Don Jr.’s Wedding Trap

If you were a Russian intelligence operative trying to penetrate the American president’s inner circle, you could hardly have done much better than Umar Kremlev did last May. Kremlev, a boxing promoter from outside Moscow, rented a private island in the Bahamas for Donald Trump Jr. to host his uber-luxe wedding celebration. Four of President Trump’s children, along with their spouses, were sequestered with Kremlev and a gaggle of other Russians during a party that went on for three days, according to an investigation by ProPublica published last week.

The guest list of family and close friends included the president’s two sons-in-law: Jared Kushner, one of his key interlocutors with Moscow, and Michael Boulos, whose father is a senior adviser to Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. A VIP party like that is what spies call a target-rich environment. “It’s an intelligence service’s dream to have so much time with these people, when alcohol is flowing and people’s guards are down,” Marc Polymeropoulos, who used to oversee the CIA’s clandestine operations in Russia, told me. When foreign agents gain access to such a setting, he said, “they are building relationships, gaining assessment data on targets, and perhaps even setting future contact, all precisely part of the recruitment cycle.”

Kremlev shelled out for one night on a private island, as well as a fireworks display, which together can cost upwards of $170,000—a pittance, given the potential payoff. The president, who didn’t attend the wedding, defended the gift, claiming that he, too, had thrown wedding parties for people. “With all of that being said, I understand that Don’s paid him back,” Trump told reporters on Friday, although he didn’t say how much money his son planned to reimburse the Russian. The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, has started an investigation. And yesterday, a Republican senator, John Curtis of Utah, called on his colleagues to investigate the wedding reception and issue a subpoena for Trump Jr.  

Kremlev, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been sanctioned by Ukraine but not by the United States. He owes his position, and apparently his wealth, to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Current and former intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe who have spent their career working against Russia told me that his gift to Trump’s son should be viewed as the continuation of a long-standing state effort to influence and potentially compromise people in the president’s orbit.

Kremlev, born Umar Lutfulloyev, grew up in a suburb of Moscow and has family roots in Tajikistan. After a few criminal convictions for extortion and battery in the early 2000s, he got into the boxing business. At age 28, Lutfulloyev changed his name to Kremlev, which essentially translates to “the Kremlin’s man.” Around this time, he joined the Night Wolves—ostensibly a patriotic biker gang but really more of a paramilitary and propaganda arm for Putin. The Russian president has previously mounted a bike and joined the gang on rides in the Crimean peninsula, an occupied territory of Ukraine. In 2014, following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Night Wolves, whose members allegedly “conducted intimidation and criminal activities” in the country.

It was in the Night Wolves that Kremlev met Alexey Rubezhnoy, a former member of the FSB, Russia’s main security agency. Rubezhnoy is the current head of the Presidential Security Service, in charge of physical protection for the famously paranoid Russian president. According to Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet that specializes in investigative reporting, Rubezhnoy put Kremlev in position to take over the International Boxing Association, which now serves as an instrument of Russian soft power and a focal point for the Russian government’s rhetorical attacks on LGBTQ people and transgender athletes. Rubenzhnoy also lobbied Putin to nationalize a chain of car dealerships and for Kremlev to lead the company, Proekt reported. The 43-year-old Kremlev is frequently described in the press as an oligarch, a broadly applied term that, if it means anything these days, describes someone who owes his fortunes to the leader of Russia.

Kremlev is just the kind of person the CIA would want to recruit because of his proximity to Putin and Russian state leadership. Yet there he was, ingratiating himself with Trump’s eldest son, who is also a close ally of Vice President Vance and one of the most influential figures on the American political right.

“Espionage is a people business, and access is its holy grail,” John Sipher, a former CIA officer who worked in Moscow and spent his career focused on Russia, told me. Trump Jr.’s Russian guests, he said, had “myriad opportunities for cultivation and exploitation. A shared contact, stray comment, or a business proposition or follow-up meeting can provide information and access that may be leveraged in countless ways.” From the point of view of the U.S. government, which tries to prevent compromising encounters with politically influential Americans, “this is the stuff of counterintelligence nightmares,” Sipher said.

Kremlev’s past and his current connections are well known to the U.S. government and its partners. The Ukrainian government has sanctioned him, citing his close relationship with Putin, Rubezhnoy, and Russian security agencies. Kremlev is also heavily involved with Healthy Fatherland, an organization run by his wife’s twin sister, which Ukraine has sanctioned for its alleged role in the kidnapping and “rehabilitation” of Ukrainian children. A Ukrainian intelligence official told me that its domestic security agency has a thick file on Kremlev. In 2021, for reasons that remain unexplained, U.S. Customs and Border Protection denied a waiver for Kremlev to enter the United States.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback]

Before Kremlev took over the boxing association, it was run by Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman whom the Treasury Department publicly identified as an organized crime figure in 2012 because of his alleged membership in Brother’s Circle, a Russian criminal network involved in international heroin trafficking. Treasury sanctioned him again five years later for providing material support to another notorious group, Thieves in Law, which originated in Stalinist prison camps in the Soviet Union and is akin to the Italian Cosa Nostra. Rakhimov’s career is a manifestation of the blurry lines in Russia between organized crime, international sports, and the state security apparatus.

The U.S. designations, as well as concerns about the International Boxing Association’s ties to the Russian banking system, prompted the International Olympic Committee to block the association from organizing the sport at the 2020 Tokyo Games. In 2023, USA Boxing withdrew from the IBA, which Kremlev now ran, citing his governmental ties as well as the association’s financial dependency on sanctioned companies. Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy corporation, had been its largest sponsor.

What Trump Jr. knew about Kremlev’s history is still unknown. When reporters pressed his father, the president suggested that his son “didn’t do a background check.” Within the West Wing, another tough headline elicited some groans and eye rolls, as well as quiet acknowledgment that the ProPublica report would, yet again, spark questions about the relationship between Russia and the Trumps.

For an administration that is generally neither moved nor shamed by questions about ethics, the wedding party triggered a response, albeit a mild one. “I mean, just how dumb can you be?” one outside Trump adviser asked my colleague Jonathan Lemire, on the condition of anonymity so as to not alienate the president’s family. One Republican who has been disappointed with the president’s consistent deference to Putin at the expense of Ukraine grimly noted that the wedding had been a savvy play by Moscow to further engender goodwill with the first family. They took this as proof, if any more was needed, that Trump would likely never back Kyiv in the war.

Maybe Trump Jr. didn’t know much about Kremlev. But Russians have long seen Trump Jr. as a conduit to his father, and they have tried to exploit him for political and business purposes.

Back in 2006, Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka went to Moscow to cultivate potential business contacts. During that trip, a real-estate developer reportedly arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair during a tour of the Kremlin. By his own account, Trump Jr. traveled to Russia half a dozen times over the next year and a half. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” he said at a real-estate conference in New York in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” which he also called a “scary” place to do business.

In 2013, Trump Jr. was the main negotiator on behalf of his father’s company with Russian figures who wanted to construct a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. The deal didn’t materialize, but it laid a foundation for future contacts between the presidential campaign and the Russians that emerged three years later. During the 2016 presidential election, Trump Jr. took a meeting in Trump Tower in New York with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who offered incriminating material about Hillary Clinton. When Trump Jr. learned that the Russian might give him dirt on his dad’s opponent, he memorably told an associate, “I love it.” But Veselnitskaya didn’t deliver, and the meeting, in retrospect, looks more like an effort to bring the future president around to pro-Kremlin foreign policy.

[Read: The Qataris gave Trump an airplane. He crippled their country in return.]

When exactly Trump Jr. and Kremlev first met is unclear. The Russian claims it was a couple of years ago. What’s known for sure is that they appeared together on a panel last September at an IBA event in Istanbul. Trump Jr. criticized transgender women and recalled his childhood love of boxing. An appearance onstage by the president’s son and a Russian who’d been sanctioned by Ukraine would not have escaped Moscow’s attention. It was the beginning of an apparent friendship that led to Kremlev subsidizing Trump Jr.’s wedding fete less than a year later.

Kremlev wasn’t the only Russian heavyweight at the party. He was joined by Alexander Lagutin, whom ProPublica described as a businessperson who served in top roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Also at the wedding party was Elena Sobol, whom ProPublica called Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA. Sobol didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Lagutin couldn’t be reached.

The attendance of what ProPublica described as a “large contingent” of Russians at a wedding party of only about 50 people was conspicuous. “‘What are they doing here?’ one person recalled thinking,” according to the news organization. After the story was published, Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina, acknowledged Kremlev’s largesse, describing it in a social-media post as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend.” “It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from,” they wrote. “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.”

Maybe not. But former intelligence officers told me they believe that it’s no mystery why Kremlev was willing to foot the bill for his friends’ big day. “Money motivates—and that generosity can be a means of buying access, cultivating obligation, stealing secrets, and securing influence,” Steven Cash, a former CIA officer who was also the director of the Counterintelligence Program at the Department of Homeland Security, told me. “When the president’s family accepts lavish benefits from someone close to Putin, private financial interests become a national-security concern.”

Kremlev knew what he wanted when he paid for the party. The worrying question now is what Trump Jr. might give him in return.

Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting and Madison Hahamy contributed research to this story.