No other conclusion is possible

According to Yuri Shvets, who was posted to Washington by the USSR in the 1980s, Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow. Shvets was a key source for American Kompromat, a book by journalist Craig Unger. Shvets, a KGB major at the time, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He worked as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006. Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB¹.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and one of the owners worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset¹.

In 1987 Trump visited Moscow and St Petersburg. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics. Shvets recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually [i.e. thick], and psychologically, and [could be easily manipulated] by flattery. It was even suggested that he should run for president”¹.

Soon after returning to the US, Trump began exploring the possibility of running for the Republican nomination for president, and even then, expressed dissatisfaction with the US being a member of NATO¹.

Recently, Alnur Mussayev, a 71-year-old ex-chief of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, made a claim in a Facebook post which went as follows: “In 1987, I worked in the 6th Department of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of work of the 6th Department was the acquisition of spies and sources of information from among businessmen from capitalist countries. It was in that year that our Department recruited the 40-year-old businessman from the USA, Donald Trump, nicknamed ‘Krasnov’”².

In a subsequent comment, Mussayev said: “Today, the personal file of resident ‘Krasnov’ has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin’s close associates”².

Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former White House communications director, has publicly remarked on the puzzling nature of Trump’s affinity for Putin. According to Scaramucci, even senior advisers such as H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly struggled to understand Trump’s apparent affection for Putin. This ongoing ambiguity has only fueled further speculation about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Moscow².

In the early 1990s, Trump made a deal with US banks to repay nearly a billion dollars of personal debt. That put paid to any possibility of him being a major real estate developer, because the US banking industry was finished with him. By that time he had gone through his portion of his father’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the airline ‘Trump Shuttle’ went out of business in 1992. In addition to these, Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice more. Repeatedly filing for protection from creditors, makes you poison to most major lenders³.

For the rest of the 1990s, Trump launched little in the way of major new business ventures with a few exceptions, such as the Trump World Tower across from the United Nations, which began construction in 1999 (financed by two German lenders, Deutsche Bank and Bayerische Hypo- und Vereinsbank)³.

Germany’s Deutsche Bank faced fines, legal action and the possible prosecution of “senior management” because of its role in a $20bn Russian money-laundering scheme, which earned it the nickname of the ‘global laundromat’. Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB, used the scheme between 2010 and 2014 to move many tens of billions into the western financial system⁴.

However, Trump did make a comeback and foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular, investment by Russian oligarchs. This was confirmed by Donald Trump Jr. who, in 2008 stated that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”³.

Indeed, Trump has been laundering money for the Russians since then. For instance, Trump would sell properties, including Trump-branded condominiums and even his own Palm Beach home, to Russians for grossly inflated prices —in one case for more than $50 million over market value. At least $109 million of these purchases were all in cash, straight through Deutsche Bank which, as noted above, is a big red flag for money laundering. Many of the sales were through shell companies with untraceable Russian owners. In addition, the casinos Trump owned were classic money laundering operations. His Trump Taj Mahal Casino, a favourite hangout for Russian mobsters, had 106 violations of federal rules against money laundering. Most of these violations were failing to report gamblers who cashed out over $10,000 in a single day⁵.

While it is clear from the above that there has been much Russian money propping up Trump’s failing businesses over the years, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to be found in some of the sources listed below^3,6,7,8.

While it may be easy to dismiss such shenanigans with Russia as being in the past, you need to look at what Trump has done in the past few weeks. He has:

blamed Ukraininian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war, a common Russian assertion⁹.
called Zelenskyy a dictator without elections, a common Russian assertion; elections were suspended because of the war⁹.
held talks with Russia to try to end the war, but excluded Ukraine from the talks⁹.
disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force; it counters secret operations waged by Russia, China and other countries⁹.
cut back the Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement; this is a tool used to neutralise malign influence and disinformation operations⁹.
cut off vital intelligence aid to Ukraine which would have helped it deal with incoming missiles and drones¹⁰.
‘paused’ military aid to Ukraine¹⁰.
stated that Russia is easier to deal with than Ukraine¹⁰.
pressured the G7 to allow Russia to rejoin (making it the G8)¹¹.
objected to the phrase “Russian aggression” in a draft G7 statement on Ukraine¹¹.
wanted to allow Russia to retain parts of Ukraine¹¹.
wanted to prevent Ukraine joining NATO¹¹.
ruled out sending US troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers¹¹.
wanted to keep Europe out of the peace process¹¹.
stated that Putin can be trusted and wants peace¹¹.
has suggested future US-Russia investment opportunities, particularly Arctic energy projects¹¹.
cut funding to pro-democracy NGOs as part of its dismantling of USAID¹¹.
had VP Vance back Georgescu’s first round victory in the Romanian presidential elections after much suspected Russian interference. The Constitutional Court annulled the election¹¹.
allowed Elon Musk to endorse the far-right AfD Party in Germany¹¹.
allowed Elon Musk to endorse the far right Reform UK Party in Britain¹¹.
closed down Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, all regarded as vital to countering Russian and Chinese influence¹².

It is difficult to understand how anyone could have pleased Putin more than Trump has done since coming to office.

In early 2017, the Steele dossier was leaked to the media and the mainstream media decided it was “a notorious dossier of unproven assertions and rumors [sic]”, which a “series of investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources”. Much of their attention fell on the pee-pee tape assertion that Trump had prostitutes urinate on the bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel in which the Obama’s had spent a night during a visit to Russia. However, the bald facts include:

That Trump had longstanding business relationships with Russians
That Russia chose to interfere in the US election on Trump’s side
That Vladimir Putin made this choice to interfere on Trump’s side
And that Trump knew about it and was happy for it to happen

These have all been proven to be true in a bipartisan report of a committee chaired by current secretary of state Marco Rubio¹³.

While it is impossible to imagine Trump being an agent as he is so lacking in intellect and self-control, he would be considered too unreliable. What seems most likely is that Putin has strings he can pull which gets Trump to do what Putin wants. Whether this is just about money, about peepee tapes, or about his association to Jeffrey Epstein, we will only find out after this debacle is all over. It is also because Trump is an admirer of Putin, perhaps because of his wealth, his ruthlessness and his control. The only rational conclusion that can be drawn is that Trump is a puppet of Putin, what the Russians like to call ‘a useful idiot’. This is something I have alluded to before, during Trump’s first term as president¹⁴.

Sources

No other conclusion is possible

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