The important information in this article, I think, is the information about
Trump's way of doing business and the business dealings he had with
Russians, rather than the Russian government.
Miriam
From 1996 to 2015, Donald Trump co-owned the Miss Universe Organization,
which also included the Miss U.S.A. and Miss Teen U.S.A. pageants. (photo:
AP)
Trump's Miss Universe Gambit
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
20 February 18
For years, he used his beauty pageants to boost business interests abroad. A
2013 contest, in Moscow, may also have helped give him the Presidency.
The first-round results of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant seem to have come
as a surprise to some of the competitions judges, who thought that they
would declare the finalists. The seven judges of the pageants preliminary
round were charged with winnowing eighty-six contestants to fifteen
finalists. Divided into two groups, they had brief conversations with each
of the contestants, who then paraded onstage, first in bathing suits, then
in evening gowns. The judgesincluding public-relations professionals, a
modelling entrepreneur, and a fashion reporterrated each woman on such
qualities as appearance and personality, after which the ballots were
whisked away. They told us not to share how we voted with each other, but
we did anyway, one of the preliminary judges told me. When the finalists
were announced, he said, the winners included several who hadnt been
selected. I was shocked, the judge told me. I didnt know what had
happened. I felt ridiculous. The contestants were not so naïvethey
understood who was in charge.
From 1996 to 2015, Donald Trump co-owned the Miss Universe Organization,
which also included the Miss U.S.A. and Miss Teen U.S.A. pageants. A day or
two before a pageant began, Trump would casually visit the contestants while
they conducted their final rehearsals. Former contestants told me that Trump
would circulate among the young women, shaking hands and chatting with each
of them, periodically turning to speak with Paula Shugart, the president of
the Miss Universe Organization, who followed him at a discreet distance.
(Paula Shugart declined to comment.) Adwoa Yamoah, who competed as Miss
Canada in 2012, told me, He made comments about every girl: Ive been to
that country. Were building a Trump Tower there. It was clear the
countries that he liked did well. Hed whisper to Paula about the girls, and
shed write it down. He basically told us he picked nine of the top
fifteen. Kerrie Baylis, who was Miss Jamaica in 2013, described a similar
scene and added that, when the finalists were announced, the list looked
like the countries that Donald Trump did business with, or wanted to do
business with. Shi Lim, who competed that year as Miss Singapore, told me,
The finalists were picked by Trump. He was really in charge. We called it
the Trump card. (A Miss Universe spokeswoman said that the pageant rules
allowed the companys staff, including Trump, to participate in naming the
finalists.)
Trump has long viewed his businesses as mutually reinforcing, with all the
productsfrom hotels to steak, vodka to golf resortscomplementing one
another. As he said in the introduction to the first episode of The
Apprentice, the reality-television show that made him a global celebrity,
Ive mastered the art of the deal and have turned the name Trump into the
highest-quality brand. Trump often staged the Miss Universe pageant in
cities where he had other business interests, and finalists usually came
from countries where Miss Universe had strong television ratings. Under
Trump, the pageant was held twice in Las Vegas, twice in Florida, and twice
in Puerto Rico. In the other years, Trump kept the pageant true to its
origins as a swimsuit competition by setting the ceremony in warm-weather
locations like Panama City, São Paulo, Quito, and Mexico City. (Although
interest in beauty pageants has faded in the United States, it remains high
in Latin America.) Only once did Trump steer the pageant away from temperate
environmentsin November, 2013, when Miss Universe took place in Russia.
Today, the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow looks like a harbinger of the
Trump campaign and Presidency, featuring some of the same themes and
characters. Miss Universe represents a paradigmatic example of Trumps
business style in actionthe exaggerations that teeter into lies, the
willingness to embrace dubious partners, the hunger for glamour and
recognition. Trump got away with this kind of behavior for decades, and he
played by the same rules during his run for the Presidency.
Last Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, unveiled the indictment of
thirteen Russian nationals, and three Russian organizations, on charges that
they conspired to throw the 2016 election to Trump. Their main method, the
indictment contends, was the manipulation of social media through posts by
Russians operating under stolen identities. The Russians diction was
sometimes imperfectone Instagram post said a particular hype and hatred
for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killarybut
their goal was apparent. In the words of the indictment, the conspirators
sought to provide information to the American public supporting the
presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaging
Hillary Clinton.
The indictment does not explicitly assert that Trump or his campaign
knowingly participated in the Russian conspiracy. On Friday afternoon, Sarah
Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said that the President
took this omission as vindication, noting that Trump is glad to see the
Special Counsels investigation further indicatesthat there was NO
COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the outcome of the
election was not changed or affected. In fact, Muellers charges suggest
the opposite. The undertaking had more than eighty employees and a budget of
more than a million dollars a month.
The indictment does not address several other efforts that American
intelligence agencies have tied to Russia, such as the hacking of e-mail
accounts linked to prominent Democrats. And Mueller has not yet made public
his findings on the clearest link between the Trump campaign and Russian
interests: the link that emerged from the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
The ever-more-pressing question is whether Trump and the Russians used the
relationships cemented at the pageant to advance Trumps goal of becoming
President of the United States.
***
Shortly after Yolande Betbeze was named Miss America 1951, she precipitated
a crisis. An aspiring opera singer, Betbeze announced that she would not
pose in a bathing suit when she went on tour. Executives at Catalina
swimwear, a sponsor of the pageant, were offended, and the company decided
to create competing events, which came to be called Miss Universe and Miss
U.S.A. (Miss U.S.A., not Miss America, advances to the Miss Universe
competition.) That rift still defines the differences between the pageants.
Miss America, with its earnest talent competitions and its scholarships for
winners, purports to reward a multidimensional female ideal. Not so Miss
Universe. As Candace Savage put it, in Beauty Queens, her amusing history
of the pageants, The new competitions were to emphasize beauty, pure and
simple, with none of the ridiculous folderol about talent.
By the late nineteen-sixties, ownership of the Miss Universe Organization
had passed to a lingerie company called Kayser-Roth. Cindy Adams, who was an
assistant at the company, and her husband, the comedian Joey Adams, were
friends of Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer and fixer who had been a close aide
to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Roy used to invite us everywhere, and once we
went to a party on Long Island, where I happened to be seated at a small
table with this tall young guy with blond hair, Adams told me recently.
Roy told me at that dinner that one day Donald would own New York. I said,
Yeah, pass the gravy.
In 1971, Adams arranged for the Miss Universe contestants to walk down
Seventh Avenue as a publicity stunt for the pageant, which was to take place
in Miami that year. Cops studded the route. Nobody was allowed near the
contestants in the line of march, Adams wrote later, in the New York Post,
where she is a columnist. I look over. Whos alongside some nifty beauty
from some Who-Knows-Where-Country? My brand-new Best Friend. He wasnt The
Donald then. Adams concluded, I also knew then that he loved beauty, loved
blondes, and loved the Miss Universe Pageant.
In 1996, Trump attended the Miss Universe pageant, which was being co-hosted
in Paradise, Nevada, by the second of his three wives, Marla Maples. Trump
heard that the owner of the organization was putting the business up for
sale. How could I pass up the opportunity to own the worlds premiere
beauty pageant? he later wrote. As with so much regarding Trumps finances,
the price he paid for it is something of a mystery. In The Art of the
Comeback, he wrote that he beat out several competitors with a bid of ten
million dollars; in subsequent interviews, he said that he had paid only two
million.
From the beginning, Trump did little to conceal his attitude toward women.
As he told Howard Stern in an interview, when he bought the pageant he found
that it had strayed from its roots as a beauty contest. They had a person
who was extremely proud that a number of the women had become doctors,
Trump said. And I wasnt interested. In 1997, during his first year as
owner, Trump became embroiled in a conflict involving Alicia Machado, of
Venezuela, who was the reigning Miss Universe at the time and had gained
weight during her tenure. Trump went on a public crusade to shame her.
Wearing a suit and tie, and trailed by cameras, he followed Machado into a
gym to watch her work out. This is somebody that likes to eat, Trump told
the reporters. The controversy resurfaced during the 2016 campaign, when
Hillary Clinton, in the first Presidential debate, said, He called this
woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping, because she was
Latina. After a pause, Clinton said, Donald, she has a name: Her name is
Alicia Machado. (Trump was unrepentant, telling Fox News, She gained a
massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.)
Trump also boasted about ogling Miss Universe contestants during the events.
Ill go backstage before a show and everyones getting dressed, and
everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and Im allowed to go in
because Im the owner of the pageant and therefore Im inspecting it, he
told Stern. You know, theyre standing there with no clothes. Over the
years, when asked about his management of the pageants, he has often replied
with some version of the quip The bathing suits got smaller and the heels
got higher and the ratings went up. The part about ratings isnt true. As
the book Trump Revealed, by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, noted, when
Trump bought Miss Universe the viewership in the United States had declined
from around thirty-five million in 1984 to twelve million in 1997. The
numbers kept falling during Trumps ownership, and the American audience for
the 2013 pageant consisted of fewer than four million. Still, Trump
recognized that the pageant was a useful vehicle for expanding his reach
overseas, and no country so consistently kindled his ambitions as Russia.
***
Trumps interest in the country goes back to the days of the Soviet Union.
His first book, The Art of the Deal, published in 1987, begins with an
account of a typical day in his life, including a phone call with an
acquaintance who conducted a lot of business with the Soviet Union. Im
talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the
Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government, Trump wrote. They have
asked me to go to Moscow in July. Later that year, he did go to Moscow and
what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), but his plans to build there
never came to fruition.
Trump returned to Moscow in each of the following decades, hoping to add one
of his eponymous towers to the citys skyline. His regular visits have led
some to speculate that Trump had a kind of obsession with the country, but
he looked for deals all over the world, and he returned to Russia because
thats where the money was. A longtime adviser to Trump told me, Its a
major metropolitan city, and around the years of 2000, give or take, with
the privatization, there was a lot of money in Moscow.
The atmosphere of post-Soviet Russia also seemed to suit Trump. He travelled
to the city again in November, 1996, during the raucous Wild East days
following the collapse of Communism and the Soviet system. His arrival in
Moscow came after a plunge in his financial fortunes. (His 1995 tax return,
published in part by the Times in 2016, showed losses of nine hundred and
sixteen million dollars.) He had lost the trust of American banks and was
forced to search for credit and business opportunities abroad. In a news
conference shortly after his arrival in Moscow, he said that he planned to
invest two hundred and fifty million dollars to build a pair of luxury
apartment towers in the city, one to be called Trump International and the
other Trump Tower. In addition, he said that he was looking into renovating
and running two famous hotels from the Soviet era. As Trump said in a Mark
Singer profile in The New Yorker, published a few months later, Were
looking at the Moskva Hotel. Were also looking at the Rossiya. Thats a
very big project; I think its the largest hotel in the world. And were
working with the local government, the mayor of Moscow and the mayors
people.
The Moskva, steps from Red Square and the Kremlin, was the subject of a
bizarre legend. The story goes that during the early thirties, in the midst
of Stalins purges, the architect submitted a set of plans to Stalin for the
dictators approval. Stalin didnt notice that the architect had provided
two versions of the front façade. Rather than risk Stalins wrath by
pointing this out, the architect used both designs, one on the left side of
the building, the other on the right. The architect survived the ordeal,
but, by 1996, the building was falling apart, and city authorities were
looking for investors to renovate it.
During this trip, Trump was accompanied by a prominent American
businessmanBennett LeBow, the chairman of the Vector Group, a holding
company with investments in tobacco and real estate. LeBow and Trump
arranged to meet with representatives of Boris Yeltsins government in a
conference room at the Moskva to discuss taking over the hotel.
An expatriate businessman who attended the event that day told me, I was
just a kid, and I was supposed to help out at the meeting. LeBow was
upstairs, in a room called the library, but Trump was late. So they sent
me downstairs to wait for him. When Trump arrived, he was accompanied by
two young Russian women. The businessman said, I had never met Trump
before, and I was nervous as hell. So I started panicking. I mean, this was
a serious meeting. So I suggested to Trump that I wait downstairs at the bar
with them. Id keep them company until he was finished. He said no way. He
thought it was hilarious. He wanted to go upstairs with them. So what could
I do? The three of them went up to the meeting together.
As with Trumps previous visit, nothing came of this mission to Moscow.
(LeBow declined to comment. A White House spokesperson indicated that the
President has absolutely no memory of any women attending a meeting with
him while there and disputes any suggestion to the contrary.) Later, the
Rossiya was torn down and replaced with a park. The Moskva was eventually
renovated and converted into a Four Seasons Hotel.
***
By the turn of the century, Trump had moved away from the capital demands of
developing real estate and begun leveraging his celebrity into franchise
deals. He had experienced repeated bankruptcies in Atlantic City, and was
cut off from traditional sources of funding. As a result, he began to
welcome less reputable partners, as long as they had access to cash.
His ambition of putting his name on a building in Russia persisted. A source
in Moscow told me that Trump was always trying to get in touch with Russian
money, adding that in 2007 the source brought a Russian real-estate
developer to meet with Trump at Trump Tower, in New York, to discuss a
franchise project in Moscow. The deals were always the same, the source
said. Trump would lend his name, and the local guy would put up the money,
build, and manage. Nothing came of it.
Trump made his first foray into the Russian market when he lent his name to
Trump vodka. By the summer of 06, Trump said in a news release, I fully
expect the most called-for cocktail in America to be the T&T, or the
Trump and tonic. The product was launched at a series of parties in New
York, Miami Beach, and Hollywood. Among the guests, according to news
reports, were Stormy Daniels, the porn actress, and the former Playmate
Karen McDougal, both of whom were reportedly later paid to conceal their
relationships with Trump. In 2007, with similar fanfare, Trump announced
that his vodka would expand its distribution into Russia, with a $1.5
million deal for ten thousand cases. The vodka flopped, in Russia and
elsewhere. A longtime vodka executive in Russia told me, Trump vodka never
even showed up on our sales reportsthats how little it sold. Production
ceased in 2011.
The 2008 recession shattered the real-estate market, but Trumps position
was cushioned by the success of The Apprentice, which was being syndicated
around the world. Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium in New York, had
already begun selling space. His partners in the project included Felix
Sater and Tevfik Arif, two real-estate operators who were born in the Soviet
Union and maintained strong ties to Russia. Sater, the son of a Russian
mobster, had immigrated to the United States as a child. In 1993, he went to
prison for fifteen months after stabbing a man in the face with the stem of
a broken margarita glass during a barroom confrontation; and in 1998 he
pleaded guilty for his role in a forty-million-dollar stock-fraud scheme
carried out with mobsters. In 2010, Arif, who had worked at the Soviet
Ministry of Trade, was arrested in Turkey with ten others aboard a luxury
yacht and accused of being part of a prostitution ring. (He was later
acquitted.) Sater and Arif were principals in the Bayrock Group, which
invested in Trump real-estate ventures from its offices on the twenty-fourth
floor of Trump Tower.
The extent of Trumps financial ties to Russia remains unclear, but he
appears to have had a number of investors and business partners from the
former Soviet Union. In 2008, Donald Trump, Jr., told the audience at a
real-estate conference, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate
cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . We see a lot of money pouring in
from Russia. He also said that he had made six trips to Russia during the
previous eighteen months. In 2013, Trumps son Eric told the sportswriter
James Dodson, We dont rely on American banks. We have all the funding we
need out of Russia. (On Twitter, Eric Trump denied having made the remark.)
***
In 2013, Trumps prospects in Russia began to look more sanguine, thanks to
a music video featuring a pop star named Emin Agalarov. Emins father, Aras,
had made a fortune as a real-estate developer in Moscow, and Emin had put
the family fortune to work for the benefit of his singing career. The Moscow
music scene favors hard-edged rap, but Emin found a degree of success as a
crooner in the mold of Enrique Iglesias. In 2013, he had high expectations
for a danceable tune called Amor, and he wanted an especially beautiful
woman to star in the accompanying music video. Emin and his publicist, Rob
Goldstone, a former tabloid journalist from Great Britain who was hired to
promote Emins singing career outside Russia, approached the Miss Universe
Organization and asked if the men could cast the reigning champion, Olivia
Culpo, the former Miss U.S.A. Emin and Goldstone also suggested that the
Agalarovs host Miss Universe in Moscow in 2013, so that Emin could perform
for the pageants global audience. That June, Emin and Aras travelled to Las
Vegas to close the deal with Trump.
In some ways, the alliance between the Agalarovs and Trump seems
preordained. The Russian familys mingled interests in real estate and show
business led some to call them the Trumps of Russia. Unlike Trump, Aras came
from a family of modest means, but he had roots in Azerbaijan, where work
was under way on a Trump hotel and residence tower in Baku, the capital.
Emin was married to the daughter of Ilham Aliyev, the longtime Azerbaijani
President. (They have since divorced.) Christopher Steele, the former
British spy who examined Trumps ties to Russia, may have hinted at a darker
explanation for the Agalarovs interest in Miss Universe. Retained by the
research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by Hillary Clintons campaign,
Steele asserted that the Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting
and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Even if Steele is wrong and
Russia was not cultivating Trump as an asset, it seems clear that by this
point Trump would do business with just about anyone. No licensing deal was
too demeaning; he would attach his name to steak, water bottles, neckties,
mattresses, lamps, and vodka.
On the trip to Las Vegas, Aras and Emin Agalarov were accompanied by
Goldstone and came to an agreement with Trump that the Agalarovs would host
the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow that year. With his characteristic
salesmans bravado, Trump later said that there had been eighteen other
bidders vying for the pageant; in fact, its not clear that there were any
others. According to various reports, the Agalarovs invested twenty million
dollars to bring the event to Moscow. Twenty million dollars is not even
close, Scott Balber, a lawyer for Emin and Aras Agalarov who has also
represented Trump, told me. The site fee to Miss Universe was a couple of
million dollars at most.
In 2002, Trump had sold half of the Miss Universe Organization to NBC, which
broadcast the pageant, and the network had representatives on the
organizations board. Trump didnt decide alone that the pageant would take
place in Russia, Michael Cohen, a former executive vice-president of the
Trump Organization and a personal attorney to the President who also served
on the Miss Universe board of directors, told me. The board unanimously
agreed that the package the Agalarovs put forward was best for the company
and best for the contestants, so we approved it. I suspect that one of the
Agalarovs motivations was to advance Emins career.
Trump, though eager to take his pageant to Moscow, likely had an exaggerated
idea of the Agalarovs place in Russian society. I remember when we first
came to him for a meeting, he was sitting in the lobby of his own hotel,
which, of course, is called Trump, Aras Agalarov told the Russian
magazine Snob. Trump, Aras continued, began to shout, Look who came to me!
This is the richest person in Russia! According to Forbess ranking of
the wealthiest people in Russia, Agalarov placed fifty-first, with a net
worth of about $1.7 billion. Anders Aslund, an expert on the Russian economy
at the Atlantic Council, in Washington, told me, Most of the great Russian
fortunes come from natural resources, like oil, and the real-estate
developers are distinctly second-class in the pecking order. And Agalarovs
stuff is mostly on the outskirts, in whats called the Moscow region, on the
way to the airport. Nor does Agalarov wield outsized clout with Putin.
Real-estate developers like Agalarov are under the thumb of the government,
and they are expected to do as they are told, Aslund said. Agalarov is
building two stadiums for the World Cup this summer, not because hell make
much money doing it but because its what the government expects of him.
Agalarov surely had met Putin, but in 2013 neither he nor Trump would have
mattered much to Putin.
Trumps mistaken impression of Agalarov seems to have given him an
exaggerated expectation of meeting Putin, which was one of his goals in
taking Miss Universe to Moscow. On June 18, 2013, just after Trump announced
that the Miss Universe pageant would take place in Russia, he tweeted, with
a kind of desperate giddiness, Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss
Universe Pageant in November in Moscowif so, will he become my new best
friend? That fall, before the pageant, David Letterman asked Trump, on
Late Night, if he had ever met Putin. I met him once, Trump replied,
falsely.
***
On Friday, November 8, 2013, Trump travelled to Moscow with Phil Ruffin, his
business partner in Las Vegas. Ruffin is married to Oleksandra Nikolayenko,
a former Miss Universe from Ukraine, who is forty-six years Ruffins junior.
After they arrived, Trump attended a morning meeting about the pageant at
his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton. Keith Schiller, a former New York City police
officer who had long served as Trumps bodyguard, sat on one side of the
room. At some point during the session, Schiller testified to the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, someone offered to send five
women to Trumps hotel room. Schiller said that he took the offer as a joke,
rejected it, and told Trump of the invitation, which he said the two men
laughed about.
Later that day, the Agalarovs hosted a reception for Trump at a Moscow
outpost of the Nobu restaurant chain. Emin Agalarov owns several restaurants
run by the Los Angeles-based chef Nobu Matsuhisa, who was also in Moscow to
serve as a judge in the final round of Miss Universe the next day. About a
dozen people attended, including Herman Gref, the former Minister of
Economic Development and Trade under Putin and the president of Sberbank,
the largest bank in Russia. From there, the Agalarovs took Trump to Crocus
City, their shopping mall, west of the city, where the pageant would take
place. Aras Agalarov hosted a fifty-eighth-birthday party for himself at
which the contestants gathered to sing Happy Birthday. The event may have
been Trumps chance to inspect the women and render his judgments about who
should advance to the finals.
The following morning, Emin, who had asked Trump to shoot a scene for his
music video, brought a camera crew to the Ritz-Carlton. In a conference
room, Trump recited his famous lineYoure firedin one take. He also held
a news conference and sat for an interview with Thomas Roberts, an MSNBC
anchorman who would serve as the television host of the finals, along with
Mel B., the British singer better known as Scary Spice. (Andy Cohen, the
television personality, had co-hosted the previous years pageant but
withdrew from the 2013 contest because Russia had passed an anti-gay law
that year. Robertswho, like Cohen, is gayagreed to take his place.) Asked
by Roberts about his relationship with Putin, Trump again dissembled,
saying, I do have a relationship, and I can tell you that hes very
interested in what were doing here today. Trump went on, Hes probably
very interested in what you and I are saying today, and Im sure hes going
to be seeing it in some form, but I do have a relationship with him. He
told Roberts that Putin had done an amazing job. . . . A lot of people
would say hes put himself at the forefront of the world as a leader. Maria
Abakumova, a Moscow-based journalist who worked for the Russian edition of
Forbes at the time and covered Aras Agalarov, told me that people thought
Putin would attend the pageant, but he never showed up. Later, Aras told the
Washington Post that Putin had sent Trump a sort of consolation prizea note
along with a decorative box.
***
The faux triumphal arch that greets visitors to Crocus City establishes the
grandiosity of the Agalarovs commercial complex. It is three separate but
connected malls. One, dubbed Vegas, features moderately priced retailers.
A second consists of dozens of luxury shops, and a third offers
home-improvement products. There is also an aquarium, a hotel, a heliport,
and Crocus City Hall, the six-thousand-seat theatre where the Miss Universe
pageant would be staged.
To accommodate the international television audience, the live broadcast in
Moscow began late on the night of Saturday, November 9th. Trump and Aras
Agalarov sat next to each other in the front row. One judge, an Italian
wristwatch designer named Italo Fontana, told me, by e-mail, that Trump
greeted me like we were friends since ages and with a smile and a pat on my
shoulder he told me: I recommend you, vote the most beautiful one!
The judges included Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith; the supermodel Carol Alt,
who had been a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice; and the ice-skater Tara
Lipinski. An announcer provided a few facts about each finalistShe never
wears flats because she feels she is made to be a beauty queenuntil only
Miss Venezuela and Miss Spain remained. (The contestants were referred to by
their countries, not by name.) At the end of the show, Olivia Culpo handed
her crown to Gabriela Isler, of Venezuela, who became the seventh winner
from that country since 1979.
Trump later boasted about how many important people he met during the
weekend, telling Real Estate Weekly, a trade publication, Almost all of the
oligarchs were in the room. This was far from truevery few attendedbut
photographs and news reports show that Trump did cross paths with some
wealthy Muscovites and a variety of prospective business partners. Perhaps
the most notorious guest was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian businessman
widely suspected of fixing an ice-dancing competition at the 2002 Winter
Olympics. At the time of the pageant, he was a fugitive from justice in the
United States, where he had been charged with running an organized-crime
money-laundering operation from an apartment at Trump Tower, three floors
below Trumps penthouse. (He denies the allegations.)
The after-party for several hundred guests took place in a large meeting
room on the Crocus City campus. Trump and the Agalarovs presided in one of
the V.I.P. boxes, receiving guests and taking photographs. Timati, a leading
Russian rapper, came to pay his respects. It was a pretty sedate affair in
their box, one guest recalled, adding that, in the next box, Roustam
Tariko, the founder of the business empire Russian Standard, which was an
official partner of the pageant, held a livelier celebration, with about a
dozen young women, including numerous Miss Russia contestants. (Russian
Standard also sponsors the Miss Russia pageant, a feeder event for Miss
Universe.) The parties wound down at around four in the morning.
Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton for only two nights, but his presence there
has given rise to the most sensational accusation about his time in Moscow.
The Steele dossier claims that Russian authorities had exploited Trumps
personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable
kompromat (compromising material) on him. A source allegedly present at
the scene said that Trump had rented the Presidential Suite at the hotel,
where Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed, and that he had employed a
number of prostitutes to perform a golden showers (urination) show in
front of him, as a way of defiling the bed in which the former First Couple
had slept. The accusation seems unlikely, though not impossible, and Trump
has denied the validity of the dossier. In any case, he seems to have been
in high spirits when he left Moscow. Shortly after his departure, he tweeted
to Aras Agalarovs account, I had a great weekend with you and your family.
You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!
***
If Trump had simply gone back to his career in business, the Miss Universe
pageant in Moscow would today rank as little more than a footnote in the
colorful saga of a flamboyant New York real-estate developer. But a year and
a half later, in June, 2015, Trump declared his candidacy for President in a
notorious speech at Trump Tower, in which he accused Mexico of exporting
criminals and rapists and called for the building of a border wall. Outrage
followed, especially in the Spanish-speaking world, and Trump quickly made a
deal to sell his ownership of the Miss Universe Organization, to the WME-IMG
talent agency. Neither the sale price nor Trumps profit on the deal, if
any, has been disclosed.
In the Presidential campaign, Trump continued his embrace of Moscow with a
roundelay of ingratiation and deference to Putin. He had also kept in touch
with the Agalarovs. A year after the pageant, he appeared in another of
Emins videos, to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday. (Emin, I cant
believe youre turning thirty-five, Trump said. Youre a winner, youre a
champ!) In April of 2016, Emin told the Washington Post, I consider him a
friend. We exchange correspondence. We see each other a few times a year.
As a Presidential candidate, Trump continued working on a plan to build in
Russia. In October, 2015, based on a proposal by Felix Sater, Trump signed a
non-binding letter of intent to license the Trump name to a potential office
tower in Moscow. In an e-mail sent at the time to Michael Cohen, Sater
wrote, I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. . .
. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I
will get all of Putins team to buy in on this. Cohen, who negotiated on
Trumps behalf, recalled, The licensee was intent on developing the tallest
building in the world, a hundred and twenty stories or so, with commercial
space, a hotel, and residential. But the most important requirement we had
was that Felix find the right piece of real estate for it, because the Trump
brand is all about location, location, location. By January, 2016, I saw
that he couldnt come up with any location, so I told him the deal was
dead.
The scope of Russian meddling in the election remains unknown, but it
appears to have included hacking e-mail accounts affiliated with prominent
Democrats, seeding social media with pro-Trump and anti-Clinton items, and,
perhaps, directing financial assistance to pro-Trump organizations.
According to six U.S. intelligence chiefs, Russia is building on its 2016
efforts by launching a new round of attacks aimed at undermining the 2018
elections. On February 13th, Dan Coats, the director of National
Intelligence, warned the Senate Intelligence Committee, We expect Russia to
continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic
spokesmen, and other means of influence to try to build on its wide range of
operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United
States. In the same hearing, Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I.,
acknowledged that the President had not asked his intelligence officials to
take specific measures to address Russian interference. We need to inform
the American public that this is real, Coats said, in what sounded as much
like an appeal to the President as to the public. We are not going to allow
some Russian to tell us how to vote and how to run our country. I think
there needs to be a national cry for that.
Trump, it seems, has never asked his top intelligence officials for an
accounting of Russian activities during the campaign or for a plan to stop
such efforts from continuing in the future. As a result, the quest for
accountability rests largely with the Mueller investigation, which is trying
to determine whether Trump and his campaign staff knew about, encouraged, or
sponsored the Russian efforts. To date, the most direct evidence that they
did is a result of connections forged in the lead-up to the 2013 Miss
Universe contest. On June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone, Emin Agalarovs publicist,
e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering damaging information about Hillary
Clinton as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump.
Donald, Jr., replied, If its what you say I love it. Six days later,
Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, the candidates son-in-law, and Paul Manafort,
then the chairman of the campaign, welcomed a group of visitors to Trump
Tower led by a Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya. In July, 2017,
the Times informed the White House that it was working on a story about that
meeting. The President and his advisers, who were returning from a trip to
Europe aboard Air Force One, prepared a misleading statement about the
purpose of the meeting, asserting that it had been a harmless discussion of
adoption policy.
Muellers prosecutors have taken a close look at the meeting, and at the
Presidents public response to its exposure. It is illegal for foreign
nationals to contribute to American campaigns, including through in-kind
contributions, such as opposition research. The misleading statement may
become evidence of obstruction of justice. And the indictments of the
Russians on Friday showed Muellers determination to reveal the extent of
foreign influence in the election and to hold accountable those who
facilitated it. For decades, in Trumps business dealings, he never paid a
price for his salesmans hype, which repeatedly edged into falsehood. The
Mueller investigation may now bring an unprecedented and overdue moment of
reckoning.
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