Who Is Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s Embattled Adviser and Once Aspiring Ukraine-War Envoy?

The transition team of US President-elect Donald Trump continues to churn out controversies this week, with its latest contentious member accused of demanding money from Republican politicians for access to the 47th president.

Russia-born lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who had asked Trump to be the administration’s point man on the war in Ukraine as he claims to have family on both sides of the conflict, has been called out by the transition team for soliciting financial retainers from potential nominees, including Scott Bessent, Trump’s selection for Treasury Secretary, in exchange for the president-elect’s ear.

He also allegedly shook down former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who submitted a sworn declaration to Trump’s transition team to that effect, with Greitens saying he felt like he was entering into a business negotiation with Epshteyn in order to be considered for US Navy Secretary.

“It was important to me to protect the president because I was concerned about the ethics of what was happening,” Greitens told CBS News. “Very specifically, I was concerned that there was an offer to advance a nomination in return for financial payments.

”The world’s wealthiest person and Trump’s hand-picked hatchet man (or “government efficiency expert”), Elon Musk, complained this week that Epshteyn also had leaked potential nominees’ names to the press prematurely.

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Kazakhstan is a member of the Moscow-led CSTO security alliance but has expressed concern about the almost three-year war, which Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has refused to condone.

Epshteyn is under the Trump team’s internal investigation on all accounts.

So who is this 43-year-old lawyer causing such a ruckus and how did he become such a trusted adviser of the 78-year-old president-elect?

Boris Aleksandrovich Epshteyn was born in Moscow in 1982 to Russian-Jewish parents. In 1993, the family emigrated to Plainsboro Township, New Jersey, near Princeton, where he graduated from public high school and then enrolled in the posh liberal arts college of Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania. After a year among the very socially polished, mostly left-leaning “Swafties,” he transferred to Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

After graduating from there in 2004, Epshteyn went on to earn his law degree from that same Washington, DC, university.

One of the students he befriended in Georgetown was Eric Trump, the second-oldest son of the future president. In those days, Donald Trump was a PR-savvy real-estate heir, the host of a new reality TV show called “The Apprentice,” and a vocal supporter of the Democratic Party. Epshteyn attended Eric Trump’s wedding in 2014, at about the same time that the future president was finding a more profitable political path with the reactionary wing of the Republican Party. When Eric Trump spoke at his father’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in 2016, Epshteyn wrote on Twitter that he was “proud to call @EricTrump a friend.” 

As Epshteyn later assumed a visible role in Trump’s administration as a legal consultant and a “TV attack dog,” taking on the task of saying on-air the nasty things about political opponents that others were unwilling to do, the Moscow-born attorney regularly was called “abrasive” by his colleagues and by those in the broadcast journalism world.

On Wednesday, Trump tapped retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg as the special envoy to Ukraine, to help bring the almost-three-year war to an end.

But that hasn’t stopped Epshteyn from acting as a very close adviser to the next US president, nor the transition team from questioning his ethics, nor the Russia-born lawyer’s future on Trump’s team, as the president-elect has made it clear he would protect those most loyal to him.

According to The Guardian, Trump told aides and his transition team at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, “that he was irritated by what he viewed as an attempt to undercut ‘my people’.”