Does his fear of exposure by Putin outweigh his loyalty to our nation? Alternet
alternet.org
Opinion by Thom Hartmann
The
Britih newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched
investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between
columnists Glewn Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant
Editor) and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).
It’s
shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has
basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for
president in 2016.
They
note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document
release:
“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir
Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to
have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for
procuring a child for prostitution.”
Essentially,
they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the
KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and
Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously
filmed having sex with underage girls.
That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for
leverage when he needed it:
“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s
largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women
for his network of associates.”
In
return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally
compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of
corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.
Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright
theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs
(including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this
country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.
America
has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in
the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through
cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every
other developed country).
And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused
to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started
taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate
empire and it was all coming from Russia.
As
Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:
“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up
a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:
“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we
need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got
some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in
our programs. We just go there all the time.’”
This
is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on
the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been
demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation
(the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure,
which Republicans are currently blocking.
That
alone is worth a call to your two US senators.
The documents released last week included a series of email
conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to
Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the
President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power
and profiting from it.
They
pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:
“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin
valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki.
…“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin,
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our
conversations.’ …
“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump
ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was
then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis
added]
Epstein,
of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while
Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine
Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she
reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant
Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:
“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name
names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”
So,
if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage
girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have
changed Trump’s behavior?
・Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?
・
Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?
Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?
・
Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?
・
Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?
・
Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?
・
Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?
・
Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?
・
Steal US intelligence
secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place
where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy
it?
・
Unleash ICE in a way that
turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War”
that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully
predicting?
・
Gut America’s soft power
around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening
opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?
In
2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first
presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with
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, all 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, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed
specific types of help, and how, and when.
With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on
social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward
Trump.
Trump pardoned
Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from
his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.
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 criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is
just the tip of the iceberg.
The
Washington Post reported 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 told him to?
Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s
terrified.
“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 team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and
his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they
were stonewalled.
The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump 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 Flynn’s 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” 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 (creating a brown-skinned
refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).
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, Sen.
Rand Paul (R-KY) 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.
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, which Jack Smith was
prepared to charge Trump under. Paul 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 worried 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 burned a man working for
the FBI — 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.”
In
the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with
Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the
Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian
infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power
position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the
nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev
for a few days.
These
aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange
foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of
others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like
someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some
sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over
other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to
serve.
If
Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and
impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest
counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of
our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.
If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if
Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious
investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our
historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for
years.
This
is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can
survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a
foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the
same as going along with it.
We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that
the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country
itself.
Let
your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to
demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can
reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the
congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.
See you in the streets on March 28th!
"Masked men with guns are swarming through American cities." (photo: Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx/AP)
Don Lemon is one of the journalists arrested by federal agents for covering an anti-ICE protest at a church in Minnesota.
