In May, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. “It was really small, like, just really close friends,” he later said on his podcast. One of those friends was Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin who speaks limited English and was in China with Putin’s delegation in the days before the wedding. He attended the celebrations with a large contingent of Russian guests, and he helped pay for them.
ProPublica reported on Kremlev’s involvement:
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. ... National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?
“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
The couple confirmed the payments, calling them an “extraordinarily generous wedding gift” from a friend. The president first dismissed the story as “Not a big deal!” and said he doesn’t know Kremlev. Then, as Republicans like Sen. John Curtis called it “corruption,” he announced that his son had repaid Kremlev.
Kremlev’s background makes the arrangement more troubling. He reportedly joined the Night Wolves, the government-backed ultranationalist biker club, eventually taking a leadership role. The club brought him close to the man who now runs Putin’s security service. Ukraine has sanctioned him personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services. He is also heavily involved in Healthy Fatherland, a group run by his wife’s twin sister that Ukraine has sanctioned for its alleged role in abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories. And he wants something from the Trumps. After the International Olympic Committee stripped his boxing association of its Olympic role, Kremlev wrote to the president asking him to look into the matter ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. After hosting Trump Jr. at a boxing event in Istanbul last year, the association announced that “this alliance will not remain symbolic.” Paying the money back after getting caught does nothing to change that.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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