Inside Don Jr.’s Russian Wedding

Julia Ioffe (0:01)

I called a source of mine in Moscow, who is quite close to the Kremlin. And usually this person is like, it's not a big deal, you guys in the West always overreact to things. And I called him up and he's like, this guy is so sketchy, I would never be caught dead with him. Even he was like, yeah, this is super weird and it's clearly a bribe.

Peter Hamby (0:20)

Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Thursday, September 7th. Today, I'm joined by Julia Ioffe, who explains the curious case of a Russian oligarch, a friend of Vladimir Putin's, who showed up at Donald Trump Jr.'s exclusive wedding in the Bahamas and why. We also look at how a single tweet led to a diplomatic standoff between France and the State Department, and what the episode says about Donald Trump's theory of diplomacy. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

Happy Thursday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my brilliant colleague, Julia Ioffe. We're going to talk about a diplomatic row. Julia, what is it? Row?

Julia Ioffe (1:26)

I think if you're British, it's row, but we're not British, so row?

Peter Hamby (1:30)

Let's say row, a diplomatic row that involves the US of course these days. France, Emmanuel Macron, the French ambassador to the US., the new supposed to be French ambassador to the US and it's all about Twitter. Of course it is. Of course it is. That's what diplomacy is these days. We're also going to talk off the top about a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin paying a pretty penny for Don Jr's lavish wedding in May in the Bahamas. He paid for the after party, paid for a private island. What's unusual about this, and ProPublica broke this story and it's fascinating, is that Don Jr didn't have a 500 person wedding. He had a 50 person wedding, I believe. Even some friends who didn't get invited were miffed. And then this random Russian guy is there. And according to ProPublica, another reporting, he was over in the corner speaking Russian to somebody else, didn't really mingle with the inner circle. All of this feels a lot like the early days of Trump 1.0.

Julia, I know we are exhausted by questions at this point around the Trump family, Jared Kushner too, and their ethics concerns, their conflicts of interest, their coziness with everyone from Russia to Qatar, all kinds of businessmen. Obviously, this raises lots of concerns about a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, getting close to the Trump family, and what he gets out of it. We should say nothing illegal, just kind of weird. What are you hearing about this and who is this guy? His name is Umar Kremlev.

You might know him from the boxing world, if you're listening to The Powers That Be. A lot of boxing fans out there listening to me, Julia right now, but how did he end up paying for Don Jr's wedding? Who is this guy?

Julia Ioffe (3:21)

So, you know, it's funny you mentioned the early days of Trump 1 because I was thinking about it the other day and I was like, man, Trump 1, we had figures like Agalarov and all these kind of second rate, second tier, third tier Russian figures, and we'd have these Gorkman and Blemur news cycles, if you know what I'm talking about, where we're like, oh, of course, this is the second in command to the third guy from Vladimir Putin, and you'd have these, like that meme of the guy from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, standing in front of the board with all the strings. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, of course, this makes sense and they're all tangled and knotted. I feel like this is just so simple. We live in just much simpler times now, where Trump even said to The New York Times, he said, I tried so hard to avoid conflict of interest, which like asterisk, he did not. In the first administration, nobody gave me credit for it, and so now we're open for business.

Everybody heard that loud and clear.

Now we have just a very simple, straight up story.

Umar Kremlev is a guy who is extraordinarily close to Vladimir Putin because, I should say also like, even the name, right? Like before you'd be like, Agalarov, who's that? This guy had a totally different last name. He had a criminal record. In 2010, he went and changed his name to Kremlev, which literally means belongs to the Kremlin. Like, it does not get more straightforward than that. Moreover, he is the kind of the proxy, the face, the wallet, whatever kind of metaphor you wanna use for Alexei Rubizhnoi, who is the head of Putin's presidential security detail. As somebody who covers this very closely told me, Rubizhnoi is the first person to greet Putin in the morning, the last person to wish him good night before he goes to bed. He uses his position. He's like physically the closest person who gets to Vladimir Putin other than maybe Alina Kabaeva.