1. Immediate Post-Election Activity As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration. They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President- Elect. As explained below, those efforts entailed both official contact through the Russian Embassy in the United States and outreaches—sanctioned at high levels of the Russian government—through business rather than political contacts. a. Outreach from the Russian Government At approximately 3 a.m. on election night, Trump Campaign press secretary Hope Hicks received a telephone call on her personal cell phone from a person 964 who sounded foreign but was calling from a number with a DC area code. Although Hicks had a hard time understanding the person, she could make out 965 966 the words “Putin call.” Hicks told the caller to send her an email. The following morning, on November 9, 2016, Sergey Kuznetsov, an official at the Russian Embassy to the United States, emailed Hicks from his 967 Gmail address with the subject line, “Message from Putin.” Attached to the email was a message from Putin, in both English and Russian, which Kuznetsov 968 asked Hicks to convey to the President-Elect. In the message, Putin offered his congratulations to Trump for his electoral victory, stating he “look[ed] forward to working with [Trump] on leading Russian-American relations out of 969 crisis.” Hicks forwarded the email to Kushner, asking, “Can you look into this? 970 Don’t want to get duped but don’t want to blow off Putin!” Kushner stated in Congressional testimony that he believed that it would be possible to verify the authenticity of the forwarded email through the Russian Ambassador, whom 971 Kushner had previously met in April 2016. Unable to recall the Russian Ambassador’s name, Kushner emailed Dimitri Simes of CNI, whom he had consulted previously about Russia, see Volume I, Section IV.A.4, supra, and 972 asked, “What is the name of Russian ambassador?” Kushner forwarded 973 Simes’s response—which identified Kislyak by name—to Hicks. After