Jared Kushner attends a small lunch event organized by the Center for the National Interest, the conservative DC think tank ran by Russian agent Dimitri Simes.
At the event, CNI honorary chairman and Nixon national security adviser Henry Kissinger talks to the attendees about how to approach US-Russia relations.
CNI was established by Richard Nixon, but his family cut ties with the organization and Simes in 2011 because of his preference for Russia and his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
The Center and – particularly — its longtime president, Dimitri Simes, had become nothing less than an embarrassment to the Nixon family name. Simes, an imposing eminence of Russia policy, was – in their view — offering apologies for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin and even attacking their party’s presidential candidate, John McCain, for his denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
Politico
A month later, Simes and CNI host a foreign policy event for Donald Trump, where he and others close to him meet Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Simes is later accused of being one of Trump’s Kremlin handlers.
In July 2017, Jared Kushner releases a statement to Congress about his relationship with Simes, who he claims he barely knows. Kushner leaves out the events of his first meeting with the Russian agent and that they met again in his office a couple weeks later.
More on Dmitri Simes, copied from this post on Trump File:
Simes was born in Soviet Russia and is now the CEO and President of the Center for the National Interest, a D.C. conservative think tank. He met with Vladimir Putin in person as recently as 2015, and Putin has publicly called him his “American friend and colleague.” In the US, Simes has used his connections to arrange meetings between officials and undercover Russian agents on multiple occasions. He is allegedly Maria Butina’s handler.
Former Soviet KGB agent Yuri Shvets tells Craig Unger in his book American Kompromat that he tried to recruit Simes but couldn’t; another agent already had. Simes was even contacted by the FBI when he applied for US citizenship in the 1970s, because they were warned that he’s a KGB agent.
The FBI official with whom he met pulled out a folder full of paper and said “This folder contains written statements of people alleging that you are a KGB agent. Here they are. But these are all just statements with no proof. Therefore, we do feel that we cannot oppose your citizenship application on the basis of these statements. However, I am telling you this so that you understand that these statements exist and that we will be watching you closely.”
Gordon
At the time of this writing in 2021, Simes co-hosts a political show on Russia’s Channel One. His co-host is Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Russian government official who met with Republican lawmakers on July 4, 2018. Nikonov is also the head of Russkiy Mir Foundation, a Putin initiative dedicated to “forming the Russian World as a global project.”
Putin opposition leader Alexey Navalny has asked the Biden administration to sanction Channel One CEO Konstantin Ernst.
External Sources
Photo: Public Domain
