Epilogue: Russia’s Return on Investment for Interfering in the 2016 Election

Chapter 20 of our series on how Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump win.

Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office in 2017

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.

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