To Russia With Love: Jared Kushner, Dimitri Simes, and Trump’s First Foreign Policy Address
This article covers Donald Trump’s first major foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s contacts with the controversial Russian foreign policy expert Dimitri Simes.
It is the seventh entry in the series “Mysterious Misfits: the 2016 Trump Foreign Policy Team and the Russian Election Interference Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read previous entries, it is recommended.
The first article covers the establishment of the 2016 Trump Campaign Foreign Policy team and an effort to find Hillary’s “missing emails.”
The second article covers how George Papadopoulos learned that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The third article describes how Papadopoulos revealed that the Russians had Hillary’s emails and his attempts to arrange a Trump/Putin meeting.
The fourth article covers Papadopoulos’ interactions with a man suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence and his last days on the campaign.
The fifth article covers Carter Page’s background in Russia and his ties to Russian foreign intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA.
The sixth article covers Carter Page’s tenure on the Trump Campaign and his mysterious trip to Moscow.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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On April 27th, 2016, Donald Trump delivered the first major foreign policy address of his campaign at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.
The genesis of the speech dates back to a March 14th luncheon at Manhattan’s Time Warner Center organized by the DC-based think tank the Center for the National Interest (CNI) for its honorary chairman, former Secretary of State during the Nixon administration, Henry Kissenger.
The purpose of the event was to promote CNI’s work and to recruit new board members. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was in attendance after being invited by CNI board member and CEO of HBO Richard Plepler.
At the time, despite the Trump campaign’s electoral successes in the primary, it was struggling to be taken seriously, much less supported, by the foreign policy community.
As a result, Kuhsner connected at the event with CNI’s President and CEO, Dimitri Konstantinovich Simes.
Born in Moscow in 1947, Simes had immigrated to the United States in 1973 and became a U.S. citizen. In his youth he served as First Secretary of Komsomol, the communist political youth organization in the Soviet Union.
Prior to leaving the USSR, Simes graduated from Moscow University, after which worked and studied at the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations.
At the time, the Institute was led by Yevgeny Primakov, who was later appointed the First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and the Director of the KGB First Chief Directorate, responsible for foreign intelligence.
His parents, Konstantin Simis (Immigration changed Dimitri’s last name to “Simes”) and Dina Kaminskaya, later became notable lawyers for defending Soviet dissidents in Soviet courts and had to flee the country after the KGB discovered that Konstantin was working on an exposé of corruption in Soviet society.
While in the United States, the Simes worked his way into the Washington foreign policy establishment. He eventually served as the Chairman of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Programs and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
After writing a op-ed piece in 1985 “re-appraising” Richard Nixon and describing him as “a very impressive President” and “an honorable statesman,” Simes was invited to meet with Nixon and later became his informal foreign policy advisor.
Simes accompanied the former president on several trips to Moscow, later claiming that Nixon helped him find a wife, acted as his best man at the wedding, and personally appointed him head of The Nixon Center.
By that time, Simes was already a controversial figure in Washington, DC. Rumors circulated that he was a spy. To supporters, he was a foreign policy realist, while to others he was known to constantly parrot what they saw as Kremlin propaganda.
He gained enemies when he suggested in a 1979 article that the motivations for what he described as Washington’s neoconservative “anti-Soviet brigade” could be explained by their “Jewish connection.”
Simes, who himself is Jewish, has used that fact, along with his parents’ story, to bolster his argument that he was a dissident while in the Soviet Union. His high level placement in communist youth organizations and elite Soviet academic institutions, however, confuse matters.
While at The Nixon Center, Simes became noted for his personal contacts among current and former Russian government officials.
Upon Vladimir Putin’s ascension to the Presidency, Simes courted controversy for his perceived sympathies with the authoritarian Russian leader. CNI and The National Interest, its flagship publication which often featured articles by Simes himself, came to be known in certain circles in Washington as “two of the most Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital.”
In December of 2005, The Moscow Times and Kommersant reported that Simes was in discussions with Gleb Pavlovsky about establishing a Washington, DC-based think tank that would be funded with Russian money and used to combat negative views of Russia in America. At the time, Pavlovsky was a political advisor to Putin.
In addition to Simes’ potential participation, The Moscow Times reported that Oleg Deripaska was also in discussions about being involved with the project.
Deripaska employee Georgy Oganov, who years later in January 2017 met Paul Manafort at a secret meeting in Madrid arranged by GRU officers and Deripaska associates Konstantin Kilimnik and Viktor Boyarkin, is quoted in the 2005 article as saying that the potential Russian-backed NGO, “was discussed… on many occasions among Mr. Deripaska and people living in the States, including people at the Nixon Center.”
The Nixon Center denied that these conversations ever took place. By March of 2011, however, Simes’ fealty to Putin became too much for the Nixon family to ignore. The Nixon Foundation officially severed ties with the newly renamed Center for the National Interest.
Writing for Politico, journalist Ben Smith reported the following: “To the Republican stalwarts, family members, and former political aides who sit on the Foundation board, however, the Center and — particularly — its longtime president, Dimitri Simes, had become nothing less than an embarrassment to the Nixon family name.”
“Simes,” Smith continued, “an imposing eminence of Russia policy, was — in their view — offering apologies for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin and even attacking their party’s presidential candidate, John McCain, for his denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia.”
In 2013, Simes attended the Valdai Discussion Summit, where he shared the stage with Vladimir Putin, who referred to him as “his American friend and colleague.”
At the time, Simes publicly voiced his support of Putin’s policy vis-a-vis the Russian intervention into the Syrian Civil War and their support of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Simes attended Valdai again in 2014, the same year that Joseph Mifsud, the man who informed George Papadopoulos that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s emails, was in attendance.
In February of 2015 Simes traveled to Moscow and met with Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials. The circumstances and purpose of the meeting remain unknown.
Shortly thereafter, Simes began interacting with Maria Butina, who was convicted of being an unregistered agent of Russia in 2018, and her alleged handler Alexander Torshin, a Russian Central Bank deputy governor whom Spanish prosecutors accuse of also being a high-level member of Russian organized crime.
Butina grew infamous after infiltrating the National Rifle Association. David Keene, the former President of the NRA, is a board member of CNI.
Two months after Simes returned from his meeting with Putin in Moscow, in April of 2015, CNI facilitated meetings for Torshin and Butina with Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Nathan Sheets, Treasury secretary of international affairs.
That same month, Butina and Torshin attended a private, “off-the-record” meeting in April of 2015 at CNI to discuss the “Russian financial situation and its impact on Russian politics.”
Nor was that the end of Butina’s interactions with CNI and Simes. On June 7th, 2015, according to emails leaked to The Daily Beast, she emailed Simes and attempted to arrange a meeting between Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, CNI’s largest benefactor, and Torshin.
Simes also put Butina in touch with Jacob Heilbrunn, Editor-in-Chief of CNI’s flagship publication The National Interest. Butina emailed Heilbrunn an essay she had written titled “The Bear and the Elephant.”
On June 12th, The National Interest published Butina’s article. It began as follows: “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States. As improbable as it may sound, the Russian bear shares more interests with the Republican elephant than the Democratic donkey.”
Less than a year later, Simes had an opportunity to help make Maria Butina’s prediction come true.
Simes and Jared Kushner first discussed the possibility of CNI hosting a major foreign policy speech at the March 14th Luncheon. According to Kushner’s later testimony, it was he who approached Simes about the idea.
Ten days later, on March 24th, Kushner and Simes spoke over the phone, and then met in person at Kushner’s New York Office on the 31st. Simes explained to Kushner that the Trump campaign ought to enlist a foreign policy advisory group that would meet with Trump and offer their counsel as well as establish policies acceptable to the candidate.
Curiously, that is precisely what was happening that very day at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, where George Papadopoulos suggested he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin.
It was agreed that CNI would host a substantive speech and its board members would offer their national security expertise to the campaign.
In mid-April, Kushner put Simes in touch with Stephen Miller, who was in charge of drafting the speech. Simes provided Miller with a set of suggested themes in the form of bullet points drafted by himself, CNI executive director Paul Saunders and board member Richard Burt.
While Burt’s contribution to the final speech appears to have been marginal, his background has been the subject of suspicion.
After being appointed the Ambassador to West Germany by Reagan, he helped facilitate a prison exchange between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. across Glienicke Bridge in Berlin in which the infamous CIA mole Karl Koecher was traded for, among others, the famous Soviet Refusenik Natan Sharansky (aka Anatoly Shcharansky).
Under George H.W. Bush, Burt was appointed as the chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). Among the Soviet negotiators at the time was an arms control expert by the name of Sergey Kislyak, who later became the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. whose tenure covered the 2016 election and who later attended Trump’s Mayflower Hotel speech.
After the successful negotiation on the START I treaty, Burt entered into the private sector.
In 2000, he became the chairman of a private intelligence and risk assessment firm called Diligence. The firm was founded by British ex-MI5 Agent Nick Day and former CIA operations officer Mike Day.
William Webster, former head of both the CIA and FBI, and Edward J. Mathas, senior advisor to The Carlyle Group, a private equity company with extensive links to the US intelligence and defense communities, both sat on its advisory board.
In 2005, while Burt was chairman, Diligence was hired by the powerhouse DC-based lobbying Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR), who in turn were representing one of the largest privately owned Russian conglomerates, Alfa Group Consortium.
Sitting on Alfa’s Supervisory Board are some of the wealthiest and most politically connected Russian oligarchs, including Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan.
In 2007, Nathaniel Rothschild purchased a stake in the company through his private merchant bank JNR.
In addition to being close to Roman Abramovich, Rothschild is one of Oleg Deripaska’s closest associates and business partners.
Deripaska became a Diligence client, and in addition to providing corporate intelligence gathering and Visa lobbying, the firm assisted him in getting a $150 million loan from the World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for one of his subsidiaries, the KOMI Aluminum Project.
Read my description of the relationship between Oleg Deripaska and Nathaniel Rothschild, and their connection to Paul Manafort, here.
Burt left Diligence in 2007 shortly after Nathaniel Rothschild purchased his stake in the company and joined Kissinger McLarty Associates, a consulting firm established by Henry Kissinger.
The firm split apart the next year and Burt stayed on with McLarty Associates, where he remains today as a Managing Partner leading the firm’s work in Europe and Eurasia.
Burt is also currently a Non-Executive Director at LetterOne, a Luxembourg-based investment company established by Alfa Group Consortium leader Mikhail Fridman.
Others who sit beside Burt on LetterOne’s board include Petr Aven and German Khan.
According to a 2007 internal report by Stratfor that was leaked by Wikileaks: “Fridman is closely tied into the Muscovite [Solntsevskaya] Organization, one of Russia’s largest and most powerful organized crime associations, via funding from Alfa.”
While Simes, Bert and Saunders provided the Trump campaign with the bullet point suggestions for the speech, it is unclear to what extent it influenced the speech itself.
The primary speech writer was Stephen Miller. Other individuals who provided notes included Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Corey Lewandowski, George Papadapoulos and Carter Page.
Several suggested passages by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Admiral Chuck Kubic that contained language challenging Russian aggression or supporting NATO were nixed.
On the day of the speech, April 27th, CNI arranged a VIP reception for 20–25 individuals consisting mostly of ambassadors and members of Congress that took place a curtain in the same room the speech took place.
Trump arrived 15 minutes prior to giving the speech and a receiving line was established where he and Sessions could meet with the assorted VIP’s.
After several members of Congress met with Trump, Simes introduced him to Kislyak and the two exchanged pleasantries. Kislyak also met and shook hands with Jared Kushner.
“I really like what he’s saying,” Kislyak told Kushner, referring to Trump. “America and Russia should have a good relationship; we don’t have one now with the current administration; and I hope if President Trump wins that will change.”
On August 17th, 2016, Kushner met with Simes at the latter’s request at Kushner’s office in Manhattan to discuss the Clinton campaign’s Russia-related attacks against Trump.
Before the meeting, Simes sent Kushner an email with subject line Russia Policy Memo describing “what Mr. Trump may want to say about Russia.” In the email, Simes wrote of a “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton” and the Russian government. According to Simes, the story was familiar to the CIA, FBI and Kenneth Starr, the special counsel who investigated Clinton in the 1990s.
Kushner forwarded Simes email to Paul Manafort, who subsequently scheduled a meeting with Simes but ended up resigning from the campaign before the meeting could ever take place.
Read my series on Paul Manafort’s activities during the 2016 election and connections to Russian intelligence here.
Simes, however, did meet with Kushner.
During the meeting, Simes told Kushner of rumors that had circulated within the US intelligence community that the Russians and recordings of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky engaging in sexually explicit phone calls.
According to the Star Report, Bill Clinton “suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories. If ever questioned, she should say that the two of them were just friends. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.”
Simes explained that he had learned this from Fritz Ermath, a former CIA Soviet analyst and Reagan White House official. Ermath would later say he told Simes during a trip to Washington in either 2014 or 2015.
Nor was Kushner, who apparently considered the item to be “old news” and unable to be “operationalized,” the only person Simes mentioned it to. Simes also brought the matter up during one of the CNI dinners arranged for Jeff Sessions.
This marks the total known interactions between Simes and the Trump campaign prior to the election, though he would continue to play an important role during the transition.
As mentioned before, there have been accusations levied against Simes that he is a Russian agent or intelligence asset. These remain unsubstantiated and, as an American citizen, Simes perhaps deserves the benefit of the doubt and has also been defended against these charges by respected colleagues such as Leslie Gelb, who has argued that Simes’ “body of work belies those who portray him as a secret Russian agent.”
The most in depth analysis of Simes that concludes he is “an agent of the Kremlin embedded into the American political elite” was done by the Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky for the Ukrainian publication GORDON.
Felshtinsky was a friend and colleague of the assassinated FSB whistleblower Alexander Litvenenko.
In his book American Kompromat, author Craig Unger and his research assistant Olga Lautman spoke with two famous KGB defectors, Yuri Shvets and Oleg Kagin, both of whom indicated that they believed Simes was connected with Russian intelligence.
According to Shvets, while he was an acting KGB officer he had wanted to attempt to recruit Simes but was told to “stand down” because “[h]e was being taken care of,” which meant he was already a KGB contact.
Kalugin relayed a story in which Simes had called him a “traitor” after he had defected to the United States.
Whether one chooses to believe the recollections of former KGB agents is a matter of personal discrimination.