It's the fall of 2015, and a man named Dmitry Klokov reaches out to Ivanka Trump.

He wants to offer Donald Trump what he calls political synergy, helping Trump get close

to Vladimir Putin.

Klokov ends up talking at length with Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, who wants to use Klokov

to help with the Trump team's efforts to build a tower in Moscow.

Cohen's conversations with Klokov never come to anything, and they might be chalked up

to just yet another instance of Russian outreach to Donald Trump's world.

Except there's a twist.

Dmitry Klokov is a Russian energy executive with ties to the Kremlin.

The kind of person you'd think might offer Donald Trump political synergy.

But the whole time, Michael Cohen thinks he's talking to another Dmitry Klokov.

If you won't be professional sportsman, you must sometimes drink training after sauna,

after massage.

This is the grossest, you know what I'm gonna do.

This Dmitry Klokov is an Olympic medalist and a weightlifter with a popular YouTube channel.

And when Cohen talks to the special counsel's office three years later,

he's apparently still under the impression he was speaking with the weightlifter

rather than the former Kremlin aid.

I'm Lawfair's managing editor, Quint Jurassic, and this is another bonus episode of the

report. We've just finished volume one of our podcast bringing to life Robert Mueller's report

on Russian election interference, and we're hard at work on volume two.

We'll have that ready for you soon, but in the meantime, we've put together some bonus

...