Inside Trump’s Mad House: What we know about his connections

The Great Spirit is angry with all men who tell lies.
Tecumsah

Chapter 1A:

Today was the last straw. I’ve never worked so hard. I’ve never had to struggle so much to do a job all the while knowing that so much of what I’m doing is wrong. Yet today I witnessed a Presidential tirade of extraordinary ferocity, foul insults aimed at staffers around him who had stayed up all night in order to serve, papers thrown across the room, hard work dismissed as just so much confetti. If it is not already clear by now, he is ungrateful, vindictive and it’s always all about him.

I have reluctantly come to believe that the very Republic that I am sworn to serve is at risk.

I’ve learned terrible things while I’ve been in the White House: how to cut health care for the poor while favoring the rich; how to design tax benefits that will give billions to the already rich while cutting benefits and opportunities for the poor. I’ve heard the President talk about climate change as the greatest hoax of modern times. Even worse, I’ve heard the President and his closest team talk seriously about waging war against China. And then there’s Russia.

It has been especially troubling for me to see what the intelligence community has been trying to do. Day after day, yet another intelligence brief comes from the CIA or the Director of National Intelligence. And every day the report is either buried or dismissed as just another lie.

The President’s Daily Brief, which is a distillation of the most sensitive reporting, has regularly set out reports of covert contacts between the President’s staff and friends and Russian intelligence operatives. The President has responded to the information either by refusing to read the material or by dismissing it as ‘lies’.

The President tweets and rants against leaks from the intelligence community but any leaks reflect the briefers’ frustration at being systematically ignored or covered up. I have seen enough in my lowly capacity to give me gray hairs.

What follows will be my personal account of life inside the White House. I can only see and hear some of what goes on and everything comes through the filter of my inexperience and the few areas where I have more knowledge than others. But the White House is a small place and we all talk.

My aim will be to post something weekly to keep you up to date with what is really going on as opposed to what folks in the White House would like you to believe.

In writing this, I am choosing to become one of the leakers so despised by the President and his allies and I imagine a major effort will be launched to find my identity. I hope it won’t be easy to find me but, if discovered, the price I pay is the President saying “You’re Fired.” And we all know how much the President likes using those words. I think the stakes are high enough to make that price worth paying.

My decision has not been taken without a great deal of agonizing. Loyalty is important to me but as I’ve wrestled with my conscience, I’ve learned that my loyalty to country comes before anything else. I am so concerned about the potential for our President to be blackmailed by an utterly ruthless former KGB officer in the Kremlin, that I feel I must speak out. I don’t trust the press to keep my identity secret and so I’m posting this anonymously to get the word to Congressional investigators. Also, I feel passionately that all of America has the right to know what is being done in their name.

If there’s one subject that is never discussed openly and is only whispered in hurried exchanges, that subject is Russia. Yet it is impossible not to conclude from the snippets of conversations, intelligence I see coming from Langley and the tirades about Russia from the President himself that Russia is front and center.

Although the President and his team will continue to insist that there is nothing to see here, the fact is that the record of what has transpired for decades between Russia and Trump is actually distressingly clear. Let me just report to you what is widely known within the White House.

1. In the late 1990s, four Russian oligarchs helped bail out a Trump empire which risked bankruptcy. This ‘investment’ took a number of forms: buying properties at significantly above market value in European countries and in Florida and investing in others. At the time, the Kremlin had simply identified Trump as a ‘person of influence’.

2. Trump announced his campaign for President on July 16, 2016. Intercepts by the National Security Agency from that summer show that Trump associates had already begun talking to Russian officials about a reset in Russian-American relationships in the event of a Trump Presidency. And so began several months of courtship by different Trump acolytes, both friends and potential appointees, to reach out to Russia with a core message: “A Trump administration will oversee a transformation in America’s relationship with Russia and between the next American President and Vladimir Putin.”

2. Among the offers made were the end to the sanctions imposed on Russia following that country’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, a deal that would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, intelligence cooperation on combating ISIS, a new, less onerous, arms control regime, trade deals that would help kick start Russia’s ailing economy and cooperation on combating China’s global expansion, something that both Trump and Putin see as a major threat.

3. The contacts that occurred were with the express permission of the soon-to-be President and were accompanied by an explicit but non specific promise from the Russians: “We will do what we can to help.”

4. It is striking to note that these overtures took place without any consultations with the State Department, the intelligence community or the Pentagon. Instead, the ideas were formed by Trump, Bannon and a few close advisers none of whom had any diplomatic, military or intelligence knowledge about any of the subjects under discussion. It was policy by instinct and based almost entirely on ignorance.

5. Both intercepts and CIA sources in the Kremlin have confirmed that Putin personally authorized the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the leaking of thousands of memos and emails as a response to the Trump overtures. The effort was specifically designed to get Trump into the White House.

6. As any child knows, we intercept all open calls going into and out of the Russian Embassy in Washington DC. General Mike Flynn is a former career intelligence officer and he for certain knows this fact. When he called Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador, he knew that the call would be recorded, a transcript made and its contents distributed. He should also have known that Kislyak, unlike US ambassadors, is not just a political appointment but a very, very experienced intelligence operative.

7. Not only calls to and from the Russian embassy are intercepted but other means are used to listen and observe meetings that take place inside the embassy. The intelligence community has known for months the extent of the betrayal of the American democratic process undertaken by US citizens who are now senior officials in the Trump administration.

8. General Flynn understands the chain of command and he was acting under orders. When asked to resign for lying to the vice-President, like the good soldier he used to be, Flynn fell on his sword and did not blame his President for the actions he took. What is clear from other intercepts and sources is that the Russians believed he was speaking for Donald Trump, the then President-elect. The same analysis applies to Jeff Sessions, the current Attorney General who met twice with the Russian Ambassador and then denied under oath that he had done so.

9. The report commissioned by Senator John McCain and prepared by Christopher Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia desk, on Trump’s contacts with Russia has been checked by the CIA and found to be ‘largely credible’. The report detailed contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, including members of the country’s intelligence service. In addition, the report was shared last summer with the office of the British Prime Minister, the CIA and the FBI. When Theresa May visited Washington last January, she knew that British intelligence believed that the allegations of Trump hiring Russian prostitutes to urinate in front of him are true.

10. Additional intelligence gathered by Britain’s MI6 and GCHQ, the UK’s equivalent of NSA, bolstered Steele’s contention of multiple meetings between Trump associates and Russian intelligence or Russian officials close to Putin. That dossier went back and forth across the Atlantic several times as US intelligence added information. In the end, the intent of this information sharing had shifted to ensure that the Trump administration would not be able to destroy files in US databases.

11. Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in Russian intelligence and a key source for Steele, was found dead in his car the day after Christmas. The CIA now believes he was assassinated on the orders of Putin as a warning to others not to speak out of turn. Indeed, CIA has prepared a report for the White House that details a long list of killings and disappearances they believe are directly related to the multi-year Russian intelligence efforts aimed at Donald Trump.

12. A video showing Trump beating his wife Melania which was sold at a secret auction last year, is believed to be in Russian hands. A multi-agency investigation has concluded that the video is part of a dossier of material that the Russians have either created or bought to blackmail the President. Harvey Levin, the Founder and head of TMZ, the gossip website, was one of those invited to the auction but he dropped out of the bidding as it crested comfortably past $20m. Levin spent an hour in the Oval Office earlier this month. Whether or not the Russian dossier has been used is not known.

13. Multiple intercepts and sources in the Kremlin have revealed that President Vladimir Putin believes that the US President should be considered an ‘asset’, spook speak for a willing stooge. A profile of Trump prepared by the FSB, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, describe the US President as an uneducated dupe, too blinded by his own insecurities to see how he is being manipulated. Russia is playing grandmaster chess while Trump is playing Chutes and Ladders.

14. Trump may be right in claiming that he has no direct contact with Putin but at the very least, he is being disingenuous. People with whom he has worked for many years, including those with ties to the American Mafia, have been acting as his surrogates with Russia for years. Also, his daughter Ivanka and son Eric have traveled to Russia on Trump’s behalf. The connections are deep, long-lasting and unprecedented for a President of the United States.

15. So concerned did the US intelligence community become last Fall, that Jim Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, presented to then President Obama the collective intelligence assessment that Trump should be considered a Russian asset and the information made public. In two different meetings in September and October, Clapper said that it was the unanimous view of the intelligence agencies that the information should be made public. Obama overruled them on both occasions believing that Trump had no prospect of getting elected.

While the intelligence community may be overly bureaucratic and in many respects out of pace with the demands of the 21st century, the vast majority of those who serve in the many different agencies are united by a common love of country and a determination to do what they can to protect our great nation. In the memory of lifetime members of the intelligence community, there has never been an occasion like this where all parts of the political spectrum are united in their concern that there is a Russian spy elected as President of the United States.

“Just think about this for a minute,” one senior intelligence official told me. “Our President has been groomed by the Russians for perhaps 20 years under Putin’s personal direction in a project that ultimately involved hundreds of people.

“They launched the largest hacking attack we’ve ever seen that changed the course of the election and we think they have enough material on the President to blackmail him until Doomsday. This was the greatest espionage success since the Second World War.”

If similar information about me and Russia were available as I was getting a security clearance, such a clearance would be denied. Such is the historic respect for the Office of the President, that he has to go through no such vetting the assumption being that simply by being elected President, he is a patriot.

It’s simply not good enough that the President dismisses Russia as “fake news” as he did at his chaotic press conference on February 16. Russia’s involvement with the administration goes to the very heart of who this President is, what he stands for and just why he sees himself as the leader of the most important democratic country in the world. And to equate America to Putin, a man who runs one of the most corrupt countries in the world with no free press and a personal group of thugs who are empowered by him to murder and arrest enemies at home and abroad, is truly bizarre. Is that the role model the President has for America? A muzzled press, a craven Congress, a corrupt elite who benefit at the whim of their leader and a rule of law that is almost entirely absent for ordinary people? Really? Well, that’s not an America I know or one where I want to live.

In the surreal world in which I find myself, the core group in the White House automatically dismiss the wealth of information that has been revealed, some from leaks and some by investigative journalism. Anything that is contrary to the accepted internal narrative has to be lies and seemingly nobody above me wants to ask the questions and find the truth.

Unable to stop the momentum of the investigations and the drip, drip, drip of revelations, Trump has become increasingly frustrated, lashing out at anyone within range for their failure to control the truth. The culmination of this was his epic early morning tweet storm alleging that Obama had bugged Trump Tower during the election campaign. This was based on nothing except a report on Breitbart that was itself based on other unreliable and unsourced reporting on conservative websites. That a President of the United States could make such accusations based on almost nothing is simply bizarre.

As a temporary distraction, it certainly caused headlines although the damage inside the White House was significant. That Trump could show such breathtaking ignorance of the law and how it works was one thing. But then to refuse to accept the denials of the leading intelligence and law enforcement professionals shows a mistrust of anyone outside of his inner circle that defies logic and will make working with all Washington very difficult.

But perhaps the most lasting damage from his recent instability is with his own family. In a well documented tantrum in the Oval Office with Bannon, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Trump railed against everyone. Bannon’s response was this: “Mr. President this is the deep state, the establishment, all the people who are trying to stop you doing what’s right. You must fight.”
It was exactly what Trump wanted to hear and confirmation of his own paranoia. But, after the meeting, Ivanka, normally loyal to a fault, said to Jared in a conversation overheard by another staffer: “I’m really worried. He’s no longer rational and Bannon has become the Chief Enabler.” Jared agreed with her but for now they are choosing to not speak to the President directly about their concerns.

I’ve seen and heard a great deal since arriving in the White House, full of idealism and a deep desire to serve my country. It wasn’t so much the President I admired but the idea of playing a part in change, in building a new America for the 21st century that resonated with me. I suppose it was naïve of me to expect the sales message to equal the reality but the difference has been really extraordinary and too much to bear.

Like most of my family, I am a lifelong Republican and yet today I find myself disgusted with many in my party who are choosing to put party before country. I always associated the GOP with love of country and loyalty to the democratic process. Now I find myself looking at a craven Congress that is moving at a snail’s pace to investigate our administration’s ties with Russia along with that country’s absolutely verified interference in our democracy. The evidence I’ve seen and read about the Russia hacking of the Democrats during the election includes transcripts of calls between Russians, intercepts of email, charts tracking exactly who did what to whom and when, and sources in the Kremlin who have made it clear that the hacking was authorized personally by Vladimir Putin. In different circumstances, this would all amount to an act of war and yet Republicans in Congress seem unwilling to put country and democracy before party.

Now that I have begun to speak out, I feel a certain sense of relief. No more frustrating gossip with my disillusioned friends and no more impotence in the face of betrayal of both my values and my country.

More next week….

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