are following and sharing our series!! Next chapter drops next Monday…

Julie and I have put together a snapshot of troll accounts, fake news sites, disinformation tactics, and Kremlin operatives that fueled Russia’s information war to help install Trump in the White House in 2016. The IRA may be gone in name, but its methods continue — now upgraded with AI technology and more sophisticated tools of deception. Read these extras, share them, and remember — pushing back against disinformation begins with each of us.

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Kremlin’s Troll Factory Extras

The Operations

Internet Research Agency (IRA) — The original St. Petersburg troll farm. Founded in 2013, disguised as a marketing firm, it was a Russian intelligence operation financed through Prigozhin’s Concord business. At its height, hundreds of staff churned out memes, fake personas, disinformation, and hoaxes that reached 126 million Americans on Facebook during the 2016 election.

Social Design Agency (SDA) — The IRA’s heir. Directed by Ilya Gambashidze under Sergei Kiriyenko, SDA absorbed ex-IRA staff after 2018 and ramped up the operations with AI tools, deepfakes, and fake local news sites. A disinfo center, testing new methods across Europe and the U.S.

Storm-1516 — One of the networks seeding fake U.S. news sites during the 2024 election.

Key Characters

Yevgeny Prigozhin — “Putin’s Chef,” the face of both Wagner and IRA.

Vladislav Surkov — Kremlin puppet-master behind early web brigades.

Vyacheslav Volodin — Helped impose controls on Russia’s internet.

Mira Terada — Runs the fake human rights “Russian FBI” (FBR) operation.

Sergei Kiriyenko — Kremlin deputy chief of staff; he currently oversees SDA, the next-gen troll factory.

Ilya Gambashidze — Now steering the Social Design Agency, IRA’s heir.

John Dougan — Former Florida cop and U.S. defector living in Moscow. His DC Weekly and other cloned “local news” sites became vehicles for Russian disinformation, fusing Kremlin narratives into the U.S. media stream.

Timeline Snapshots

2013: Internet Research Agency (IRA) founded.

2014: Crimea annexation; trolls flood comment sections.

2014 July: MH17 disinfo blitz (40,000 tweets/day).

2015: Hoax “Columbian Chemicals” plant explosion.

2016: Blacktivist & Heart of Texas pages hit hundreds of thousands.

2018: Mueller indictments.

2024: AI-driven disinfo campaigns with Storm-1516 during the 2024 election.

The Troll Factory

Quotas: 100 comments/posts per troll per shift.

Shifts: 12 hours, two days on / two days off.

Training: Watch House of Cards, learn slang, memorize NFL trivia.

Formats: Memes, hoax news, fake protests, sock-puppets.

Budget: $1.25M/month by 2014.

Russia’s Notable Operations

Columbian Chemicals, 2014: Fake explosion at a Louisiana chemical plant. Dozens of fake accounts + doctored video.

Ebola Panic, 2014: Fake reports of outbreaks across the U.S. to stoke fear.

MH17, 2014: 40,000 tweets in 24 hours pushing four contradictory lies.

Fake Police Shootings: Exaggerated or invented claims designed to inflame race relations.

Top Fake Persona Accounts

@TEN_GOP — Posed as the Tennessee Republican Party, racked up 100,000 followers (including real politicians).

Jenna Abrams — Fake “All-American girl” blogger, quoted by major U.S. outlets and even politicians.

SouthLoneStar — Masqueraded as a patriotic Texan, pumped out anti-immigrant and pro-Trump memes.

Blacktivist — Pretended to be part of Black Lives Matter, drew 350,000+ followers, bigger than real BLM pages.

Heart of Texas — Called for secession, pushed anti-Muslim hate, gained 250,000+ followers.

Being Patriotic / Secured Borders — Targeted conservatives with pro-Trump, anti-immigrant propaganda.

United Muslims of America / LGBT United / Black Matters US — Progressive masks designed to splinter left-leaning coalitions and suppress turnout.

Top Disinfo Topics of 2016

Clinton’s Emails — Trolls amplified WikiLeaks dumps and pushed conspiracy theories about “deleted” emails.

Clinton’s Health — Memes and fake stories claimed she was gravely ill or unfit for office.

Immigration & the Border — Fear-mongering posts about migrants, Muslims, and “open borders.”

Race & Policing — Fake BLM pages vs. Blue Lives Matter memes to deepen divides.

Religion — Anti-Muslim propaganda, “Christian values under attack” themes.

Traditional Values & Anti-LBGTQ+ — Posts portraying LGBTQ+ rights as a Western assault on morality, while pushing “family values” rhetoric “aligned” with Russia.

Election Integrity — Claims of “rigged voting machines” and ballot fraud, seeding distrust before Election Day.

Third-Party Boosts — Troll accounts urging votes for Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders to siphon support from Clinton.

Repetitive Memes

Hillary in prison stripes.

Hillary’s “illness” memes to question her fitness.

Anti-immigration “keep out migrants” graphics.

Fake BLM protest graphics designed to inflame divisions.

“Heart of Texas” memes railing against Muslims and immigrants.

Endless recycled slogans like “Crooked Hillary” and “Lock Her Up,” amplified until they felt organic.

A Few Samples of False Flag Protests (All Staged by the IRA)

Houston, 2016: Anti-Muslim rally vs. “United Muslims of America” counter-rally — both sides summoned by trolls.

Dallas, 2016: “Blue Lives Matter” vs. “Black Lives Matter” dueling protests (same time and location).

By The Numbers

126 million Americans reached on Facebook.

50,000 bots on Twitter.

2 million+ tweets about the 2016 election.

$100,000 spent on U.S. ads that helped spark street protests.

IRA vs. Wagner

Wagner: Mercenaries; operations in Ukraine, the Balkans, Latin America, Syria, and Africa.

IRA: Trolls, memes, fake personas, fake pages, fake news sites, operations online.

Both were built to give the Kremlin deniability while carrying out Russia’s hybrid war.

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Well in advance of the U.S. 2016 presidential election, the Kremlin employed a broad, coordinated influence operation across U.S. right-wing media. Its aim: to sow discord, promote Donald Trump, and damage Hillary Clinton.

The seeds of this effort began years earlier, shortly after Barack Obama was first inaugurated. The birther conspiracy had dogged Obama since he first ran for the presidency. Even after he released his short-form Hawaiian birth certificate in 2008, right-wing sites insisted it was a forgery and continued to harp on it ad nauseam. By 2010, birtherism had become a fixture on conservative blogs and forums.

In August 2009, a crank named Wayne Madsen appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda network that was then breaking into the U.S. market, to report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was behind the creation of the Obama "birther" movement — that is, the conspiracy theory that Obama was not a natural born American citizen and was therefore ineligible to serve as president.

By 2010, RT was running segment after segment promoting the notion that Obama was not born in the United States, aligning its messaging with an emerging right-wing blogosphere that was taking root in the United States. RT’s propaganda on this front was quite effective, not least because that year, it ranked among the top 10 most-viewed news and political channels of all time on YouTube.

Perhaps the single most prolific birther amplifier was WorldNetDaily (WND), which ran dozens of articles alleging Obama’s birth certificate was fake. Founder Joseph Farah launched petitions and billboards reading, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” that popped up along highways across the country in 2010. WND columnist Jerome Corsi made birtherism his singular mission, writing books and columns about it. RT and WND repeatedly created a loop where they would mirror each other’s “reporting,” helping to legitimize the conspiracy theories that each was promoting.

The birther conspiracies, helped by RT’s massive reach on YouTube, was eventually picked up by the most trusted name in cable news: Fox News. The biggest Fox stars – from Sean Hannity to Bill O’Reilly to Greta Van Susteren to Steve Doocy – ran stories raising doubts about Obama’s birthplace. The segments varied in tone, with some overtly flirting with birtherism and others hedging, while giving “birther truthers” airtime. But the net effect was to move WND’s and RT’s fringe narrative into millions of mainstream households.

Users on the influential Free Republic forum, a conservative message board, circulated “Kenya birth” rumors, often recycling debunked claims (like fake Kenyan birth certificates). These discussions later bled into Tea Party Facebook groups during the 2010 midterms. Right-wing blogs like Gateway Pundit gave oxygen to lawsuits filed by right-wing activists, presenting them as credible challenges to Obama’s legitimacy.

Chief among these activists was Orly Taitz, a Soviet-born U.S. attorney and dentist who became an early figure of the birther movement. Through relentless (and unsuccessful) lawsuits, she gave the conspiracy a veneer of legal legitimacy and helped it migrate from fringe blogs to right-wing media, including Fox.

Amplifying all this was RT, which had already spent a considerable amount of time promoting other fringe conspiracy theories, including that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were really an inside job. In 2010, RT ran segment after segment with Taitz and others promoting the Obama birther conspiracy theory.

RT’s efforts, coupled with the relentless focus on birtherism by right-wing media and blogs, helped pave the way for Donald Trump to mainstream it in 2011.

In March of that year, Trump appeared on Good Morning America, where he said of Obama, “I have real doubts. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him.” He repeated the same claim days later during an appearance on The View. Both appearances — and Trump’s specious claims — received widespread pickup across mainstream news outlets. Conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage cited the GMA remarks almost immediately, while fringe blogs and WND celebrated Trump and his claims “going mainstream.” Fox News ran and re-ran Trump’s segments.

In early April, Trump appeared on the Today Show to claim that he had deployed investigators to Hawaii to get to the bottom of Obama’s birth certificate. “I’m not convinced that he has one,” Trump told host Meredith Vieira. “Three weeks ago when I started, I thought he was probably born in this country and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.” He added, “I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.”

Trump never produced any evidence of his “people” going to Hawaii or what they might have found there.

By April, Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes signed Trump to appear on the network’s flagship morning show, Fox & Friends, for a weekly segment called “Monday Mornings with Trump.” Though the segment was scheduled to run only for several months, Trump used the opportunity, relentlessly amplified by Fox, to push the birther conspiracy. These appearances coincided with his flirtation with a 2012 presidential run, giving him a national political platform on a network favored by Republican primary voters, even as he was still hosting The Apprentice on NBC.

Trump’s birther narrative only solidified his standing with the right-wing media ecosystem that was already playing footsie with RT. As Trump began talking about birtherism on TV, Corsi published a WND-branded book in May 2011 titled Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President. While Trump was taking the narrative mainstream, the right-wing echo chamber was buttressing his messaging relentlessly.

Trump chose not to run in 2012, and Obama was re-elected to his second and final term that November. Even then, it was apparent that Hillary Clinton was likely to make a second run for the White House in 2016. Both the Kremlin and right-wing outlets were paying attention.

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On September 11, 2012, armed militants attacked U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, murdering Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. What began as a national tragedy quickly morphed into a polarizing political saga. While multiple bipartisan investigations eventually found no intentional wrongdoing by Clinton, who was serving as Secretary of State during the Benghazi crisis, the attacks became a recurring symbol of alleged Democratic incompetence or malfeasance on Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere.

A feedback loop emerged: partisan blogs and talk radio floated accusations; Fox News and other conservative outlets amplified them; Russian state media like RT picked up and repackaged those same narratives for U.S. and international audiences; and the stories cycled back into American discourse. This loop kept Benghazi alive long after initial facts were established, shaping Clinton’s public image through the 2016 campaign.

In the days after the attack, conservative blogs such as The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, and Hot Air began to frame Benghazi as the result of the Obama administration’s weakness, while suggesting a deliberate cover-up by Clinton.

These outlets highlighted early discrepancies in administration statements —such as whether the attack was linked to an anti-Muslim video — and framed them as evidence of intentional deception. Right-wing media’s incentive structure, which depends on speed and outrage, ensured that the most conspiratorial claims spread fastest, even before investigations began.

Fox News soon took up the Benghazi story with intensity, devoting extensive coverage in the months before the 2012 election. Congressional Republicans launched hearings, often with coverage that mirrored blog talking points.

Right-wing media created a feedback loop in which claims from blogs flowed into Fox News, which then legitimized them for mainstream conservatives.

This loop meant that even minor revelations — emails, testimony snippets, drafts of talking points — were framed as scandalous. By 2014, “Benghazi” had become a shorthand for government betrayal in the conservative media ecosystems.

At the same time, Russian propaganda outlets, especially RT and Sputnik, amplified American right-wing media’s most damaging narratives about Benghazi. RT produced segments questioning Clinton’s honesty and suggesting the attack was emblematic of U.S. decline. Coverage often mirrored U.S. conservative framing, focusing on “cover-up” narratives, Clinton’s “dereliction of duty,” and the idea that mainstream American media was complicit in ignoring the truth.

This alignment wasn’t coincidental. U.S. intelligence later concluded that Russia sought to undermine trust in American institutions and damage Clinton politically. Benghazi coverage fit neatly into both goals: it undermined U.S. foreign policy credibility abroad and fueled partisan attacks against Clinton at home.

The feedback loop created a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Once RT or Sputnik published a story, right-wing blogs or commentators sometimes cited those reports to reinforce their own claims. This lent an air of international validation to narratives that originated domestically.

For example, RT’s commentary on Clinton’s Benghazi testimony in 2015 circulated widely on Twitter and was shared in conservative Facebook groups. Once recycled into the domestic ecosystem, it became difficult for audiences to distinguish between right-wing U.S. media and Kremlin state propaganda because they were saying the same things.

By the 2016 election, Benghazi was fused into Clinton’s political identity. The chant “Lock Her Up!” was as much about Benghazi as about her private email server.

Russian disinformation campaigns, through troll accounts and memes, continued to highlight Benghazi alongside emails and health conspiracies. The Senate Intelligence Committee later confirmed that Russian troll farms heavily targeted conservative voters with anti-Clinton messaging, often bundling Benghazi into memes portraying her as corrupt or murderous.

As the 2016 campaign kicked into high gear, “Benghazi” became less a specific event than a symbol of Clinton’s alleged untrustworthiness – a case study in how domestic partisanship and foreign influence can reinforce one another. The feedback loop blurred the line between homegrown outrage and foreign propaganda, leaving U.S. audiences with a distorted sense of scandal that was ginned up by a foreign adversary as much as by domestic partisan media.

Benghazi was not the only issue where Kremlin propagandists and right-wing media mirrored each other’s talking points. After Clinton’s widely covered 9/11 memorial incident, where she stumbled and left the event early (which was later attributed to pneumonia), RT published pieces that pushed rumors and suspicion, citing mainstream outlets as admitting “concerns” about her health after the pneumonia disclosure. Conservative networks and blogs then flooded the zone, reinforcing the same doubts.

As RT and Sputnik pushed stories on Clinton’s health, alleged corruption, and the WikiLeaks email dumps, Breitbart News, under Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones’s Infowars produced near-identical content for American audiences. Breitbart headlines about Clinton’s “crookedness” and supposed physical frailty dovetailed with RT’s speculative health coverage, while Infowars segments went further into conspiracy, alleging Clinton had Parkinson’s or seizures – claims that originated in the same ecosystem Russia was amplifying abroad.

In fact, Kremlin propaganda seeped into right-wing media outlets with such ease that Alex Jones’ Infowars actually republished RT’s articles more than 1,000 times between 2014 and 2017. At the same time, Jones became a regular on RT, expounding on conspiracy theories ranging from Osama Bin Laden’s “staged” death to whether 9/11 was an inside job.

In 2014, Steve Bannon opened Breitbart’s London bureau, aligning closely with Nigel Farage, then a populist Member of the European Parliament, and his party, UKIP. Its coverage railed against the EU, NATO, and immigration in language that tracked word-for-word with Moscow’s propaganda. Farage showed up on RT as a plain-spoken “outsider,” while Breitbart sold Europe’s “decline” to American readers. Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik hammered the same themes, boosting Brexit as a blow to the EU while amplifying U.S. right-wing coverage that cast Clinton as corrupt and Trump as the nationalist alternative.

The timing was critical. This transatlantic echo chamber unfolded alongside the Brexit referendum in Britain in the summer of 2016 and the run-up to the U.S. election, synchronizing populist nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Bannon used Breitbart London as his bridge to Trump’s campaign, tightening the pipeline between Kremlin narratives, European populism, and America’s far right. Farage himself later campaigned with Trump in advance of the presidential election, turning the echo chamber into a literal alliance on stage. The Kremlin seeded the themes, Breitbart amplified them, and Farage gave them a political face.

In the summer of 2015, Russian hackers (linked to GRU Unit 26165, often called “Fancy Bear”/APT28) gained initial access to the Democratic National Committee’s network. In the spring of 2016, as Trump consolidated his hold on the Republican presidential nomination, GRU spear-phishing emails began targeting Democratic officials. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, fell victim to one such email in March 2016, allowing Russian intelligence to access his Gmail account. That spring, GRU hackers expanded their penetration of the DNC’s network, stealing emails, opposition research, and other internal files.

That summer, the GRU created the persona “Guccifer 2.0” to leak hacked documents. In July, WikiLeaks published thousands of DNC emails, just before the Democratic National Convention.

In October, weeks before the election and after Trump had publicly urged WikiLeaks more than 160 times to release Clinton-related emails, the group obliged with the trove of hacked Podesta documents. RT ran a drumbeat of pieces highlighting “revelations,” curating “top 10” lists, and framing the dumps as proof of elite corruption — coverage that matched the right-wing blogosphere’s editorial appetite. Examples included RT’s day-one posts on the first tranches and a steady stream of follow-ups as more batches dropped.

At the same time, Fox News, Breitbart, and The Gateway Pundit turned the leaks into a rolling storyline – “October Surprise,” “most explosive revelations,” and long bullet lists of supposed smoking guns – often relying on content that maximized outrage and dissemination. The framing was spectacularly similar, even when the specific claims differed.

The Podesta and DNC email leaks provided fertile ground for this alignment. Russian military hackers stole the material, WikiLeaks published it, and RT and Sputnik framed it as proof of elite corruption. Breitbart ran wall-to-wall stories highlighting salacious details from each batch, packaging them in ways designed to inflame conservative outrage. Jones celebrated WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as truth-tellers, casting them as allies against “globalists.” This language mirrored the Kremlin’s own propaganda, which depicted the leaks as evidence of Western rot while denying Russian responsibility for the hack.

The relationship wasn’t just parallel play; there were moments of explicit cross-referencing. On October 28, 2016, The Gateway Pundit amplified a false claim about an impending WikiLeaks revelation that would lead to Clinton’s arrest and “sourced it“ via a Russia Today reporter in London. (There were signals of affinity in the other direction as well. When Google demoted RT and Sputnik in late 2017, Breitbart framed the move as censorship of legitimate news — an implicit defense of the very Kremlin outlets whose 2016 narratives had fed the right-wing ecosystem while serving as foreign disinformation.)

To deflect blame from its 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, RT, Sputnik, and social media troll accounts floated alternative theories, suggesting that the leaks came from a DNC insider rather than a Russian cyberattack. To push this narrative, the Kremlin found a useful idiot in Fox News’ Sean Hannity, one of the most-watched and trusted voices in media. Hannity relentlessly spread the conspiracy theory that the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was an inside job connected to Clinton or her allies – and that it might have been Rich who leaked the damaging DNC email to WikiLeaks.

As early as July 2016, days after Rich’s murder, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to its “Reward for information” program, offering $20,000 for information about Rich’s murder – which immediately fueled speculation that Rich was the source of their DNC emails.

This was all the GRU and the Kremlin needed in order to distract from the truth. Instead of focusing on who was really culpable for the hack, Fox News and right-wing media and blogs framed the murder as suspicious, suggesting that it was a political assassination by Democrats and implying that Rich was the DNC hacker who turned the emails over to Wikileaks. This aligned with Russia’s strategic objective: to cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s attribution of the DNC hack to Russia, sow division inside the U.S. political system, and – critically – take attention away from the truth: that it had interfered in the upcoming election to harm Clinton and help Trump.

The Rich story has a tragic coda. In early 2017, Ed Butowsky — a Dallas financier, Trump supporter, and frequent Fox News guest — inserted himself into the tragedy. Butowsky presented himself to Joel and Mary Rich, Seth’s grieving parents, as a Good Samaritan offering to fund a private investigation into their son’s murder. He volunteered to pay for the services of Rod Wheeler, a former D.C. police detective turned media commentator, assuring the family that his only motive was to help uncover the truth. The Riches, who were desperate for answers about the murder of their son, accepted his offer.

Behind the scenes, however, Butowsky was pursuing a different agenda. Texts, emails, and later court filings showed that he was coordinating with Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman to produce a story framing Rich as the source of the DNC’s hacked emails to WikiLeaks — a narrative that would undercut U.S. intelligence findings that Russian intelligence had carried out the cyberattacks. Butowsky bragged in messages that the White House was aware of the effort and that “the president [Trump] himself” wanted the story published.

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The resulting Fox News piece, which ran on May 16, 2017, quoted Wheeler as if he had evidence tying Rich to WikiLeaks. Wheeler quickly disavowed the quotes, and the Rich family denounced the article. Within a week, Fox retracted the story, acknowledging that it did not meet editorial standards. In 2018, the Rich family filed a lawsuit against Fox News, Zimmerman, and Butowsky, accusing them of intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Litigation revealed further communications showing Butowsky boasting about his political connections, including his friendship with Trump adviser and former Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon.

But despite Fox’s decision to pull its story down shortly after it ran, Hannity continued to amplify it night after night for months, framing Rich’s death as part of a sinister Democratic cover-up. Hannity characterized the case as “the single biggest fraud… perpetrated… by the media and the Democrats” – exactly as Russia intended.

The Kremlin-Fox feedback loop expanded well beyond the Rich conspiracy. RT aired multiple stories speculating about Clinton’s stamina and health after the 9/11 memorial incident, even as online Russian trolls circulated memes of Clinton collapsing. In turn, Hannity and other Fox hosts devoted repeated segments to Clinton’s “stamina” and “coughing fits.” RT and Sputnik described NATO as obsolete and a threat to peace and promoted the narrative that the West was collapsing under “globalist elites.” At Fox, Tucker Carlson questioned NATO’s relevance and advocated for an effective end to American foreign involvement. Kremlin outlets tied the migrant crisis in Europe to chaos and terrorism, painting globalism as destabilizing. At the same time, Fox hosts highlighted immigration as a security threat. “Build the wall” rhetoric, amplified on Fox, paralleled Kremlin anti-migrant frames.

A big nexus between RT and right-wing media, especially Fox, was former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn. In December 2015, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, traveled to Moscow to attend the Russian state media outlet RT’s 10th anniversary gala, where he and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein were seated at the head table with Vladimir Putin. For the Kremlin, they were trophies—proof that U.S. insiders would legitimize a propaganda outlet. But they were also more.

RT funneled roughly $45,000 to Flynn for attending the gala and delivering a speech that criticized U.S. foreign policy and praised the potential of cooperation with Russia. (Flynn also failed to properly disclose the speech fee when renewing his security clearance.) Upon his return, Flynn became a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business, criticizing the Democratic Party and Clinton. He delivered a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that summer, shouting “Lock her up!” from the dais.

Meanwhile, in an effort to promote a candidate who might syphon votes away from the Democratic nominee, RT hosted a Green Party presidential debate in July 2016. Two months later, Fox Business hosted a Green Party town hall featuring Stein, where she discussed her policy priorities, particularly environmental issues such as ending reliance on fossil fuels and moving toward 100% renewable energy. Fox, which routinely extolled fossil fuels and questioned man-made climate change, was an odd forum for a Green Party candidate. Just over a month later, Stein’s campaign peeled off just enough votes from Clinton in key swing states to hand the election to Trump.

But Fox was not alone in mirroring Kremlin talking points. In fact, most right-wing media participated enthusiastically.

Russian outlets consistently attacked NATO, the European Union, and immigration policies, arguing that Western elites were leading civilization into decline. Breitbart echoed these themes almost verbatim, publishing anti-EU and anti-immigration stories that amplified Russian depictions of a collapsing West. Infowars added its conspiratorial twist, telling listeners that NATO and “globalists” were plotting war with Russia, a line that tracked closely with Moscow’s claim that U.S. foreign policy was aggressive and illegitimate.

Together, these outlets created a feedback loop. Russia seeded themes through state media and troll networks; Breitbart and Infowars translated those themes into red-meat content for partisan U.S. audiences; and Russian outlets then cited Breitbart or Infowars as evidence that even American media recognized Clinton’s corruption or Western decline. The effect was to launder Kremlin talking points through American voices with built-in credibility for their audiences. When Hannity or Breitbart ran a story, RT and Sputnik cited it as “American media reports.” When RT floated conspiracies, blogs and Fox segments later echoed them.

Kremlin talking points didn’t just run through Fox, InfoWars, or Breitbart – they seeped into local television. Ben Swann, a local news anchor, built a following with his “Reality Check” segments, which looked like news but trafficked in conspiracies. After leaving Cincinnati’s Fox affiliate in 2013, he appeared regularly on Russia Today through 2015, raising his profile inside Kremlin media circles, before bringing his conspiracy-laden segments to a local CBS affiliate in Atlanta.

That same year, Swann launched his “Truth in Media” brand, pushing Kremlin-aligned narratives about NATO, U.S. wars in Syria, denial of Assad’s chemical attacks, and Clinton’s corruption. His clips were embedded on pro-Kremlin sites and spread widely on Facebook and YouTube. In January 2017, just weeks after the election, he used his CBS affiliate platform to air a “Pizzagate” segment – a conspiracy Russian trolls had amplified – showing how deeply Kremlin disinformation had penetrated U.S. newsrooms. He later worked directly for Russian state media, with FARA filings showing his company took in over $6 million from RT-linked entities like TV Novosti to produce programming that pushed Kremlin propaganda.

Rather than relying on official media channels alone, Moscow also turned to social media, fake personas, algorithmic targeting, and tailored narratives to harm Clinton and benefit Trump.

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg–based troll farm tied to oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, played a central role. (Prigozhin would later meet a grisly end after attempting a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin.) The IRA was founded in 2013 to target Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, but in 2015, it pivoted toward U.S. audiences, promoting right‑wing outlets in its attempt to tilt the election toward Trump.

The IRA hired hundreds of operators to produce blog posts, memes, comments, and videos. Its strategy wasn't necessarily to persuade, but to overwhelm social media with fake content, making the internet hostile to democratic discourse.

The IRA’s Facebook efforts were effective and viral. Ads featuring absurd imagery (e.g., Jesus arm-wrestling Satan over Clinton) tapped into existing institutional distrust and partisan divides. These ads loaded onto feeds with remarkable click-through rates and helped validate Trump’s messaging.

At the same time, the IRA targeted traditionally Democratic audiences in order to divide and suppress their votes. For instance, the IRA deployed fake accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to target Black voters. Messaging such as “Our Votes Don’t Matter” or “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton” aimed to suppress turnout by sowing cynicism and distrust.

Russian operatives, leveraging U.S.-trained programmers, harnessed social media algorithms to target specific individuals, including political reporters and Defense Department staffers. Fake news stories and conspiracies (e.g., Clinton having Parkinson’s and Pizzagate) were injected into tailored networks to maximize psychological impact.

In the run‑up to the 2016 election, American conservatives retweeted content from Russian troll accounts about 30 times more often than liberals, supercharging the spread of Russian-planted narratives to harm Clinton and benefit Trump. Simultaneously, the IRA used mostly organic posting, rather than paid ads, to deepen political divides. Tactics included urging voters (especially African Americans) to boycott elections or mistrust institutions, and encouraging confrontational behavior among the far right.

Russian trolls also leaned more on local news outlets than on broad fake‑news sites. By citing or impersonating local sources, troll content gained credibility and seeped into regional political coverage more effectively. At the same time, coordinated social feeds, ads, browser traffic, and search indexing worked together to manipulate opinion across multiple platforms.

By the fall of 2016, the incentives of Kremlin-aligned outlets and the U.S. right-wing media ecosystem lined up neatly: both benefited from stories that damaged Hillary Clinton and energized Donald Trump’s base. U.S. intelligence later assessed that Moscow’s information campaign aimed to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” “denigrate Secretary Clinton,” and “harm her electability,” while aiding Trump.

This amplification only required a convergence of interests. The Kremlin and right-wing media all sought to energize American audiences in service of its goals: to elect Trump and defeat Clinton. The result was a mutually reinforcing cycle that magnified disinformation far beyond what the Kremlin could ever have achieved alone.

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Putin’s Dresden Days

Last week, we traced Moscow’s infiltration of America’s Evangelical networks in Chapter 4: Putin’s God Squad. This week, we continue the story by delving into another front of Russia’s active measures — its cultivation and infiltration of neo-Nazis, a campaign that began in Dresden in the 1980s and would echo decades later across the West.

It may seem improbable that the Soviet Union, which built its post–World War II identity on defeating fascism, would entrust a Nazi with missions into West Germany. Yet for the KGB, ideology was never the north star it pretended to be. Fascists, anarchists, monarchists, terrorists, and fanatics of every stripe could be turned into weapons to achieve Russia’s strategic goals. One of Vladimir Putin’s first dealings with a Nazi came through Rainer Sonntag, a violent neo-Nazi cultivated by the KGB in East Germany and sent across the border into the West. Sonntag would later surface as a notorious figure in Saxony’s far-right underworld before being gunned down in 1991, but in the mid-1980s, he was already serving as a pawn in Moscow’s shadow war.

When Putin was sent to Dresden in the mid-1980s as a KGB officer — officially a translator at the Soviet-German Friendship House but in reality embedded in a clandestine network working as an intermediary with the East German Stasi security services — he did not operate alone. Stationed alongside him was Sergey Chemezov, another KGB operative who would one day ascend to head Rostec, Russia’s state arms conglomerate, and emerge as one of Putin’s most loyal oligarchs. Together, they ran intelligence operations and recruited informants — skills that would provide Putin with valuable lessons he carried into the Kremlin

From Dresden to Moscow

The contradiction was hard to miss. Soviet propaganda wrapped itself in the glory of defeating fascism, yet behind the curtain, its intelligence services quietly recruited the very extremists it condemned, embedding them inside the networks it sought to destabilize. For the KGB’s foreign arm, Nazis and far-right militants were useful tools that were easy to manipulate, violent enough to spread fear, and ruthless enough to be unleashed against the Western democracies they already despised.

Putin carried this approach into the 1990s. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia descended into economic and political turmoil. Skinhead gangs emerged and roamed Moscow and other major cities, attacking migrants and ethnic minorities in waves of racially motivated violence. Veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya were drawn into newly formed paramilitary and mafia groups. At the same time, ultranationalist ideologues such as Aleksandr Dugin re-packaged elements of fascist ideology into the rhetoric of “Eurasianism,” casting Russia as the heart of a new civilizational empire. What had begun in the 1980s as a KGB tactic hardened into a homegrown breeding ground of extremists by the 1990s — a force the Kremlin could crush when it posed a danger, or later quietly exploit to serve the state’s interests.

Inside the Kremlin’s Nazi Network

By the early 2000s, Putin’s regime learned to turn this current to its advantage. Inside Russia, neo-Nazis were alternately repressed or recruited; abroad, they became a weapon. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, ultranationalist groups were given space to grow as counterweights to pro-democracy movements. Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union emerged as an export arm of Russian fascism — translating manifestos, sending delegations to ultranationalist allies in Serbia, hosting international gatherings in Moscow, and portraying Russia as the “last fortress” of white, Christian, traditionalist civilization.

By 2008, as Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, the Kremlin no longer treated far-right actors as fringe outliers but as partners in a broader campaign to fracture NATO and undermine the West. Just as the Russian Orthodox Church had become a Trojan horse for influence among American evangelicals — as we traced in last week’s chapter — neo-Nazis and ultranationalists were molded into a parallel channel, a darker, more violent arm of Moscow’s active measures.

The Alt-Right Finds Its Patron in Moscow

America’s alt-right intersected with Moscow’s ideological apparatus by the 2010s. Richard Spencer, the movement’s most visible figure, married (and later divorced) Nina Kouprianova, a Russian émigré who translated Aleksandr Dugin’s works into English and, under her online alias Nina Byzantina, became one of the most prolific pro-Kremlin voices in far-right spaces. Kouprianova was more than a translator. She was, by her own admission, a “Kremlin troll leader,” tirelessly promoting Russian nationalism online and feeding Dugin’s worldview directly to American audiences. Spencer himself praised Putin as “the sole white power in the world” and cast Russia as the natural ally of a future American ethno-state.

In May 2017, at the Unite the Right rally, Spencer led torch-wielding marchers through Charlottesville (a rally he had planned out of Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.), chanting “Jews will not replace us," and “Russia is our friend” – a slogan that laid bare the transatlantic echo chamber. His alliance with Dugin was quite transparent: Spencer invited Dugin to his 2014 far-right conference in Hungary (raided by police before it could proceed), published Dugin’s essays on his site AltRight.com and his journal Radix, and in turn contributed articles to Dugin and Konstantin Malofeev’s think tank Katehon. Through this partnership of marriage, media, and ideology, Spencer became the most visible bridge between America’s alt-right and the Kremlin’s fascist movement.

But Spencer was hardly alone. Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who once lived in Moscow and wrote a book extolling Russia as a model for white survival, repeatedly described Putin as a bulwark for the white race. Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, raised Confederate and Russian Imperial flags side by side at his rallies and even launched his party with a Skyped-in speech from Dugin.

The ties between Duke and Kremlin-aligned Russian white nationalists was particularly longstanding. As Putin was seizing power in the Kremlin, Duke traveled and lived in Russia, where he developed relationships with like-minded politicians and other leaders. His book, My Awakening, was actually sold in the Duma’s bookstore, where its title was translated into Russian as The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American. Duke wrote effusively about what he discovered in Russia, claiming, “Russia is a White nation! In my opinion, Russia and other Eastern countries have the greatest chance of having racially aware parties achieving political power.” In Moscow, Duke and Dugin operated in the same circles, and Duke called Dugin “one of the leading intellectuals of Russia’s patriotic movement.”

By 2016, as Donald Trump’s campaign flirted openly with white nationalist rhetoric, Spencer and his circle seized the moment. Spencer organized the notorious “Hail Trump” conference in Washington after the election, where his followers raised Nazi salutes — an event Russian state media gleefully broadcast. Duke, meanwhile, loudly backed Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primaries, saying, “Voting for these people [Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz], voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.” When asked to disavow Duke, Trump wavered, claiming he didn’t “know anything about David Duke,” despite having spoken publicly about him for years.

The signal was clear: America’s far-right saw Trump as their vehicle, and Moscow amplified that perception. Kremlin-funded outlets and troll farms pushed alt-right talking points throughout the campaign, weaving them into disinformation campaigns that reached deep into American social media feeds. Russia had become the ideological patron of America’s resurgent white supremacists, laundering their rhetoric into its broader arsenal of propaganda.

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The Daily Stormer

In 2013, Andrew Anglin launched The Daily Stormer, which quickly became the neo-Nazi command post of the Trump era — a meme-driven hub that hailed Trump as “our Glorious Leader,” amplified Kremlin propaganda on NATO, Ukraine, and “globalism,” and cast Putin as the defender of the white race.

By the mid-2010s, as Putin deliberately positioned Russia as a conservative alternative to the liberal West, Anglin and his writers at The Daily Stormer routinely praised Putin as a defender of Christianity and “European identity.” In their view, Russia represented a modern state that openly challenged feminism, LGBTQ rights, and multicultural pluralism—precisely the forces that the Daily Stormer’s readership despised.

The strongest evidence of ideological convergence appeared in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and began its occupation in eastern Ukraine. While Western governments condemned these actions as violations of international law, The Daily Stormer amplified narratives that portrayed Russia as the rightful protector of Crimea and Ukrainians of Russian descent. The site derided NATO and the European Union as illegitimate “globalist” structures and echoed many of the Kremlin’s propaganda tropes — casting Ukraine’s pro-European protesters on the Maidan as tools of Jewish or liberal Western elites.

In doing so, the Daily Stormer helped funnel Kremlin talking points into the American far-right ecosystem. The synergy was clear: Russia gained ideological support among extremists abroad, while The Daily Stormer found in Russia a geopolitical model for its vision of white nationalism.

After the Charlottesville march in 2017, U.S. registrars and hosts cut ties, forcing Anglin through a carousel of dark-web mirrors and fringe providers. He briefly shifted the site to a Russian .ru domain before Roskomnadzor shut it down. By 2019, it re-emerged under BitMitigate, then Epik, and finally VanwaTech, which kept it online until suspending service in 2023.

Russia as a Breeding Ground

By the 2010s, Russia was no longer just a sponsor of extremists abroad — it had become their incubator. The most notorious case was the Iron March forum, launched in 2011 by Alisher Mukhitdinov under the alias Alexander Slavros. What began as a fringe forum quickly mutated into a crucible for global fascism, spawning groups such as Atomwaffen Division (AWD) in the United States and neo-Nazi cells across Europe and Australia. Members openly fantasized about terror campaigns and even nuclear apocalypse in the name of a white revolution.

Unlike older forums such as Stormfront, which often cloaked their racism in more palatable rhetoric, Iron March was unapologetically militant. It glorified terrorism, praised perpetrators like Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik, and urged its members to accelerate societal collapse through violence. This made it a crucible for the most extreme elements of the global far-right—and a breeding ground for groups that would go on to kill in the United States.

The AWD, founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell in the United States, embodied the accelerationist ideology that Iron March promoted, combining neo-Nazi propaganda with military-style training and a fixation on mass-casualty violence. Within just a few years, AWD members had committed multiple murders on U.S. soil. In 2017, member Devon Arthurs killed two of his roommates in Tampa, Florida, after revealing that the group was preparing terrorist attacks. In 2018, another member, Samuel Woodward, murdered Blaze Bernstein, a young gay Jewish man in California, in what prosecutors described as a hate crime. These killings, along with other plots against infrastructure and civilians, bore the ideological fingerprints of Iron March’s radical accelerationism.

Despite Iron March’s central role in inspiring murders on U.S. soil, Mukhitdinov lived openly in Moscow, untouched by authorities. The site had even been registered under his own name — a detail that strongly suggested it operated with the blessing, or at the direction, of Russia’s intelligence services.

When Iron March abruptly vanished in 2017, its network did not die. From its ashes rose The Base, founded by American expatriate Rinaldo Nazzaro, who had moved from New York to St. Petersburg in 2018. From Russian soil, Nazzaro recruited cells across the U.S., Canada, and South Africa, funneling some members into paramilitary camps in St. Petersburg, where they received training in weapons and explosives alongside Russian extremists. In 2025, defectors confirmed what many had long suspected — that Nazzaro was an FSB asset, and The Base itself functioned as a Kremlin cut-out, its operations aligning closely with Russian sabotage missions inside Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s Own Nazis

The grotesque hypocrisy of Putin’s “denazification” claims was laid bare by Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine. Among the forces Moscow sent to the front was Wagner, the paramilitary group founded by Dmitry Utkin — a “former” GRU officer whose call sign “Wagner” came from Hitler’s favorite composer, and whose body was marked with SS tattoos. Under his command, Wagner became a magnet for neo-Nazis and ultranationalists, its leaders flaunting SS insignia and its ranks seeded with extremists. Its affiliate, the Rusich unit — led by notorious neo-Nazis Aleksei Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky — pushed the depravity even further, reveling in Nazi iconography, posing with swastikas, and in 2014 mutilating corpses on camera in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine.

Equally damning was the Kremlin’s “tolerance” of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). Based in St. Petersburg, RIM fused Orthodox monarchism with white supremacism and ran paramilitary camps training foreign extremists. In April 2020, the U.S. State Department designated RIM and three of its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists — the first white supremacist group ever to receive that label. Officials cited its “Partizan” camp, which trained Swedish militants who later bombed refugee centers, and German extremists tied to The Third Way and the NPD.

RIM’s reach extended across the Atlantic. According to the FBI, U.S. neo-Nazis tied to Atomwaffen Division and The Base maintained contact with RIM, swapping propaganda and training manuals. Several even attempted to travel to Russia for instruction. RIM’s leaders openly called for a “white international,” a transnational brotherhood stretching from Europe to America. U.S. officials warned that RIM posed a “significant terrorist threat” to the homeland — not because it ordered attacks directly, but because it exported the skills, networks, and ideological fuel for violent cells to metastasize.

As we wrote in Chapter 1 on the KGB’s Cold War playbook, Moscow’s real specialty has always been subversion: taking enemies, conditioning them as assets, and unleashing them against its adversaries. By allowing RIM to operate freely in St. Petersburg while claiming to “fight Nazis” in Ukraine, the Kremlin once again showed that extremists are not problems to be eliminated — but resources to be weaponized.

Prigozhin’s Troll Factories

Overlaying this infrastructure was the Kremlin’s information warfare machine. The Internet Research Agency — Prigozhin’s infamous troll farm — together with state-funded media amplified Nazi and far-right propaganda deep into Western feeds. Trolls posed as American patriots, glorified Confederate and fascist symbols, spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and reframed white supremacists as guardians of “traditional values.” It was the same method we traced with evangelicals: amplify grievances, launder them through Moscow, and weaponize them against liberal democracy.

Using fake American personas, the IRA organized pro-Trump rallies, contacted Trump campaign staff for materials, and staged events like “Florida Goes Trump.” Their content heavily promoted Trump, criticized Clinton, and sought to suppress Democratic turnout, particularly among African American voters.

The effort went beyond online memes: the IRA bought ads, spread disinformation across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and amplified Kremlin narratives designed to polarize Americans. U.S. intelligence assessments, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller all concluded that these actions were intended to sway the election in Trump’s favor. In 2018, Mueller indicted 13 Russians and three companies tied to the IRA for conspiring to interfere with the U.S. political process.

Closing the Circle

By 2016, the strands had converged: Putin’s Dresden handling of Rainer Sonntag; Russia’s co-optation of Russian skinheads in the 1990s; the pivot to “traditional values” in the 2000s; the Iron March forum under Alisher Mukhitdinov; the alt-right alliance through Richard Spencer and Nina Byzantina; The Base’s Russian sanctuary under Rinaldo Nazzaro; RIM’s transnational networks; and the troll factory’s amplification of Nazi propaganda. Neo-Nazis were force multipliers in Moscow’s hybrid war.

And so the arc that began in Dresden — when KGB agent Vladimir Putin sent a Nazi across a border — came full circle. The same cynicism that once treated a fascist as an expendable pawn now drives a global operation in which Russia shelters, trains, and amplifies extremists from the U.S. to Austria, from St. Petersburg to Charlottesville. In Russia, claims of “denazification” are nothing more than a disguise for exporting fascism — another weapon in Moscow’s arsenal to corrode democracies from within.

As it did with the NRA and American evangelicals, the Kremlin deployed white supremacists to help Trump’s election in 2016. The IRA created thousands of fake social media accounts posing as Americans to adopt explicitly racist, nativist, and white nationalist voices that aligned with Trump’s political messaging. These accounts praised Trump as a defender of “traditional America,” attacked Hillary Clinton as corrupt and anti-white, and spread memes that glamorized far-right extremism.

At the same time, Russia’s propaganda machine worked to normalize and elevate U.S. alt-right figures. Kremlin-controlled outlets like RT and Sputnik gave sympathetic coverage to white nationalist talking points and provided platforms for commentators in Spencer’s orbit. Russia paired this promotion of white nationalist voices with a parallel campaign to suppress minority turnout. IRA-linked accounts spread disinformation targeting Black voters, suggesting their votes were meaningless, promoting boycotts, or encouraging third-party protest votes. This dual strategy — boosting white nationalist enthusiasm while discouraging participation by communities of color — dovetailed with Trump’s electoral interests, especially in key swing states.

The result was a feedback loop: Russian propaganda boosted white nationalist groups online, and those groups in turn amplified pro-Trump, pro-Russia messages within the United States.

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Thank you to everyone who joined and me for our ongoing conversations and series on Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. If you missed it live, you can watch it here. And thank you as well to all who are following and sharing our series!!

We curated a timeline and a list of people involved in the Russian plot to infiltrate American evangelical circles, which you can see below.

Before diving in, we have a request: the mainstream media has refused to cover this story and continues to ignore Trump’s false narrative that Russia’s attack on the 2016 election was a “hoax.” If you’ve followed our series, you know this is a lie and that the Kremlin is still actively working to sabotage our elections and interfere in our domestic affairs. Please read our series and share it widely. It’s up to us to fight back against Trump’s lies and a complacent media that’s become little more than a transcription service for his regime.

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Timeline of Russia’s Evangelical Operations

2008–2009: Patriarch Kirill enthroned; ROC begins intensified outreach.

2010–2011: Malofeev opens St. Basil Foundation; Komov becomes WCF representative

2012: Franklin Graham praises Russia’s Christian values.

2013: Russia passes “gay propaganda” law; UN “traditional values” resolution.

2014: Malofeev sanctioned for funding Russian operations; WCF Moscow rebranded.

2015: Tsargrad TV launched; Torshin and Butina attend Prayer Breakfast.

2015: Graham meets Putin and Patriarch Kirill; Evangelical media echo Kremlin propaganda.

U.S. Evangelical Leaders and Organizations Engaged with Russia

Franklin Graham — Met with Putin and Patriarch Kirill in Moscow (2015) and praised Putin’s defense of Christian values.

Brian Brown (NOM/WCF) — Championed Russia’s “family values” laws and partnered with Alexey Komov; elected WCF president in 2016.

Larry Jacobs (WCF) — Publicly defended Moscow’s role in hosting and promoting WCF conferences.

Allan Carlson (WCF co-founder) — Co-created WCF with Russian allies, promoting U.S.–Russia cooperation on traditional values.

National Prayer Breakfast — Attended by Russian Orthodox and WCF-linked delegations facilitated by Torshin and Butina.

Russian Media Targeting U.S. Evangelicals / MAGA

RT (Russia Today) / RT America – Pushed narratives of U.S. decline, moral corruption, and deep state conspiracies.

Sputnik – Amplified divisive cultural content and “Christian persecution” framing to conservative audiences.

Tsargrad TV – Orthodox-nationalist, Fox-style media exporting Kremlin “values” discourse.

Russia Insider (Charles Bausman) — English-language propaganda for far-right audiences, casting Putin as a defender of Christianity and echoing themes that appealed to evangelicals.

Katehon (Malofeev think tank) – Blended geopolitics, Orthodoxy, anti-liberalism for an international audience.

Geopolitika.ru (Dugin) – Ideological hub for Eurasianist narratives, Orthodox values, anti-West propaganda.

Political & Intelligence-Linked Operatives

Alexander Torshin — Russian Central Bank official and longtime senator; cultivated NRA and National Prayer Breakfast ties; sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018.

Maria Butina — Protégé of Torshin; infiltrated the NRA and National Prayer Breakfast; pled guilty in 2018 to acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

Elena Mizulina — Duma member; author of the 2013 “gay propaganda” law, centerpiece of Kremlin’s “traditional values” arsenal.

Edward Lozansky — Expat organizer in Washington; ran “Russia House” and the World Russia Forum; created access points for Kremlin officials, GOP lawmakers, and U.S. faith leaders.

Vladimir Yakunin – Ex–Russian Railways chief; sanctioned 2014; backed Orthodox initiatives, far-right outreach, and ran the “Dialogue of Civilizations” forum.

In case you missed it, here are the chapters below.

Chapter 3…

Chapter 1 & 2 Video and Print…

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Join Julie Roginsky and me every Tuesday at 12:30 PM ET on Substack Live as we discuss the latest installment of our new series. Bring your questions and comments!

Last week, we traced Moscow’s quiet infiltration of the NRA in Chapter 3: Guns, Spies, and Trump, and this week, the story takes an even darker turn.

It may seem improbable that the Kremlin, once synonymous with atheistic Communism and the brutal suppression of religion, would later recast itself as a guardian of global Christianity. After all, Stalin nearly annihilated the Russian Orthodox Church, persecuting its clergy and destroying its churches, before partially reviving it in 1943 as a wartime tool to rally patriotism and unify the Soviet people against Nazi Germany. From that point forward, the leadership of the Church was infiltrated and tightly managed by the Soviet state. Senior clergy were often vetted or even directly recruited as informants by the KGB. Archival materials released in the 1990s (after the collapse of the USSR) showed that many bishops, metropolitans, and even patriarchs carried code names as KGB agents. This ensured the hierarchy remained politically loyal and served state interests — for example, in promoting Soviet positions abroad and discouraging religious dissent at home.

Throughout the Cold War, the Moscow Patriarchate became a tool of Soviet “soft power.” Church delegations were sent to international religious conferences to echo Soviet foreign policy lines. At home, the Church was allowed to function only under constant surveillance, with the KGB controlling seminary admissions, clergy promotions, and even sermons.

As he consolidated power in the post-Soviet era, Vladimir Putin again discovered that the language of faith could be every bit as powerful a weapon as the language of ideology. Appeals to “traditional values” became a tool to fracture Western societies, forge alliances with disaffected movements abroad, and prepare fertile ground for political upheaval.

Even as Russian operatives courted Second Amendment absolutists, another, arguably even more consequential, campaign was underway – one aimed at one of America’s most influential voting blocs: Evangelical Christians. By wrapping its geopolitical ambitions in the language of spiritual renewal, Putin’s Russia positioned itself as the last fortress defending Christianity against the encroaching forces of secular liberalism.

The Road to 2016

By 2016, the Kremlin was well on its path to cultivating American evangelicals. Figures like Vladimir Yakunin, the former head of Russian Railways and a close Putin ally, sponsored the Dialogue of Civilizations forums, inviting Western religious and political conservatives to Greece and Moscow. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Kirill, promoted an explicitly anti-LGBT and pro-natalist agenda, which resonated with the American Christian Right. The World Congress of Families (WCF) became the key institutional bridge: American Christian activists such as Brian Brown, Larry Jacobs, and Scott Lively worked closely with Russian lawmakers like Elena Mizulina, who authored Russia’s notorious 2013 “gay propaganda law.” These collaborations produced not just joint statements but also a sense of shared global mission — casting Russia and U.S. evangelicals as partners in a spiritual war against liberal democracy.

The Kremlin’s Ideological Pivot: “Traditional Values” as Geopolitical Weapon

The Kremlin’s embrace of “traditional values” was more than a slogan – it became the cornerstone of a strategy to build influence abroad. Russian diplomats, Orthodox clerics, and state-backed NGOs crisscrossed Europe and the United States, casting Moscow as the defender of family, faith, and civilization. Every crackdown at home, whether on NGOs, media, or LGBTQ+ citizens, was reframed as a moral defense against a predatory West bent on erasing national identity.

This message resonated with Western populists. In France, Marine Le Pen hailed Putin as a champion of Christian Europe. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán praised Moscow’s cultural stance while declaring illiberal democracy the future. In the United States, evangelical leaders and Catholic traditionalists echoed Kremlin talking points on the “natural family” and “gender ideology.”

What looked like scattered culture wars – in Eastern Europe over marriage, in America over abortion, in France over secularism – were pulled under Moscow’s umbrella. Russia didn’t invent these battles, but by amplifying grievances and offering state backing, it elevated them into a transnational front. “Traditional values” became both shield and sword: shielding repression at home, while fracturing Western unity abroad.

The Orthodox Church: An Arm of Statecraft and Intelligence

Central to this transformation was the Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill, whose collaboration with the KGB dated back to Soviet times. Operating under the codename “Mikhailov,” Kirill was among a generation of clerics co-opted by Soviet intelligence, which routinely used the Church as a vehicle for soft power and espionage. In the 1970s and 1980s, his assignments abroad – most prominently as the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative to the World Council of Churches in Geneva – were conducted under KGB supervision. For Soviet authorities, clerics operating on the other side of the Iron Curtain provided ideal cover for influence operations, recruitment of sympathizers, and discreet information gathering in circles otherwise closed to official diplomats.

After his enthronement as Patriarch in 2009, Kirill expanded that role, turning the Church into a parallel diplomatic corps that operated as an unofficial arm of Russian intelligence. Pilgrimages, “family values” conferences, and clerical exchanges abroad doubled as platforms for recruitment and influence.

The mending of the nearly 90-year schism between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in 2007 helped in this pursuit. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the ROCOR split with the Moscow Patriarchate over the Patriarchate’s capitulation to the Soviet regime. The fall of the Soviet Union removed the original political barrier, but distrust lingered, as the ROCOR still viewed Moscow as compromised by decades of collaboration with the KGB. In 2000, the Moscow Patriarchate canonized Tsar Nicholas II and his family, signaling a shift closer to ROCOR’s stance. In the early Putin years, dialogue deepened under the former KGB collaborator Patriarch Alexey II, operating under the codename “Drozdov,” and ROCOR’s Metropolitan Laurus. Both sides emphasized healing the “civil war” divide in the Russian diaspora.

The 2007 reunification of the ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate widened the Kremlin’s reach into U.S. parishes, providing new channels to engage conservative Americans. Under Kirill, Moscow framed its geopolitical gambits, such as its illegal annexation of Crimea and deadly intervention in Syria, not as imperial conquests but as sacred battles to “defend” Orthodoxy in Ukraine from Western-backed “persecution,” and “protect” Christians from Islamic extremism in Syria.

By weaving political objectives into spiritual language, the Church gave Moscow’s foreign policy a moral gloss and built resonance with American evangelicals. For many, Putin came to be seen not as a geopolitical adversary but a warrior in a global struggle against liberalism.

Konstantin Malofeev: The “Orthodox Oligarch”

No figure embodied the fusion of faith, finance, and politics more vividly than Konstantin Malofeev, the so-called “Orthodox Oligarch.” Through his St. Basil the Great Foundation, Malofeev promoted Orthodox philanthropy while simultaneously bankrolling Russian operatives in Donbas. For these activities, he was sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union, yet he remained central to Russia’s ideological operations abroad.

In 2015, Malofeev launched Tsargrad TV, explicitly modeled on Fox News. Staffed with nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin and powered by former Fox producer John Hanick – a veteran of Sean Hannity’s show who was later indicted by the Department of Justice for violating sanctions – Tsargrad adopted a format instantly recognizable to American conservatives, blending Orthodox traditionalism with U.S.-style populist outrage. The network’s name underscored the vast ambitions of the enterprise: “Tsargrad” is the old Slavic name for Constantinople, symbolizing Russia’s claim to be the “Third Rome” and spiritual heir to Orthodox Byzantium.

Meanwhile, Malofeev and Dugin’s think tank Katehon churned out “civilizational” manifestos in English, while their ally Charles Bausman amplified Kremlin rhetoric to MAGA audiences through Russia Insider, an online propaganda site aimed at Americans that he launched in 2014. Bausman, a Pennsylvania-born businessman who had spent a significant amount of time in Moscow during the heady post-Soviet days, helped stage a “Stop the Steal” rally in Pennsylvania, surfaced at the Capitol in Washington on January 6, and soon after fled back to Russia.

Aleksandr Dugin: The “Ideological” Architect

While Malofeev provided the funds, the intellectual foundation was supplied by Dugin, the ultranationalist philosopher whose 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics urged the undermining of the West through cultural subversion as much as through territorial conquest. The book became a staple in Russian military academies, treated as required reading for senior officers and strategists. By 2009, in his Fourth Political Theory, Dugin was openly calling for a global alliance of traditionalist and religious movements—a “Conservative International” united in opposition to liberalism.

As editor-in-chief of Tsargrad TV and through his platform Geopolitika.ru, Dugin broadcast these ideas widely, weaving geopolitics into a theological narrative that portrayed Putin as a messianic figure destined to save civilization. Though Dugin himself had little direct contact with U.S. evangelicals, that hardly mattered. His ideas were laundered through Kremlin allies like Malofeev, his associate Alexey Komov, Tsargrad TV, and Katehon, repackaged into “family values” rhetoric and culture-war language that American conservatives readily absorbed. Evangelical leaders didn’t need to read Fourth Political Theory to echo its message – they only needed the Kremlin’s filtered version, which cast Russia not as an adversary but as a providential partner.

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Alexey Komov: Malofeev’s Right Hand

As Dugin supplied the ideology and Malofeev the money, Alexey Komov provided the connective tissue. Seen as Malofeev’s right hand, Komov emerged as the Kremlin’s envoy to conservative religious movements abroad. Beginning in 2011, he joined the leadership of the World Congress of Families (WCF), where he built bridges to U.S. evangelical leaders, European far-right politicians, and Orthodox clergy.

The efforts paid off. In 2014, Larry Jacobs, the WCF’s managing director, said, “I think Russia is the hope for the world right now.” That year, the WCF planned to host its annual gathering in Moscow but was forced to cancel after Russia annexed Crimea that year.

In practice, the Crimean invasion did not matter to WCF. Its Russian partners went ahead with the event in Moscow under a new name – the International Forum “Large Family and the Future of Humanity” – opening in the Kremlin and continuing at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. A message from Putin was read aloud, and senior figures such as Patriarch Kirill, Mizulina, and Yakunin attended, alongside some 1,500 participants from 45 countries. Although the World Congress of Families distanced itself on paper, its leaders, Larry Jacobs and Don Feder, still took part, joined by other U.S. activists like Brown of the National Organization for Marriage. Delegates issued an “Urgent Appeal to the Nations of the World,” calling for Russia-style bans on “homosexual propaganda,” opposition to surrogacy for same-sex couples, and the promotion of the “Natural Family.”

Komov also sat on the board of CitizenGO, a Spanish-based Christian-right advocacy platform, and partnered with Brown to rebrand WCF’s network under the International Organization for the Family. Together, this triad—WCF, IOF, and CitizenGO—formed a transnational hub that bound Russian Orthodoxy, Catholic traditionalists, and American evangelicals into a coordinated culture-war front.

The National Prayer Breakfast: Opening Washington’s Doors

The WCF gave Moscow access to activists, and the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington opened doors to political elites. Russian Central Bank official Alexander Torshin and his protégé Maria Butina, who also successfully infiltrated the National Rifle Association, exploited the event as a backchannel to U.S. lawmakers, donors, and evangelical power brokers. Butina later pled guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent, confirming what intelligence officials had long suspected: the Kremlin deliberately targeted religious networks as infiltration vectors.

The opaque role of the Prayer Breakfast’s organizer, the Fellowship Foundation, better known as “The Family,” made the venue uniquely vulnerable. Its secrecy created space for unofficial diplomacy. GOP operative and Butina’s longtime boyfriend Paul Erickson – whom she first met in Moscow while he was on a gun-rights junket – acted as Butina’s guide through Republican and evangelical circles, bridging NRA networks and Prayer Breakfast corridors.

By the mid-2010s, these efforts converged into what Dugin had envisioned: a Conservative International linking evangelical, Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox clergy, and far-right populists into a transnational illiberal bloc. In 2016, right as Trump was solidifying his hold on the Republican nomination, Torshin and Butina brought a Russian delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast, which gave the Kremlin access to top U.S. conservative and evangelical leaders, symbolically embedding Moscow in a U.S. religious-political tradition.

Exporting the Playbook

The Evangelical–Legal Pipeline: From the ACLJ to Moscow

One less visible but significant vector was the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), run by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, which funneled millions into its Moscow affiliate, the Slavic Centre for Law & Justice (SCLJ). The SCLJ sat on Kremlin-linked councils and advanced the same “family values” lawfare agenda domestically. This legal network gave Moscow a veneer of credibility when appealing to American Christian conservatives.

The ACLJ, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson and long run by Sekulow, has served as one of the most influential legal advocacy groups for the Christian Right. The organization was designed as a conservative counterweight to the ACLU, focusing on issues such as religious freedom, opposition to abortion, and defending the role of Christianity in American public life. Under Sekulow’s leadership, the ACLJ grew into a well-funded, media-savvy institution with deep ties to evangelical donors and activists.

The group’s influence became politically significant when Sekulow also emerged as one of Trump’s personal attorneys. He represented Trump during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and later appeared as part of Trump’s impeachment defense team in 2020. This dual role blurred the line between nonprofit legal advocacy and partisan political defense. The ACLJ’s media arms, including its daily radio program and later its relationship with the Salem Radio Network, became megaphones for defending Trump’s policies and framing his presidency as aligned with evangelical values.

The ACLJ also gave Trump’s political and legal strategies a veneer of legitimacy within the evangelical world. By embedding Trump’s lawyer at the head of a respected Christian legal ministry, the campaign secured a pipeline to evangelical voters and donors, the most reliable bloc in the Republican base.

Beyond the U.S., the ACLJ’s international branches, such as the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), extended this influence abroad. The ECLJ regularly filed amicus curiae briefs in cases before the European Court on Human Rights, often siding with Russia on issues ranging from opposition to LGBTQ rights, family policy, and religion in public life. In cases challenging Russia’s “gay propaganda” law, the ECLJ submitted briefs supporting Moscow’s position, arguing that states should have wide latitude to protect “public morals” and “traditional family values.”

While the ECHR consistently ruled against Russia in such cases, the ECLJ’s filings provided legal cover and rhetorical support for the Kremlin’s stance.

Media, Diaspora, and Washington Networks

Beyond Tsargrad, RT, and Sputnik, Russia built English-language propaganda arms aimed squarely at U.S. conservatives. Russia Insider and Katehon pumped out Kremlin narratives about “Western decadence” for MAGA and Evangelical audiences. Diaspora fronts like Rossotrudnichestvo and KSORS ran cultural outreach in the U.S.—until FBI scrutiny exposed their role as influence channels. At the center was Elena Branson, a Kremlin agent who courted community leaders before fleeing to Moscow as investigators closed in. In 2022, the Justice Department charged her as an unregistered foreign agent, proof that Moscow’s “cultural” networks were tools of espionage.

Meanwhile, Edward Lozansky’s Russia House and World Russia Forum staged annual gatherings on Capitol Hill, where Russian officials like Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and Torshin – often joined by his protégé Butina – mingled with GOP operatives, evangelical leaders, and conservative intellectuals. Butina was not alone; other Russian operatives moved freely through these circles as Moscow turned Lozansky’s forums into covert conduits for influence, posing as dialogue while quietly binding together political, religious, and policy networks, similarly to how they were cultivating the NRA.

Why Evangelicals Were Pivotal in 2016

By the time Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, Moscow’s cultivation of evangelicals had already reshaped the American political landscape. In March of 2024, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) placed Putin on the cover of its Decision Magazine, which also featured an op-ed praising Putin’s ban on the dissemination of "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" to children.

“To be clear, I’m not endorsing President Putin,” Graham wrote. “Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?”

Later that year, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a high-ranking Russian Orthodox Church official, met with Billy and Franklin Graham in North Carolina to celebrate Billy Graham’s 96^th birthday. After that meeting, Hilarion traveled to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association headquarters, which was holding a summit between Russian church leaders and American evangelical leaders. There, he delivered a broadside against sanctions the United States had placed on Russia, which the Obama Administration levied after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.

This was not Hilarion’s first attempt to co-opt America’s religious leaders. In 2011, he traveled to the United States to deliver a speech at the Catholic University and at Dallas Theological Sem­inary. He also reportedly met with former President George W. Bush while in Texas.

In 2015, Franklin Graham flew to Moscow, where he met with high-ranking Russian Orthodox officials, including Patriarch Kirill, to discuss shared concerns, particularly the persecution of Christians and moral decline in Western societies. During that trip, Graham also held a 45-minute private meeting with Putin, who offered to support a conference on persecuted Christians. After the meeting, Graham announced he and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church would organize a 2016 World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians in Moscow, which Graham was forced to move to Washington after Russia passed new anti-terrorism laws that restricted evangelism. Still, this did not deter the BGEA from spending millions to host the summit the following year in Washington, where Russian participants dedicated their time to railing against sanctions.

When evangelicals turned out in record numbers for Trump in 2016, their support reflected not only domestic politics but also the fruit of a decade-long Russian campaign. They were primed to view Putin favorably, to excuse Trump’s praise of him, and to treat Paul Manafort’s quiet 2016 GOP convention platform change removing a call to arm Ukraine not as betrayal, but as consistent with their emerging worldview.

Prayer as a Trojan Horse

Russia’s infiltration of the evangelical community was not a sideshow but a central pillar of its active measures. By blending oligarchic wealth, Church diplomacy, transnational conferences, far-right alliances, legal pipelines, diaspora fronts, and “traditional values” propaganda, Moscow weaponized faith as an instrument of its arsenal.

As Trump emerged as a presidential candidate in 2015, Russia’s prior cultivation of evangelical networks provided fertile ground. Trump’s campaign leaned heavily on evangelical support, and Kremlin messaging amplified his appeal by portraying him as a strongman aligned with “Christian” values. Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik echoed themes familiar to evangelical audiences: opposition to same-sex marriage, hostility to abortion, suspicion of globalism, and nostalgia for national greatness. American religious-right leaders who had built ties with Moscow, such as Graham, Sekulow, and Brown, not only legitimized Trump within evangelical circles but also reinforced a narrative that linked his rise to a global movement resisting secular liberalism. In this way, Russia’s earlier infiltration of evangelical networks helped inflate Trump’s candidacy, granting him access to a constituency that ultimately became decisive in his 2016 victory.

Russia proved that influence operations don’t always come through just hackers or spies. They can be cloaked in scripture, sanctified by family and tradition. By 2016, Moscow had already primed millions of Americans to see Putin not as an enemy but as a defender of their faith. It was a decisive front in Russia’s attack—and they were just getting started.

Russia’s engagement with American evangelicals prior to 2016 was not accidental. By building bridges through the Russian Orthodox Church, oligarch-backed forums, and the World Congress of Families, Moscow won influence within a massive and most loyal Republican voting bloc. When Trump arrived, Russia did not need to build new infrastructure – it simply harnessed the evangelical networks already primed to see Moscow as a moral partner. The result was an extraordinary feedback loop: evangelicals buoyed Trump, and Russia amplified evangelicals, reshaping U.S. politics in profound and lasting ways.

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In the early years of Barack Obama’s first term, as Washington talked of a “reset,” Moscow was already plotting to inflame America’s culture wars and deepen its divides. One of its prime targets was the National Rifle Association, a political powerhouse with unmatched sway over the GOP and millions of voters. By cloaking itself in Second Amendment rhetoric and patriotism, Russia turned gun rights into a Trojan horse for influence, exploiting the NRA’s partisan loyalty and hardline defense of gun ownership to burrow into the heart of the Republican Party.

By 2011, any “reset” that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had hoped to achieve between the United States and Russia was up in smoke. After Russia’s parliamentary elections that year were marred by widespread allegations of fraud, tens of thousands of Russians staged some of the largest anti-government protests since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Demonstrators in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square and other cities demanded new elections and an end to Vladimir Putin’s rule. These demonstrations marked the start of the 2011–2013 protest wave often called the “Snow Revolution.” Virtually every leader of these protests has since been murdered, imprisoned, or exiled. Notable among them was Alexei Navalny, likely poisoned in a Russian labor camp, and Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated on a bridge near the Kremlin.

Putin publicly accused the United States, and specifically Hillary Clinton, of encouraging and “funding” the unrest. On December 8, 2011, he alleged that Clinton had sent “a signal” to opposition forces “with the support of the U.S. State Department,” which Russian activists “heard” and acted upon. Putin claimed that the protests were aimed at destabilizing Russia and that foreign actors had spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” on political activities inside the country.

As this was happening, a shadowy Russian organized figure named Alexander Romanov was expanding his mafia empire to Western Europe. Romanov was a Russian “businessman” with a long history of fraud convictions inside Russia before becoming a central figure in one of Spain’s highest-profile money laundering cases. Spanish authorities identified him as a key member of the Taganskaya organized crime syndicate, a Moscow-based group involved in racketeering, extortion, and large-scale financial crime.

After moving some of his operations to Spain, Romanov purchased the Mar i Pins hotel in Mallorca in 2010 for roughly €1.6 million. According to Spanish prosecutors, the hotel acquisition was a front for laundering illicit proceeds from Russia, with funds routed through offshore companies in Panama and other jurisdictions.

During their investigation, Spain’s Civil Guard and anti-corruption prosecutors wiretapped dozens of Romanov’s phone calls. In multiple conversations, Romanov spoke with Alexander Torshin, then deputy speaker of the Federation Council, using language that implied Torshin was not just a political patron but also a figure of authority within the organized crime network. Romanov referred to Torshin as “el padrino” — “the Godfather” – and described Torshin as “above” himself in the mafia hierarchy.

Investigators later claimed that Torshin was a “godfather” in both the political and criminal sense, acting as a bridge between Taganskaya leadership and legitimate business and political circles in Russia.

In August 2013, Spanish prosecutors planned to arrest Torshin when he was expected to attend Romanov’s birthday celebration in Mallorca. According to Spanish investigators, Torshin abruptly canceled his trip just days before the event, leading authorities to believe he had been tipped off. Romanov was eventually convicted of money laundering and sentenced to four years in a Spanish prison.

Because of his political position and because he remained in Russia, Torshin was never charged, but Spanish investigative reports detailed his regular contact with Romanov, his awareness of the hotel scheme, and his possible role in advising or facilitating transactions linked to Taganskaya’s criminal operations.

But Torshin’s activities extended far beyond organized crime. He was focused on gaining access to one of the biggest, most prominent organizations in the United States, one that influenced Republican elected officials, held them in thrall, and which was poised to play a pivotal role in the 2016 election.

Torshin’s assignment was to infiltrate the National Rifle Association.

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Phase 1: Building the bridge (2011–2014)

By the early 2010s, Torshin began courting the NRA as part of a broader outreach to the American right wing. He cultivated a public identity as a gun-rights enthusiast, made repeated appearances at NRA annual meetings, and promoted a Russian gun-rights group, the “Right to Bear Arms,” helmed by his young protégé Maria Butina. The Justice Department later described the strategy in plain terms: Butina, acting “at the direction of a Russian official,” sought to build back-channel lines to American political decision-makers through conservative and gun-rights circles. The official was Torshin.

Butina began her operations in Ukraine. From 2011 to 2013, she quietly built ties between her Right to Bear Arms group, which she had founded as a sister organization to the NRA, and the Ukrainian Association of Weapon Owners (UAVZ), led by Georgy Uchaykin. Uchaykin, who appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars in 2014 and 2017, amplified pro-Kremlin narratives while cultivating relationships with U.S. gun lobby figures. In 2016, UAVZ formed a formal alliance with Alan Gottlieb’s Second Amendment Foundation — Gottlieb himself had been photographed with Butina in 2013 — showing how the Kremlin leveraged overlapping networks to fuse pro-gun activism, far-right politics, and cross-border influence operations.

The irony was glaring: Russia enforces some of the strictest civilian gun laws in the world. Russia has no interest in arming its own citizens—only in weaponizing “gun rights” abroad. Invoking the Second Amendment was never about principle but about a calculated influence campaign, a Trojan horse to penetrate U.S. politics, advance Moscow’s strategic objectives, and lay the groundwork for the 2016 election.

In 2011, as protests were erupting across Russia and Putin was blaming Hillary Clinton for the unrest, a right-wing lawyer named G. Kline Preston IV introduced Torshin to NRA president David Keene at the gun rights organization’s annual meeting. Preston, who represented Torshin, had done business in Russia for years. His role as a Russian influencer is questionable, to say the least. While squiring Torshin around the United States, he often acted as a Kremlin mouthpiece, serving as a Russia-organized election observer and praising the corrupt 2011 Russian election as “free and fair.”

In 2013, Torshin and Butina invited Keene (who had recently stepped down as NRA president but remained on its board) and longtime Republican operative Paul Erickson to Moscow to meet with the Right to Bear Arms organization. Keene addressed the gun rights group as part of a push to loosen Russian gun laws and to formalize ties with the NRA. Butina later wrote that having “the leadership of the NRA” visit helped her obtain a U.S. visa for the 2014 NRA convention, underscoring how the trip conferred legitimacy on her outreach. The relationship that Torshin and Butina solidified with Keene in 2013 gave them unfettered access to the NRA in the years that followed.

A few weeks after meeting in Moscow, Butina and Erickson reunited in Tel Aviv on New Year’s Eve, where they began dating. Butina was 25; Erickson was 51. They would later live together in Washington, D.C., after Butina moved to the United States several years later.

Also in 2013, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who would go on to become Trump’s National Security Adviser, recorded a video for Butina’s Right to Bear Arms organization at Keene’s request. Bolton, who was then chairing the NRA’s International Affairs Subcommittee, praised the post-Soviet Russian constitution as a “new era of freedom” and framed the right to bear arms as part of that freedom. An endorsement from someone of Bolton’s stature also gave Butina an imprimatur of seriousness in Republican and gun-rights circles even before she arrived in Washington.

While this was unfolding, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll factory in St. Petersburg was laying the groundwork for a massive online influence push. Through the Internet Research Agency’s “Translator” project, it ran a coordinated bot-and-troll network targeting Second Amendment and Christian voters from 2014 to 2016. Operating across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, the IRA built large, trust-based communities around identity and values, then injected pro-Trump, anti-Clinton, and anti-establishment messaging at strategic moments. Its flagship Christian page, “Army of Jesus” (≈216k followers), pumped out patriotic and Scripture memes for months before dropping a viral pre-election image of Jesus versus “Hillary the Devil.” On gun rights, Twitter data showed that 77% of IRA firearm-related content was pro-NRA/Second Amendment, generating an estimated 32.4 million impressions compared to just 6.7 million for anti-gun posts—making pro-gun messaging a clear Kremlin priority. Other high-engagement IRA pages like “Heart of Texas” and “Being Patriotic” routinely paired Second Amendment memes with anti-immigrant messaging, cross-sharing this content to Christian-branded pages to maximize audience overlap.

On Twitter, IRA accounts seeded #2A and #NRA hashtags with pro-gun memes timed to coincide with U.S. mass shootings and legislative debates, later pivoting that content toward overt election framing. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s release of IRA ad files, the operation also deployed ads that explicitly micro-targeted “Christian” and “Second Amendment” interests in battleground states during the final month of the campaign. These ads and hashtag efforts mirrored the offline outreach Torshin and Butina were conducting through the NRA, reinforcing the same ideological themes across both real-world and digital spaces.

Phase 2: VIP access (2015)

In 2015, Butina’s influence operation shifted from planning to execution.

That March, she drafted her “Description of the Diplomacy Project,” proposing that Russia should build unofficial lines of communication with Americans who influence U.S. politics, rather than rely on official channels. She identified the NRA as a prime gateway into the GOP and predicted that the Republican nominee would win the next presidential election. She then sought $125,000 from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian billionaire, to attend targeted conferences and hold side meetings with business figures and officials at the Foreign Ministry, reporting that her plan would be at least partially funded. After first asking her boyfriend, Erickson, to review it, she submitted the proposal to her handler, Torshin, who, a few months earlier, had been appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia.

By April, Butina was executing on the plan. That month, she traveled to a major NRA convention in Nashville, leveraging her credentials and prior relationships as a Russian gun-rights activist to meet influential Republicans, and began inviting NRA power brokers to Moscow. At the convention, she and Torshin posed for photos with then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who was considered a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Several months later, she attended Walker’s presidential campaign launch in Waukesha and posted about being there. At the campaign launch, Butina was introduced to several of his foreign policy advisers and reported back to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that she would share the name of a Walker adviser “who can come to Moscow.”

That same month, Butina staged a high-visibility moment at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, asking Donald Trump on camera whether he would keep Russia sanctions if he were elected. Trump replied that he didn’t think sanctions would be needed and that the U.S. and Russia would “get along very, very well” if he were president.

Ostensibly, Trump called on Butina at random, but this was not the first time she attempted to make contact with him. Days earlier, Erickson had asked Sam Nunberg, a senior Trump aide, to set up a quick “meet-and-greet” and photo between Butina and Trump at FreedomFest. According to Nunberg, Erickson pitched her as a “Russian” involved with the NRA, but the request was denied after Nunberg told Erickson that he did not control the schedule and that Trump would not have time to accommodate the request.

The capstone of Butina’s year was a Moscow trip that December for an NRA delegation that she and Torshin helped arrange. Although the NRA later insisted it was not an official visit, contemporaneous emails, itineraries, and photos show NRA staff helped coordinate the visit, arranged gifts branded with the NRA logo, and smoothed meetings with prominent Russians, including sanctioned defense interests, while several delegation members simultaneously pursued private business opportunities.

The Senate Finance Committee’s 2019 investigation concluded that the NRA misled the public about the nature of the trip and documented that Torshin and Butina had “extensive access to NRA organizational meetings.”

Phase 3: Election-year proximity (2016)

The infiltration of the NRA allowed Torshin and Butina direct access to key figures in the Trump firmament. In February of 2016, Butina and Erickson formalized a vehicle for expenses through Bridges, LLC, and ran NRA reimbursements through it. After the December 2015 Moscow trip, Butina sought to be reimbursed for about $6,000 in expenses she said she fronted for Outdoor Channel CEO Jim Liberatore while in Moscow. She invoiced through Bridges, LLC, routing the emails via an NRA executive. Pete Brownell, then an NRA officer and later its president or his company paid Bridges $6,000, and the NRA then reimbursed Brownell. A few days later, the NRA reimbursed Brownell $21,535.10 (covering that Bridges payment plus other travel costs the NRA had advanced for the trip). In Feb 2018, after Senate inquiries began, Brownell was asked by outside counsel to repay $17,000 to “get the trip off the NRA’s books.”

After the delegation returned to the United States, Liberatore’s company hired Butina, paying Bridges, LLC $5,000 per month plus expenses.

By the time 2016 rolled around, Butina was deeply enmeshed in the gun rights organization’s work. Internal NRA emails show its staff coordinating an “Events for Delegation from Russia” itinerary with Butina in the days before the group’s 2016 convention. A planned meeting between Torshin and Trump was reportedly scrubbed by campaign vetters, but Donald Trump Jr. did meet Torshin briefly at an NRA dinner.

That month, Erickson emailed senior Trump aide Rick Dearborn with the subject line “Kremlin Connection,” offering to set up a back-channel meeting between Trump and Putin via his contacts in the NRA. Erickson wrote that he wanted advice from Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions, who was advising the Trump campaign and would become Trump’s first attorney general, about how to proceed in connecting Trump and Putin. Erickson wrote that Russia was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and would use the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Louisville to make “‘first contact.’”

“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” Erickson wrote. “He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election. Let’s talk through what has transpired and Senator Sessions’s advice on how to proceed.”

In August of that year, Butina moved to Washington, ostensibly to study at American University, and moved in with Erickson. Once in the United States, she routinely hosted “friendship” dinners that gathered Republican operatives, donors, and policy hands and reported the results back to Torshin. Among the attendees were Erickson, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, and George O’Neill Jr., the right-wing Rockefeller heir who hosted and helped arrange the dinners with Butina.

During this period, Butina also met and socialized with J.D. Gordon, the Trump campaign’s director of national security.

Epilogue (2018-2019)

In July 2018, federal officials arrested and charged Butina with conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation. Prosecutors described a coordinated effort to infiltrate influential conservative groups, explicitly including the NRA, to establish “private ‘back channel’ lines of communication” for Russian interests. She pleaded guilty that December to one conspiracy count, for which she admitted to acting under the direction of a senior Russian official to cultivate a political backchannel via U.S. conservative groups. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison, paroled in October, 2019, and immediately deported back to Moscow.

Two months after returning to Russia, Butina was hired by Kremlin propaganda channel RT to host an online show, whose primary purpose was to lampoon opposition figures. Less than two years later, she was elected to the Duma as a member of Putin’s United Russia party, where she continues to serve today.

Her erstwhile boyfriend, Erickson, was indicted and pleaded guilty in 2019 for unrelated investment-fraud schemes. He was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison but pardoned by Trump during his last day in office in January 2021. Butina has since referred to him as a “monster” and accused him of stealing money from her bank account while they were still together and she was serving time in an American prison.

Also in 2018, the Treasury Department sanctioned Torshin, placing him on the SDN list, a formal U.S. determination that sharply restricted any dealings with him.

Torshin’s infiltration of the NRA ended up as a phenomenally successful multi-year access campaign. By legitimizing himself in NRA circles and parlaying that into VIP treatment, he used the NRA’s prestige and convening power to reach senior Republican figures during the 2016 campaign. U.S. courts, via Butina’s plea, and the U.S. government, via the Treasury’s sanctions on Torshin, have validated this influence operation.

During Trump’s first administration, the FBI investigated whether Torshin, then a deputy governor of Russia’s central bank, funneled money through the NRA to boost Trump’s election effort and whether the NRA acted as a conduit for foreign-sourced political spending. The NRA made record election expenditures in 2016 — about $54 million overall, with more than $30 million aimed at helping Trump. In response, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden pressed the NRA for records on foreign-funded accounts. The NRA acknowledged taking some foreign money into non-political accounts but denied using any of it for election activity.

No charges have been established that the NRA knowingly laundered Russian political money in 2016. It remains unclear whether the NRA acted as the Kremlin’s useful idiot or whether some of its officials knowingly coordinated with a foreign adversary to advance the Trump campaign’s interests.

We hope you’ll follow and share this series widely—because in the face of Trump and GOP’s coordinated efforts to rewrite history, it’s more important than ever to stay informed, uphold the truth, and resist the erasure of what really happened.

Stay tuned for our next installment, Guns, God, and the Kremlin: How Russia Infiltrated the NRA…

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Hi everyone! I’ve received several questions about where to find the video and print editions of the new series and I just launched: Active Measures: Russia’s Attack on the 2016 U.S. Election. I’m putting all the links here in one place.

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Active Measures Chapter 2: Laying the Groundwork (2008-2012)

Thank you to everyone who joined my Live with Olga Lautman today to discuss the second installment of our Active Measures series about how Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump become president…

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