Russia Russia Russia Never Stopped Russia Russia Russiaing
One of the infuriating things about Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, is that it introduces key players who played important roles in the influence operations targeting Trump in 2016 with no reminder they were part of them.
Regime Change describes the central role of Kirill Dmitriev in current efforts to negotiate a “peace plan,” without describing that Dmitriev had cultivated people close to Jared Kushner in the transition to the first Administration, dangling business deals similar to the ones currently on offer, before the Russian investigation made such negotiations toxic.
A National Security Council staffer at the table weighed in with a proposal to assess whether Dmitriev was the real thing. “Well, sir, we could test him,” the staffer said to Rubio. “We could ask him to release a hostage, for example.”
Rubio liked the idea. And he said he knew just the guy they could ask for: Marc Fogel, an American high school teacher who had been sentenced to fourteen years in a Russian prison for carrying a small amount of medical marijuana in his luggage.
Witkoff would later tell colleagues that Dmitriev came with the strong endorsement of not only Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, but also “TBZ”—Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the high-powered national security advisor of the United Arab Emirates. An endorsement from TBZ seemed to mean a lot to Witkoff. “TBZ is the guy,” he told a colleague. “When somebody like that says he’s the real thing, then you take that to the bank.”
Regime Change describes how Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan dumped $500 million into the Trump-Witkoff corruption via crypto deals.
There was also a huge investing partner in WLF—a fact that would remain a secret for over a year. In January 2026, The Wall Street Journal revealed that four days before Trump was sworn in, a 49 percent stake in World Liberty had been acquired by Aryam Investment 1. The company was run by associates of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controlled $1.5 trillion of Emirati sovereign wealth funds. Sheikh Tahnoon was a major power player in the Middle East, and a close associate of both Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. A UAE fund backed by sovereign wealth had already invested more than $200 million in Kushner’s investment fund.
But it doesn’t remind readers that someone either reporting to Tahnoon, or Tahnoon himself, had cultivated Tom Barrack during the 2016 election to shift US policy towards the Emiratis and Mohammed bin Salman.
I believe that Tahnoon, the guy who made the payoff to Trump last year, is Emirati Official 2 in the Barrack indictment. If that’s right, then Barrack crafted his public comments to meet Tahnoon’s needs, approved of a 100-day plan to cater to Emirate needs that Barrack drafted, and visited the White House in May 2017.
And while we have always focused closely on Manafort’s role in crafting pro-Russian policies in advance of the first Trump term, Manafort was working with Barrack on policies — including a foreign policy speech — to please the Emiratis, too.
Of course, the Emiratis were always intimately involved in the Russian cultivation (and I still suspect the $10 million suspected bribe that went through Egypt was actually a pass-through from others). Child sex predator George Nader is the one who first set up the meetings with Kiril Dmitriev who would have been, and remains now, the key handler for the effort to co-opt the United States. Dmitriev is not in the NYT graphic either.
That cultivation was revealed in the failed prosecution of Barrack, which resulted in acquittal after Barrack argued he would have pursued such policies whether or not the Emirates dangled big payoffs to do so.
Relatedly, the book does a great job of describing Boris Epshteyn’s growing power base in the White House and his central role in some of Trump’s most direct assaults on rule of law.
Epshteyn had a long and sometimes fraught history with the Trumps—highly valued by the President as an enforcer, but viewed by many in his circle as a liability. He had known the family since meeting Eric Trump at Georgetown. But even Eric had privately complained to confidants over the years about Epshteyn’s approach. His determination to stay as close as possible to Donald Trump and aggressively deliver perceived wins had led to his own indictment in Arizona the previous April, for his alleged role in a conspiracy to certify a slate of fake electors, though the case would suffer a blow in 2025 and it was unclear whether it would continue. In congressional testimony that year, the special counsel, Jack Smith, named Epshteyn as one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the 2020 election case against Trump.
Trump would joke about how Epshteyn could spin any development—good or bad—as a positive. But he liked Epshteyn and credited him with assembling a legal defense team that helped Trump stay out of prison. Where Epshteyn’s money came from once the new administration began was less clear.
[snip]
Another close advisor explained that Trump liked to keep people like Epshteyn close at hand. He valued lawyers he thought would do anything for him. Trump had also learned through bitter experience that it was unwise to make enemies of former aides—especially those privy to his secrets. n his first term, he had followed the advice of his lawyers and kept a safe distance from those caught up in scandals, among them Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen. Now, with a Congress that would not check him and presidential immunity afforded by the landmark 2024 Trump v. United States ruling, Trump had little reason to heed Warrington’s warning.
But its biography of Epshteyn doesn’t mention Boris’ Russian ties or his expulsion from the White House in the first term for security reasons — even though they themselves have covered those issues in NYT stories.
President-elect Donald J. Trump was flying to Washington for his first face-to-face meeting with President Biden since winning the election when a top aide offered a startling idea to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.
The adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases, suggested to the president-elect that he should be Mr. Trump’s special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict, according to four people briefed on what took place.
Mr. Epshteyn, who was born in Russia and lived there as a child, has no experience in foreign policy. He told the group that he had family on both sides of the conflict.
[snip]
Mr. Epshteyn, who left his role in the White House communications office in 2017 over what was described as an issue with his security clearance that has since been resolved, had told friends before the special envoy discussion that he intended to stay outside government as a counselor to Mr. Trump. And in Mr. Trump’s world, the lack of an official title has meant little in terms of measuring influence.
When you hide all these ties, you hide the way that Trump’s second term looks like the culmination of that joint Russian-Emirati influence operation Dmitriev pitched in the Seychelles nine years ago. Maggie has helped cover up some of this in the past. But Swan just seems not to understand how the world works, as when he told Tim Miller (starting at 43:37) that he and Maggie simply never bothered to check Natalie Harp’s problematic conversion story, and so just assumed she goes to great lengths to serve as his gatekeeper for entirely naive reasons.
Such a background is similarly absent from this blockbuster NYT story, describing how Trump is about to sell out Ukraine so his buddy and campaign donor can get a big Lukoil deal. It describes how Dmitriev remains at the core of the corrupt effort to bribe Trump to sacrifice Ukraine, as he was in 2017.
Kirill Dmitriev, Mr. Putin’s economic envoy, has been closely involved, people familiar with the sale process said. He traveled to New York and Washington for meetings last month, and told reporters that “dialogue” with the United States was “continuing across many areas, including energy.”
It describes how Tahnoon would be a partner with what would be nostalgically called the US government
Another major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi-based investment fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ top national security adviser, who controls another fund that purchased a large stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty, run in part by Mr. Witkoff’s son.
Steve Witkoff was a co-founder of World Liberty, and Mr. Trump’s sons are also involved in the company, which generated $799 million for Mr. Trump last year, in part because of an additional cryptocurrency purchase worth $2 billion that Sheikh Tahnoon’s affiliate made in 2025. Mr. Witkoff himself has sold off his stake in World Liberty, a person close to him said.
Sheikh Tahnoon also helps oversee an Abu Dhabi investment fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in the private equity firm Mr. Kushner set up after he left the White House at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term. This means Sheikh Tahnoon is effectively a business partner of Mr. Kushner’s as well.
It even includes a role for Bryan Lanza — who back in 2016 encouraged George Papadopoulos to pursue his ties with Russia — and Mercury Public Affairs — which has been the influence peddling wing of this operation for over a decade.
Lukoil’s international division, which is based in Austria, hired its own Washington-based consultant who is close to Mr. Trump, Bryan Lanza, who served as a senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2024 election campaign and now works at Mercury Public Affairs. He is no longer working for Lukoil, a person familiar with the matter said.
All of these pieces were put into place in 2016, as part of the process by which Russia helped Trump get elected. Russia had a big role, too, in the developments that led Trump not to care that we all see him selling out the US to curry favor from a dictator of a failing country around the world.
The 2016 Russian operation is not the past. Russia has, relentlessly, never stopped pursuing the plan they put in place when Tom Barrack put Paul Manafort in charge of Trump’s campaign.
