Think Tank Staffer Took Pics Of Trump's Mayflower Speech On Dimitri Simes Desk
Trump's Mayflower fopo speech, an employee of Center for the National Interest saw a detailed outline of the speech on Dimitri Simes' desk and took a picture of it.
D.C. Wise Man Had Early Access To Trump’s Pro-Russia Speech
Photos obtained by The Daily Beast show that controversial think tank chief Dimitri Simes was closer than previously known to the speech’s drafting.
by: Betsy Woodruff
“The Committee has reason to believe that Mr. Simes played a central role in drafting portions of the speech related to Russia.”
Washington D.C., think tank, wandered into the office of Dimitri Simes, the group’s president.
The staffer saw a pile of papers on the desk titled “FOREIGN POLICY AND DEFENSE OUTLINE.” The staffer realized the papers were the detailed outline, in bullet-pointed paragraphs, of a major foreign-policy address that then-candidate Donald Trump was set to deliver six days later as a guest of the center. The staffer used a cellphone to snap pictures of all five pages of the document.
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More than two years later, Maria Butina, who once wrote for the center’s magazine and occasionally emailed with Simes, was arrested as an accused Kremlin agent. Subsequently, the person provided the photos to The Daily Beast. The photos’ metadata confirm they were taken on a cellphone on the morning of April 21, 2016. A second former staffer told The Daily Beast that he saw the same documents on Simes’ desk.
The pictures provide new insight into the creation of Trump’s historic foreign-policy speech. They also indicate that Simes was closer than previously known to the drafting of that speech. (Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the center’s magazine, wrote for Politico shortly after the speech that he didn’t know what was going to be in it. “I was curious as anyone to see what Trump would actually say,” he wrote.)
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Simes, who was born in Moscow and served as an adviser to Richard Nixon, has distinguished himself from the largely monolithic Washington think-tank crowd by his working relationships with Kremlin officials—and, as The Daily Beast has reported, his apparent effort in one instance to use those connections to try to assist one of his organization’s most generous benefactors. Under his leadership, the center has argued for more effective cooperation between Washington and Russia on some issues. It also gets notable access to some Russian government officials; in March of last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sat for a lengthy interview with the center’s executive director in Moscow.
Both the outline found on Simes’ desk and the speech the future president delivered at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington called for warmer relations with Moscow.
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MUCH MORE (Fascinating):
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-wise-man-had-early-access-to-trumps-pro-russia-speech?ref=home
Link to tweet
= new reply since forum marked as read
Rand Paul’s Russian Connection
Paul names controversial Kremlin expert foreign policy adviser
BY: Alana Goodman Follow @alanagoodman
August 20, 2014 9:59 am
Dimitri K. Simes (born Dmitry Kostantinovich Simis, Russian: Дмитрий Константинович Симис )
Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has named as one of his key foreign policy advisers a controversial Russia policy expert with deep ties to the Kremlin.
Dimitri Simes, the president of the Center for the National Interest, and Ambassador Richard Burt, a member of the Center’s board of directors, are recent additions to Paul’s foreign policy advisory team, the senator told National Journal earlier this year.
For years, Simes and the center have provided a sympathetic platform for the Russian government in the heart of the D.C. policy establishment. Its ties to Moscow extend throughout the organization.
The advisory council of the National Interest, the center’s chief publication, includes Alexey Pushkov, a Russian Duma official recently targeted for sanctions by the U.S. government in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Pushkov has come under fire for claiming that the Bush administration orchestrated the September 11 attacks and for blaming the 2013 Navy Yard shooting on "American exceptionalism."
A former aide to Richard Nixon, Simes is publisher of the National Interest, a hotbed of "realist" foreign policy thinking that boasts Henry Kissinger as its honorary chairman.
Simes’ views and connections are widely known in Russia policy circles. Last September, days after Vladimir Putin published a column in the New York Times denouncing American exceptionalism, Simes joined the Russian president on stage at the Valdai International Discussion Club forum in Russia for a televised panel discussion.
Flanked by three other panelists—Germany’s former defense minister and France and Italy’s former prime ministers—Simes seemed out of place at the high-ranking, Kremlin-sponsored forum.
"No one directly addresses Putin at Dimitri Simes’ level," noted one Washington-based Russia policy expert. "It just doesn’t happen."
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