Congressional investigators will have a chance Tuesday to question one of President Donald Trump’s closest confidants and longtime associates, providing an opportunity for lawmakers to potentially learn more about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians and Trump’s links to Kremlin-friendly interests in his business career.
CNN reported last week that Keith Schiller, who quit his White House job in September, is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the House intelligence committee, according to two sources familiar with the matter. He joined the Trump administration as director of Oval Office operations but left after about eight months.
Schiller has been by the President’s side for many years. During the campaign, “it mattered more to me what Keith Schiller thought of me than what the campaign manager thought,” a former top Trump campaign aide told CNN in May.
Being so close to Trump for so long means Schiller was around for some of the most controversial moments of Trump’s political career.
Trump dispatched Schiller in May to hand-deliver a letter to the FBI headquarters, informing then-Director James Comey of his termination. Comey was on a work trip on the other side of the country, but CNN cameras spotted Schiller entering and then leaving the FBI building.
Comey’s firing is now a key part of Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential obstruction of justice. Mueller’s team has recently interviewed White House witnesses who could shed light on Comey’s firing. And CNN reported last week that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner turned over documents about the firing to Mueller’s investigators.
Trump has said that years earlier, Schiller joined him on a trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. The significance of the event, held in November 2013, wasn’t clear at the time. But now, the contacts Trump made as part of that deal are coming back in a big way.
That deal was struck between Trump and Aras and Emin Agalarov, the father-and-son team of billionaires that own a major development firm in Russia. The Miss Universe pageant was held at one of their properties in Moscow.
Trump’s activities while in Moscow for that event have been the subject of rampant speculation ever since the January leak of a 35-page dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier accuses the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia as part of its “active measures” campaign to influence the election and defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Several of the dossier’s most salacious claims have not been independently corroborated, despite nearly a year of efforts by reporters around the globe. Whatever Schiller knows about these alleged events — proving or disproving them — will surely be sought after by the House panel.
The dossier’s broad assertion that Russia waged a campaign to interfere in the election is now accepted as fact by the US intelligence community. CNN also reported earlier this year that US investigators have corroborated some aspects of the dossier, specifically that some of the communications among foreign nationals mentioned in the memos did actually take place.
Video obtained exclusively by CNN showed Schiller, Trump and other Trump associates sharing a dinner in July 2013 with the Agalarovs and their associates, including British publicist Rob Goldstone, who represents Emin Agalarov in his musical career. The day after the dinner in Las Vegas, the Trump Organization announced it would bring Miss Universe to Moscow.
The Agalarovs stayed in touch with Trump after the 2013 event and re-entered the picture in summer 2016. Through the publicist, Emin Agalarov reached out to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., in order to broker a meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer. The publicist said the Russian government was eager to offer information that would “incriminate” Clinton.
Trump Jr. took the meeting and the rest is history — it became a major political scandal after it was revealed this summer, nearly one year after it took place, and amid sprawling federal investigations into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. Trump Jr. denies colluding with the Russians and says he didn’t get anything useful from the meeting.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correctly identify the pageant that Schiller and Trump traveled to Moscow for in 2013. It was the Miss Universe pageant.