Not surprising at all...

Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a ‘pro-Kremlin’ campaign adviser

Dimitri Simes, who runs a Washington think tank, offered advice on Russia policy and even peddled rumors about the Clintons.

By NATASHA BERTRAND

Jared Kushner needed help.

It was March 2016 and Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, was steamrolling to the Republican presidential nomination. But the businessman-candidate was taking heat for his campaign’s lack of foreign policy expertise, something Kushner was trying to remedy.

That’s when he found a Russian willing to assist.

On March 14, 2016, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Kushner attended a lunch in Manhattan in honor of Henry Kissinger. Also in attendance was a tall, bearded Russian émigré with a booming voice. His name was Dmitri Simes, and for nearly 20 years he had been president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank.

Simes had been a Washington fixture since he left the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, obtained U.S. citizenship, and served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon. A longtime advocate of warmer U.S.-Russia relations, he was also dogged by criticism that he was notably sympathetic to Moscow’s views.

Kushner and Simes met at the lunch and began communicating, including in a meeting at Kushner’s office later that month. Although the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser, he provided counsel to the Trump team, particularly with regard to Russia. In June 2016, Mueller found, he sent a memo to then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who headed up Trump’s foreign policy team, offering several policy recommendations, including “a new beginning with Moscow,” and in August he would send Kushner himself a “Russia policy memo.”

In April of that year, CNI hosted Trump’s first genuine foreign policy address, attended by Russia’s U.S. ambassador, in which the candidate offered a similar message. Mueller also discovered that Simes also offered Kushner disparaging information about former President Bill Clinton.

The Simes-Kushner relationship was outlined in detail by Mueller’s report, which mentions Simes over 100 times. While the report concluded that Simes did not act as a campaign intermediary with Moscow, and did not allege that he works at the behest of the Kremlin, it did note that Simes and CNI have “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials.”

To Simes’ allies the report was, as Trump might say, a total exoneration that should end the speculation over his Simes background and motivations: “I think what is in the report is very clear,” said Paul Saunders, a former CNI executive director and current board member. “They did not find evidence that he or the center were involved in passing any messages back and forth between the campaign and Russia. More than that, the report states that he advised the Trump campaign against hidden contacts with Russia.”

Even so, former U.S. officials and people who know Simes say Mueller’s report is a fresh reminder that he is at best a mysterious—and at worst alarming—player in Washington’s foreign policy community. Depending on who you ask, he is either a shrewd foreign policy realist dedicated to defusing tensions between his birth-nation and the one where he chose to make a life — or a Kremlin advocate who cloaks his true agenda in Washington, D.C.

“It’s very transparent what his agenda is,” said Michael Carpenter, a former adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and a top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine in the Obama administration. Carpenter said that while Simes positions himself as a pragmatic foreign policy realist, “he is completely pro-Kremlin and always has been.”

Simes’ allies reject such charges as unfair Russophobia. One Simes friend who has worked closely with him called allegations that Simes has a pro-Kremlin agenda “old, unfair, and unfounded.”

Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior Defense and State Department official who has known Simes since the 1970’s, said that Simes’s “body of work belies those who portray him as a secret Russian agent.”

Another Simes acquaintance believes his behavior stems more from a desire for access than from any kind of formalized relationship with the Kremlin. “He’s the ultimate realist,” this person said. “He’s only working for himself.”

Simes does not come across as a propagandist at CNI’s policy luncheons and other events, which regularly feature current and former U.S. officials as well as prominent journalists. His commentary on U.S. Russia-relations is often measured: “[A]ny responsible U.S. government should want to normalize the relationship with Moscow,” Simes wrote in late 2017, adding: “The objective should not be to become allies or friends, neither of which is possible or advisable.”

Simes, who declined to comment for this story, has also defended himself in pointed terms. In a tense exchange on Russian television last week, he confronted Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon over Gordon’s decision to publish a piece late last year by the Russian-American historian Yuri Felshtinsky. In the article, Felshtinsky accused Simes of being a “handler” for Mariia Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who pleaded guilty last year to acting as an unregistered agent of a Russian government official during the election.

Simes has been linked to Butina, who wrote an article for CNI’s magazine, The National Interest, arguing that U.S.-Russia relations could improve under a Republican administration. He also reached out repeatedly in 2015 to Butina’s associate Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, to discuss a CNI board member’s financial problems, according to The Daily Beast. Simes has denied any wrongdoing.

“After what the Mueller investigation established, don’t you wish to apologize to me for the libelous material you published on your site?” he asked Gordon. Gordon defended Felshtinsky and his right to publish the article, but said he would re-examine it. “To be honest I personally have nothing more to discuss with you,” Simes shot back, before ordering the producers to cut off Gordon’s microphone.

Mueller found no evidence that Kushner had sought out Simes because of his Kremlin ties. But Simes did use the opportunity to influence the campaign’s posture toward Russia, acknowledging to Mueller that he “initiated all conversations” about Russia with Kushner.

“Jared was genuinely eager to cultivate relationships with foreign policy people,” said a campaign adviser at the time who has worked with Simes. “He was having a hard time early on when the foreign policy establishment was horrified by what Trump was doing. And he recognized in Dmitri someone who had serious foreign policy credentials and was sympathetic to the candidate.”

As someone who has long felt like an outsider to Washington’s foreign policy establishment, meanwhile, Simes felt a kinship with the blustering real-estate developer who pledged to “drain the swamp.”

He also saw an opportunity.

“A trait I observed with the true-believing Trump people is that they have this very bitter, resentful outlook on the world,” the former campaign adviser said. “Dmitri fit into that mold. He also saw that Trump was willing to buck a lot of conventional wisdom on Russia.”

Indeed, several people who know Simes say that while he was fairly ideologically aligned with Trump on several issues, he also saw the brash billionaire as a vehicle to drive the GOP toward his longtime project of improving U.S. relations with Moscow, despite Putin’s ongoing election interference.

“I think Simes found Trump as much as the campaign found him,” said the foreign policy veteran, pointing to Simes’ desire for political relevance.

It arguably paid off. Simes helped draft Trump’s CNI-hosted foreign policy speech in which Trump called for an “easing of tensions” with Russia, and was still advising Trump on “what to say about Russia” months later, according to Mueller. Although Trump made a point of publicly announcing a foreign policy advisory team in mid-2016, his campaign never openly discussed Simes’ quiet role.

Another memo Simes sent Kushner in August recommended that the campaign “downplay Russia as a U.S. foreign policy priority at this time” while adding that "some tend to exaggerate Putin's flaws,” according to Mueller. He also advised the campaign "not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" with regard to Russia, Mueller’s report says, and made suggestions about how to handle Ukraine-related questions.

Despite his access, Simes had frustrations with the campaign and with Trump himself, whose cavalier attitude he found “maddening,” the former campaign adviser said. “So he tried to take Trump’s intuitions and turn them into something coherent.”

Simes told Mueller that he had warned Kushner against establishing “hidden Russian contacts” that might look bad for the campaign. Kushner heeded that counsel, at least initially, advising the campaign to “pass” on a proposed meeting with an officer at a Russian state-owned bank in May 2016. (The officer is not identified in Mueller’s report but appears to be Alexander Torshin, a Butina associate then trying to arrange a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the NRA’s annual convention.)

Even so, the following month, Kushner joined Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son Donald Jr. for an infamous meeting at Trump Tower with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Nor was Simes himself above peddling anti-Clinton dirt. With Clinton criticizing Trump’s friendly posture toward Putin in mid-August 2016, according to Mueller, Simes met with Kushner and offered him information he claimed to have received from a former CIA official: rumors within the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had intercepted President Bill Clinton’s sexually explicit phone calls with Monica Lewinsky and was blackmailing him, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Kushner told Mueller that he didn’t receive any information from Simes that could be “operationalized” against Clinton, and the relationship appears to have cooled by the end of the campaign. Several people familiar with Simes’ thinking at the time said he was disappointed that some longtime associates who he’d recommended for administration jobs, including Saunders and former U.S. ambassador Richard Burt, were not hired.

FBI agents interviewed several Washington’s foreign policy insiders about Simes’ background and contacts last year, according to three of the people interviewed. They said that those agents gave no indication one way or the other about whether they were affiliated with Mueller’s team. In March a Russian media outlet reported that sources who know Simes said the bureau had questioned them about his ties to Butina.

David Rivkin, an attorney at BakerHostetler who represents CNI, said he is unaware of FBI interviews concerning Simes beyond the confines of Mueller's probe. “There was an investigation that looked at hundreds and hundreds of people and institutions within the context of the special counsel’s mandate, and we know what it found—that neither Simes nor the center did anything wrong, and as far as proffering foreign policy advice to a presidential campaign, that is what academics and think tanks are supposed to do.”

Meanwhile, Simes' story has delivered a new plot twist: he has been spending a large amount of time back in his home city of Moscow, making regular appearances on the hugely popular Russian television show, “The Great Game.” Simes co-hosts the program, which airs most weeknights on Russia’s state-owned Channel One, alongside one Vyacheslav Nikonov—the staunchly pro-Kremlin grandson of the Soviet diplomat and Stalin protege Vyacheslav Molotov.

Simes’ defenders say he is simply using the show as a platform to represent the American perspective on U.S.-Russia relations, and infuse it into mainstream Russian thought. But his critics see more evidence of pro-Russian sympathies.

On a recent episode, for example, Simes implied that the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko—a frequent target of Kremlin propaganda who recently called it his “strategic mission” to secure Ukraine’s membership in the European Union and NATO—was “taking orders from Washington.” Poroshenko took power after Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and forcibly annexed Crimea in 2014, and subsequently strengthened ties with the west.

Simes also framed Poroshenko’s election defeat earlier this month as a rejection of his defiant stance towards Moscow—an assertion that John Herbst, the former ambassador to Ukraine and the director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, disagreed with when he appeared on the show last week. “The voters were generally supportive of Poroshenko’s foreign policy,” he told Simes. Herbst and many other veteran Ukraine-watchers say that a much larger factor was Poroshenko’s inability to rein in corruption in Kiev.

Felshtinsky, the Russian-American historian and fierce Simes critic, told POLITICO that he has always found Simes’s “pro-Russian” stance “very unusual for a former Soviet citizen who emigrated to the United States.” He also pointed to the peculiarity of Simes’s high-level Kremlin relationships and noted his ability to address Putin directly at high-level public forums, like at the Valdai International Discussion Club in 2014—where the head of a modest Washington think tank was flanked by Germany’s former defense minister and France and Italy’s former prime ministers.

When it comes to Simes, Felshtinksy said, “I think we only know the tip of the iceberg.”