Who is Dmitri Simes, and why haven't we heard of him before?

Politico has an article sketching what's known about Simes, including his appearance in the Mueller report.

On March 14, 2016, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, [Jared] Kushner attended a lunch in Manhattan in honor of Henry Kissinger. Also in attendance was a tall, bearded Russian émigré with a booming voice. His name was Dmitri Simes, and for nearly 20 years he had been president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank.

Simes had been a Washington fixture since he left the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, obtained U.S. citizenship, and served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon.

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Although the Trump campaign never identified Simes as an adviser, he provided counsel to the Trump team, particularly with regard to Russia.

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In April of that year, CNI hosted Trump’s first genuine foreign policy address, attended by Russia’s U.S. ambassador, in which the candidate offered a similar message. Mueller also discovered that Simes also offered Kushner disparaging information about former President Bill Clinton.

The Simes-Kushner relationship was outlined in detail by Mueller’s report, which mentions Simes over 100 times. While the report concluded that Simes did not act as a campaign intermediary with Moscow, and did not allege that he works at the behest of the Kremlin, it did note that Simes and CNI have “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials.”

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Depending on who you ask, he is either a shrewd foreign policy realist dedicated to defusing tensions between his birth-nation and the one where he chose to make a life — or a Kremlin advocate who cloaks his true agenda in Washington, D.C.

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Simes has been linked to [Maria] Butina, who wrote an article for CNI’s magazine, The National Interest, arguing that U.S.-Russia relations could improve under a Republican administration. He also reached out repeatedly in 2015 to Butina’s associate Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, to discuss a CNI board member’s financial problems, according to The Daily Beast. Simes has denied any wrongdoing.

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Mueller found no evidence that Kushner had sought out Simes because of his Kremlin ties. But Simes did use the opportunity to influence the campaign’s posture toward Russia, acknowledging to Mueller that he “initiated all conversations” about Russia with Kushner.

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“Jared was genuinely eager to cultivate relationships with foreign policy people,” said a campaign adviser at the time who has worked with Simes. “He was having a hard time early on when foreign establishment was horrified by what Trump was doing. And he recognized in Dmitri someone who had serious foreign policy credentials and was sympathetic to the candidate.”

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“A trait I observed with the true-believing Trump people is that they have this very bitter, resentful outlook on the world,” the former campaign adviser said. “Dmitri fit into that mold.

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Simes helped draft Trump’s CNI-hosted foreign policy speech in which Trump called for an “easing of tensions” with Russia, and was still advising Trump on “what to say about Russia” months later, according to Mueller. Although Trump made a point of publicly announcing a foreign policy advisory team in mid-2016, his campaign never openly discussed Simes’ quiet role.

Another memo Simes sent Kushner in August recommended that the campaign “downplay Russia as a U.S. foreign policy priority at this time” while adding that "some tend to exaggerate Putin's flaws,” according to Mueller. He also advised the campaign "not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" with regard to Russia, Mueller’s report says, and made suggestions about how to handle Ukraine-related questions.

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Kushner told Mueller that he didn’t receive any information from Simes that could be “operationalized” against Clinton, and the relationship appears to have cooled by the end of the campaign. Several people familiar with Simes’ thinking at the time said he was disappointed that some longtime associates who he’d recommended for administration jobs, including Saunders and former U.S. ambassador Richard Burt, were not hired.

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David Rivkin, an attorney at BakerHostetler who represents CNI, said he is unaware of FBI interviews concerning Simes beyond the confines of Mueller's probe. “There was an investigation that looked at hundreds and hundreds of people and institutions within the context of the special counsel’s mandate, and we know what it found—that neither Simes nor the center did anything wrong, and as far as proffering foreign policy advice to a presidential campaign, that is what academics and think tanks are supposed to do.”

Meanwhile, Simes' story has delivered a new plot twist: he has been spending a large amount of time back in his home city of Moscow, making regular appearances on the hugely popular Russian television show, “The Great Game.” Simes co-hosts the program, which airs most weeknights on Russia’s state-owned Channel One, alongside one Vyacheslav Nikonov—the staunchly pro-Kremlin grandson of the Soviet diplomat and Stalin protege Vyacheslav Molotov.

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[Yuri] Felshtinsky, the Russian-American historian and fierce Simes critic, told POLITICO that he has always found Simes’s “pro-Russian” stance “very unusual for a former Soviet citizen who emigrated to the United States.” He also pointed to the peculiarity of Simes’s high-level Kremlin relationships and noted his ability to address Putin directly at high-level public forums, like at the Valdai International Discussion Club in 2014—where the head of a modest Washington think tank was flanked by Germany’s former defense minister and France and Italy’s former prime ministers.

When it comes to Simes, Felshtinksy said, “I think we only know the tip of the iceberg.”

  Politico