Hope Hicks’ defiantly unhelpful Congressional testimony on June 19 yielded one unexpected dividend for those of us convinced Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to undermine the 2016 election. In a brief aside, she breathed new life into the sordid tale of Trump gleefully eyeballing a “golden showers” sex show in Moscow in 2013 — and being caught on Russian candid cameras in the process.
If indeed this happened it would mean that Putin had one more piece of leverage to use against Trump during his later run for the presidency, one more way to coerce him into aiding and abetting Russian election interference.
It would also mean Robert Mueller’s overly forgiving treatment of the conspiracy issue is somewhat beside the point. As is now burned into our psyches, Mueller decided he could not prosecute Trump for coordinating/conspiring with Putin in destabilizing the 2016 election because he could not prove the two had an actual “agreement” to that effect. He thus gave Trump a pass in the public’s mind and free license to play the martyr to miscarried justice.
But here’s the catch: If Trump was under Putin’s thumb all along, because of his vulnerability to blackmail, no “agreement” was needed to make him Putin’s willing collaborator in blitzing the election.
That’s why Hick’s testimony is so improbably important.
In her appearance before the House Judiciary committee, this sleek, one-time personal aide to Trump refused to answer than more than 150 questions from Chairman Jerry Nadler and his colleagues. But late in the proceedings she volunteered, out of the blue, something they hadn’t known about, let alone expected her to reveal.
She was responding to a question about the infamous Access Hollywood tape – the one where Trump can be heard bragging about his preferred “grab-them-by-the-pussy” method of sexual assault. News of the audio tape surfaced on October 7, 2016, the very day WikiLeaks dumped the Podesta emails. Asked how the campaign had reacted to the first event, Hicks let on there was something else even bigger in the works that effectively upstaged it.
The very next day, she said, a colleague of hers, campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson told her about “rumors of a video tape involving Mr. Trump in Moscow with, you know — can I say this? — with Russian hookers, participating in some lewd activities.” Pierson also suggested that Harvey Levin of the website TMZ “might be the person that has access to the tape.”
Hicks confirmed to the House committee that Trump had immediately been briefed on the newly reported footage and had reacted with shock. She did not say whether he’d denied its existence, only that her own concern was how to spin the story if it became public.
Since Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen seemed to have his lines out everywhere, Hicks turned to him for help. “I knew Michael Cohen had a good relationship with Harvey Levin,” she explained to committee members. “So, I reached out to Michael to ask if he had heard of anything like this — if Harvey contacted him, if he could be in touch with me.”
At this point Hicks’ story begins to dovetail with something Cohen himself told Mueller’s investigators, but which they never put in context.
His revelations appear in two footnotes, Volume 2, pages 27-28, of Mueller’s final report. They reveal that three weeks after Hicks asked him to track down the footage in question Cohen “received a text from Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze that said ‘Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else. Just so you know…’”
Rtskhiladze was later questioned by Mueller’s team, as their footnotes indicate. He acknowledged that in using the word “tapes” he was referring to “compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group.”
The Crocus Group is headed by Aras Agalarov, the Putin-favored, extravagantly rich oligarch who sponsored Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 and whose offer of “dirt on Hillary” (relayed through a PR flack) led to the famed Trump Tower meeting in June 9, 2016.
Cohen, in his own testimony to Mueller, admitted that he’d spoken to Trump about the tapes after receiving Rtskhiladze’s message. Under follow-up questioning Rtskhiladze tried to trivialize what he’d passed along by claiming to have been told by his own sources the tapes were “fake.” But, he added, he’d never communicated this to Cohen.
The first known account of how the tapes originated and what they contained came from former MI 6 operative Christopher Steele. As we all know from on-going GOP efforts to discredit him, Steele was hired in 2016 to investigate Trump’s rumored ties to Moscow by an American opposition research firm that wound up working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign (after a brief similar stint for Republican Ted Cruz). The dossier Steele compiled has become one of the most hotly debated artifacts of Trump-Russia scandal.
For the “tapes” episode, Steele drew on an individual he described as Source D, “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow.” The description could fit any number of people associated with the Agalarov family.
In an entry dated June 20, 2016, based on what Source D told him, Steele detailed the (alleged) indelicacies in stilted disapproving prose:
“TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB [Russian intelligence] control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”
Steele cited corroborating sources, claiming that one of them had pegged the episode to Trump’s trip to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss America Pageant, which he owned. Another reportedly checked with a hotel employee and confirmed what had happened.
From June 2016 onward Steele shared his findings on this and other Trump shockers with the FBI, which had long valued him as an intelligence source. In an October 2016, when FBI officials applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court for a warrant against Trump aide Carter Page, they listed Steele as a prime informant, identifying him as “Source 1,” and vouched for his reliability, noting that his “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.”
Later that month, according to a subsequent FISA application, Steele became disenchanted over FBI Director Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation of Hillary’s Clinton’s personal email server. Steele “believed it would likely influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” in the words of the FISA document, and he began leaking his dossier to the press.
One of his beneficiaries, David Corn of Mother Jones, published a breakthrough story on October 31 detailing how an unnamed ex-British operative had been keeping the FBI apprised of Russian efforts to “cultivate” candidate Trump. There was no mention of the golden-showers/pee-tapes episode.
But it didn’t stay hidden for long. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before inauguration day, Director Comey punctuated an official intelligence briefing for the President-elect by privately informing him of Steele’s allegations about the tapes. As Comey later recalled in his memoir, Trump “strongly denied the allegations, asking — rhetorically, I assumed — whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes.”
Based on Comey’s account, Trump did not let on that he’d heard about the tapes from Hicks and Cohen three months before. Nor, it seems, did he acknowledge that he’d had them search for these hot items and had received a report from Cohen in late October assuring him a Russian businessman (Rtskhiladze) had “stopped flow of tapes from Russia.”
On January 10, 2017, Buzzfeed published a leaked copy of the Steele dossier, complete with details of the rumored pee party. The following day, Trump protested to Comey, insisting the whole golden showers story had to be fiction since he’s germaphobe. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me,” Comey recalls him saying. “No way.”
Trump also denied having overnighted in Moscow during the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013. Comey dismissed this as irrelevant. “I decided not to tell him that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in proximity to the participants,” he writes.
In fact, Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller later testified to Congress that his boss had spent one night in the Presidential suite at the Ritz Carlton, Moscow, during the pageant. Schiller acknowledged having briefed Trump on a Russian offer to bring girls to the room but claimed that both of them had laughed it off. Schiller also alleged that he’d stood watch outside the hotel room door to keep Trump safe from marauding hookers.
A week after assuming office Trump remained fixated with the idea the sex tapes/pee video might come back to haunt. He even broached it in his now infamous conversation with Comey in which he asked the FBI director for his loyalty. Once again, writes Comey, “he brought up what he called the ‘golden showers thing.”
“It bothered him if there was ‘even a one percent chance’ his wife, Melania, thought it was true,” says Comey. “He just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie. I said it was up to him.”
Trump’s seeming determination to get to the truth about the tapes was disingenuous. He already knew enough to be chilled to be bone. This is apparent from Hope Hicks’ recent testimony, buttressed by Cohen’s admissions to Mueller and the statements of his Russian contact, Giorgi Rtskhiladze.
The upshot of all this is that by late October 2016 Putin was putting the screws to Trump, big time. The message Cohen got from Rtskhiladze and forwarded to his boss was nothing less than a blackmailer’s warning, even if Rtskhiladze was merely an unwitting delivery boy.
In that message Trump was given to understand the tapes existed and were deeply compromising. He was also led to believe the threat they posed, and the possibility of their surfacing, had been quashed for the moment. But he was also put on notice they were still in Putin’s hands, and available for instant deployment.
Rtskhiladze’s later statement to Mueller that the tapes were possibly fake is of no consequence in this context, since he also acknowledged to Mueller he never conveyed this to Cohen (and thus to the candidate). As far as Trump was concerned, the tapes were a very real and present danger, the psychological equivalent of a Damocles sword hanging over his head.
Why did Putin bring the threat to bear in the fall of 2016? In a sense his hand was forced. Steele’s dossier had leaked and sooner or later the contents were bound to become public, as indeed they did – sooner than might have been expected.
But Putin may also have been hedging against the now glimmering possibility that Trump might actually eke out a victory. Either way, the former Russian spymaster had everything to gain by keeping Trump on an ever-tightening string. Even a defeated candidate could be a priceless sounding board for Russian interests and an on-call agent of chaos in American politics.
Indeed, by now Putin had clearly telegraphed to Trump what he wanted in exchange for all the help he’d given the candidate. At the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, Aras Agalarov’s surrogates had made clear that sanctions relief was a top Putin priority. On August 2, according to Mueller’s report, campaign chairman Paul Manafort received from his long-time Russian associate, Konstantin Kalimnik, a “peace plan” for Ukraine which Manafort himself recognized was simply a “backdoor” way of handing the eastern part of the country over to a Putin proxy.
In short, by late October 2016, Putin had put his cards on the table. Pressuring Trump to pick them up was an inevitable corollary.
Nor were the tapes Putin’s only source of leverage against Trump at the time. Though critics have faulted Steele for trafficking in thinly sourced allegations, the record he assembled provides an invaluable window on the extent of Putin’s potential stranglehold on Trump as the election neared.
For Steele, the tapes, in fact, were merely symptomatic of a whole galaxy of dirty little secrets Putin had on Trump which he could use for manipulative purposes. “Source D,” as Steele called his chief informant, gave him a chilling sense of the larger picture.
“Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years,” he/she told Steele, “had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.” Steele surmised the Russians had been “cultivating” Trump for “at least 5 years.”
Subsequent dossier entries expand on this theme. On June 30, 2016 Steele wrote that Trump and the Russians had been trading information for at least 8 years. He quoted one source as telling him the hard-charging real estate mogul had regularly snitched to Moscow about the business and personal dealings of Russian oligarchs in the U.S. in exchange for assurances he wouldn’t have to answer for the kompromat – dirty material – the Russians had on him.
In another entry, Steele recounted what he’d learned from “two knowledgeable sources in St Petersburg” who’d seen Trump at work during his various visits there. They remembered him as an inveterate hustler who’d tossed around bribes and hush money to sweeten deals, cover his tracks and set up celebratory sex parties. They also hinted to Steele that Agalarov’s son, Aras, whose talents as a pop singer had been showcased at the Miss Universe Pageant, had the goods on many of Trump’s excesses.
Denials have been issued by various named parties, including the Agalarovs. And many parts of Steele’s dossier remain unsubstantiated. But now that golden-showers/pee-tape allegations are tipping into the provable category, it may be time to give the dossier a second, more sympathetic look.
The most immediately urgent question is whether Putin has the capacity to unnerve, intimidate and unman Trump, the President. The anxiety Trump displayed to Comey over the tapes issue does not reassure. And Trump’s seemingly chronic inclination to suck up to Putin and toot his horn on NATO, Syria, the alleged inadequacies of U.S. intelligence and a variety of other issues suggests he is feeling the squeeze from Moscow. The tawdry tale of the sex tapes, indeed the unsavory character of so much of the alleged behavior that could render Trump vulnerable to Russian blackmail makes many of us want to look away. But we do that at our peril. Hope Hicks has performed an invaluable service by reminding us in her uniquely authoritative way that our president may not be entirely his own man.