Putin’s Troika: Three Russian Agents Who Infiltrated the Trump Campaign
On 14 March 2016, Jared Kushner attended a lunch event at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. The keynote speaker at the event was Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser to Richard Nixon who has subsequently met 17 times with Vladimir Putin. The lunch was organized by the Center for the National Interest, a foreign policy think tank once known as the Nixon Center, whose head, the Russian-born Dimitri Simes, had been friendly with the eponymous U.S. president — and is friendly with the current Russian president.
At the time, Kushner was a bit player in the Trump campaign. He’d come aboard in November 2015, just four months before, and was nominally in charge of the campaign’s social media operations, which would not take off until June 2016, when supercharged by Cambridge Analytica. If he was known at all, it was as the husband of Ivanka Trump.
The 14 March lunch is significant, because it is the first known contact between Kushner and representatives of Russian president Vladimir Putin. For Dimitri Simes was not just the head of a think tank and publisher of a periodical, the National Interest, that trumpeted pro-Putin views. He was also, allegedly, one of the highest-ranking Russian intelligence operatives in the United States. He’d met with Putin in Moscow not long before that…
