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In that incestuous company town on the Potomac, the gold standard for scandal for the last 45 years has been Watergate, the infamous imbroglio that took down President Richard Nixon. In a ham-handed effort to cover up a relatively minor, if embarrassing crime—a black-bag break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s office at the eponymous Watergate complex—the Nixon administration tied itself in illegal knots that eventually became unstuck and doomed them. “It’s the cover-up that gets you, not the crime,” became the pol’s mantra after Watergate, leading to suspicions now that Team Mueller will go after Team Trump for obstructing justice before anything else.
This is plausible. It’s certainly easier to prove obstruction than unraveling a complex, multi-year criminal conspiracy for a jury. Regardless, there are significant differences between Watergate and Kremlingate that need to be clarified. While Nixon liked to complain about the partisan “witch hunt” out to get him, just like the current Oval Office occupant, Tricky Dick was a skilled political operator, a savvy veteran of Washington wars. In contrast, Reality TV Don is an utter political neophyte who came to the White House with no apparent understanding of how the U.S. government works; worse, he seems to have learned precious little over the last 15 months of increasingly part-time work as the commander-in-chief.
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Someone as unmotivated and unskilled as Trump ought to have chosen top people for his administration, but he did not. By and large, the working staff of Trump’s campaign-turned-White House consists of fourth-raters deemed too unskilled or simply too dumb to get a job in any administration but Trump’s. Therefore, we have shady political hacks considered untouchably unsavory and crooked by Washington’s shady political class. There are sub-shop managers masquerading as consiglieri. There are soi-disant academics turned Fox News blowhards. There are deviants in league with foreign intelligence. There are of course wife-beaters and related criminals. While it was once fashionable to deride Nixon’s staff as inept bunglers lacking basic ethics, they loom as moral paragons and MacArthur Fellows compared to the doomed crew of room-temperature-IQ wannabes that Trump has collected around himself in Washington.
However, the greatest distinction between Watergate and Kremlingate is the underlying crime. In the case of the former, it was a politically-motivated break-in; with the latter, it appears to be collaboration with a hostile foreign power that may be tantamount to treason. Whatever Nixon’s flaws, he was a veteran and former Navy man who was impeccably loyal to the United States. Trump is a draft-dodger who tears down our national institutions, one by one, while possessing a strange unwillingness to criticize Vladimir Putin—whose nasty crimes abroad have increased since January 2017—under any circumstances, for anything.
But is Donald Trump actually a Russian agent? To the eyes of a veteran counterintelligence hand, the answer to that question is: Not exactly. Trump is far too psychologically unstable and personally compromised to be deemed a good fit for clandestine work by the KGB (or any serious spy service). However, Trump gives every appearance of being a longtime agent of influence, to use the proper Chekist term, that is a person (often a high-flyer in business or politics) to be exploited as a conduit for pro-Kremlin propaganda.
Agents of influence are frequently not on the Chekist payroll, strictly speaking, though they are often given sweetheart deals by Moscow as payment for services rendered. The classic American case was Armand Hammer, a son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa made good with an impressive business empire, Occidental Petroleum; in fact, Hammer’s start in business was arranged by Kremlin spies, and his KGB sponsorship was barely hidden during the Cold War. He was an unfailing public advocate for Moscow and, embarrassingly, his political connections in Washington, which were substantial, ran through Democratic Senators Al Gore Sr. and Jr., who took significant donations from Hammer that counterintelligence circles believe originated in Moscow. It’s best to think of Trump as a markedly less successful and less intelligent Armand Hammer.
This relationship began no later than the summer of 1987, when Trump visited Moscow and Leningrad, at the Kremlin’s invite, ostensibly to discuss building hotels in Russia (which, three decades on, have never materialized). In fact, Trump’s VIP visit was arranged by the KGB, as all such Cold War sojourns by Western notables were. The KGB invariably assessed whether foreign VIPs might be amenable to secret work for the Kremlin. (Two East Bloc intelligence veterans, one with direct knowledge, confirmed to me that Trump was closely watched for “operational purposes” during his 1987 visit to Moscow and Leningrad.)
Whether the KGB got anywhere with Trump in 1987 remains unknown, but it seems a remarkable coincidence that, barely a month after his return from the USSR, he made a splash by taking out newspaper ads in three major outlets, at a cost of almost $95,000, lambasting America’s allegedly free-loading allies. The plus-sized ads demanded that the United States disband the Western security system altogether, which of course was precisely what Moscow wanted. Trump’s public attacks on America’s allies thus began—and have continued to the present day.
Unfortunately for Trump and whatever deal he may have reached with Moscow, the Soviet Union fell apart four years later, and the KGB disbanded, at least for a while. In the 1990s, when his real estate/casino empire went bust and he desperately needed cash to stay afloat—which no American bank would lend him, knowing his creditworthiness—Trump apparently went to less conventional lenders to make good on his enormous losses. By the end of the 1990s, the Trump Organization was again in the black, though nobody officially can explain how, based on public records. Here Trump’s associations with less-than-upstanding biznismen from the former Soviet Union seem to have played a dubious role.
Suspicion lingers that in the 1990s the Trump Organization, which failed as a legitimate business, reinvented itself as a money-washing machine for Eastern organized crime. There’s evidence that this is precisely what happened, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for nearly two decades. The Treasury Department’s $10 million fine levied in 2015 on the now-defunct Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City for pervasive violations of the Bank Secrecy Act gives hints that there’s a lot of unraveling being done by Team Mueller as it gets to the bottom of what the Trump Organization really is.
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Western intelligence has evidence that Trump may have discussed his impending presidential run with Kremlin higher-ups in November 2013, when he was in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant. That he’s hiding something is indicated by the fact that Trump can’t keep his basic story straight about that visit. At times, Trump has denied he even spent the night in Russia, as if he magically flew from the United States to Moscow and back, hosting the Miss Universe event for the cameras, without an overnight stay. We’ve recently learned that Trump in early 2017 informed then-FBI Director James Comey that Vladimir Putin bragged to him, “We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world”—notwithstanding the fact that Trump had repeatedly claimed he’d never met the Russian president. That Trump’s political guru Steve Bannon was test-messaging Putin for campaign purposes back in 2014 now seems more than coincidental.
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What, then, can we say about Trump and the Kremlin? To anyone versed in counterintelligence, particularly involving Russians, Trump seems to have been an on-again, off-again agent of influence for Russian intelligence for at least three decades. We can assume that Kremlin spies long ago took the measure of him and realized he was an erratic figure who could be useful to Moscow, if kept at arm’s length. His desire to run for the presidency was likely deemed useful for Putin and his retinue, but they surely considered it as unlikely to succeed as everyone else did. Donald Trump’s poetic undoing will be his unplanned winning of the White House. That unanticipated victory is bringing him the deep scrutiny by federal authorities that Trump and his flimflam business empire long needed, but never got. Moscow, too, will likely rue the day that they secretly helped get their man in the Oval Office.
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But is Trump actually a Russian agent? To the eyes of a veteran CI hand, the answer to that question is: Not exactly https://t.co/iuNG7VZpWP
— John Schindler (@20committee) April 26, 2018
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