Seven of our American service
members are dead and over 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly
gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, Airmen, and
Marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision
because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and
advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.
The Washington Post, which
first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as
saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or
over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added: “Iran possesses only a handful
of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which
would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities
highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after
years of war in Ukraine…”
When asked about the reports,
Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer —
basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did
when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan
insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence
with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him,
Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service
members:
“They’d say we do it against
them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”
His fellow real estate
billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East
and has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Putin)
similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC: “I can tell you that yesterday,
on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been
sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they
did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”
Putin himself, though, was
nowhere near as circumspect, saying: “On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering
support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been
and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”
As if to confirm that Trump
is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting off the Strait
of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president
signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts
of Russian oil directly to India. Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump
asks, “How high?” Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always
give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against
him?”
Is it possible that Trump is
actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing
him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least
2017? That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents
Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).
And let’s not forget that
right after Trump won re-election in November of 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and
their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first
assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?
Jack Smith’s case in Florida was
limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly
known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret
maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).
That said, you can bet your
bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to
contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave
damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take
cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for
essentially unlimited access Club membership.
But what if it goes beyond
that? What if Putin has owned him for years? From Russian oligarchs
laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering
— to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple
bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?
Or perhaps blackmailing
him? What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America
found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Epstein’s videos of Trump with
underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of
his beauty pageants?
Which begs the question:
exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what
does he have planned for the next three years of this second term? And is
he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s
so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?
In 2019 The Washington
Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was
having regular secret phone conversations with Russia’s
President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including
one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from
the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between
Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team,
as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016
campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir
Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 —
has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret
inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via
the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf. Throughout the
campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and
when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed
help. Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any
investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.
As The New York
Times noted in 2020: “[I]nvestigators found enough
there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’
by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and
the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
There is no known parallel to
this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily
exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was
just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying
top-secret information that could severely damage our national security,
leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations. Was he
bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or
oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents
in those countries, told him to? Trump doesn’t put all that effort into
hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he
thinks he can make money off them. Or he’s scared.
“Boxes of documents even came
with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him
to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign
adversaries of the United States.”
When Robert Mueller’s FBI
team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing
sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled. The
Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to
obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul
Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his
dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit
Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched
public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could
possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President
engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President
attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General
Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent
public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between
Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential
witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who
declined to cooperate with the government.”
It adds, detailing Trump’s
specific Obstruction of Justice crimes: “These actions ranged from
efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney
General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of
the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the
potential to influence their testimony.”
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that
when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner
circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they
believed they made happen. And apparently Putin and his
intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November
2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in
office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what
he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians
released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn”
(relocate, change identity of) that spy.
The undercover agent was
apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled
in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into
rubble. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American
spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him
over to Putin.
As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later): “The source was considered the
highest-level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national
security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a
former senior intelligence official. “According to CNN’s sources, the
spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the
Russian leader’s desk.”
The CIA concluded that the
risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so
great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have
otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s
presidency, 2017.
Similarly, when they met in
Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours
and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that
much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator
(Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a
distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump
met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A
US intelligence official told the Post: “There was this gasp’ at the
CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode
watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”
Three weeks after Trump’s
July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver
a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still
unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Senator Paul has also
consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he
single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the
Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for
the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI
may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to
Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their
sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources
have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump
having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job
at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the
Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials
said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated
matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I.
informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA
Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House
allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in
Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I.
scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Things were picking up the
following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while
Trump was preparing for the 2020 election. In July 2019, Trump had
conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit
that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those
conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made
promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national
security scramble across multiple agencies.
As The Washington Post noted
in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are
part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and
Congress”: “Intelligence Community
Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against
Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent
concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight
committees.”
On the last day of that
month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The
White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he
and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in
this car… But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily
Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its
employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days,
and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Perhaps just by coincidence,
months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The
New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed
or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American
counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the
world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about
troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the
United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The message, in an unusual top
secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had
looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign
informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although
brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival
intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence
officials typically do not share in such cables.”
And now, to complicate
matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of
all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk
who, himself, The Wall Street Journal reports has also reportedly been
having his own secret conversations with Putin. If it turns out the Trump
has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?
Czechoslovakia’s Státní
bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977,
as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified,
because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently
buried on his golf course in New Jersey.
Czechoslovakia at that time was
part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had
been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a
wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started
tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.
As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found: “Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček,
gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits
from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was
classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted
until the end of the communist regime.”
An investigative reporting
breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to
Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Shvets told the story — from his
own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were
essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped
Donald Trump Win.
Their trip was coordinated
by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the
KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking
points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.
The KGB’s psychological
profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a
deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he
should run for president in the US. Much to the astonishment and
jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a
Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on
September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO,
both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.
Trump’s ad laid it on the line: “Why are these nations not
paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are
losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s
politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined
for allies who won’t help.”
As The Guardian reported in 2021: “The bizarre intervention was
cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who
had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief
directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a
successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets
said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name
and that it will impress real serious people in the west, but it did and,
finally, this guy became the president.’”
Meanwhile, Putin was making
friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an
unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous
journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President
Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdoğan apparently
gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as
Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December
of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent
statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador
Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while
working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from
Erdoğan.
Around the time he was
leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire
story. From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting
Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to
be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.” The big question
is, “Why?”
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