Sergei Millian | |
---|---|
Born | Siarhei Kukuts October 22, 1978 [1] |
Nationality | Belarus, United States [2] |
Other names | Sergio Millian, Sergey Kukuts, and Sarhei Kukuts [3] |
Education | Minsk State Linguistic University [4] |
Occupation | Businessman |
Website | sergeimillian |
Sergei Millian (born Siarhei Kukuts; October 22, 1978) is a Belarusian-American businessman and former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. He has claimed association with Donald Trump and members of Trump's 2016 election campaign, and he was alleged to have been a source for the Steele dossier. Millian has denied being a source. In November 2021, after the indictment of Steele's primary subsource Igor Danchenko for allegedly lying to the FBI about the sources he used in compiling claims for the dossier, The Washington Post corrected and removed large portions of their previous articles that had identified Millian as a source. [5]
In 2001, Millian moved to the United States, [6] and in May 2006, he formed the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta. [7] [8] [9] [10] In January 2016, Millian stated that the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce has about 200 businesses and most of them are in the United States. [11]
Millian has also worked as a translator and interpreter, including for clients such as the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [12] He has claimed to have "high-level contacts in the Russian government" but denied that he was affiliated with Russian intelligence services. [13]
In 2007, Millian met Donald Trump and Jorge Pérez at a horse racing event in Miami, [14] and he has claimed that Donald Trump then introduced him to Michael Cohen. [15] Millian claims that he was subsequently contracted to market Trump Hollywood properties by a brokerage company hired by the Trump Organization and The Related Group. [15] [16] He also claimed to be the "exclusive broker" for Trump Organization properties in the former Soviet Union. [16] Trump Hollywood has stated that they have no record of any signed agreement with Millian; [16] Michael Cohen has also denied meeting Millian and said that Millian had no substantive relationship with Trump or his company. [13]
During Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Millian began months-long outreach to Trump's onetime foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos. [13] In an August 2016 Facebook message, he offered to supply Papadopoulos with a "disruptive technology that might be instrumental in [his] political work for the campaign." [17] Papadopolous told investigators for the Mueller report that he had no memory of the matter. [17] Millian also offered Papadopoulos a consulting contract to work simultaneously for Trump and an unidentified Russian, which Papadopoulos declined. [13]
Millian was reportedly identified as Sources D and E in the Steele dossier and later as "Person 1" in the Inspector General's report. [18] [19] [20] [21] [14] [22] As an alleged source, Millian was said to have shared key information with a compatriot (later identified as Steele's primary subsource, Russian analyst Igor Danchenko), who then shared it with Christopher Steele. Millian has denied being a source for any material in the dossier, [22] [23] [24] and he has reportedly refused to cooperate with investigators for the Mueller report. [25] According to Christopher Steele, Danchenko told him he met with Millian in 2016 on three different occasions at restaurants in Washington DC, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina. [26] [27] However, Danchenko told the FBI that he never met Millian, but only spoke on the telephone with someone whom he believed was Millian. [28] [29] Danchenko was indicted by John Durham in November 2021 (and later acquitted [30] ) for allegedly having fabricated this telephone conversation with Millian, [28] [29] and The Washington Post later corrected and removed large portions of their previous articles that had identified Millian as a key source of the Steele dossier. [5]
In October 2022, judge Anthony Trenga cast doubt on Millian and two 2020 emails he wrote denying he talked to Danchenko: The "emails lack the necessary 'guarantees of trustworthiness' as the government does not offer direct evidence that Millian actually wrote the emails, and, even if he did, Millian possessed opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts." [31]
Source E (in September 2022, reported to have been Bernd Kuhlen, a German citizen who does not speak Russian [32] ) and Source D were reported as the sources behind multiple allegations in the Steele dossier, [7] [14] [33] including the alleged prostitution ("pee tape") incident at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Moscow. [34] [26] According to the founders of Fusion GPS, seven Russian sources told Steele about this incident. [34] According to the dossier, these included Sources D and E and others in Steele's "alphabet list of assets". [35] Media reports in November 2021, however, suggest that the dossier's claims about prostitutes in Moscow did not originate from Millian, but from Charles Dolan Jr., who was "a longtime participant in Democratic Party politics". [36]
Source E was also alleged to have admitted to "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership...managed for Trump by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort", [14] that included "moles in the Democratic Party" [7] and coordinated cyber-attacks such as the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak. [7] [35] This was alleged to have the objectives of swinging supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and toward Donald Trump, weakening Clinton and bolstering Trump. [37] [38] [39] [40] In return for this assistance, Source E alleged that the Trump team had agreed to "sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine." [35] Source E was also alleged to have said that the Trump camp became angry and resentful toward Putin when they realized he not only was aiming to weaken Clinton and bolster Trump, but was attempting to "undermine the US government and democratic system more generally". [37] [38]
Some of the claims in the dossier allegedly made by Source E became part of the FBI's foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on Carter Page. [38]
Millian was a confidential human source for the FBI field office in Atlanta from September 2007 to March 2011. [41] [42]
In August 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence case on Millian to determine if he had been "directed to engage in activities related to Russian Government efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election." In January 2019, the case was ultimately closed. [43] [44]
In January 2015, Millian received the Silver Archer Award in the category of "Persona," considered to be the most prestigious, for his efforts to attract investments to Russia, which were estimated to be around $500 million (~$628 million in 2023). [45] [46] [47]
Spygate is a disproven conspiracy theory peddled by 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his political base on many occasions throughout his presidential term. It primarily centered around the idea that a spy was planted by the Obama administration to conduct espionage on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for political purposes. On May 17, 2018, Trump tweeted: "Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI 'SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.'" In that tweet, he quoted Andrew C. McCarthy, who had just appeared on Fox & Friends repeating assertions from his own May 12 article for National Review.
Carter William Page is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.
Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report compiled by Christopher Steele that was published without permission as an unfinished 35-page compilation of "unverified, and potentially unverifiable" raw intelligence reports—"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation". It was written from June to December 2016 and contains allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. Steele was the first to warn that Russia was seeking to elect Trump, and several other key dossier allegations made in June 2016 about the Russian government's efforts to get Trump elected were later described as "prescient" because they were corroborated six months later in the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Mueller Report, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton; that he personally ordered an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process"; that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties; and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents.
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George Demetrios Papadopoulos is an author and former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Trump presidential campaign. In 2018, he served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.
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The Nunes memo is a four-page memorandum written for U.S. Representative Devin Nunes by his staff and released to the public by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee on February 2, 2018. The memo alleges that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "may have relied on politically motivated or questionable sources" to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in October 2016 and in three subsequent renewals on Trump adviser Carter Page in the early phases of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
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Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into links between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia and "whether individuals associated with [Trump's] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice, which triggered the Mueller investigation.
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This is a timeline of major events in the second half of 2017 related to the investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, the post-election transition, and the first half of 2017. The investigations continued in the first and second halves of 2018, the first and second halves of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation is a report by the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General which was released on December 9, 2019 by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. The report reviewed the Crossfire Hurricane investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which looked into whether people associated with the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Igor Yurievich Danchenko is a Russian citizen and U.S. resident currently residing in Virginia who works as a Eurasia political risk, defense and economics analyst. Together with Clifford Gaddy he analyzed Vladimir Putin's 1996 university dissertation and presented examples of plagiarism. In July 2020, Danchenko was revealed to have worked for Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence as a source for the Steele dossier. In November 2021, he was indicted on charges of lying to the FBI about the identities of his sources but "not about the information [in the dossier] itself". He was acquitted of all charges in October 2022.
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Mr. Sergei Millian was born in the Republic of Belarus on October 22, 1978
The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusan American businessman as a key source of the 'Steele dossier,' a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump. The newspaper's executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as 'Source D,' the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The story's headline was amended, sections identifying Millian as the source were removed, and an accompanying video summarizing the article was eliminated. An editor's note explaining the changes was added. Other stories that made the same assertion were corrected as well.
Millian moved to the United States in 2001.
A Russian-American Chamber of Commerce has been formed in Atlanta to encourage business ties between Russia and the former Soviet republics and Georgia and to bring investment to the state.
Sergei Millian, president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce – established in 2006 in Atlanta – estimates there are more than 10,000 such businesses in our two countries, employing up to 3 million people.
Date of Formation / Registration Date: 5/24/2006
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)In the dossier, the source believed to be Mr. Millian is referred to at various times as both Source D and Source E and is cited as somebody "speaking in confidence to a compatriot" or "speaking in confidence to a trusted associate."
The allegations by Millian — whose role was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Washington Post — were central to the dossier compiled by the former spy, Christopher Steele.
The chamber of commerce removed from its website earlier this year an April 2009 newsletter, where Mr Millian said the chamber had "signed formal agreements" with the Trump Organisation, Mr Perez's Related Group and one other company to "jointly service the Russian clients' commercial, residential and industrial real-estate needs".
Millian has not always been silent. He granted an interview to ABC News in July of 2016, during the presidential campaign. He described meeting Trump in 2008 during a marketing meeting to help bring attention to the Trump-branded development in Hollywood, Florida.
The Mueller report indicated that Millian in August 2016 sent a Facebook message to Papadopoulos offering to share with him "a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign."
In the dossier, the source believed to be Mr. Millian is referred to at various times as both Source D and Source E and is cited as somebody "speaking in confidence to a compatriot" or "speaking in confidence to a trusted associate."
The source of the most salacious allegations in the uncorroborated dossier about President Trump and the Russians is a onetime Russian government translator, according to a person familiar with the raw intelligence provided to the FBI.
Source E," according to recent reports by the Wall Street Journal and ABC, is Sergei Millian. Millian, who attended several black-tie events at Trump's inauguration last month, denies this.
On Facebook and in literature for his Russian chamber of commerce, he posted a photo of himself with Trump, snapped at a horse track in Miami in 2007 after he said "mutual associates" introduced them.
The March 16, 2017, May 18, 2017, Oct. 24, 2017, and Nov. 16, 2017, counts involve statements made by Danchenko on those dates to FBI agents regarding information he purportedly had received from an anonymous caller who he believed to be a particular individual [Sergei Millian], when in truth and in fact he knew that was untrue. The information purportedly conveyed by the anonymous caller included the allegation that there were communications ongoing between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and that the caller had indicated the Kremlin might be of help in getting Trump elected.
DANCHENKO's January 24, 2017 and January 25, 2017 statements claiming that he spoke with an individual that he believed to be Chamber President-1 [Sergei Millian] and arranged to meet him in New York, were knowingly and intentionally false. In truth and in fact, and as reflected in contemporaneous communications, DANCHENKO did not receive such a call from Chamber President-l, and did not agree to meet Chamber President-1 in New York.
The Government has interviewed and expects to call at trial the then-general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, Bernd Kuhlen, a German citizen who does not speak Russian (and whom the Steele Reports describe as "Source E," a senior (western) member of staff at the hotel.")
Mr. Millian, at one time, had been a source. [...] I believe [the information that Millian] provided was the Atlanta -- the Atlanta field office. [...] I believe [Millian's status as a confidential human source] was closed because he moved out of the area of responsibility for the Atlanta field office.
From September 2007 to March 2011, Sergei Millian served as an FBI CHS.
They did investigate Papadopoulos. They did investigate Manafort. They did investigate Carter Page, and they did investigate Sergei Millian, and that was in the August of 2016.
On January 17, 2019, the FBI closed its case on Millian, noting that "the investigation found no confirmation that [Millian] was directed to engage in activities related to Russian Government efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election."
The prize in the most prestigious category "Persona" was given to Sergey Millian, the president of Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, who has organized the cooperation between Russian and US businessmen and helped to attract investment to Russia's economy estimated at $500 million.
One [Silver Archer] award winner was Sergei Millian, an American citizen born in Belarus who founded the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
"Silver Archer" continues the series of interviews with Partners. Introducing Sergey Millian, President of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA