Is Donald Trump a secret agent for Vladimir Putin? It’s a question a lot of people have asked themselves and out loud. The question is based on Trump’s relentless ass-kissing of the Russian leader and policies that seem custom-made for Putin’s anti-American agenda. Let’s explore the available evidence.
“I have no investments in Russia. None whatsoever.”
—President Trump in an NBC interview
That may be true. Trump is too broke to legitimately invest anywhere. Banks want nothing to do with him, based on costly experience.
But it’s obvious to anyone who looks at the evidence and Trump’s history of business failures that Russia has something on Donald Trump that makes him a stooge for Vladimir Putin.
Putin spent 16 years as a Soviet foreign intelligence agent. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the KGB before switching to politics.
Peter Strzok is a former FBI top counter-intelligence expert:
“I continue to believe that Donald Trump is compromised by the Russians.”
James Clapper was Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama. This was his assessment in late 2017:
“I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset. And that’s what he’s doing with the President.
Q: You’re saying that Russia is handling President Trump as an asset?
“That seems to be, that’s the appearance to me.”
Secret Agents and Useful Idiots
Let’s take a moment to define spy terms.
What the movies and public call secret agents are known in the intelligence world as case officers.
A true secret agent is usually a foreigner, sometimes paid, who passes information to an intelligence case officer.
An asset is someone who is not an on-the-books agent, but sometimes provides tips to a case officer.
Then there are Useful Idiots. This seems to be a term unique to the Russian intelligence services. It is an erratic, undependable and perhaps unwitting source of information, or a Useful Idiot.
Donald Trump fits the definition of a Russian Useful Idiot.
Some people speculate Russia’s hold over Donald Trump may be a Moscow sex liaison with videotapes. Not likely.
Moscow knows Trump is the kind of guy who would brag about such tapes in any attempted sex blackmail.
In the Watergate-inspired film All the President’s Men, Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s secret FBI source.
Deep Throat counseled the reporter to “Follow the trail of the money.” That advice was true then, it’s true now.
“One of the largest ways that people—foreign governments—gain leverage, certainly in the case of the President, is through financial entanglements.” —Peter Strzok, former FBI agent
Donald Trump is financially entangled with Russian organized crime and has been since the early 1980s.
The Russian Mafia and Russian oligarchs have invested big-time in the Trump real estate empire in the United States. Vast sums of Russian racketeering money have been laundered through Trump real estate deals and his cut has kept the failed businessman afloat.
Trump Tower in New York has been described as a money laundromat for Russian racketeers.
Trump’s extensive condo developments in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida came to be known as Little Moscow, as Russian gangsters and bigwigs scrambled to use the Trump properties to hide and launder illegal money.
Money laundering is a scheme used by criminals to make the profits of crime appear to be legitimate, by passing them through a series of secretive, shadowy business transactions.
Trump and the Russian Mafia
The late Wayne Barrett, a legendary investigative reporter, began exposing Trump’s shady business deals as far back as 1978.
Craig Unger, who wrote a story called Trump’s Russian Laundromat for New York’s now-defunct Village Voice, is another reporter/author who has dug into the long-running and tangled web of the Trump/Russian Mafia conspiracy:
“I found as early as 1984 Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s properties, were being used to launder money for the Russian Mafia. A man associated with the Russian Mafia met with him in 1984 at Trump Tower and put down six million dollars, the equivalent of about 15 million dollars today and paid for it, put it in an anonymous shell company. And as I traced things, this happened at least 1,300 times, in 1,300 condos over the next 20 or 30 years.”
The investor Unger referred to is David Bogatin, a Russian international gangster who teamed up for a time with the American Sicilian Mafia in various rackets including a billion-dollar-a-year gasoline tax fraud scheme.
Michael Franzese, a former member of the New York Colombo Crime Family speaks fondly of doing business with Bogatin, Trump’s Russian real estate investor:
“The Russian mob. Great guys. Some of the best partners I ever had. Stand up guys, at least with me they were. We did some great business together.”
(But) Lemme tell you how I got involved in the Russians. There were three Russians that were my partners for seven or eight years and we did great business with: Mike Markowitz, Lev Persits and David Bogatin.
Bogatin is an associate of Semion Mogilevich, described as the Boss of Bosses of global Russian Organized Crime. One of his nicknames is the Brainy Don. He has a degree in economics and is reputed to be a money laundering mastermind.
In the minds of many Americans, The Godfather and Sicilian organized crime is what they think of when they hear the term, Mafia.
After years of federal prosecutions, the Sicilian Mafia is a pale shadow of what it used to be.
The Russians are now the 800-pound gorillas of global racketeering.
Featured as one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, admiring criminal associates describe Mogilevich as “the most powerful mobster in the world.”
An FBI profile says Mogilevich’s crimes include drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, nuclear materials trafficking, prostitution and money laundering.
His associates are fond of buying Trump real estate.
“Donald, all his life, has done business with mobsters and criminals, because it’s a way to make money,” says Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Kay Johnston, another journalist who has probed the Trump criminal empire for years.
Vladimir Putin Knows and Approves
All of this couldn’t happen in Russia without the knowledge and approval of Vladimir Putin. Experts say Russian organized crime and Russian intelligence services are closely intertwined and often one and the same. It is impossible for Donald Trump to make money from and with the Russian Mafia without Vladimir Putin’s knowledge and approval.
That is what Putin has on Donald Trump. Putin could leak a blizzard of evidence that would put Trump in prison for the rest of his life.
Consequently, Trump kisses Putin’s ass without being asked. Trump’s policies and actions reflect what Vladimir Putin would do if he were the leader of the United States.
Putin’s election interference and disinformation campaign is aided and abetted by Trump’s policies.
Putin’s disinformation propaganda fuels U.S. voter suppression and Trump ignores it.
Putin loves the American fight over Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett because it weakens our court system.
Putin loves Trump’s hands-off attitude toward police brutality and white extremists because it weakens American justice.
Putin loves the racial confrontations Trump has encouraged because it divides us.
Putin knows he can commit outrages like offering bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers because he has the American President by the gonads, because Trump is in deep with Russian criminals. Russian Mafia money is a key source of revenue for Trump.
“I believe this was the greatest intelligence operation of our times and it ended up putting a Russian asset in the White House.”
—Craig Unger, Author
Our presidents need to have robust relationships with all foreign leaders, even our enemies. But they need to remember they are Americans leading America. They need to put America’s interest first. Trump has shown us the dark side of Presidential international relations. Having seen it, we are now forewarned and we should raise holy hell if a future President forgets words and phrases like patriotism, loyalty and America First.
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