Dimitri Simes, a 71-year-old think tank founder who was one of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s top advisers on Russian policy — and who also offered what he said was damaging information on former President Bill Clinton which was in possession of the Russian government, according to the Mueller report (posted online by The New York Times ) — has now relocated. The repo to Russia where he hosts a political television talk show and receives a “mid-six-figure salary” from the Russian government, owner of Moscow’s Channel One .
The report by special counsel Robert Mueller on his Russia investigation findings goes into extensive detail about the role of Soviet Union-born Simes, founder of the Washington think tank, Center for the National Interest, in the 2016 Trump campaign, stating at Volume One, Page 104 that Simes had both “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials,” as well as “contact with other individuals associated with the Trump Campaign,” including Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
The Mueller report also says that Simes conveyed the supposedly compromising information about former President Clinton — who, of course, is the husband of Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton — to Kushner. Though the report blacks out the information offered by Simes for reasons of “personal privacy,” The Washington Post this week reported that “Simes was spreading the rumor that the Russian government had tapes of Bill Clinton having phone sex with Monica Lewinsky.”
Simes’ offer of derogatory information about Clinton that is in the possession of the Russian government is one of at least three such instances contained in the Mueller report. As The Inquisitr has reported, another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, was told by a Russia-linked academic that the Kremlin held “thousands of emails” that could damage Hillary Clinton.
And as the Mueller report documents at Volume One, Page 185 , Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was offered “incriminating” information on Clinton by a Russia-linked acquaintance who set up a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in New York in One of 2016. Trump Jr. responded to the offer, “If it’s what you say it is, I love it.”
But while Simes still draws a salary of more than $500,000 from the Center for National Interest, according to a public tax filing posted by the investigative group Pro Publica , he told The Washington Post that he is paid a “mid-six-figure salary” to host the Channel One show Bolshaya Igra , or The Great Game , putting Simes, in effect, on the Kremlin payroll.