WASHINGTON In many universes, it would be strange for Rob Goldstone, a British publicist and globetrotting eager beaver whose life could easily be mistaken for extended performance art, to be at the center of a massive political scandal involving the president of the United States. In a video he once posted to Facebook , Goldstone frantically shrieks while grabbing dollar bills out of a money wind tunnel. In another post, he is seen wearing a Greek gold-leaf crown with the caption The Emperor Muppettus Maximus. He posts from trips to Greece, Bangkok and Montenegro with insights like Moussaka yum yum . In June 2016, he weighed in on the killing of Harambe the gorilla: The zoo officials should have shot the idiotic child, he declared.

In many universes, the involvement of this sort of character in a major political scandal might seem very strange. But this is the universe called 2017. So perhaps it makes perfect sense that Rob Goldstone, who once posted a photo of himself biting an Olympic gold medal with the caption Golden Boy in Rio, is the man responsible for placing a Kremlin-linked lawyer in a room with President Donald Trumps oldest son suggesting that Donald Trump Jr. hoped to collude with the Russian government during the 2016 election.

Goldstone, who appears to own at least one pair of black and yellow shoes that say SEX, has a work history with the Trumps that dates back to at least 2013. Thats when he and Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Azerbaijani-Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin , helped convince the Trump-owned Miss Universe Pageant to hold that years event in Moscow. Goldstone believed the Miss Universe event would help sell Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov Goldstones client and Aras son to a global audience.

It was the same pageant that Trump hoped would help make Putin his new best friend . The Russian president skipped the event, but with Goldstones help, Trump met with Aras Agalarov and crafted a deal to build a Trump-licensed property in Moscow, according to Yahoo News . Trump Tower-Moscow is next, Trump tweeted to Agalarov shortly after the pageant.

Trump put Donald Trump Jr. in charge of the project, and Ivanka Trump later traveled to Moscow to scout potential locations, according to Yahoo News . The Trump Organization has long maintained that the company never had a full agreement to build a property in Moscow.