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Emin Agalarov, Trump-Connected Russian Pop Singer, Trolls The World With New Video

Three years ago, Donald Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt about a 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump partly owned at the time. The event took place at Crocus City Hall, a venue owned by billionaire Aras Agalarov's companies Crocus International and Crocus Group.

"I really loved my weekend; I called it my weekend in Moscow," Trump told Hewitt. "But I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people. I can't go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary."

As if the world weren't already bizarre enough, that visit is now the subject of a music video by Emin Agalarov, the aspirant pop star son of Aras Agalarov who performed during the Miss Universe pageant in 2013. In a promotional tie-in that same year, Trump appeared in a music video of Emin Agalarov's, along with that year's Miss Universe contestants.

The opening of the video for "Got Me Good" features an unidentified computer hacker watching security camera footage of Emin and an actor portraying Trump as they enter a hotel. Upon entering a hallway, Emin hands Trump a briefcase. Soon after — following a snippet of footage of the real Ivanka Trump — Emin and the actor portraying Trump are shown in a hotel room, where they are joined by three women. The hacker, in his bunker, digitally removes Trump from the footage, as the words "TRUE_FAKE" appear on a screen.

Shortly after the scene, an actress portraying Hillary Clinton and another portraying Ivanka Trump faire la bise in a dark club before taking a shot of alcohol. Several shots of spycraft-ish behavior — dead drops, handoffs — follow, before the Trump-erasing hacker is revealed to be an actor portraying Kim Jong Un.

All told, the video is nearly nonsensical, except for the ham-fisted allusions it makes to Emin Agalarov's connection to several key points in the investigation of Robert Mueller.

Trump's 2013 visit to the Russian capital has accrued significant importance, both for the salacious, unverified allegations linked to it within the now infamous "Steele dossier" and for the connection it seemingly has to a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower where Trump campaign leaders met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin about supposedly incriminating information on Clinton.

That meeting, according to emails that became public nearly a year ago, was arranged by music publicist Rob Goldstone at the request of Emin Agalarov, who was conveying a message from his father, Aras, which originated as an offer of help from Russian federal prosecutor Yuri Chaika.

"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting," Goldstone's email to Donald Trump Jr. read. The rest, as they say, is history.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: June 26, 2018 at 11:00 PM CDT
A previous version of this story misspelled a reference to Emin Agalarov's last name as Alagarov.
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