Dmitri Simes

• Russiagate 
• The Timeline
• Conspiracy: The Meetings 
• The Russians
  • Sergey Lavrov–Ministers of Foreign Affairs Simes regularly met with after 2004
  • Sergey Kislyak-Russian Ambassador at the Mayflower April 27, 2016 Meeting
  • Maria Butina-US HANDLER, published Right To Bear Arms manifesto June 12, 2015
  • Oleg Deripaska–RUSAL, 2005 Think Tank plans funded by “Basic Element”
  • Valdai Club– Papadopoulos met Josef Mifsud at a conference in London on March 24th, 2016
  • Ed Lozansky-Early Republican Ties
• Ukraine–Alexey Pushkov sanctioned for invasion, CNI Board member
• Jared Kushner-Simes introduced Kislyak to Kushner at the April 27, 2016, Mayflower Hotel meeting
• Richard Burt-The Center for National Interest Board of Directors, Gazprom lobbyist, GTech (Gambling)/Dominion Voting Systems
• Rand Paul Dmitri Simes advised in 2014 with Richard Burt
• The Religious RIght

President and CEO of the Center for National Interest (CFTNI), Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) Expert. (Andranik Migranyan formed in NY 2008, appointed by Sergey Lavrov), Deputy Secretary of the Komsomol Organization [All-Union Leninist Young Communist League] at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Nixon aide; Nixon chose Simes to run his think tank, the Nixon Center, which became the CFTNI in 2011.

• CFTNI Director: Paul Saunders
• CFTNI Adviser: Alexey Pushkov, Duma official Sanctioned for Ukraine invasion
• Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) “Expert”; IDC founder Andranik Migranyan in New York 

Dmitri Simes: Rand Paul’s Russian Connection Paul names controversial Kremlin expert foreign policy adviser The Washington Free Beacon

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.

When contacted by the Washington Free Beacon, the Center for the National Interest denied that Simes was advising Senator Paul. Simes declined comment.

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.”

Putin, in good spirits from his recent success at preventing U.S. military action against the Syrian regime, chatted with Simes about U.S. and Russia policy and quizzed his “American friend and colleague” about the U.S. budget deficit.

“I fully support President Putin’s tough stance [on Syria],” said Simes, according to the transcript released by the Kremlin.

“Not because I’m not an American patriot, but because I believe that baby talk among great powers is not the way to reach an agreement. One has to understand what to expect from the other country, and what their mettle is.”

He hoped recent events would “open up a real opportunity for Russian-American relations.”

The appearance with Putin “set off a lot of internal alarm bells with Russian experts,” said one Russia policy specialist.

“You don’t get onstage with Putin, and sit onstage with Putin, and ask him questions in public, unless everything has been greased and unless you’re not gonna do anything that detracts from the message.”

Simes has been dogged throughout his career by allegations that his work and his organizations have a pro-Kremlin slant.

After immigrating to the United States in the 1970s, Simes worked as a Russia analyst and caught the eye of Richard Nixon, who took him on as an aide.

Vladimir Kozlovsky, a Russian-born journalist who met Simes in the 1970s, said Simes often tried to play up his relationships inside the Russian government.

“I don’t think he had any knowledge of inside workings in the Kremlin [in the 1970s], but he convinced people that he did,” said Kozlovsky. “People were divided. Some of them thought he was just a fake, or a Soviet agent. The rest were enamored of Dimitri.”

Nixon later chose Simes to run his think tank, the Nixon Center. But Simes’ defenses of the Kremlin often dragged the Nixon Center into controversies.

The Nixon Center dropped the 37th president’s name in 2011 and became the Center for the National Interest. Sources close to the dispute say the break was due to bad blood between the Nixon family and the organization’s leadership.

Following the Putin government’s crackdown on independent Russian news outlet MediaMost in 2000, Simes mounted a vigorous defense of the Kremlin. He criticized the ousted owner of MediaMost as a corrupt oligarch who was pushing a “propaganda campaign,” and hosted a meeting with one of the Kremlin-allied oil tycoons who aided the government takeover of the news outlet.

His comments prompted an angry letter from the late U.S. Ambassador to Russia Robert Strauss.

“Dear Dimitri: You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” wrote Strauss in a letter on Apr. 20, 2001, as reported by the Times Union. “Irresponsible statements attributed to you … do a disservice to the new administration, the directors of The Nixon Center and many distinguished members of the American press.

“As for me personally, if you understood this country and its people a bit better, you would know the kind of personal references you make can only diminish The Nixon Center,” Strauss added.

However, Simes continued to appear on MediaMost years after the government takeover.

In 2005 the Russian-American newspaper Kommersant reported that Simes had met with Kremlin allies to discuss forming a Russian-funded think tank.

The Nixon Center denied the story. Days later, the Moscow Times reported a similar account, along with claims from Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska that they had met with Simes about the project.

Simes remained at the Nixon Center. A Kremlin-backed think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, was formed in New York in 2008 under Putin adviser Andranik Migranyan.

“I think it was unfortunate for Mr. Simes that the Kremlin had changed its mind,” said Dmitry Sidorov, who wrote the original story for Kommersant. “And the glory went to Mr. Andranik Migranyan in New York who has this Institute for Democracy and Cooperation.”

The Center for the National Interest said Simes had no involvement in the development of the think tank and did not meet with Russian officials to discuss it.

“Neither the Center nor any individuals here had any part in organizing the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation,” said the Center for the National Interest’s executive director Paul Saunders. “Likewise, neither the Center nor anyone at the Center discussed plans to create it with Russian officials or others.”

Today, the Center for the National Interest often partners with the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation.

“The Center for the National Interest periodically arranges events with the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation as we have done with a number of other organizations in Russia across Russia’s political spectrum,” said Saunders. “These events have always included individuals with differing perspectives who often disagree with one another during the discussion.”

Migranyan was selected to run the IDC by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

“Further boosting Migranyan’s candidacy is his well-known loyalty to the Kremlin and, especially, Putin and Medvedev, whom he describes as ‘democrats’ who support a liberal economic regime,” said the cable.

Migranyan has often been given a platform both by the Center for the National Interest and in the National Interest.

Last May, the IDC and the Center for the National Interest held a joint press conference during which Migranyan defended Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

In a National Interest article last February, Migranyan said American conservatives should “recognize Putin is the same type of ‘great communicator’ that Reagan represented—a bold leader and visionary.”

“I would like to turn to O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Senator McCain, Dennis Miller, and others,” wrote Migranyan. “I would like to appeal to them paraphrasing Safire: ‘Gentlemen, do not be afraid to say that you love Putin, that you dream of such a leader for the United States.’

“I am confident that this will remove the heavy psychological split in which you exist,” he added. “It will ease your neurosis and you will cease to poison the atmosphere of Russian-American relations.’”

Migranyan’s byline noted that he was director of the IDC but did not disclose his role as an adviser for the Putin government.

Such a pro-Putin slant extends to much of the National Interest’s editorial team, observers say.

“Although there is diversity in the dozens of articles TNI has run, its editorial staff leans heavily toward portrayal of the Kiev protests as an illegitimate coup d’état while encouraging concessions to Russia rather than a firm response to its aggression,” wrote David Adesnik in National Review last March.

The Center for the National Interest does not accept money from the Russian government or other Russian entities, according to its executive director.

“The bottom line is that neither the Center for the National Interest nor The Nixon Center ever accepted contributions from the Russian government or its supporters either directly or indirectly,” said Saunders.

Saunders said the Nixon Center did previously accept “relatively small” donations from a European company run by a Russian businessman “who was living in Europe after having been detained by the Russian government and losing his principal assets to a state-controlled firm.”

However, he said, the organization has “not had any contact with him since that time.”

The Center also denied that Simes is an adviser to Paul.

“We are aware of the reference in the National Journal but do not know more than that,” said Saunders.

Saunders said Paul attended two events at the Center earlier this year, including a small discussion where Simes and others “had the opportunity to express their views.”

“Indeed, we were honored to provide whatever advice we could in this way,” said Saunders. “Nevertheless, we have never identified Mr. Simes as an adviser to Senator Paul.”

“That overstates Mr. Simes’ role,” he added.

Russia consultant Tom Moore said Paul’s outreach to Simes and Burt indicates the prospective 2016 candidate is “going to some lengths, apparently, to scoop up people who aren’t associated with anything they think is ‘neoconservative.’”

Moore said this could leave Paul with limited options as he works to assemble a credible foreign policy team.

“A vast proportion of those of us who are Republicans and do foreign policy do have intellectual roots, or at least influences, that stem from neoconservatism,” he said. “That doesn’t always mean dropping bombs or intervening against somebody.”

Paul’s office did not respond to requests for clarification about his relationship with Simes.”

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The Center for National Interest is formerly the Nixon Center and Simes met Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky (Russian Political Scientist/Soviet Dissident/Kommersant) and Oleg Deripaska December 5, 2005, “Plans are in the works to set up a Washington-based think tank that would be funded with Russian money and combat the U.S. perception of Russia ‘as a bad pupil,’ Georgy Oganov, a spokesman for Deripaska’s Basic Element holding company, said “this issue was discussed … on many occasions among Mr. Deripaska and people living in the States, including people at the Nixon Center.” Simes said the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank, had paid for Pavlovsky and several other Russian political analysts to visit Washington in November for a research project on American influence in former Soviet republics. But he said he had not discussed plans for a Russian-funded think tank with them or with Deripaska. “There’s clearly a background for this” think tank idea, Simes said, citing plans for Russia Today.”Moscow Times Stephen Boykewich

“Oleg Deripaska, RUSAL and Bazovy Element owner, arrived in the United States yesterday. Russian officials were once outraged at some foreign NGOs, at the Carnegie Fund, for example, which were giving floor to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The new institute is largely believed to be a brainchild of Gleb Pavlovsky and Dimitri Simes, political scientists close to Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush. Simes is the long-standing director of Washington-based Nixon Center.  A new surge of interest appeared, among other things, due to recent problems at the Nixon Center. Moris Grinberg, the chair of the center’s board and former CEO of U.S. largest AIG insurance company, is now charged with fraud and other financial offences. Thus, the organization may soon lose may the man responsible for a lion’s part of sponsor money. What is more, a number of well-known scholars have already left the editorial staff of National Interest, a journal issued by the Nixon Center.” Kommersant December 5, 2005

On April 26, 2016, a follow-up breakfast between Mifsud when he was offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and thousands of hacked emails.  

April 27, 2016  The Mayflower Hotel Foreign Policy Speech Kislyak & Campaign

“The main person who became a friend and a leader of this jolly group from then on – Dimitri Konstantinovich Simis, a former Deputy Secretary of the Komsomol Organization [All-Union Leninist Young Communist League] at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations and an international lecturer at the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who, while still in that role, suddenly applied for US asylum in 1972. During his many wandering years away from the Motherland, Dimitri Konstantinovich had morphed into Dimitri Simes, a President and CEO of The Center for the National Interest.” Gordon UA

Why I Hosted Trump’s Foreign-Policy Speech Politico By JACOB HEILBRUNN April 27, 2016

“The Center for the National Interest was originally contacted by Trump’s savvy son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about hosting the event, long before Manafort was even associated with the campaign. Nothing like this has been heard from a Republican foreign policy candidate in decades. Trump doesn’t want to modify the party’s foreign policy stands. He’s out to destroy them. What Trump is talking about is dispensing with an entire wing of the GOP that has controlled the commanding heights of foreign policy over recent decades.”

Trump campaign emails show aide’s repeated efforts to set up Russia meetings  Washington Post  August 14, 2017

Meet Putin’s top influencers behind Russia’s election attack on America The Stern Facts Grant Stern, June 25, 2018

Who is Dimitri Simes And Why Is He Trying To Sink Mayflower? Gordon UA Investigation by Yuri Felshtinsky August 22, 2018
“Center for the National Interest and it’s journal created in the USA by Soviet-born Dmitri Simes instead of serving American interests serve only those of the Kremlin and Simes himself, declares Yuri Felshtinsky, Russian-American historian. In an exclusive material for GORDON Felshtinsky wrote about Simes’ specific activities, his influence on American politics and his connections with top-level officials in Russia and in the USA.

In 1620, the famous ship Mayflower carrying its hundred or so passengers arrived from Britain to the United States, the dangerous journey having taken several months. In 1925, a hotel in Washington, D.C. was named “Mayflower” in its honor. This is the hotel where, on April 27, 2016, The Center for the National Interest (CNI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization headed by Dimitri Simes, organized a meeting between Donald Trump, then a Presidential Candidate from the Republican Party, and his supporters, which included a Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. It was at that meeting that Trump introduced his foreign policy program. Two months prior, Simes met in Moscow with President Putin and a number of other Russian Government officials. In addition, it turned out that Dimitri Simes, through CNI, also organized the meetings between Maria Butina, who was arrested on Russian espionage charges in Washington, D.C. on July 15, 2018, and Stanley Fischer, then-US Federal Reserve Vice Chairman, and Nathan Sheets, then-Treasury Department Undersecretary for International Affairs, on April 7, 2015. At that time, Butina was accompanying Alexander Torshin, who was then the Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank and “who investigators believe was Butina’s Russian handler as an agent.”
A high-level government official Torshin with an illustrious biography was Butina’s handler from Russia. But who was her handler in the United States? An answer to this question was supplied by Butina herself when she began cooperating with the investigation and named two people. The first one was Anton Fedyashin, Professor of History at the American University, who could not resist the temptation to be photographed with his mentee and to mention her in his publication of April 6, 2017.

Notably, Fedyashin erased the portion of his publication referencing Butina after her arrest and removed his picture with her which was previously available at this site American University. Now any traces of the history being rewritten by the “historian” Fedyashin exit in someone’s Twitter feed. Here is the photo that disappeared: Butina is marked with an arrow, and Fedyashin is depicted on the left. And here is the site, on which one can see, for the moment at least, some of the pictures of Fedyashin and Butina together.

Felshtinsky: Here is the photo with  Fedyashin and Butina that disappeared. Screenshot by Yuri Felshtinsky

The second handler named by Butina was Dimitri Simes.
No one may have paid attention to Simes’s involvement in organizing Trump’s public appearance at the Mayflower Hotel on April 27, 2016, if not for Trump winning the Presidential Election later that year and for the ensuing scandal in the United States regarding the alleged Russian meddling in the Election. This is what Andrey Piontkovsky, a political observer, had to say about the matter:
“A routine investigation revealed that Jeff Sessions, US Attorney General, forgot to mention in his application for security clearance one of the meetings with the Russian Embssador Sergei Kislyak. But it was not an ordinary meeting. […] It so happens that in the same four-dimensional point of place and time, the world trajectories of several other noteworthy individuals had crossed – namely, of Paul Manafort, Carter Paige, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, and – finally – the main person who became a friend and a leader of this jolly group from then on – Dimitri Konstantinovich Simis, a former Deputy Secretary of the Komsomol Organization [All-Union Leninist Young Communist League] at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations and an international lecturer at the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who, while still in that role, suddenly applied for US asylum in 1972. During his many wandering years away from the Motherland, Dimitri Konstantinovich had morphed into Dimitri Simes, a President and CEO of The Center for the National Interest.

“The think tank that resulted was most likely the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC),” – was noted later by another US publication. A Kremlin-backed think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC), was formed in New York in 2008 under Putin adviser Andranik Migranyan. Migranyan was selected to run the IDC by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

Notably, an event occurred on September 5, 1972, that influenced the life and destiny of Dimitri Simis: the Israeli Olympic team members were taken hostage at the Olympic Games in Munich by the terrorists. Since it was known (at least in the USSR) that the terrorists arrived from Lebanon, the Soviet Jewish activists in the USSR, who were seeking to immigrate to Israel, decided to organize a protest in front of the Lebanese Embassy in Moscow. On September 6, 1972, at approximately 6pm, about 25-30 people gathered in front of the Lebanese Embassy in Moscow. They were surrounded by approximately 100 members of police. There were several empty buses parked nearby. The demonstrators were told that the demonstration was not sanctioned and that they need to disperse. They refused to do so and unfolded a couple of banners. All of the demonstrators were immediately apprehended, put into the buses and taken to the River Station subway stop. Men were put into one bus, women – into another. The Alcohol Detox Center was located near the River Station subway stop, and people who were drunk were usually taken there. But on that day, the arrested demonstrators were taken to that Center. Men were put into one room, and women – into another. Each room had beds. Simes was among the arrested. It was approximately 7pm.
At around 7:30pm, Andrei Sakharov was brought into the same room as the arrested male demonstrators. As it turned out, he showed up to the demonstration late as he was told to show up by 6pm and he arrived around 6:30pm, by which time the demonstrators were already arrested. Sakharov asked one of the policemen: “Can you please tell me where the demonstration in front of the Lebanese Embassy is taking place? I came to participate.” The policeman was quite surprised and told his colleagues: “There is another one here.” Sakharov was put into a separate bus and was also taken to the Alcohol Detox Center near the River Station….In November 1972, Simis was arrested and detained for two weeks for participating in a protest in front of the Central Telegraph building in Moscow. However, by the end of the year, he received a permission to relocate to Israel…Years later, that story sounded differently as narrated by Simis himself:
“Many years ago, I was speaking with Don Kendall [a head of “PepsiCo”]. He used to invite me to his luxurious headquarters outside of New York. Don was in a good mood and kept refilling my glass with Stoli. And so he tells me – ‘Saw you on TV the other day. You were talking about the Soviet policies. But when did you last speak with Brezhnev?’ I replied: ‘You see, Don, I never spoke with him at all.’ It was not entirely true – I met him once at one of the events in Moscow before immigrating but did not manage to speak with him.”
What was it that Simis told (or did not tell) to the US officials in the US Embassy in Rome in 1973 when applying for the US visa, is not known. It seems unlikely that he was telling him about his Komsomol leadership activities and that his departure was sanctioned by Evgeny Primakov, a long-time KGB official and a future Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
The fact that during those years Simis was supervised by Primakov is known from the interview given some later by Simis himself: “I spent the first few years of my professional career at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, working for Evgeny Maksimovich Primakov…

Dima [Simes], indeed, went into politics. He got in touch with Richard Perle, a conservative Republican who served at the time as a staffer for Senator Henry M. Jackson (the co-sponsor of the famous Jackson-Vanik amendment); with Brent Scowcroft, the future National Security advisor for Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, Sr.; and with James Schlesinger, who served as both the Director of Central Intelligence and as a US Secretary of Defense. With the support of his influential friends, Simis became a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, becoming “Simes” (rather than “Simis”) in the process.
Nevertheless, not everything went according to plan. When he was applying for US citizenship, Simes was approached by the FBI. 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.”
Simes did become a US citizen. In the second half of 1977, his parents emigrated from the Soviet Union. A few years later, when they were visiting him at his home, a phone rang. Konstantin Simis picked up the phone. “OK, just a moment.” He turned to his son and said “It’s President Nixon calling you.”
By that time, Nixon was not the US President anymore. Simes met him in the mid-1980s and became one of his close associates and an informal advisor on the matters concerning the USSR. In particular, Simes accompanied Nixon during his trips to Russia, including his last trip to Moscow in 1994. On January 20, 1994, not long before Nixon died (which happened on April 18 of that year), the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom was established under the auspices of the Nixon Fund, with Simes as its president as “a leading US expert on the issues of political challenges in modern Russia.

Simes publishes most frequently in his own magazine, The National Interest, allowing there only those from his circle – i.e., people holding the same views as he and his agents. Here is an excerpt from the publication in The National Interest from June 12, 2015:
“It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States. As improbable as it may sound, the Russian bear shares more interests with the Republican elephant than the Democratic donkey. […] Perhaps a Republican president would look for ways to move past the increasing confrontation that has characterized the U.S.-Russia relationship in the past few years. […] Perhaps only a Republican can repair relations between the U.S. and Russia today. How could a Republican president help in building that relationship? First, shared economic interests can lead to political resolutions. […]
A second point of shared interest revolves around the global oil market. As long as America maintains its ban on selling its oil reserves to foreign markets, American oil companies seeking international markets will need international sources of oil. Russia has them. Huge proven reserves in the Arctic and huge proven reserves of oil shale within the Russian mainland. But Russian oil companies lack the technology to exploit these reserves. And the current economic sanctions have frozen cooperative agreements like that between Russian Rosneft and American ExxonMobil like an Arctic drilling rig. […] Finally, many Russians have taken note of recent Pew Research Center data that shows that the American Republican Party derives much of its support from social conservatives, businessmen and those that support an aggressive approach to the war against Islamic terrorism. […] At the very least, it would appear that modern Russia has more to talk about with American Republicans than American Democrats. […] My plea is simply to not surrender to what many view as inevitable conflict between these two great nations, no matter the consequences. […] Global maps may be redrawn, global economies will ebb and flow, but chaos need not reign. A time may be coming when Russia and America can move from turmoil to calm.”
The author of this primitive manifesto that appeared in Simes’s magazine was Maria Butina, who signed the article as “The Founding Chairman, The Right To Bear Arms, a Russian version of the NRA.

In March of 2015, Simes visited Moscow again, and met with Putin, among others. The timing of publication of Butina’s article on June 12, 2015, was not accidental – 4 days before Trump’s formal announcement of his Presidential candidacy. The image of a “Russian Bear” (Putin), in front of whom the American “Republican Elephant” (Trump) was supposed to back down in order to save himself, as coined by the Russian agent Butina and pro-Russian political observer Simes, were all over The National Interest magazine. On December 24, 2016, Robert Merry, who served as both the editor and an author at The National Interest at different times, published an article titled “Stop Poking the Bear.” On August 19, 2017, the same author published in the same periodical the article on the same topic, having changed only one word in the title: “Stop Poking the Russian Bear.”
“The first version of the article was an ‘instruction’ of sorts to the new US President Trump, and the current version – the second one – concludes that he was not able to follow that ‘instruction’” – this is how these publications were described by Georgi Kunadze, a former Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations of Russia and a research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (where Simes worked during the Soviet times). His article was titled “On Usefulness of Useful Idiots.”
It is noteworthy that the former director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden referred to Trump by the same phrase: “Trump is Russia’s useful fool”. “We have really never seen anything like this. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt.”
Let us consider that, for purposes of our publication, the terms “useful idiot” and “agent” carry a legal, rather than substantive, difference. The first one insures the author of a statement from a lawsuit. The second one requires proof (we shall return to it). Kunadze, an expert in Russian Foreign Policy who can be hardly suspected of lack of objectivity, writes as follows:
Больше читайте тут: https://english.gordonua.com/news/exclusiveenglish/who-is-dimitri-simes-and-why-is-he-trying-to-sink-mayflower-investigation-by-yuri-felshtinsky-316154.html” 

Who is Dimitri Simes And Why Is He Trying To Sink Mayflower? Continued “Also, let us specifically recall an article by Simes, titled “The Litvinenko Matter: Kremlin Conspiracy or Blofeld Set-Up?” which was published on December 7, 2006, soon after the brutal murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. This article had little to do with politology but had a lot to do with Kremlin’s campaign to minimize the political damage inflicted by the Russian Secret Service operation in London, with the cover-up operation called damage control. Kremlin involved Simes in this operation immediately, and just two weeks after the Litvinenko’s death, Simes advanced several murder theories: …

The answer is obvious: Simes did not do well by the Kremlin by sloppily revealing in his article too many unnecessary details, including those concerning Putin. (So, the only site where the text is still accessible is in Russian).
After the poisoning of the Skripals, Simes started along the path of political damage control that is required of the Kremlin’s agent. Notably, it seems that nowadays, Simes works more and more in that capacity on the two fronts – US and Russian. In Russia, he explains that the Russian Secret Service has nothing to do with the assassination attempt and that the US Administration should demand the following explanation from the Brits:…

Simes was fairly well familiar with all former Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Russia. Yevgeny Primakov (1996-1998) was his boss at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations; Igor Ivanov (1998-2004) was his colleague at this Institute as they worked together. In 2004, Igor Ivanov was succeeded by Lavrov, with whom Simes started to meet regularly.
Quite a few suspicious circumstances point to the fact that Simes may be an agent of the Kremlin:
Testimony of Maria Butina, who was arrested in the US and is accused of spying for Russia.
Information regarding his Komsomol youth in the Soviet Union prior to the rapid immigration to the United States.
Stories told by his Moscow acquaintance regarding his short-lived but active “dissident” activity that allowed him to present himself at the US Embassy in Rome and in the United States as a politically persecuted person.
Conversation between an FBI operative and Simes regarding the latter being potentially a KGB agent around the time of him applying for the United States citizenship.
Account of Andrey Piontkovsky regarding the Kremlin officials arriving to the United States with instructions to meet with Simes and receive further instruction from him.
Hundreds of pages of publications in The National Interest, hours of video interviews of Simes on the US and Russian television, his numerous published articles and interviews pointing to the fact that Simes takes an openly pro-Kremlin stance on all the issues concerning internal and external affairs.
I could start cataloguing endless quotes from numerous articles authored by Simes. I will refrain from doing so since they all have the same theme: we must engage in a dialogue with Kremlin (from the position of strength) but must reach an agreement on the conditions that are favorable to Putin since he would not agree to anything less and would destroy us at the first opportunity. The rest – Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, NATO, the Baltic States – are just the bargaining chips for us in leveraging our negotiations with Putin (from the position of strength), so as to be able to agree to preserve peace between the United States and Russia, a great nuclear power capable of destroying the United States in 30 minutes.”