Rob Goldstone: The 'fixer' behind the Russia-Trump Tower meeting, on the one email he regrets sending

In an extensive interview with The Independent, Rob Goldstone says nothing could have prepared him for the fallout from being a key player in the 'Russian dirt' meeting of 2016

Donald Trump, taking the Miss Universe contest to Moscow, sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin inviting him to the show. Scrawled at the bottom was the enticement “lots of beautiful women!”. It was during that same trip to the Russian capital in 2013 that the man who is now president of the United States allegedly hired prostitutes to urinate on each other on the same hotel bed the Obamas had once slept in.

The letter and the scandalous claims about the night at the Ritz Carlton are vivid memories for Rob Goldstone who had helped to arrange that trip. The British-born music promoter recalled the note about the women to the Russian president as being “in Don’s inimitable style”. On the sex act alleged in former MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s dossier, he says: “The report of the pee episode came as a total shock ... I would have expected something as scandalous as prostitutes peeing on each other in Trump’s suite to have reached my ears.

“I don’t know if it happened or not ... anything is possible, but as far as I was aware, on the night in question, Trump should have been getting five or six hours of much-needed sleep in order to be ready for our video shoot early that morning, which would then be followed by an extremely long day.”

What took place in Moscow, whether the Kremlin gathered compromising material, or kompromat on businessman Trump, is now a part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the current US president was the Muscovian candidate in the 2016 election. But it was not a Russian encounter but one in America that propelled Goldstone into the bitterly divisive, incendiary crisis which has overshadowed the Trump White House.

It was Goldstone who had arranged a meeting, which would have huge repercussions, between Trump’s son Donald Jr, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer in New York.

What happened there, in the glass-walled boardroom of Trump Tower overlooking Central Park on 9 June 2016, has been of intense interest to investigators. It has resulted in claims of high-level Kremlin collusion and, for Goldstone, testimony in front of a special counsel’s grand jury and interviews as part of both the Senate and House of Representatives investigations. Goldstone has given evidence for more than nine hours to the Mueller investigation.

Manafort, who was recently convicted of fraud charges over his earnings as a political fixer, is the second person from the Trump Tower meeting to have offered cooperation to Mueller – having agreed to tell the special counsel all he knows as part of a plea deal to avoid a second trial.

While Goldstone digested how “a nice Jewish boy from Manchester” got himself into such international controversy, the music producer wrote a book, Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life, which is due to be published this week. It is an autobiography that charts his life growing up on a council estate in the north of England, being a journalist who found himself working with Mohammed Ali and Michael Jackson, and becoming a fixer for wealthy stars and tycoons.

The book is dedicated to “HM King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands”, who may wonder why he is in the saga of US elections and the Kremlin. The reason is that the meeting between Trump and Putin during the Miss Universe pageant did not take place because the Dutch king was late for his own meeting with the Russian president, throwing Putin’s schedule out of kilter.

Being present at the meeting between Putin and Trump would have made Goldstone even more of a focus of in the investigations that followed, and the dedication was his thanks to King Willem-Alexander for inadvertently sparing him that.

But Goldstone could not avoid Russiagate. “I would always be known as the man who sent that email, the man who set up that meeting at the Trump Tower; the man who got drawn into one of the biggest political scandals of our time; there is no denying that,” he reflects, talking in New York to The Independent.

“It is strange that I of all people I should be drawn into it. I am not at all political, I have never even voted in my life and certainly didn’t vote for Donald Trump; the one I personally liked in the race was Bernie Sanders. So to be accused of being part of a secret plot to get Donald Trump to power was quite a shock, as you can imagine, it turned my life upside down, it has changed everything.”

The life-changing experience for Goldstone began when he sent an email to Donald Trump Jr saying that he could arrange a meeting with a lawyer from Moscow who had “official documents” from the “Crown Prosecutor of Russia” that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father”. Trump Jr’s response was: “If it’s what you say it is, I love it.”

The message was sent 3 June 2016, when Donald Trump, against all expectations, had won the Republican nomination, and was about to embark on one of the most aggressive and toxic election campaigns in recent American history whipping up his supporters to frenzy at rallies with invectives against Hillary Clinton.

Goldstone had been asked to contact Donald Trump Jr by his main client, Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star, businessman and the son of an oligarch, Aras, who had an extensive property empire and whose father-in-law was the president of Azarbaijan. The music promoter had worked with Emin to bring the 2013 Miss Universe contest to Moscow with its co-owner, Donald Trump.

The Agalarovs are now persons of interest in Mueller’s inquiry, Goldstone has concluded from the questioning he underwent from the special counsel’s team. The belief is based partly on Goldstone discovering later that Trump Jr has, separately, had a telephone conversation with Emin Agalarov. Trump Jr has told a congressional inquiry that he cannot recall such a call. Agalarov’s lawyer stated that his client only had a vague recollection that they spoke.

All that was to come in the future. At the time, the call for an introduction to the Trump team for the Russian lawyer surprised Goldstone, but not the fact that he was the conduit. “I had always been the contact man between the Agalarovs and the Trumps, so it is natural that I was the one he called. At the time I was uneasy about it, there was a voice in my head saying that ‘no good will come of this’ and I said this to Emin,” Goldstone recalls.

But, nevertheless, he sent an email to Trump Jr asking for the meeting, with the tantalising offer of intelligence which would help his father’s presidential bid.

“Listen, I am a publicist, I try to do my best to get attention and I used the terms that would attract Donald Jr’s attention, so I built up the Russian lawyer and used terms like ‘crown prosecutors’, a term I used because I grew up in England where they are like federal prosecutors in US. I did not mean the chief Russian prosecutor, whom I knew nothing about,” Goldstone explains.

He now feels he was not entirely wrong in saying that Moscow wanted to help Mr Trump. “Emin had spoken to me about how this woman was well protected, about money from Russians to the Democrats and that could mean Hillary Clinton, so surely that would have been useful to Trump?” he had asked himself.

“Also, don’t forget, I have seen in Moscow how highly the Russians thought of Trump when he was there for Miss Universe, how powerful people had lined up to meet him,” he adds. “I had seen and heard that Vladimir Putin thought highly of Trump, and I had heard Trump speak of his admiration for Putin, saying he was strong and Obama was weak, so all this made sense.”

Goldstone says he did not want to be at the meeting, but stayed at the request of Trump Jr. There were four people who turned up on the Russian side, including a lobbyist who, it was subsequently revealed, was a former member of his country’s secret service.

Trump Jr has admitted that he saw the lawyer expecting to hear secrets about Clinton and that is the reason he had asked Kushner and Manafort to come after copying them into Goldstone’s emails under the subject “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential”.

In the fallout after news of the Trump Tower gathering came out, the White House account of events changed several times, and one line of the Mueller inquiry is that Trump helped write one of the versions presented by his son.

But both the Trump team and Goldstone took the line that, after talking briefly about Democrat malpractice, Veselnitskaya had switched to talking about the Magnitsky Act, American sanctions against prominent Russians and the Kremlin’s retaliation which put restrictions on Americans adopting Russian children.

“I felt very embarrassed by what had happened. I did not know anything about the things she was going on about, only found out later on about things like Magnitsky,” insists Goldstone.

In October 2017 The New York Times stated in an article that Veselnitskaya had arrived at the Trump Tower with material on Clinton that she hoped would interest the Republican campaign and that, prior to the meeting, she had discussed points to be raised with Yuri Y Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general. The article also referred to Bill Browder, who had campaigned to bring in the punitive measures against Russia which took the name of his murdered colleague Sergei Magnitsky, and the Ziff Brothers being mentioned several times in the conversation.

Goldstone now recalls that the names were indeed brought up at the meeting. Media reports stated that Veselnitskaya had brought a memo alleging that Ziff Brothers Investment, a US-based firm, had made illegal share purchases in a Russian company and evaded huge sums in Russian taxes. Two of three brothers who controlled the company were major donators to Democrat campaigns, including that of Clinton. The Democrats, claimed the Russian lawyer, had benefited from “stolen money” – information the Trump campaign would, one would have thought, found extremely attractive. Ziff Brothers Investments has not commented on the claims.

Seven months after that, Veselnitskaya appeared on NBC News to declare that although she was privately employed: “I am a lawyer and I am an informant ... Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.”

Goldstone was now beginning to feel that, inadvertently, he was proving to be right. “My emails were puffed up, of course, but more and more they were proving to be on the right track. I was quite amazed! The puffery to help a client was in fact getting to the truth without me realising.”

“As the months passed and more details came to light, my puffed-up email would become more and more spot-on. And no one would be more astonished than me. I had hyped my way to helping a client get the meeting he wanted, but now all my hype was turning out to be pretty much true.”

And much later, at the Helsinki summit with Trump, Putin brought up the name of Browder as a Clinton funder.

“Watching this, I thought now we have the president of the Russian Federation mentioning these names, so again, it took me back to Trump Tower and how it was all related,” Goldstone recalls.

After taking legal advice he decided to cooperate with the investigators voluntarily. Preparing for them was a time of great worry, bringing anxiety attacks from his past.

“I was told by some people that appearing before a grand jury was full of traps: one could easily incriminate oneself,” he says. “Even saying something like ‘I was wearing a raincoat that day’ could be dangerous. They could produce a weather report saying it was in fact a dry, sunny day. But I decided to be as open as possible, I did not say I couldn’t remember things; in fact, I could remember things pretty well. I think they believed what I said, I think they understood me, what I went through. Unfortunately, they don’t give you something like a school report to mark your performance.”

Among those who do not understand him, however, are former friends who firmly believe he was party to Russian collusion. “I have been accused of being a traitor, of somehow lumbering America with Trump, they have transferred their hatred of Trump on to me,” says Goldstone. “It has got quite dangerous at times, I was sitting in a friend’s car when this man ran up and tried to attack me. I couldn’t believe that someone I didn’t even know would feel that much anger against me. We had to drive away.”

Goldstone does not know what the future will be for him. “Because my name is now a bit well known, people answer my calls,” he says. “But It will be very difficult to go back to the working life I used to have, I am not even sure I want to do that. Maybe I will write another book, something like ‘The hundred emails you wanted to write and you never did – and one you really wish you hadn’t’.”