FBI agents have raided and searched the Virginia home of Dimitri Simes, an author and policy analyst, who advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and who currently hosts a current affairs program on Russia’s state-run Channel One.
The raid began on 13 August, the FBI told the local Rappahannock News, which first reported the story.
Simes, whose name was included more than 100 times in the 2019 Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, told the paper he was out of the country and had not been notified about the search ahead of time. He was not aware he was the focus of any current law enforcement investigation, he said.
“I’m puzzled and concerned,” he said. “I have not seen a warrant. I was not contacted by any law enforcement or anyone else whatsoever.”
In an interview with Russian government-owned Sputnik News, Simes said on Friday that the raid “clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state”.
He added: “My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me or even to arrest me, their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back.”
Simes’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr, told Sputnik News that his father has not been in the United States since October 2022. “The Biden regime is terrified of being called out over Ukraine and Israel,” he tweeted on Friday. In another tweet, he added: “Elements of Biden regime are trying to disrupt any possibility for deescalation with Russia and plunge America into World War III.”
Simes, who was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States in 1973. He served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon before leading the Center for the National Interest for nearly three decades.
After meeting Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner at a luncheon in honor of Henry Kissinger in March 2016, Simes began providing the Trump campaign with informal counsel on foreign policy, including advising on a speech Trump gave envisioning greater cooperation with Russia.
Simes and the Center for the National Interest featured prominently in the Mueller report, which cleared them of any wrongdoing. Around the same time, Simes underwent a Senate finance committee investigation into his contacts with Russian Central Bank official Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trying to infiltrate US conservative groups before the 2016 election.
Last year, Simes moderated a conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the St Petersburg international economic forum. And in June, Simes participated in a closed-door meeting with Putin, the state-owned Russian news agency Tass reported.
