Through family, business and campaign operatives, Russian nationals repeatedly sought contact with Donald Trump’s world, starting only a few months after his presidential bid was announced in 2015. They forwarded proposals to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, brought a Trump adviser to Russia to speak and repeatedly sought meetings with Trump and his aides. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is now probing whether the contacts were isolated coincidences or part of Russia’s effort to interfere with the presidential campaign.
Mueller’s main charge is to learn whether Trump’s team coordinated with Russia.
A history of contacts
Michael Cohen corresponds with Felix Sater in fall 2015 through January 2016 about building a Trump Tower in Moscow in partnership with Russian developer Andrei Rozov. Read more
Cohen is sent a proposal from Russian developer Sergei Gordeev in late 2015 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. He declines the proposal. Read more
Ivanka Trump receives an email from the wife of Russian weightlifter Dmitry Klokov. She puts Klokov in touch with Cohen, who was handling the attempt to build a Moscow Trump Tower.
Cohen speaks with Klokov.
Cohen speaks for 20 minutes on the phone with an assistant to Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The call comes after Cohen seeks Peskov's help on a Trump real estate deal in Moscow. Read more
Russian central banker Alexander Torshin, a gun rights and Christianity advocate, chats with Donald Trump Jr. at an National Rifle Association convention in spring 2016, according to an interview Torshin gave Bloomberg News. A White House official has acknowledged Torshin briefly greeted Trump's son at the event. Read more
Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos has interactions with a professor who connects him to a Russian with connections to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a female Russian national, starting in March 2016 and continuing until at least August 2016. The Post has identified the man as Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian think tank, who has denied he was part of a government effort to reach the campaign. Read more
A Russian man who goes by the name Henry Greenberg contacts Trump aide Michael Caputo and then meets with longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone. Greenberg offers dirt about Hillary Clinton for $2 million. Caputo and Stone say they dismissed the offer. Read more
Felix Sater tries to get Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Ecomonic Forum in June 2016, telling him in an email that he could meet with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders and perhaps Putin. Read more
Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, after being offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Billionaire Aras Agalarov and his popstar son Emin helped arrange the meeting.
Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page travels to Moscow and speaks at a Russian university, offering critical remarks about U.S. foreign policy. He has acknowledged briefly greeting one government official, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, after his speech but said he did not meet with others. Read more
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak meets Sen. Jeff Sessions at a Heritage Foundation event associated with the Republican National Convention on July 18.
Kislyak meets Trump advisers J.D. Gordon and Page at a July 20, 2016, event associated with the Republican National Convention.
Paul Manafort meets in May and in August 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, the Russian manager of his lobbying shop’s Kiev office. In between, he exchanges emails with Kilimnik in which he offers to set up private briefings about the campaign for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska's spokeswoman says he never got the messages and no briefings were held. Read more
Jeff Sessions meets with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at his Capitol Hill office. He later says he took the meeting in his role as a member of Congress, not as a campaign surrogate. Read more
Accused Russian agent Maria Butina contacted former campaign aide Gordon, who was then working for Trump's transition effort. The two exchange emails and socialize twice, ending in October 2016. Read more
According to court documents, campaign adviser Rick Gates communicates with a Russian employee of Paul Manafort's consulting business to discuss work the two had done in Ukraine before the campaign began
Donald Trump Jr. delivers a paid speech in Paris to the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs, a French think tank that advocates the Russian position on Syria. An event organizer says she went to Moscow shortly after the election to brief Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, about the event. Read more
On separate occasions, Jared Kushner meets with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, during the presidential transition. Read more
Graphics by Aaron Williams and Chiqui Esteban.
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Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting: What we know and when we learned it
Shortly after the 2016 election, the Trump campaign insisted none of its officials had interacted with Russians during the campaign. Over time, they have released more and more information about contacts, including a series of misleading statements about a meeting with a Russian lawyer on June 9, 2016.
