Blockbuster allegations broke late yesterday that the Russians have damaging, compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump. Information that is reportedly so explosive, it could be influencing the President-Elect himself and therefore damaging America. This morning Donald Trump has taken to Twitter with an all caps defense of himself and alleged Russian ties.
Here’s the thing: 2013 Donald Trump disagrees. Watch as Trump brags about his relationship with Putin:
Donald, you can’t have it both ways. Do you or do you not have a relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin?
And why would the President of Russia give two shits about Donald Trump, an American reality television star? Why would he care enough to monitor what Trump is saying? Could it be because the two DID have a relationship and Putin was cultivating Donald Trump for several years? According to some intelligence sources, the astonishing answer is “yes.” From Mother Jones in October 2016:
In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) "It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."
This was, the former spy remarks, "an extraordinary situation." He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was "sufficiently serious" to share with the FBI.
The conclusion of the report was that Putin had been cultivating Trump for 5 years.
But, that’s not all. Let’s keep going and look back at his business ties to Russia, including this critical information from the Washington Post regarding Trump's visit to Moscow around his Miss Universe pageant:
Putin canceled at the last minute, but he sent a decorative lacquered box, a traditional Russian gift, and a warm note, according to Aras Agalarov, a Moscow billionaire who served as a liaison between Trump and the Russian leader.
Still, the weekend was fruitful for Trump. He received a portion of the $14 million paid by Agalarov and other investors to bring the pageant to Moscow. Agalarov said he and Trump signed an agreement to build a Trump Tower in the heart of Moscow — at least Trump’s fifth attempt at such a venture. And Trump seemed energized by his interactions with Russia’s financial elite at the pageant and a glitzy after-party in a Moscow nightclub.
And Trump’s own son bragged of the Russian investments into the Trump organization in 2008:
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
Not to sound like an old infomercial, but—Wait! There’s more. The plot thickens. Donald Trump’s original campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who has lived in Trump Tower since 2006, had to leave the campaign in August after revelations that his name turned up secret ledger showing $12 million in payments from the Russian-friendly sources. From the New York Times:
On a leafy side street off Independence Square in Kiev is an office used for years by Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, when he consulted for Ukraine’s ruling political party. His furniture and personal items were still there as recently as May.
And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.
In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies that helped members of Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle finance their lavish lifestyles, including a palatial presidential residence with a private zoo, golf course and tennis court. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Pick your jaw up off the ground and prepare yourself for what you are about to read next. During the Republican National Convention the Trump team made a series of perplexing moves to alter just one foreign policy piece of the republican platform—the party’s stance on Ukraine. From the Washington Post in July, before Manafort left the campaign:
Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.
Still, Republican delegates at last week’s national security committee platform meeting in Cleveland were surprised when the Trump campaign orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.
Inside the meeting, Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas who was a Ted Cruz supporter, proposed a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian military.
Emphasis added. What. The. F*ck. The Trump campaign personally intervened to prevent Republicans from passing an amendment promising sanctions against Russia for interfering with a free Ukraine. Why? Some Republican delegates and security experts were gobsmacked by the move:
That amendment was voted on and passed. When the Republican Party releases its platform Monday, the official Republican party position on arms for Ukraine will be at odds with almost all the party’s national security leaders.
Unfortunately for all of us, it doesn’t end there. Another Trump advisor, Carter Page, has extensive Russian business dealings and the FBI took notice last year:
Another report, dated 19 July last year said that Carter Page, a businessman named by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, had held a secret meeting that month with Igor Sechin, head of the Rosneft state-owned oil company and a long-serving lieutenant of Vladimir Putin. Page also allegedly met Igor Divyekin, an internal affairs official with a background in intelligence, who is said to have warned Page that Moscow had “kompromat” (compromising material) on Trump.
Two months later, allegations of Page’s meetings surfaced in the US media, attributed to intelligence sources, along with reports that he had been under FBI scrutiny.
Page, a vociferous supporter of the Kremlin line, was in Moscow in July to make a speech decrying western policy towards Russia. At the time he declined to say whether he had been in contact with Russian officials, but in September he rejected the reports as “garbage”.
The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
REPEAT. The FBI’s investigation into coordination between the Trump campaign and Putin’s Kremlin was so serious that they requested a warrant to monitor all communication of four Trump staffers. Unprecedented and wildly dangerous for the security of American citizens, not to mention wholly illegal to coordinate with a foreign power to meddle in U.S. elections. And that wasn’t Page’s only trip to Moscow this year. He was there shortly after the U.S. election and refused to say why he was in Moscow:
Carter Page, an early foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump who was scrutinized by the F.B.I. on suspicion of private communications with senior Russian officials over the summer, was back in Moscow on Thursday.
Mr. Page was closelipped about the purpose of his visit, telling RIA Novosti, a Russian state-run news agency, that he would stay in Moscow until Tuesday and would meet with “business leaders and thought leaders.”
He called the FBI’s investigation into his activity a “witch hunt.” Interesting use of that term given another one of the Donald Trump’s tweets, this one shortly after the intelligence report was leaked late yesterday:
Strange that Donald Trump, who claims to have no ties to Russia (despite his own video documented words saying otherwise) and his former advisors seem to be on the same Russian page. All day. Every day.
One last note on Donald Trump and these allegations that the Russians have damaging information on him. U.S. officials and pundits alike have scratched their heads over Trump’s repeated public bashing of U.S. intelligence officials since the election. Russian Chess champion Garry Kasparov, now a Russian political activist (and noted Putin foe) says he think Trump’s has been laying the groundwork, bracing for these damaging revelations to be revealed:
That would certainly explain Trump’s badmouthing of U.S. intelligence experts from the get-go, no?
Anyway you slice it, the entire picture is troubling. Un-American, anti-democracy, possibly even treasonous. The United States Congress should immediately demand a full, independent investigation. Donald Trump should immediately release his tax returns and open his financial books for a full examination of his possible ties to the Russian government, as should his advisors. Doing anything less puts every American citizen at great risk.
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