Recent Developments in the Trump/Russia Scandal. It’s Now a Question of When

Dan Brewster
Jul 30, 2017 · 26 min read

For months now, the question has been neither whether Kremlingate will end Donald Trump’s presidency (it will), nor by what mechanism (Congress will be forced to act). Rather, the question is: when. It is still not clear how long it will take for the endgame to commence or exactly what path we will go down to get there, but the walls are beginning to close in on Trump. He knows that, and he’s panicking.

But before I get to all of that, below is my personal summary of key developments from the past month, including some critical items that got lost in the flurry of news.

Following the Money

The New York Times and Bloomberg reported last week that Mueller’s probe has started digging into Trump’s business finances. There has been speculation, as well, that Mueller has been examining Trump’s tax returns. My assessment is that there are four primary areas of investigation that Mueller is pursuing:

  • Whether Russian money flowed into the Trump campaign, and whether the campaign knowingly accepted such funds;
  • Whether Russian loans/investments flowed into the Trump organization or Trump associates, and whether any such transactions serve, or could serve, as a basis for political leverage asserted by the Kremlin against either Trump, his businesses or his associates;
  • Whether any Trump business transactions violated federal money laundering laws; and
  • Whether any Trump business transactions were in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Money Laundering and the FCPA

I expect that the money laundering and FCPA violations may be the most straightforward to nail down. First, there is already substantial evidence to suggest that the Trump organization, through its luxury real estate and casino operations, has for the past two decades served as a conduit by which a host of Russians — from well-known international organized crime figures, to Kremlin-linked oligarchs, to multi-millionaire Russian government officials — have laundered their ill-gotten gains (from drug and weapon sales, to international human trafficking, to government bribes to tax avoidance to extortion).

Second, among the Trump projects that appear to be in violation of the FCPA are recent hotel developments in Baku, Azerbaijan (the subject of an extensive investigative report by Adam Davidson in the New Yorker in March) and in Panama City. According to the New Yorker, Trump’s Baku hotel was built with funding from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and lots of powerful people in Azerbaijan — including Trump’s friend Emin Agalarov, the former son-in-law of Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev — know all about it.

Trump has railed against the FCPA in the past, telling CNBC in 2012 that “the world is laughing at us” because of the Obama Administration’s vigorous enforcement of the anti-fraud and anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA. By “the world,” Trump was undoubtedly referring to the oligarchs and mafiosos he regularly cuts deals with. And so Trump, by his own admission, is enticed by bribes. (Bribery, it should be noted, is one of two crimes specifically identified as grounds for impeachment under the U.S. constitution. The other is treason.)

I have outlined the facts regarding several Trump-related money laundering schemes in previous write-ups, including those involving the Trump Taj Mahal (which was fined a record $10 million in 2015 for failure to comply with federal money laundering regulations), the Trump Soho development in New York City, and the Trump International Hotel in Toronto.

According to Bloomberg and the Washington Post, Mueller is also examining Trump’s $40 million profit from the 2008 sale of a Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch and Putin confidante Dmitry Rybolovlev. But there are literally hundreds of suspicious sales of Trump properties to Russians.

Personal Finances

Mueller wants to know whether Trump or his associates are financially indebted to Russian oligarchs or banks, particularly those known to be linked to the Kremlin. According to Trump’s own financial disclosure statements, during 2016 his debt load suddenly increased dramatically, from $350 million to $630 million. A large chunk of that debt is owed to Deutsche Bank. As the New York Times reported on July 19, Mueller’s team is taking a close look at Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, for good reason.

On the one hand, it’s interesting that Deutsche Bank and Russian money launderers have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship for years. Just this year Deutsche Bank was fined by U.K., U.S. and New York State authorities a collective $700 million for laundering $10 billion in dirty Russian money through mirror trading.

On the other hand, it’s interesting — very interesting, in fact — that when not a single other major bank would lend to Donald Trump or his businesses (other than on a senior secured basis involving hard assets), Deutsche Bank did. And what is particularly unusual about Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump in recent years is that they came not from the investment side of Deutsche Bank, as would be expected for a business, but from the personal wealth management side. That’s not normal. Mueller’s team is pressing Deutsche Bank for answers, as are the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Are Trump’s loans from Deutsche Bank backed by the Kremlin?

Mueller’s team is also, according to the Wall Street Journal, planning on using potential charges regarding money laundering undertaken by Paul Manafort as leverage against Manafort to get him to squeal. Manafort’s money laundering crimes appear to include three pieces of real estate in New York City that he purchased in full with cash from suspicious accounts and then borrowed against in full. Manafort also set up phony companies in Belize and multiple accounts in Cyprus through which he appears to have funneled funds from the Kremlin. He is in deep.

Jared Kushner is also having some financing issues, having gotten himself into some serious debt with the loans coming due. Interestingly, it was Deutsche Bank who came to his rescue, extending him a $285 million loan just before Election Day. Kushner initially failed to report the Deutsche Bank loan on his financial disclosure forms, along with billions of dollars worth of other transactions, assets and liabilities.

Now that his financial disclosure forms have been revised for the umpteenth time, it is apparent that Kushner’s properties are so heavily leveraged that it is a struggle for him to make payments. Perhaps that’s why Kushner secretly met with a representative of Vnesheconobank, which is essentially a Kremlin slush fund, and why he wanted to set up a secret back channel to the Kremlin. His pyramid of lies, layer upon layer, on his financial disclosure forms and security clearance applications are felonies that should have cost him his job at the White House months ago.

The Trump Campaign

Although Trump, his businesses, his family members and many of his associates are saturated with Russian money, most of it illicit, it may prove difficult or even impossible to show a direct financial link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. But we shall see.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that certain European intelligence agencies warned their U.S. counterparts in the spring of 2016 that Russian money was flowing into the U.S. presidential campaign. But the report is unclear as to whether those funds were flowing into Trump campaign coffers directly and, if so, whether the Trump campaign knowingly accepted such funds.

According to a McClatchy News report from March, federal authorities have been looking into an alleged operation run by a Russian diplomat/spy, Mikhail Kalugin, by which payments disguised as pension benefits for former Russian soldiers were funneled to U.S.-based hackers and bots to deploy against the Clinton campaign. There are indications that Russian money also flowed into Cambridge Analytica, the Mercer-related consulting firm that stole information regarding Facebook users and then used that information in connection with the deployment of Kremlin propaganda on behalf of Trump.

And, the BBC reported in January that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant last October to intercept and examine bank records and transaction statements of certain Russian banks linked to the Kremlin, specifically with the purpose of determining whether transfers had been made to the Trump campaign. The FBI could only have obtained such a warrant by showing the FISA court probable cause.

Collusion

The Trump campaign and its accomplices, like Republicans throughout the country, were obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s personal emails. The emails that Russians stole from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, were so anodyne that conspiracy theorists had to imagine that they were in code. Podesta’s invitation to staffers to come over to his house for homemade CHeese Pizza was imagined as code for CHild Porn. And thus, Pizzagate was born.

The DNC emails were a bit more interesting, with a handful of snarky comments and gossip, and conversations featuring a power struggle between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band regarding Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It was revealed as well that the Democratic National Committee was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton, a Democrat who had campaigned and raised millions of dollars over decades on behalf of Democratic candidates, over Bernie Sanders, a Socialist who for decades disavowed the Democratic Party but joined it anyway in 2015 solely to seek its nomination for president. An email from Donna Brazile, who chaired Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 but was in 2016 employed by CNN as a commentator, revealed that she advised the Clinton campaign to be prepared, during a CNN Q&A in Flint, Michigan, for a question about the lead crisis. When the incriminating email was disclosed by Wikileaks, CNN fired Brazile. Those were the scandals upon which the Kremlin made sure the gaze of the country was fixated while they waged war on the foundations of our democracy.

Republicans believed that if they could just get their hands on Hillary Clinton’s personal emails, they could bring her down, once and for all. Clinton, as we all know, intermingled her personal and work emails on a single server that she kept in the basement of her home in New York State during the four years when she served as secretary of state. When her tenure ended, she had her attorneys and her assistant Huma Abedin go through all of her emails and hand over the work-related ones to the State Department. Her personal emails were deleted.

But Republicans were adamant about the prospect that some of the emails that Clinton claimed were personal might have contained sensitive national security information, perhaps related to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. They were certain that Clinton was covering up crimes. Merely by using a personal server rather than a government server for her emails, Clinton was indeed guilty of mishandling any classified information that may have been contained in any emails that passed through her private server, even though the FBI determined that there was no nefarious intent, that there was no law against her use of a personal server, and that her emails, as best as they could determine, were never hacked, except for those that were sent or received from the State Department’s official email account, which had been hacked.

The Kremlin does not now and never has had any of Clinton’s emails. But it masterfully dangled the possibility that it did to several Trump associates, including Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, as well as Roger Stone, and an obscure Republican operative by the name of Peter W. Smith. The gullible Trump associates took the bait.

Peter W. Smith

Smith reached out to Wall Street Journal reporter Shane Harris in early May, shortly before he committed suicide, with an extraordinary story. He told Harris that in the summer of 2016 he undertook a concerted effort to scour online forums for hackers who could connect him with Clinton’s emails. He also told the Journal that he was in close contact with Mike Flynn during that time. In emails obtained by the Journal, Smith indicated to hackers who he contacted that he was working closely with Flynn, who at that time was a top adviser to the Trump campaign. Smith also showed the Journal corporate documents for a company he set up specifically to hunt for Clinton’s emails. The corporate documents listed Mike Flynn as an officer, along with Trump campaign advisers Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Sam Clovis.

One of the hacking experts who Smith contacted was Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity guru. Smith wanted Tait to independently verify that emails Smith had solicited from a hacker on the Dark Web were, in fact, Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Tait warned Smith that he was probably being baited by the KGB, but, according to Tait, Smith could have cared less. He made clear to Tait that, in his mind, the end justified the means. Colluding with the Kremlin was fine by him if it meant preventing a Clinton victory. Tait declined to assist Smith, and in the end Smith concluded that the emails sent to him by the hacker were fakes.

The June 9, 2016 Trump Tower Meeting

Less than two weeks after that blockbuster Wall Street Journal article about Smith, a source from inside the White House covertly informed the New York Times that, on June 9, 2016, Don Jr., along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, held a meeting with a Kremlin operative in Trump Tower. Don Jr. confirmed that he had such a meeting, but at first he claimed that it was a brief low-key meeting regarding adoptions of Russian orphans. He was lying, and there was an email chain to prove it.

As each piece of the story trickled out over the subsequent week, it became clear that Don Jr., Kushner and Manafort enthusiastically agreed to meet with a person who was described to them as a representative of the Russian government to accept damaging information on Clinton from Russia’s top prosecutor. The email explained that the Kremlin was providing the information as part of Russia’s ongoing help to Trump (!) It turns out that Junior, Kushner and Manafort met with four Kremlin agents plus an interpreter. One of the agents was the “poster child” for the practice of establishing anonymous US shell corporations that could be used to launder “ill-gotten gains,” according to a Congressional investigation in 2000. Another agent, an actual Kremlin spy, left documents with Don Jr.

We do not know the contents of those documents, but any dirt on Clinton that may have been passed along to Junior from the Kremlin never surfaced. Some espionage experts have propounded that the Kremlin intended the meeting to test the Trump campaign’s reaction, to make sure that they were, indeed, willing participants and that they could be trusted to play along with the Kremlin. Others have speculated that the Kremlin was passing along, as a threat, damaging information (aka “kompromat”) it had on Trump, not Clinton. At any rate, Trump and his supporters claim that the meeting was no big deal, that anyone would have done it, that all they were doing was standard opposition research. But the fact that they expected to receive stolen emails could spell trouble.

In fact, participation in that meeting by Junior, Kushner and Manafort could be in violation of several federal statutes, including, most notably, the Espionage Act of 1917. Section 957 of that Act provides that “[w]hoever, in aid of any foreign government, knowingly and willfully possesses or controls any property or papers used or designed or intended for use in violating any penal statute, or any of the rights or obligations of the United States under any treaty or the law of nations, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

The penal statutes that may have been violated include not only campaign finance laws prohibiting acceptance by a political campaign of anything of value from a foreign government, but also the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Consider this: In 2008 a 20 year old college student in Tennessee by the name of David Kernell broke into Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account, searching for damaging information on the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee. Kernell was charged with four felonies punishable by up to 50 years in prison. He was ultimately convicted on two federal charges, anticipatory obstruction of justice and intentionally accessing an account without authorization, and, since it was his first offense, sentenced to only one year in prison plus three years of supervised release. Accessories to the crime or anyone who might have willingly taken possession of Palin’s stolen emails could have faced similar federal charges.

Cockrum v. Donald J. Trump for President

If nothing else, the Peter W. Smith revelations and the known facts regarding Don Jr’s. meeting might help to advance a lawsuit filed on July 12th by three U.S. citizen against the Trump campaign and Roger Stone (Cockrum, Comer, and Schoenberg v. Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and Roger Stone) in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia for violation of privacy and civil rights. The three plaintiffs all had personal information, including names, addresses, phone numbers and even details about sexual orientation, which was relayed in electronic correspondence with the Democratic National Committee, publicized as a result of the hack of the DNC perpetrated by the Kremlin. The complaint outlines the known evidence linking the Trump campaign, and Stone particularly, to the effort by Russian hackers to release the DNC emails and, accordingly, seeks to depose Stone and other witnesses and obtain Trump campaign emails as part of the discovery process.

Putin’s Attack on Voting Systems

On June 21, Jeh Johnson, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security testified before the House Intelligence Committee. Johnson told the Committee, “In 2016 the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyberattacks on our Nation for the purpose of influencing our election — plain and simple.”

And last week’s Time gave specific examples of the damage perpetrated by Russian hackers at the behest of Putin. Among the hacks reported on by Time were infiltrations of voter registration databases in Illinois and Riverside County, California. In Illinois, hackers attempted to download profiles of all 15 million registered voters and managed to extract names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and last four digits of social security numbers for 90,000 voters before the hack was discovered. Fortunately, Illinois had backed up all of its voter data. What officials discovered was that the hackers had tried to delete some data and alter other data, such as voter names and addresses.

The hack in Riverside, CA, provided critical insight into the hackers’ intentions. The hackers were successful in surreptitiously manipulating voter information, but apparently not for the purpose of significantly altering vote totals. Only several dozen voters were affected. When those voters went to the polls, they found that their registration information had disappeared. They were able to cast provisional ballots, all of which were ultimately included in the vote totals.

But many of those voters lodged complaints with the authorities, perhaps assuming that either sloppy or treacherous government employees were to blame. The hack appeared to be purposely limited but not deliberately targeted at particular individuals or partisans. At first, investigators were mystified, but as “[t]he lingering mystery of the voter-registration changes bred doubt among members of both parties,” it dawned on investigators that the intention of the hack may have been to propagate such doubt and to undermine confidence in the integrity of the electoral system. A limited hack can go a long way.

The Charlotte Observer reported in late June that the registration system in heavily Democratic Durham County, North Carolina, apparently fell victim to the malware that Russian hackers deployed against software supplied by the vendor VR Systems. On Election Day, according to the Observer, long lines at the polling places in Durham caused many voters to leave without casting a ballot.

The South Carolina State Election Commission reported in mid-July that on Election Day alone there were 150,000 attempts to penetrate its voter registration system. That’s about 2 attempts every second. All of the attacks were successfully repelled, but the extraordinary volume of attempts points to a sophisticated attacker intending to cause chaos and potentially shut down the election. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, what happened in South Carolina was a microcosm of what was happening throughout the country on Election Day in 2016.

The Obama Administration’s Response

On June 23rd the Washington Post published a huge exposé titled “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault.” The article opens with this passage:

Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

The Obama administration struggled with how to respond to the attack and debated options that included cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin, and economic sanctions. But the administration worried that any actions they took might backfire. First, they did not want to provoke escalation by Putin. They feared that the Russians, who had already apparently infiltrated the voter rolls in numerous states, might have possessed the capability of conducting successful cyberattacks on Election Day, causing systemwide chaos.

Second, they were hamstrung by Trump’s repeated warnings that the election would be rigged. They did not want to add fuel to Trump’s alarmist declarations. Even though Obama publicly backed Clinton, he could not be seen as doing anything that might be wrongly interpreted as biasing the system in her favor. Obama sought support from Republican congressional leaders to join the White House and Democratic congressional leaders in issuing a bipartisan disclosure about the Kremlin’s attack, but Mitch McConnell withheld approval.

And so, Obama paired behind-the-scenes warnings at Putin with quiet measures to fortify the electoral infrastructure and protect the integrity of the vote. The Department of Homeland Security took the lead in warning the states about the Russian probes and assisting with measures to protect and fortify their election systems. On October 7, DHS Secretary Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a joint statement to the public warning about the Russian cyberattacks. But their warning that day was overshadowed by a certain “Access Hollywood” tape and by Wikileaks’ release of John Podesta emails.

Even as Obama witnessed the Russian active measures on behalf of Trump unfolding, he gambled that Clinton would prevail and that Russia could be dealt with after the election. Even as he sought to ensure the validity of the election, he allowed the ongoing Russian attack to ultimately undermine that validity given Trump’s razor close upset victory in three key states. It is conceivable that without the Kremlin’s relentless disinformation campaign, as parroted by the Trump campaign, and without the Kremlin’s late October release, via Wikileaks, of the emails of John Podesta, Clinton might have scored victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All she needed was 77,000 votes.

In December, Obama expelled 35 Russian “diplomats,” seized two Russian compounds and imposed limited economic sanctions. More ominously, according to the Post, Obama also approved “a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow.” So far as we know, Trump has not issued an order to reverse that directive. Yet.

The Ongoing Russian Operation

There were several articles published over the past month that collectively paint a picture of what Russia has in store for us going forward, following its success with its 2016 attack. It’s not just about elections anymore, although as every major intelligence analyst and several in Congress have noted, Russia will be back with significantly more firepower in 2018 and 2020.

Wired published, on June 20th, a frightening account of what it called the “digital blitzkrieg that has pummeled Ukraine for the past three years — a sustained cyber­assault unlike any the world has ever seen.” Following a series of malware attacks on a variety of infrastructure targets, Russian hackers have mastered command and control capabilities over large portions of Ukraine’s electric grid. Bombardments of Russian cyber attacks have periodically taken down electric service over various cities or entire regions for hours or even days at a time. The most notorious attack came in the days before Christmas 2015, when multiple Ukrainian targets were hit again and again. The Russian attackers paralyzed railways, banks, hospitals, water systems, and commercial and residential lighting and heating. Many global cybersecurity experts interviewed by Wired believe that Russia is using Ukraine “as a cyberwar testing ground — a laboratory for perfecting new forms of global online combat.”

In two reports published in June, Politico described a disagreement between the U.S. intelligence community and the State Department regarding the leeway afforded to Russian “diplomats” to skirt federal law requiring advance notice of planned domestic travel. The intelligence community estimates that a third of Russia’s diplomats are actually intelligence operatives. FBI counterintelligence agents tracked some of the Russian spies to locations along underground fiber-optic cables, leading intelligence officials to conclude that the Kremlin was mapping the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Kremlin-backed hackers are actively penetrating the U.S. energy infrastructure, including nuclear power plants. Bloomberg, the New York Times and Reuters reported to varying degrees on recent hacking activity, which appears at this point to be surveillance rather than sabotage. But Newsweek quoted the Department of Homeland Security and FBI as indicating that one strategic goal of the cyber espionage is to gain “the ability to disrupt energy systems in the event of a hostile conflict.”

New concerns were raised by the FBI and the U.S. Senate regarding ties between Russian intelligence and Kaspersky Labs, a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm that, according to Wikipedia, is the fourth largest vendor in the world of anti-virus software and the largest such vendor in Europe. Kaspersky has 400 million users worldwide. In late June the FBI conducted simultaneous surprise visits to the homes of Kaspersky Lab employees in multiple U.S. cities as part of a probe of Kaspersky’s collaboration with Russia’s intelligence services and Kremlin-backed hackers.

Additionally, legislation approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee would, if approved by Congress, prohibit the Pentagon from using any Kaspersky software. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said that “ties between Kaspersky Lab and the Kremlin are very alarming.” Kaspersky is among the Russian firms linked to former national security adviser Mike Flynn. According to Flynn Intel Group invoices, Flynn was paid $11,500 by Kaspersky. He claimed to have received that payment for addressing a Kaspersky-sponsored cybersecurity forum.

Russian hackers are suspected of generating a global malware attack on June 27, using tools developed by and stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency. According to the New York Times, the attack was initially focused “on Ukrainian government and business computer systems” before spreading throughout Europe and eventually to North America and beyond. It was, according to the Times, “an assault that appeared to have been intended to hit the day before a holiday marking the adoption in 1996 of Ukraine’s first Constitution after its break from the Soviet Union.” The malware attack, which affected an estimated 2,000 individuals and organizations worldwide, was disguised as ransomware, but the Guardian reported that cybersecurity experts concluded that that assault was “deliberately engineered to damage IT systems rather than extort funds.”

And finally, in mid-June BuzzFeed News published a fascinating investigative piece regarding 14 suspicious deaths over the past decade in Britain that appeared to be targeted assassinations committed by Russian operatives linked to both the Kremlin and Russian mafiosos. Some of the apparent homicides were committed with difficult-to-detect poisons that cause cardiac arrest. According to BuzzFeed, a 2006 Russian law gives agents “a licence to kill enemies of the state abroad.” BuzzFeed’s investigation was spurred in part by the conclusion last year of a formal public inquiry by British authorities into the mysterious death from radioactive polonium of defector and one-time KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. That inquiry found that Litvinenko was likely murdered at the direction of Vladimir Putin in what was essentially an act of nuclear terrorism perpetrated in the British capital.

Putin’s American Objectives

Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA under President George W. Bush, told an audience at the annual Aspen Security Forum that the 2016 Russian operation against the U.S. was the “most successful covert influence operation in history.” Wow.

As the enormity of Putin’s interference in the 2016 election is becoming increasingly apparent, so too are his objectives. It’s widely accepted that the Kremlin’s tactics were intended to sow political discord — and they were quite successful in that regard — but discord was not their primary goal. And, yes, it’s also true that Putin had a personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton. He wanted her to lose, and he would have taken satisfaction in seeing Clinton lose to any opponent.

Personal vendettas aside, Putin had actual policy objectives he was seeking to accomplish. None of the Republican candidates running for president in 2016 offered an approach towards Russia substantially different than the Obama/Clinton policy, except for one. In fact, most Republicans pledged to take a harder line towards Russia than Clinton. But one candidate took a notably different tack. That candidate was Donald Trump.

Putin wanted Trump to become president more than any other candidate, and perhaps more than any other American public figure. We are only now beginning to grapple with the lengths to which Putin went to not only support Trump as a candidate, including during the Republican primaries, but to cultivate him as an agent of Russia over the course of many years. The tools he used on Trump’s behalf in 2015 and 2016 were hacking, propaganda and financial support. The tools he has been using for many years (some analysts think that Moscow has been gathering compromising information on Trump for three decades) to manipulate Trump and that he is holding over Trump’s head today are: damaging information, financial obligations and bribery.

On her July 18 show, Rachel Maddow compiled the following Russian “Wish List” that outlines the Kremlin’s intentions in attacking the U.S. election.

  1. Isolate the U.S.
  2. Fracture the West
  3. End U.S. sanctions re Ukraine and the 2016 election
  4. End the Magnitsky Act and related sanctions
  5. End U.S. influence/actions in Syria
  6. Significantly diminish the State Department
  7. Have the U.S. return its seized diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland
  8. Increased ability to conduct intelligence operations within the U.S.
  9. Increased ability to manipulate U.S. elections
  10. Diminished U.S. cybersecurity

The Russians have so far made progress on items 1, 2, 5, 6, 8 and 10, and they appear to have Trump administration backing for the rest. But it’s really items 3 and 4 that are Putin’s priorities. It is estimated that U.S. sanctions imposed under the Magnitsky Act, and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and in response to the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election are costing Putin and his oligarch friends a collective $200 billion per year. That’s the equivalent of about 15% of the entire annual GDP of Russia.

At the end of June, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a major address in which he bragged about Russian success in dismantling the West and NATO, which he blamed for destabilizing Europe, propagating Nazism in Ukraine and causing an uptick in international terrorism. Lavrov said the polycentric world that Russia seeks is emerging, a fantasy world with no leaders and no followers, no good and no bad, just competitive nation-states jockeying amongst each other for advantage. In such a conception, the U.S. is no longer a leader and NATO and the EU are weakened and ultimately disbanded.

The G19 Summit

Trump did not go to the annual G20 summit in early July to represent the interest of the United States. Rather, he went, as the Huffington Post put it, to meet his maker. Although Trump’s obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin was on full display, we know only bits and pieces of what the two discussed because Trump, contrary to all established protocols, forbade any U.S./Russia policy experts, including his own National Security Adviser, from attending. Secretary of State Tillerson attended the first bilateral meeting, lasting two hours, but he disclosed little about what was discussed. The second of Trump’s discussions with Putin, an hour-long aside at a dinner, included only Trump, Putin and a Russian interpreter.

Trump told us that he confronted Putin about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and that he believed Putin’s denials over the unanimous conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community. Great. We also know, from Trump, that he and Putin discussed the possible lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia pursuant to the Magnitsky Act. What was there to discuss beyond the clear policy position of the U.S. Congress, which is that the Magnitsky Act sanctions will be lifted only when the Kremlin takes deliberative action to respect human rights and crack down on corruption?

Did Trump bring up with Putin the fact that U.S. intelligence has determined that Russia is cheating on its nuclear arms reduction obligations to the U.S.? How about the Kremlin’s human rights violations, including towards political opposition figures and journalists? What about the fact that authorities in Chechnya have been rounding up, torturing and even executing gay men? Did they discuss Russian military actions in Ukraine and Syria that violate international law? And what about Russian support of the North Korean regime? From everything we know, Trump did not push any of those issues with Putin. It’s not just that Trump’s failure was an embarrassment and a national security danger. Trump’s bootlicking behavior is further damning evidence that he is beholden to Putin.

And although Trump was surrounded by the leaders of the 20 largest national economies in the world, he accomplished absolutely nothing. In the wake of a North Korean missile launch that constitutes a real threat to the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Canada and others, Trump did not even raise the subject. Other G20 leaders were prepared to discuss the possibility of joint action, including additional international sanctions against the North Korean regime. They reacted with shock and dismay when the U.S. let the issue slide. As an Australian journalist who covered the G20 put it, “Trump pressed fast forward on the decline of the U.S. as a global leader.”

The Endgame is Coming

Most people do not realize that Trump will be removed from office, including many of the Republican lawmakers who will be tasked with the chore of doing so. It is easy to get distracted and confused by all of the noise, by the daily bluster of pundits, by the Scaramuccis and the Huckabees, by false narratives and rumors du jour.

But envision, if you will, a Congress at some point within the next year presented not with a mere collection of evidence of sundry criminal activity by the president, but rather with a detailed delineation — with proof — of a panoply of his crimes, of money laundering and bribery and fraud and espionage and obstruction of justice, with timelines going back decades and casts of characters that include some of the most sought after organized crime figures on the planet and a trail of money totaling billions of dollars.

Imagine as well a weak president, an unpopular and impotent bully, discredited as a political leader, surrounded by a dysfunctional and incompetent staff, consumed by a growing mountain of legal challenges to his policies and his family’s numerous ethical violations, illegal emoluments and self-dealing, and at loggerheads with the very Congress that will have been presented with proof of his crimes, a Congress that knows full well that a vice president of their own party waits in the wings, ready and willing to take on the role of national savior. That is the scenario we are careening towards. The writing is on the wall, in all caps.

Even in a best case scenario for Trump, if there never emerges sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted in concert with the Russians to cheat in the 2016 election, and even if the exact nature of the compromising information that the Kremlin has on Trump is never fully known, and even if the special counsel declines to find grounds to bring even a single criminal charge against the president, the special counsel’s report to Congress on Trump and his campaign will at a minimum paint a detailed and disturbing mosaic of unethical and treasonous behavior by the president and his inner circle. Yes, that’s the best case scenario, but significantly more likely is the alternative.

Although the special counsel has been on the job for only two months, the investigations related to Trump’s ties to Russia have been ongoing for a year and, by all indications, have branched out to include a wide array of potential targets and charges. A month before he was fired, Jim Comey, alarmed at the depth of apparent criminal activity being uncovered, created a dedicated FBI investigative unit, reportedly comprised of between 30 and 50 agents, which was up and running in early May. And Robert Mueller, with immediacy and fearlessness, assembled within weeks an unprecedented five-star brigade of 15 of the most experienced and knowledgeable prosecutors in the country — experts in national security, espionage, organized crime, money laundering and fraud — plus at least another 10 staffers to sift through the FBI’s findings and peel away at the pastiche of the Trump family’s mendacity. And according to an NPR report from early July, there are more hires to come.

Mueller’s team is, with precision and discipline, piecing together the details, connecting the dots, sketching out the timeline, prioritizing the charges, mapping out the paths to prosecutorial success, and, line by line, page after page, compiling and documenting proof of Trump’s guilt. That is how Robert Swan Mueller III — lifelong Republican, decorated military hero, litigator and investigator with 44 years of unblemished experience, one of the greatest law enforcement officials this country has ever known — operates.

Trump’s number one priority these days is to get rid of Mueller. In his mind, the political price for doing so is easily outweighed by the personal and financial risks of not doing so. But there is a force field encircling the special counsel, an edifice of reputational integrity reinforced by bipartisan political respect. No matter which path Trump chooses to go after Mueller, whether via bludgeon or political Machiavellianism, any attempt to dismiss the special counsel will backfire. And so Trump and his allies are relegated to lashing out and lobbing cheap grenades, all with the intent of smearing Mueller and his team and convincing the true believers that Mueller is a tool of the mythical anti-Trump conspiracy of the Deep State and the Clinton/Obama machine. They will use Trump’s bully pulpit to try to sow doubt in the minds of the public, to embolden the Trump base and to try to intimidate the special counsel.

Additionally, Trump expects to cultivate a direct patronage relationship with the incoming FBI director, Christopher Wray, while he simultaneously disparages other top FBI officials, intending to effectively put himself in control of the FBI, including the Kremlingate investigations. Just as disturbing, Trump has asserted, wrongly, that the pardon powers of the president are absolute and that he and anyone who he so deems shall be superior to the Rule of Law. All of this is chilling.

But in the background, the wheels of the justice system are grinding on. We know that grand juries have issued subpoenas. We know that there are four congressional inquiries that have been interviewing witnesses and gathering documentation. We know that the attorney general of New York State has ongoing criminal investigations into Trump family members, the Trump Foundation and into various associates of Trump, including Paul Manafort. We know that the District Attorney of New York City is conducting related investigations. We know that discovery is being conducted in several lawsuits related to Trump’s ties to Russian money, including a suit in New York City that could expose the intricacies of illicit funds flowing from Russian crime figures to the Trump organization. Even, arguendo, if Trump is able to dismantle the office of the special counsel and end the FBI’s probes, there is ultimately no way out for him.

And so, we wait. The only question is: when.

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