We know what you did last summer, Mr. Trump
What a strange time it has been. On the one hand it is clear that Russia has some kind of illicit hold on President Trump’s mind or his fortunes or both. On the other hand the mainstream media has bent over backwards to give Trump the benefit of the doubt even amidst the flurry of incriminating reports, while his flacks in the right-wing media insist that the Trump-Russia story is a hoax and that the investigations should be dropped.
Rather than being a hoax, the central mystery of Trump’s Russia connection has never satisfactorily been explained. One, why do so many of Trump’s associates have connections with ex-Soviet money, allied with the Kremlin? Two, why is Trump bent upon promoting the Kremlin’s viewpoint, especially on ending sanctions? And three, why have his associates consistently lied about their meetings with Russian officials, even under oath and on security clearance forms?
I don’t want to be coy. I believe that Trump and Putin pulled off a heist in 2016, and are allied in their goal to enrich each other at the expense of their countries. I want to walk you through why I think this is obviously true; and why it frustrates me that pundits with bigger media megaphones still insist on treating this like an outlandish claim.
The strangeness of Mr. Trump
Never before has a US Presidential campaign or US President so completely adopted the Kremlin’s viewpoint — on everything. Since 1949, when NATO was formed as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, Trump is the first US President to decline to affirm Article 5 — which is the entire point of NATO. He has advocated and secretly sought to remove all sanctions on Russia with no preconditions. He ill-advisedly sought a face-to-face meeting with Putin at the G20 summit, and asked his staff for a list of ‘deliverables’ — offerings to lay at Putin’s feet. At no time, during the campaign or as President, has he shown the slightest concern at the Russian attack on our elections.
In fact, his penchant for the pro-Kremlin viewpoint extends to the trivial and the absurd: he says that people in Crimea ‘would rather be with’ Russia and that Russia had nothing to do with the downed flight MH17; to the point where he might as well be a paid lobbyist for Putin (indeed, this is exactly what Republican House majority leader Kevin McCarthy was caught speculating on tape).
Add to that the fact that almost everyone that Trump has surrounded himself with seems to have ties to Russian money. Here is a partial list: Felix Sater, Michael Cohen, Gen. Flynn, Boris Epshteyn, Michael Caputo, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Wilbur Ross, Richard Burt…and the list goes on.
When stated simply, the situation is even more startling: never before has a US Presidential campaign had so many undisclosed contacts with foreign officials, from a country that committed acts of espionage to help that campaign win the Presidency.
Clearly there is something to explain.
But let’s step back a bit. It is not a mystery why Russia hacked into our elections in order to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and to prop up Trump’s.
Putin and the Right
In 2012, Romney castigated Obama for seeking a ‘reset’ in US-Russia relations. He named Russia as our primary geopolitical foe, and Republicans chorused in agreement. Within four short years, Russia unleashed a vendetta against the Democrats, while more and more Republicans have begun to think of Russia as an ally. What changed?
It is the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of Putin to woo the Right in America.
Obama and Putin tussled almost instantly over regime change in Syria after Putin’s re-election in 2012. That election’s legitimacy was questioned by Clinton as Secretary of State; which means that the “Democracy R.I.P” social media blitz that the Kremlin had planned in case of a 2016 Clinton victory could be seen as a Shakespearean vengeance drama.
Then came a series of sanctions: the Magnitsky Act passed by Congress in 2012 sanctioned individuals close to Putin himself: but more importantly, by naming the act after a man tortured and killed by the Kremlin, it became a public relations disaster for Putin. Putin’s 2014 attack on Crimea drew a response in the form of further sanctions.
Much of Putin’s subsequent vendetta can be seen as chafing against the weight of sanctions. Russia is essentially a corrupt petro-state run by organized crime, and the sanctions hit directly at the heart of these two enterprises.
Sensing that the Republican Party’s fealty to the fossil fuel lobby implies that their interests are ultimately allied with his own, he has been separately working the elements of the Right in America. The NRA, the gun rights group that donated $30 million to help elect Trump, has ties with operatives deep within the Kremlin. The Christian Right have also seen Putin’s Russia as an ally while their own nation turns leftward. The fossil fuel lobby needs no working as they see eye-to-eye already.
To add to that, he found fertile ground among the hyper-partisan American Right, who detest Democrats so much that their opinion about Putin kicked up a notch simply because of his campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton.
Putin and Trump
But Putin’s ambitions run deeper than merely influencing opinion polls.
Putin is ex-KGB and had his formative experiences during the Soviet era. Under him, Russia has revived its use of Soviet ‘active measures’: psychological warfare that uses espionage and propaganda to demoralize, then destroy the enemy from within. The jujutsu practitioners of the Kremlin would like nothing better than to see America destabilized with chaotic leadership and to question the legitimacy of their government.
Therefore, in 2011 as Trump went on a media blitz questioning Obama’s legitimacy to be President, Putin must have stroked his chin.
Trump’s campaign began in 2015 with a tirade against Mexicans; and he quickly became a pied piper for white nationalists who had thus far labored in online anonymity. Whether he realized it or not, he was killing it in the Putin primary as well.
While the Kremlin also woos useful idiots on the left, they have a special bond with neo-Nazi movements across Europe, who they fund and propagandize through their state TV channels. Through these puppets, they hope to have Westerners question the very basis of their color-blind, secular society. So it is a given that Trump would draw their attention as someone they should prop up if they could.
Then there are issues of character. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton called Trump “Putin’s puppet” in a debate, it was not merely a statement of fact, but a characterological sketch as well. The fact is that Trump, due to his greed, his narcissism, and his general ignorance of policy, is easy to control with flattery and bribes.
Yuri Bezmenov, ex-KGB officer and a defector to the West, gave Westerners a glimpse into the methods used by the KGB to identify agents that they could influence:
…cynical egocentric people who can look you in the eyes with an angelic expression and tell you lies, [as] these are the most recruitable people who lack moral principles, people who are greedy or who suffer from self-importance, they feel they matter a lot.
It is as though Soviet scientists built Trump in a lab.
But the happy confluence of Trumpian traits does not end there. Putin likes to have financial leverage over his clients: also known as kompromat. With Trump, he got it.
The money trail
In the 2000s, while Trump played a successful businessman on the reality show The Apprentice, his actual record in business had been a trail of catastrophes. He had just come through six bankruptcies of his casinos in Atlantic City, spending like a “drunken sailor” with little understanding of the dire financial straits he was in, at the same time as his loans were being restructured .
His troubles were not caused merely by incompetence, but also through unscrupulousness. He converted his personal loans into business loans, then bankrupted the businesses. Creditors and investors large and small — from banks to carpenters to employees— lost their shirts, while Trump walked away free and clear. He failed to follow rules that prevent money-laundering at casinos; and in 1998, had to pay a fine of $10 million to the Treasury Department, one of the largest such fines in their history.
New York financial institutions considered him a deadbeat and from that day to this, and no longer finance his projects.
This particular mix of unscrupulousness and incompetence bookended with ceaseless self-promotion has been a pattern of his career: failures, fraud, and money-laundering on one side, best-selling books and a ‘reality’ show casting himself as the boss on the other.
Coinciding with Trump’s troubles, Russia’s stock market crash in 1998 caused the value of the ruble to plummet, and billionaires rushed to get their money out and launder it through legal channels in Western countries. New York real estate was a prime target, with one building in particular — Trump World Tower.
A fateful meeting in 2002 with Felix Sater, a Russian mobster, brought Russian oligarch money into Trump’s businesses. Sater himself had been through jail for a bar fight, committed stock fraud, and only escaped prison by working with the FBI as an informant. Trump licensed his name to several properties developed by Sater’s real estate development firm Bayrock Group. During those years Bayrock was essentially a front for dirty money from ex-Soviet nations.
Today the Trump Organization’s financing comes mainly from murky Russian sources. This is made clear not only through statements made by both his adult sons who run his businesses, but also by much reporting. A large proportion of his real estate is purchased by Russian elite with political connections. Some of these are clearly money-laundering schemes, such as the Palm Beach purchase made by Russia’s fertilizer king Rybolovlev. Over the last year, 70% of purchases of Trump properties were limited liability companies, which are often a vehicle used by money-launderers.
His latest financial disclosures show that he owes more than a $100 million to Deutsche Bank, a sprawling German bank “structurally set up by management to allow corrupt individuals to commit fraud”. US and UK regulators have tussled with it for its lax practices, most recently charging it a fine of $630 million for failing to prevent Russian money-laundering.
In 2013 his search for Russian business hit paydirt when he took his Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. He also satisfied his craving for respect from glamorous elite as the Russian nouveau riche found something to admire in Trump’s dictator-chic style. He got featured in a music video created by the son of his Russian partner; and tweeted an invitation to Putin with little girl excitement (it was not accepted). And then, apparently, at a meeting minutes away from the Kremlin, met the all oligarchs close to Putin himself.
Trump and Putin
It is almost certain that the Kremlin would have collected damning videos and incriminatory data about Trump during his travels in Moscow. Not only does the Steele dossier (that no one except the FBI appears to take seriously) attest to this, Trump himself has said that he was aware that he would have been recorded. Given the way bureaucracy is set up in Russia, it is impossible to do business without stepping on a few laws.
For all these reasons, by the time Trump started his campaign in 2015, he was already an unwitting Russian asset. Russian social media trolls that had previously promoted Yanukovych in Ukraine began advocating for Trump by December of that year.
He came out of the gate with already formed pro-Kremlin opinions and blamed Obama, rather than Russia, for the attack on Ukraine. It isn’t necessary to posit any illicit Russian contact — he was eyeing business opportunities in Russia, and that would have been enough for him to genuflect to Putin. At that time, late 2015, he showed no public consciousness of guilt around the Trump-Russia connection: he strutted his connections with Putin and the oligarchs.
But by the early months of his Presidency he displayed clear signs of guilt: denying any Russia connection whatsoever, denying that Russia hacked the elections, firing FBI Director Comey, exerting his considerable influence as President to try to kill the investigation into Flynn, trying to undermine the legitimacy of the Press, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and all who are rifling through his doings.
What happened in the middle?
Back in 2015, his public statements must have been seen as an ‘open for business’ clarion call by the sort of cynical globe-trotting operative who works on behalf of corrupt money from authoritarian countries.
Gen. Flynn was one. By the time he joined Trump’s campaign in late 2015, he was an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey and had been paid by Russia. In short order, he became Trump’s closest foreign policy adviser and traveled with him to campaign rallies.
Paul Manafort was another. A formidable political consultant to tyrants around the world, he has advised Putin ally Yanukovych in Ukraine and has received $10 million to lobby for Putin’s interests in the US. He was Trump’s campaign chair by early 2016.
Others: Carter Page, energy consultant with business in Russia, who has been recruited by Russian intelligence as an asset; Wilbur Ross, now Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, who runs the Bank of Cyprus, known for laundering Russian money; Michael Caputo, who has worked for the Kremlin and served as communications adviser; Boris Epshteyn, who moderated the 2013 “Invest in Moscow!” panel and became a Trump surrogate; and so on.
Russia’s cyber operation to help elect Trump intensified after these operatives joined his campaign. Democratic officials first noticed Russian cyberattacks in March 2016. It could be that the Kremlin wasn’t going to put itself out too much on his behalf unless they had some footprint of influence within Trumpworld.
What ensued later was an elaborate public dance that ended in an embrace.
On the one side, we saw Trump making public offerings to Russia. His first foreign policy speech in April 2016, written by Russian lobbyist Richard Burt, made his pro-Kremlin viewpoints official. Trump campaign officials pushed for the altering of the Republican Party’s platform to be soft on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (to the shock of other Republicans), then lied about it. Then in July 2016, he shocked the rest of us by openly urging the adversarial nation to hack into his opponent’s emails.
All this was peppered with repeated clandestine talks between Trump surrogates and Russian officials.
On the other side, we saw the Kremlin show good faith towards the Trumpian proffer of alliance. Six Trump trademarks in Russia that were set to expire were extended, and the dumping of hacked emails to hurt the Democrats started in earnest in June.
Late into fall, the coordination between them intensified. Russian fake news bots on Facebook and Twitter were targeting precints with surgical precision with information that could only have come from Americans, while Trump’s campaign used Cambridge Analytica’s research to pinpoint Facebook users that were influencible. Soon Trump’s own trolls were amplifying stories that started on Russia Today and vice versa.
Sanctions
Somewhere during that phase, it is clear that dropping sanctions became a serious, and secret, topic between Trumpworld and Kremlin officials. This would only make sense in return for something — such as help with hacking the election.
We recently learned of the first such meeting, that occurred all the way back in June 2016. It was between Donald Trump Jr and Kremlin-allied lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who works for removal of Magnitsky sanctions. Donald Trump Jr’s statement says that they discussed ‘adoption of Russian children’ — however, banning adoption is a well-known counter-Magnitsky measure. Today’s report adds the further damning detail that Trump Jr was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before this meeting.
Sanctions were the subject of a highly secretive backchannel meeting in the Seychelles between Trump and Putin surrogates, and of the conversations that Jeff Sessions, Flynn, and Jared Kushner had with Kisliyak and sanctioned Russian banker Sergei Gorkov.
Importantly, they took pains to hide these conversations from US intelligence.
(Some have suggested that these Trump surrogates were merely free-lancing. But this is absurd. No shrewd operator like Putin would bother to negotiate with surrogates unless they provided assurance of the principal’s backing.)
After they won the election, their efforts became more brazen. During the transition, as Obama shut down Russian compounds in the US for espionage, smart observers expected Putin to retaliate. But by this point, the channels of communication between Trump surrogates and the Kremlin were well-developed. Flynn talked five times with Kisliyak on that very day, and the next day, as Putin chose not to retaliate, Trump tweeted out appreciation for this show of ‘smartness’ from Putin.
As soon as the Trump administration came into office, they moved with secret purpose to have the 2014 sanctions on Russia removed without preconditions. It is only thanks to career State Department officials, and the aggressive sunlight directed at them by an invigorated press, that this did not happen. Even today, they are lobbying hard against the Senate bill that brings Russia sanctions under legislative control.
All about the money
None of this precludes some of the darker theories that have been floated: that Trump is being threatened by the Kremlin with the release of kompromat; that there was an explicit deal involving the privatization of Russian state energy giant Rosneft; or that Trump is literally paid by Putin. But the theory I have postulated above is based on public sources alone.
Once he realized during the campaign that Russia was interfering to help him win, it would have been irresistible for the author of Art of the Deal to try to swing a deal where others with a conscience might have seen treason. The outlines of a potential deal would have been clear: removing sanctions would help both the Russian oligarchs and those who want to do business with them, but for that to happen, he’d have to win first — with Russian help.
Thus it is clear that money is at the heart of the cabal that has taken over the US government.
Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Anne Applebaum has warned of the corrosive impact of Russian money on Western democracies:
Nobody in Western politics paid much attention, but many others in the West were eager to aid that transformation [of Russia into a corrupt kleptocracy]. In particular, many were eager to help a cabal of revanchist former KGB officers, in league with Russian organized crime, to steal money that belonged to the Russian state, launder it abroad, bring it back and use it to take power. While Western presidents and prime ministers were distracted by other things, Western lawyers, accountants, unscrupulous offshore bankers and even mainstream bankers were happily taking cuts.
This also suggests that the three lawsuits filed against Trump based on the emoluments clause of the constitution represent the best way to defeat this coup. In the words of the three plaintiffs of the lawsuit filed by CREW, a watchdog group:
The Emoluments Clause, until recently not much discussed because its constraints have been taken for granted, constitutes a clear barrier to the intermingling of business and governmental interests that Donald J. Trump proposes to build into his conduct of the Presidency.
It strikes at the heart of our Russia problems.
