Description
While investigating the personal wealth of the president’s oldest son, investigative reporters Justin Elliott and Brett Murphy learned something almost too strange to be true: that a Russian oligarch closely allied with Vladimir Putin might have attended Donald Trump Jr.’s recent wedding in the Bahamas. Using a combination of social media and shoe-leather reporting, a team of ProPublica reporters soon realized that the guest list was just the tip of the iceberg.
Transcript
Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. This transcript has been lightly edited for style.
Jessica Lussenhop: In the absolute avalanche of stories coming out about the Trump administration this year, you might’ve missed a more human-interest story about the Trump family.
“TRIGGERED WITH DON JR.” PODCAST, Donald Trump Jr.: Glad to be with you guys live and in studio with my schedule these days, and getting married, and all that kind of craziness …
Lussenhop: This past May, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. got married in the Bahamas. He talked about it on his podcast, “Triggered.”
“TRIGGERED WITH DON JR.” PODCAST, Donald Trump Jr.: But it was, uh, really small, like, just really close friends. Uh, uh, it … just tried to keep it really tight.
Lussenhop: In the lead-up to the big day, reporters asked President Trump if he was planning to go.
C-SPAN, reporter: Are you attending your son’s wedding this weekend, by the way?
C-SPAN, Donald Trump: Uh, he’d like me to go, but it’s gonna be just a small little private affair, and I’m gonna try and make it. I’m, I’m in the midst … I said, “You know, this is not good timing for me.” I have a thing called Iran and other things.
Lussenhop: President Trump did not end up going to the wedding. But a team of my colleagues at ProPublica have gone super deep on this event.
Justin Elliott: This is wedding No. 2 for Don Jr. with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson.
Brett Murphy: It was a three-day event across this pair of islands.
Elliott: These are very luxurious private islands that celebrities have rented out. One of them was featured in the James Bond film “Casino Royale.”
Murphy: The Bahamas is beautiful, obviously. You know, the cerulean water, the white sandy beaches.
Elliott: People flew in on helicopters, seaplanes. There was no paparazzi there. It was all very private.
Murphy: This was, as they kept saying, an intimate affair.
Elliott: Don Jr. had very old friends who were disappointed not to be invited.
Murphy: There was a fireworks display from a barge.
Elliott: There was apparently an illusionist.
Murphy: Dancers in sailor outfits.
Elliott: They had two cakes from their favorite bakery in South Florida brought in via plane, boat and, I think, golf cart, including a five-tier Funfetti cake.
Murphy: People dancing, wearing linen on the water. It was quite captivating, as, like, a scene.
Lussenhop: Why, you might ask, are two investigative journalists for ProPublica talking like wedding correspondents for People magazine?
Murphy: My name’s Brett Murphy.
Elliott: My name’s Justin Elliott.
Murphy: We’re both very bald, and we communicate telepathically.
Lussenhop: The reason they became so interested in these nuptials began late last year, when ProPublica decided to start investigating Don Jr.’s personal wealth.
Elliott: Forbes Magazine last December estimated that his net worth had gone from $50 million before the election to $300 million about a year into the second term. This whole sort of economy — we’ve been calling it the Don Jr. economy — has sprung up around him since the start of his father’s second term, and so we started poking around.
Lussenhop: Justin wanted to know, did any of that money come from trading on his access to the president?
Elliott: Even though he does not hold a government role, there’s a lot of evidence that he’s incredibly influential in the Trump administration. He’s doing an awful lot of travel around the world, meeting with businessmen, sometimes foreign leaders. And, you know, I think a lot of these trips … it’s probably not more than meets the eye. But some of them actually were quite interesting.
Murphy: Justin and I became interested in this press release we saw from Istanbul.
Elliott: This organization we’d never heard of called the International Boxing Association had put out a press release saying, you know, “We were proud to host Donald Trump Jr. at a panel discussion in Istanbul, Turkey, about boxing.”
TELEGRAM POST, Trump Jr.: I really love what Umar is doing to just make sure there’s actual fairness, no nonsense …
Elliott: It’s, like, chairs on a stage, and it’s, like, five people. One of Muhammad Ali’s daughters, Manny Pacquiao, a few other people and Donald Trump Jr.
Lussenhop: Is Don Jr. a boxer?
Elliott: He’s not a boxer. I think Don Jr. identifies as a boxing fan.
TELEGRAM POST, Trump Jr.: Boxing for me growing up was such an important thing. Those great Saturday night fights, I loved every minute of it; I was so passionate about it.
Lussenhop: OK.
Elliott: He’s not a sought-after boxing commentator as far as we’ve been able to tell. It seemed very random and weird.
Murphy: What stuck out to us is that, uh, one, Junior did not have an obvious connection to the boxing world.
Elliott: And then the host of it was the head of this boxing organization, this Russian guy that we’d never heard of named Umar Kremlev. This guy is a Russian oligarch. If you, like, Google Image search him, what comes up is him at boxing fights, but also there’s pictures of him with Putin.
Murphy: Turns out he is actually quite close with the Kremlin, quite close with Vladimir Putin himself.
Elliott: So we were, like: This, this is kind of interesting. This guy seems like a potentially significant figure.
Murphy: So we wanted to know: Is there more to their relationship? Was it just a one-time thing where, uh, Junior sat on this panel and then these two never saw each other again? Or is there more?
Elliott: Obviously, you know, Trump-Russia, Trump Jr. to Russia is something that has a long history.
Lussenhop: Yeah. That’s pretty noteworthy.
Elliott: People may or may not remember, there was this famous so-called Trump Tower meeting with Trump Jr. and some others. There was a famous email exchange in which somebody emailed Trump Jr. saying they had dirt on Hillary and they wanted to give it to them, and this was part of the Russian government’s support for Trump. And Donald Trump Jr. famously responded, “I love it, especially if it’s later in the summer.” So yes, that was in the back of our minds of wondering what was going on here. But we were poking around on it, and, you know, at a certain point in this, we heard that this Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, not only had he hosted Don Jr. at this panel in Istanbul, but we heard that he might have actually attended his wedding. And that’s when we were, like, this is getting kind of interesting.
Murphy: It was a little crazy cause it was so strange.
Elliott: My first thought was, like, OK, so, Don Jr.’s father didn’t attend the wedding but this Russian oligarch did. Like, is that really possible? Like, that would be very strange.
Murphy: A Russian oligarch who is personally close with Putin, is in Putin’s circle, spending time on a private island with people like Jared Kushner and Don Trump Jr.
Lussenhop: Remember, the context here is Russiagate. And even though Robert Mueller and the FBI investigations concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge anybody in the Trump family with a crime, the whole thing dogged Trump’s first term. And Jared Kushner, Don Jr.’s brother-in-law, is currently helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. So Justin and Brett combined their telepathic powers with reporters Alex Mierjeski and Josh Kaplan to go deep into this bizarre guest list situation.
Murphy: We immediately thought, well, there must be kind of a bigger story here.
Lussenhop: Was a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin really at the president’s son’s wedding? And if so …
Murphy: Why is he there? How did he get invited to this thing?
Elliott: We are convinced that this is a tip of the iceberg situation.
Lussenhop: I’m Jessica Lussenhop. This is “Paper Trail.”
Lussenhop: First order of business: Did Umar Kremlev, this Russian oligarch, actually attend this blessed occasion?
Elliott: We were trying to find anything we could about this wedding on the internet.
Murphy: There was a curated gallery of photos that the family kind of authorized to be published through a tabloid, Hello! Magazine, and the wedding planner spoke about it. They gave great details about the food, the fireworks, the ambiance, how everything kind of went off without a hitch. They just showed people like Eric Trump, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, people you would kind of expect to be there, some close business associates here stateside. And in those photos that they authorized to be released, there were no Russians.
Elliott: Umar Kremlev is a very heavy Telegram poster. So, you know, one of the first things I did was download Telegram. For people that are not familiar, it’s sort of, Telegram’s sort of like WhatsApp and Twitter combined. And, like, “OK, did he post any videos of the wedding?” And he posted a couple videos of himself on the wedding weekend.
TELEGRAM POST, Umar Kremlev: И ничего не бояться. То, что вы делаете, будьте уверены. … (And have no fear. Be confident in what you are doing. …)
Elliott: Certainly not with Donald Trump Jr., they’re very closely cropped. But in one of the videos you can see these, like, wicker chairs in the background that have a distinct design.
Murphy: What Justin, uh, first picked up on, he noticed, uh, what I have been referring to among us as, uh, kind of Justin’s wicker chair analysis.
Elliott: We knew the islands that the wedding was held on because it was publicly reported. And if you look up marketing materials for these islands, pretty quickly we were able to match the chairs, the wicker chairs in this video he posted on, the day, one of the days of the wedding. I mean obviously it’s not proof, but what are the chances that these identical wicker chairs are in this video? It’s pretty close to proof. And then one of the big breakthroughs was when Alex found this swimwear model who owns a line of swimwear, who’s a friend of Bettina’s, posted a bunch of sort of less-authorized photos from the wedding on Instagram, and that included a group photo from the wedding on the beach on one of these private islands that shows maybe 30 people in it. And in the back row of this group photo, kind of like two rows back from Don and Bettina, maybe 45% of the head of Umar Kremlev was visible in the background.
Murphy: So it was kind of a big aha moment for us.
Elliott: And so at that point, we were like, “Oh, wow, he was actually there.”
Murphy: It was in black and white in the photos.
Lussenhop: Or color. Cerulean blue.
Murphy: We saw some other Russians we had noticed earlier in the reporting as well, people we knew who were in the IBA world. This added even more questions. What is going on? Why did a large group of Russians show up at a tiny wedding for the president’s son in the Bahamas?
Lussenhop: How did you feel when you first saw that photo?
Murphy: It was a little crazy cause it was so strange, um, because we had heard that he speaks pretty limited English, this guy Kremlev.
Elliott: So it’s not really at all self-evident how he could even be close friends with Donald Jr. Obviously, like, you can have relationships with people that don’t speak English. I don’t think Donald Trump Jr. speaks Russian. But it’s not, like, an obvious candidate for a very close, intimate friend to be invited to your wedding that a lot of your actual old friends were not even invited to.
Lussenhop: So, this guy is there. Like, who is Umar Kremlev?
Murphy: He’s a big guy, shaved head.
Elliott: He’s a very kind of larger-than-life character. He’s actually famous in Russia for giving away free iPhones and free cars.
Murphy: He gives a lot of life advice.
Elliott: We spent a lot of time on Umar Kremlev’s Telegram.
Murphy: In one of the videos, he is critiquing a female staffer’s, uh, who works for him, like what she’s wearing. He makes her go change.
TELEGRAM POST, Kremlev: Женственность, должна быть. Это ты где увидела? (There has to be femininity. Where did you get this idea?)
TELEGRAM POST, staffer: Щас исправимся. (We’ll fix this right away.)
Elliott: It’s, like, not feminine enough, and he, he himself posted the video of it. You know, posts a lot of pictures of himself working out in the boxing gym.
Murphy: He’s usually shadowboxing into the phone. In one video we saw, he’s shadowboxing, uh, some ostriches.
Lussenhop: What?
Murphy: Uh, a very eccentric guy. He has a very fascinating backstory, this Kremlev guy.
Elliott: A lot of what we know about him is from a really great investigative profile from a Russian independent news organization called Proekt. He was basically unknown in Russia until about 15 years ago.
Murphy: He had a, kind of a criminal history.
Elliott: At least reportedly, he had a criminal record for, I believe, extortion and battery. Early on, he was associated with boxing. He was a kind of low or mid-level boxing promoter in Russia. Boxing is a big sport in Russia. And how he became the kind of oligarch he is today is he became a member of this kind of notorious Russian biker gang called the Night Wolves. A biker gang that has received support from the Russian government. It’s sort of like a nationalist or ultranationalist biker gang. They’re known for playing a role in, I think, the takeover of Crimea in 2014.
Murphy: And he grew close, I think, through the biker gang, with a member of the security services. And that partnership, I think, helped him grow closer to the Kremlin and closer to Putin through this guy. Since leaving the Night Wolves, he ascended into these various positions of power around Russia being handed nationalized companies, the biggest car dealership in the country, the national lottery, this boxing association. These are, these are huge enterprises, and it made him personally very wealthy. And that sort of background, again, is not the type of person you typically see associating with children of the U.S. president.
Elliott: We know that he and Putin have spent time together. There’s pictures of them together at various events over the years. He’s received a number of awards from the Russian government, from Putin. One of them he actually received in April, the month before the wedding. There’s video of him getting this, I think it’s called the Order of Friendship from Putin. But I think most interesting, and this was another mini watershed moment in the reporting, is we were trying to figure out what Kremlev had been up to around the time of the wedding, and we, again, through his, mainly through his Telegram posts, realized that he had come to the wedding from China. Um, like, literally, right before the wedding. He was in China, like, the day before or a couple days before. And, we were trying to understand what he was doing in China and ultimately came across these articles in the Chinese state media that reported that he was in China as part of Vladimir Putin’s delegation to China.
Lussenhop: That’s wild. So his mere presence there, obviously, is eyebrow-raising, it sounds like. As you kinda keep interrogating this relationship, where’d the reporting go from there?
Murphy: From there, we kinda do our traditional talk-to-a-million-people move.
Elliott: And obviously, this is, you know, thinking about wedding guest lists is not something that I’m used to, uh, focusing on at ProPublica. But it did become relevant here.
Murphy: Attendees are like, “Who are the Russians?”
Lussenhop: Who are these people?
Murphy: Yeah. We talk to dozens of folks trying to find the middle of the Venn diagram, of people who might know helpful stuff for us. What we found out next became, I guess, the crux of the whole story, is we found out that he wasn’t just there. He helped pay for a large portion of this wedding, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Lussenhop: How did you figure out that he’s not just a guest, he’s paying for this?
Elliott: We reviewed records and spoke to three people familiar with it, and they confirmed it. Kremlev paid for a very significant chunk of this wedding through an entity called IB Challenger that’s out of Dubai. That’s affiliated with this boxing organization. And I think besides Kremlev being sort of broadly speaking in Putin’s circle, the other thing that we’re very fixated on is this organization, the boxing association, very publicly has been very, very heavily funded by Gazprom, which is a state-owned company. So this is, this is an organization that has been very recently funded very heavily by Russian state government money that is paying for the wedding expenses. And that includes renting one of the private islands that rents for up to $100,000 a night for multiple nights, and the fireworks show, and other big-ticket expenses. We don’t know the exact total, but well into the six figures.
Lussenhop: That’s, uh …
Elliott: At least.
Lussenhop: That’s shocking.
Elliott: We were surprised.
Lussenhop: I know you’re not a wedding correspondent. I was at one, very early in my career, a fact-checker for a wedding magazine, so I know more about this than I care to talk about. But is this a thing? Like, obviously, you know, it is 2026. It is no longer, like, I don’t know, the family of the bride who has to pay for the wedding. There’s all kinds of, you know, unconventional arrangements for paying for weddings. But …
Elliott: Well, I mean, you’re the one that used to be a fact-checker at a wedding magazine.
Lussenhop: I do not …
Elliott: Have you heard of it?
Lussenhop: I do not remember fact-checking the social, uh, trend of Russian oligarch friends paying for your wedding.
Elliott: It seems like an unusual arrangement. Um, I have not heard of even friends paying for another person’s wedding, especially when they can seemingly afford it. Donald Trump Jr., if you believe Forbes, last year had a net worth of $300 million. And obviously, that doesn’t mean he has $300 million of liquid cash that he can just spend. But presumably, if you’re worth at least $300 million, and that was a year ago, you can afford to pay for even a very, very expensive wedding, which this was. And so why accept this?
Lussenhop: That’s next.
Lussenhop: So on its face, this seems shady that a close associate of Vladimir Putin is, you know, paying for the president of the United States’ son’s wedding. How do you report out the question, like, is this bad? And, like, why is it bad?
Elliott: Right, I mean, cause of course, like, Don Trump Jr. is not. … He holds no formal government role but he’s incredibly influential. Vice President Vance has said that Don Jr. is responsible for him being the vice presidential pick. It’s been credibly reported that he played a role in cabinet picks, and so then the question is, when somebody’s essentially, like, giving you a lot of money, or, I mean, not like literally writing a check to you in the case of the wedding expenses at least, but paying for something that you were gonna have to pay for otherwise, I think that the natural human dynamic there is that there’s a sense of indebtedness. And so the natural question is, what does this person want from you, if anything? Is this just a selfless act of generosity?
Murphy: So it was certainly weird to us, right? But we don’t know. You know, we’re journalists. We like to keep a very open mind about these types of things. You know, I don’t like to think anything is on its face bad until I have enough people who are experts telling me something to that effect. What we did is we called around to as many different expert types as we could think of, and the folks who seemed to know the most about this were counterintelligence types here in the U.S., and they put this into perspective and context for us. And what they said is that, yeah, this is kind of the Russian government’s MO, Russian intelligence MO. It’s no secret that they have been trying to penetrate the Trump family inner circle for a long time. This is what they do. It’s not just in the U.S. They do it in other places too, and money is a really good way to do that. We don’t know to what extent this oligarch was coordinating with the Kremlin, with Putin. A lot of the experts we talked to said that it’s very common for them to do that, for there to be coordination. We don’t have evidence that that happened here, but it just raises all sorts of flags. The expert take was, from the other side, if you are the president’s son, you don’t get into a place where you are indebted to a Russian oligarch who is funded by the Russian state, who is someone who’s close to Putin. Uh, you don’t get yourself into a place where you owe them something because we don’t know what their motivations are. We don’t know why they’re giving you this, but better not do it. And they kept coming back to: The motivations of Kremlev are not immediately clear. This does not look good.
Elliott: And to be clear, we have no specific evidence that Kremlev is operating on behalf of, like, the Russian security services or anything like that. Uh, we just don’t know. I think as one of the people we quoted said, “If somebody pays for your wedding, you’re gonna owe them something at some point.” And to be clear, this is not specific to the Russians. I think, like, the U.S. government I’m sure does the exact same sorts of things — that relationships can start one way and then turn into a different thing. Like, it could start as, I’m becoming your friend and, uh, doing very expensive acts of generosity, and I’m not, like, talking to you about Ukraine policy during that. But then maybe in a year, you get a phone call and asked for a favor or something. You know, this is just how, how these things could work. So that, that’s what the kind of counterintelligence types that we spoke to, that’s the sort of thing that they found very, very concerning and troubling about this.
Murphy: It’s no secret, I think, that the people in and near the administration have been personally enriching themselves to various degrees, uh, for the past year and a half. That’s almost like a blasé observation now. But this is very direct. This is a lot of money, and it’s in a context I don’t think we’ve seen before, really. And the person who was doing it, an oligarch with this close of a tie to the Russians, to the Russian government, I think is something we haven’t seen before either.
Lussenhop: In response to detailed questions, a spokesman for Don Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. He told Justin and Brett that Umar is a personal friend of Don’s. The spokesman said the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors. He said Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with.” In an Instagram post after Justin and Brett published this story, Bettina Trump confirmed that “our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding.” She wrote — all caps — “NO CONSPIRACY, NO MYSTERY.”
Justin and Brett reached out to Kremlev, too. His press office confirmed that Kremlev and Trump Jr. met a couple of years ago and have a friendly relationship. The office said Kremlev is a businessman and a philanthropist and that he has “a completely clean legal record.” They said that he was not a part of Putin’s “official delegation,” and that he’s never discussed political matters with any of his American friends. They said the boxing organization didn’t pay for the wedding but didn’t comment on payments from related entities. They also said the boxing association’s sponsorship with Gazprom “expired long ago.”
The White House, the Russian government and Kushner did not respond to requests for comment. But Eric Trump did. He was there at the wedding, but when ProPublica reached out, his spokesperson said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”
Elliott: I do think that there’s been so much, especially in the second term, that kind of like your average reader and American has become fairly inured to this. I mean, sometimes, especially 10 or 15 years ago, if you published a story about, like, something bad happening with a government official or important person, you would expect there to be some kind of reaction. Our role is to kind of document it, and then we put it out in the world, and I’m not sure we’ve figured out any other way to do our job. The thing, the thing that the reporting group has kept coming back to is, like: “This is weird, and we don’t really understand it.” And even frankly, at this point, we still don’t fully understand it. There’s, there’s definitely a lot of unanswered questions here, mainly just the why.
Murphy: If anyone listening knows more about Junior’s business relationships, knows more about Russian oligarchs’ relationships with the U.S. government or people in the first family, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or my colleagues.
Lussenhop: Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Brett Murphy can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Signal or WhatsApp at 508-523-5195. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.
This episode was produced by Julia Longoria. Editing by Katherine Wells. Fact-checking by Darya Marchenkova. Sound design and mixing by David Herman. Music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi and Simone Sims Longo, with additional music by Epidemic Sound. Our team also includes Sabby Robinson, Gabrielle Berbey and Emma Talkoff. We’ll be back in your feed in two weeks.
