The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy. Greg Miller

the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester, ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets, and Technology’ course which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.” (Page, an adjunct professor at NYU, had twice failed to defend his PhD thesis at the University of London before finally earning his doctorate.)¹

      In the end, the FBI probe had limited results. The two Russians caught speaking about Page were protected from prosecution in the United States by diplomatic immunity. A third, however, was under what intelligence agencies call “non-official cover”—that is, using phony private sector credentials rather than working out of an embassy or consulate. Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as an executive at Vnesheconombank, a Russian development bank, was arrested and convicted of espionage as part of a broader case in which Page was only a small player. Buryakov served a thirty-month sentence before he was released in 2017 and deported to Russia. Page was never accused of wrongdoing, in part because the bureau was never sure that he knew he was interacting with Russian spies.

      His brush with the FBI did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for Russia. In the ensuing years Page continued to travel to Moscow, pursue business deals there, and publish articles and blog posts that read like Kremlin talking points. In one remarkable 2014 piece for Global Policy—a scholarly publication of Durham University in England—Page praised a particularly controversial Putin ally. Igor Sechin was Russia’s former deputy prime minister and chairman of the Rosneft energy conglomerate. He was also one of the oligarchs sanctioned by the United States to punish Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. Page wrote of Sechin with reverence, saying that he had “done more to advance U.S.-Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade.” A year later, Page likened the rationale behind the American sanctions to one of the nation’s darkest legacies, equating the effort to dissuade Moscow from meddling in other countries to an 1850 guide on how to produce “the ideal slave.”

      In December 2015, Page sought a volunteer position with the Trump campaign by reaching out to Ed Cox, the son-in-law of former president Richard Nixon and the chairman of the New York State Republican Party. Cox, who was directing would-be volunteers to many of the GOP candidates, helped Page get an appointment with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. When Page arrived at Trump Tower, he encountered an overwhelmed political operative who interrupted their conversation repeatedly to answer calls on a pair of incessantly ringing cell phones. Lewandowski took Page next door to the office of Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host from Iowa serving as the Trump campaign cochairman.

      After a cursory background check that involved little more than a Google search, Clovis added Page’s name on the list of advisers that Trump carried into his meeting with the Post.

      Former colleagues, business associates, and teachers struggled to make sense of Page’s new profile. His adviser at the Naval Academy recalled a student who was a striver, opportunistic but eccentric. “I always found him a little out of place,” said Stephen E. Frantzich,² a political science and history professor who supervised Page’s work on a research paper. Page was a “geeky kid, a good writer and hard worker” who displayed no particular interest in Russia. Yet Page claimed in an interview decades later that he was specifically drawn to the academy after seeing two officers in naval uniforms standing in the background on television coverage of U.S.-Russia arms negotiations in the 1980s. Page, then a teenager in Poughkeepsie, New York, said, “I came in off the street on my skateboard and I watched the summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.” The naval uniforms made him think “that’s interesting, maybe that’s some kind of way of getting involved and helping out.”

      After five years in the Navy, which included an assignment as an intelligence officer for a UN peacekeeping mission in Morocco, Page devoted himself to chasing riches. In 2004, he moved to Moscow for the position with Merrill Lynch. The title he was given, vice president, sounded more glamorous than the tasks it entailed—planning meetings and drafting papers for the firm’s principals. But Page later depicted himself as a heavy hitter, setting up transactions involving billions of dollars and serving as an adviser to Gazprom. Sergey Aleksashenko, chairman of Merrill Lynch Russia at the time, described Page’s claims as outlandish and said that he reacted to hearing Trump had named him an adviser by “laughing, because he [Page] was never ready to discuss foreign policy.”

      Page left Moscow in 2007 and made his way to New York, where he continued to embellish his Moscow business record and social life, even claiming to have had a long-term romance with a Bolshoi ballerina. His company, Global Energy Capital, had a website decorated with stock photos of oil derricks and the Manhattan skyline, but listed no employees or clients. In interviews, Page spoke of working in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that shared an atrium with Trump Tower. In reality, the office he occupied was a windowless room rented by the hour in a corporate coworking space.

      For Page, the stars suddenly aligned when a billionaire businessman declared he was pursuing the nation’s highest office with no standing entourage of advisers. Trump’s views of foreign policy were at best a work in progress, but on one subject he spoke with a clarity that Page found intoxicating: Trump was more overtly enamored of Russia than any candidate to compete for one of the major American political party nominations in a century.

      “I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin,” Trump said in July 2015, shortly after announcing his run. He was speaking at a forum in Las Vegas when a Russian graduate student in the audience—a woman named Maria Butina, who would be charged two years later as an unregistered Russian agent who had infiltrated conservative circles—asked how he would alter the U.S. relationship with Moscow. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump said. “I think we would get along very, very well.”

      AS THE ELECTION APPROACHED, THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ATTRACTED figures who were more recognizable to party veterans, though regarded as damaged or discarded by the establishment. Veteran campaign strategist Paul J. Manafort and retired three-star U.S. Army general Michael Flynn were both from middle-class New England backgrounds—Manafort’s family had started a construction company in Connecticut and Flynn was one of nine children, the son of a retired Army sergeant and a schoolteacher, on the shore of Rhode Island. Each had ascended the ranks of core American institutions, Manafort the Republican Party and Flynn the U.S. military. But neither had ended those associations entirely on his terms. Manafort had drifted to the margins of Republican politics after the 1990s and focused on chasing riches overseas. Flynn had been forced to resign the last position of his military career, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, over concerns with his leadership failings. The Trump campaign offered an unexpected shot at redemption, a chance to restore their reputations and position themselves either for a return to power or profit in the private sector.

      Manafort and Flynn had one other thing in common: a charitable view of Russia’s role in the world and a willingness to take money from sources close to the Kremlin.

      This approach had already made Manafort rich. After decades at the center of American politics—serving as a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Robert Dole—he had turned his attentions to a surging demand for lobbying firepower among despotic regimes overseas. His qualms were minimal and his qualifications substantial: his decades in Republican back rooms had given him a deeply embedded network of government contacts. His experience running campaigns and his intricate knowledge of modern polling and messaging positioned him as the go-to consultant for autocrats willing to pay huge sums for skills that would help them fend off any rivals but also apply a veneer of American-style democracy in otherwise rigged contests.

      The foreign clients Manafort represented had risen or clung to power through corruption and bloodshed. Among them were Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Manafort’s firm took so much money from sources in those countries and others, including Nigeria and Kenya, that he was referenced repeatedly in a scathing 1992 report called “The Torturer’s Lobby” by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization.

      Manafort moved into an even more lucrative echelon through his work in Ukraine on behalf of a candidate and party with extensive ties to Putin. After the revote that put Yushchenko into office, his Moscow-backed