The Steele Dossier and More: The Trump-Russia Connection
The government you elect is the government you deserve.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
ON JANUARY 5, 2017, PRESIDENT OBAMA AND President-Elect Trump were briefed by US intelligence officials. They were told that the Russians said they had compromising personal and financial information on Trump.
When part of this briefing became public, Trump immediately tweeted, “FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”
Then came BuzzFeed’s thirty-five-page report of the contents of what would become known as the Steele dossier. The report said that Russian officials fed Trump information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had met secretly with Kremlin officials in Prague. Carter Page, Trump’s advisor on foreign affairs, had met with the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company and a senior Kremlin internal affairs official in Moscow. It talked of Trump’s attempts to make real estate deals with Russians in Moscow. Most headline making was a report that Trump had hired prostitutes to “perform lewd acts such as golden showers” on a bed in the presidential suite of the hotel where President Obama once stayed. The report said that the Russian security services, FSB, had “arranged and monitored” what went on and were holding it as leverage against Trump.
The information was based on memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials considered credible.
That former British operative was Christopher Steele, who had served in the MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, since the end of the Cold War. The MI6 was so secretive that the British government for many years didn’t acknowledge its existence. Steele was a spy in Moscow and Paris. His expertise was in all things Russian, and he was assigned to investigate the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy whose tea was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 during a meeting with two other Russian agents in London. Litvinenko had been a member of Russia’s FSB, defected to London in 2000, and wrote two books, including one describing how the FSB’s violence had helped bring Putin to power. After a British inquiry, on which Steele worked, the British concluded that the FSB was responsible for Litvinenko’s murder and that Putin had “probably approved” it.
Steele left the MI6 in 2009 and founded Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. The London-based firm specialized in investigations and intelligence gathering. Steele was hired by the US Department of Justice in 2015 to investigate the corruption of FIFA, the international governing body of soccer. Several members of FIFA’s ruling executive committee were indicted on bribery charges as part of a far-reaching corruption investigation headed by the FBI and Department of Justice.
Steele had remarkable Russian sources, many close to Russian intelligence, and he was hired by anti-Trump conservative groups to get background information on Trump and his connections with Russia. After Trump won the nomination, the Hillary Clinton campaign used Steele and similar investigations for much the same purpose. The result was the “Steele dossier.”
When this information was first offered to the New York Times and the Washington Post during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the papers declined to publish the story because the information wasn’t verified by another source.
The Steele dossier, it turned out, became a key issue.
The dossier was first made public by CNN, which reported that the contents had been sent to both President Obama and to President-Elect Trump. The rogue entertainment and news site BuzzFeed published the Steele report ten days before Trump’s inauguration.
Because some of the information in the dossier, especially the more sordid revelations, hasn’t been proven with second sources, Trump and the Russians have been able to scream that it was a report with “no factual bases.” Even so, no one has yet disproven what Steele’s dossier says about Trump’s deep ties to the Russians.
Below is a transcript of the first part of Steele’s dossier.
SUMMARY
Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years. Aim endorsed by Putin has been to encourage splits and divisions in Western Alliance. So far Trump has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However, he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin including on his Democratic and other political rivals. Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB (formerly the KGB) has compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts, which have been arranged or monitored by the FSB. A dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesmen Deskoff directly on Putin’s orders. However it is not yet been distributed abroad including to Trump. Russian’s intentions for its deployment are still unclear.
DETAIL
1. Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian foreign ministry figure and a top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities have been cultivating and supporting a U.S. Republican and Presidential candidate Donald Trump for at least five years. Source B asserted that the Trump operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the United States itself but most importantly within the TransAtlantic Alliance, which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. Source C, a senior Russian financial official, said the Trump operation should be seen in terms of Putin’s desire to return to 19th Century Great Power politics, anchored upon country’s interests rather than the ideals based on international order established after World War II. She or he had overheard Putin talking in this way to close associates on several occasions. [He wants nationalism, which is also what Trump wants. America first and the hell with NATO.]
2. In terms of specifics Source A [identified as Konstantin Kilimnik, once an intelligence officer working for the GRU and a close friend of Paul Manafort] confided that the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for several years. This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of Trump, who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow. And who reported in June 2016 that this Russian intelligence had been “very helpful.” The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on Trump also had compromised, offering him various lucrative development business deals in Russia, especially in relationship to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, Trump had not taken up any of these.
3. However, there were other aspects to Trump’s engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit Trump’s personal obsessions and sexual perversions in order to obtain suitable kompromat on him. According to Source D (a close associate of Trump) where she or he had been present, Trump’s perverted conduct in Moscow included hiring the Presidential Suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, who he hated, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia. And defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
4. The Moscow Ritz-Carlton episode involving Trump reported above was confirmed by Source E [the rest of the line is blacked out] who said that she or he and several of the staff were aware of it at the time and subsequently she or he believed it had happened in 2013. Source E provided an introduction for a company ethnic Russian operative to Source F, a female staffer at the hotel where Trump had stayed, who also confirmed the story. Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B, the former top level Russian intelligence officer (one who was arrested and killed perhaps) asserted that Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican Presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.
5. Asked about the Kremlin’s reported intelligence feed to Trump over recent years and rumors about a Russian dossier of ‘kompromat’ Hillary Clinton (being circulated), Source B confirmed that the files existence. S/he confided in a trusted compatriot that it had been collated by Department K of the FSB for many years, dating back to her husband Bill’s presidency and comprised mainly of eavesdropped conversations of various sorts rather than details or evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behaviors. Some of the conversations were from bugged comments Clinton had made on her various trips to Russia, and focused on things she had said which contradicted her current positions on various issues. Others were most probably from phone intercepts.
6. Continuing on this theme Source G, a senior Kremlin official, confided that the Clinton dossier was controlled exclusively by chief Kremlin spokesman Dmiti Cheskov [Dmitry Chesnokov], who was responsible for compiling and handling it on the explicit instructions of Putin himself. The dossier, however, had not as yet been made available abroad, including to Trump or his campaign team. At present it was unclear what Putin’s intentions were in this regard.
20 of June 2016
Perhaps to feed a public appetite for the most lurid details, the headlines buried the most important information about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the hacking of the emails of the Democratic National Committee. The newspaper, radio, and TV news headlines focused on what is perhaps the most bizarre accusation ever made against an American president. Donald Trump was accused of hiring several prostitutes to come to a ritzy Moscow hotel, where former president Barack Obama and his wife once had slept, and urinate all over the bed. Not only that, but the Russians took pictures! Vladimir Putin supported Trump’s blanket denial when, during a press conference, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told the audience, “The Kremlin has no compromising dossier on Trump. Such information isn’t consistent with reality and is nothing but an absolute fantasy.”
Buoyed by Putin’s echoed denial, Trump tweeted, “Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is ‘A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.’ Very unfair! … Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NOTHING! … I win an election easily, a great ‘movement’ is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state! … Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
When FBI Director James Comey later asked Trump whether Steele’s claim was true, Trump denied even spending a single night in Moscow. Both Bloomberg News and Politico were able to obtain the flight records of Trump’s plane, owned by casino mogul Phil Ruffin, and the flight records showed that Trump’s plane had landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport, and he had been in Moscow from Thursday through Sunday night, when the jet took off at 3:58 in the morning.
Trump apparently lied to the FBI director about his trip to Moscow.
A year later, in a rambling conversation with Fox and Friends, Trump finally admitted he had stayed “one or two days” in Moscow that weekend.
For liars, keeping one’s story straight is always a serious problem.
During a news conference at Trump Tower, Trump for the first time opined that the election-related hacking was conducted by Russia. He also said, “If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia.” Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he was open to lifting the sanctions on Russia if “Russia is really helping us”:
“If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”
Here, we must ask ourselves a very important question: What if it turns out everything or even a part of the Steele dossier is true? What if Putin had spied on Donald Trump for five years and learned enough incriminating information to blackmail him? What would Putin ask President Trump to do?
If the Steele dossier is a fabrication, why were four Russian sources for the dossier murdered or arrested?
Oleg Erovinkin, a key aide to Igor Sechin, who was named in the dossier, was murdered. Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow. He had been shot twice in the head. Steele wrote about “a source close to Sechin who had links between Trump supporters and Moscow.” Erovinkin was that source. Russian officials later claimed he had died of a heart attack.
Other Steele sources—Russian cyber experts allegedly involved in hacking Clinton’s emails—also were killed, disappeared, or imprisoned. Sergei Mikhailov, the head of the Center for Information Security, a part of the FSB, and Ruslan Stoyanov, the lead researcher with Kaspersky Lab, disappeared and were presumed murdered. According to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, during a meeting of intelligence officers, a bag was thrown over Mikhailov’s head and he was dragged away, never to be seen again.
In addition, five other Russian diplomats died under mysterious circumstances. They were not directly connected to the hacking scandal or Trump’s interference in the election, but their unexpected deaths—some violent—raised the possibility that somebody wanted them rubbed out to make sure they didn’t talk.
In January 2017, a Ukrainian businessman named Alex Oronov, who had arranged a meeting at the Loews Regency on Park Avenue in Manhattan between Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, and Felix Sater, a Russian-born Brooklynite and associate of Trump’s with ties to the Russian mob, died suddenly. Cohen reportedly was bringing Trump’s “peace plan” aimed at helping Putin gain control over Crimea. Oronov, who was the father of Cohen’s brother’s wife, lived in one of Trump’s buildings. He also was said to have died of a heart attack, an all-too-common occurrence for prominent Russian businessmen and government officials who get too close to sensitive situations.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, died in New York on his way to work.
Mikhail Lesin, a Putin aide, dropped dead in a DC hotel room. He had been bashed over the head. Sergei Krivov, a Russian intelligence agent, was found dead in the Russian consulate in New York on Election Day. His head had also been bashed in.
Russian diplomat Andrey Malanin was found dead in his Athens apartment. The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was murdered by a policeman on the same day that another diplomat, Peter Polshikov, was shot dead in his apartment in Moscow.
That’s a lot of dead Russians.
Some Americans also had short lives.
Peter Smith, a GOP operative who reportedly told the Russians to turn over the stolen Clinton emails to WikiLeaks, committed suicide in a hotel room in Rochester, Minnesota. Smith had been a focus of Robert Mueller’s investigation. He was an ally of Trump campaign advisor Michael Flynn.
Smith, a wealthy businessman, had been hounding the Clintons for years. He had offered to pay Arkansas state troopers to get dirt on Bill Clinton. He had been behind the Troopergate allegations that Bill Clinton used them to arrange trysts with women. Smith also looked into a trip that Bill Clinton made to the Soviet Union in 1969 as a student. In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Smith said he began his search for Hillary Clinton’s missing emails in September. He contacted known hacking groups, including two in Russia, who told him they had the emails. Smith told them to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks to make sure they were genuine and not fakes.
Smith said that in his attempt to obtain Clinton’s emails, he worked with Trump associates Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn.
Bannon naturally said he had never even heard of Smith.
Ten days after his conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Smith killed himself by pumping helium into a plastic bag and placing the bag over his head.
Police found a helium tank, an obituary, and a suicide note.
We should also ask ourselves, why didn’t the FBI take action after receiving the Steele dossier in July 2016? According to Steele, the New York office of the FBI appeared to be devoting its time to Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions. Steele said that some of the agents had a long-standing relationship with Rudy Giuliani—then part of the Trump campaign—and as we know, just days before the election in November 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that Clinton was facing another investigation into the use of her emails.
Two days earlier Giuliani mentioned “a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next few days. We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeves that should turn things around.” In other words, the FBI was focused on election eve announcements about Clinton’s email, not on the Steele dossier.
In addition to the allegations in the Steele dossier, there are other disturbing facts about Trump’s relationship with the Russians.
First, there is the question of whether Trump could be indebted to the Russians or have profits and benefits tied to the Russians. We raised this earlier with the discussion of the Constitution’s emoluments clause in Chapter 17.
Second, there were a remarkable number of contacts between Russian operatives and senior Trump campaign officials during the campaign, his transition team, and then senior Trump White House officials during the beginning of his presidency. Almost nobody is willing to tell the truth about those contacts.
Third, there is an alignment between Trump’s foreign and economic policies in several areas (both his promises as a candidate and his actual policies as president) and what Russia wants. Quid pro quo relationships between politicians and patrons are always difficult to prove, but the circumstantial evidence of a pro-Russia bias in the Trump administration is strong.
Fourth, there is the secrecy surrounding meetings that President Trump has with Putin, from which other top US officials are often excluded.
Fifth and perhaps most telling is the extreme sensitivity that Trump has to any allegations related to Russia. Trump has been accused of sexual assault, racism, violations of the emoluments clause, and other financial conflicts of interest, but the allegations that set him off most arise from the Russia “witch hunt.” Something is indeed rotten in the United States of America, and in this tragic play within a play, it is Trump who “doth protest too much, methinks.”
Some of the many specifics follow (this book would be thousands of pages long were we to list them all).
BUSINESS DEALS WITH THE RUSSIANS
Trump has suspicious financial relationships with oligarchs aligned with Vladimir Putin.
In addition to the mysterious financial arrangements we pointed our earlier, Trump apparently owes as much as $560 million to the Blackstone/Bayrock group, which is owned by Russian billionaires, many of whom owe their position and wealth to Putin. Men who have borrowed from Bayrock claim that owing money to them is like owing to the Russian mob; they ask for favors.
Bayrock, founded by Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan, partnered with Trump on a series of real estate deals between 2002 and 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump SoHo hotel and condominium in Manhattan. Trump lent his name to a number of Bayrock projects for large fees. In return, Bayrock took money from foreign investors—apparently including money launderers—for projects in Iceland, Belgium, France, and England. Trump testified in 2017 that he met Bayrock officials in Trump Tower to discuss deals in Moscow.
“It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump said in that deposition. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”
One of Bayrock’s principals, Felix Sater, was implicated in a stock-manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals inflating stock prices on Wall Street. Around 2001 Sater joined Bayrock. Sater proposed erecting building complexes with Trump’s name. They apparently discussed buildings in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Ukraine, and China.
In 2005 Trump and Bayrock joined to develop a project in Moscow. Sater said he had Russian investors and a site for a luxury high-rise—a shuttered pencil factory named for American radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
“I showed [Trump] photos, I showed him the site, showed him the view from the site,” said Sater. “It’s pretty spectacular.”
Sater handled all the negotiations, but the deal fell through.
Another Bayrock principal was Salvatore Lauria, who brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm. According to a lawsuit against Bayrock by Jody Kriss, a former executive, the firm was funded by wealthy Russians close to President Vladimir Putin. Another Bayrock investor was Alexander Mashkevich, a Russian billionaire once charged in a corruption case in Belgium.
Kriss accused Bayrock of being a front for money laundering. In the lawsuit he said that Bayrock occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia. In addition to laundering money, Kriss said Bayrock executives skimmed cash, dodged taxes, and cheated him out of millions of dollars.
After Sater left Bayrock, he was given office space in Trump Tower and Trump Organization cards that identified him as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump.”
In November 2013 Trump in a deposition denied knowing both Arif and Sater.
When asked about Arif, he said, “I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times. I have met him.” As for Sater, he said, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
An unlikely story.
There was also the Trump Tower Moscow project that, although never consummated, Trump contemplated as late as 2015. Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen has already acknowledged lying on multiple occasions to hide Trump’s involvement with this project.
During his presidential campaign, Trump had been attempting to make a deal with Russian oligarchs and Putin’s government to build what would have been the tallest building in all of Europe and Asia. The Moscow Trump Tower was to be a dazzling one-hundred-story glass skyscraper offering ultra-deluxe residences, hotel rooms, and his famous name.
Trump always contended that the plans never got very far, but reporters showed that it had gone quite far. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen worked to convince Russian developer Andrey Rozov to use Trump’s completed design.
On September 15, 2015, Rosov wrote to Cohen, “The building design you sent over is very interesting and will be an architectural and luxury triumph. I believe the tallest building in Europe should be in Moscow, and I am prepared to build it.”
Rozov signed a letter of intent that he sent to Cohen. Trump countersigned on the same day as his third presidential debate with Hillary Clinton.
As part of the deal, the spa was to be named “The Spa by Ivanka Trump,” and Vladimir Putin was to receive his personal penthouse worth $50 million. The idea was brought to Trump by Felix Sater, who pitched it to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. According to Sater, giving Putin the penthouse would lure other oligarchs to buy apartments in the building.
On November 3, 2015, Felix Sater emailed Michael Cohen to outline the idea of having Vladimir Putin attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the tower.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote. “I know how to play it and how to get this done. Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it … I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this. I will manage this process.”
Cohen met with the Russians at least ten times in 2016 to discuss the project, but in the end Trump Tower Moscow was never built. Russian real estate experts said that Cohen and Sater’s choice for the developer, Rozov, lacked the clout and reputation to take the project to its conclusion.
Trump at times has denied knowing anything about these projects in Russia during the presidential campaign.
Every time he was lying.
Trump Tower Moscow would have been Donald Trump’s highest business achievement.
SECRET CONTACTS WITH THE RUSSIANS
The number of Trump officials who have lied about contact with Russians is shocking. By May 2019, information gathered by the FBI, court records, and reporters stated that, during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition, seventeen Trump campaign officials and advisors had interacted with Russians and with WikiLeaks more than a hundred times. These contacts are the subject of the entire first part of the Mueller Report (much of which is still redacted by Attorney General Barr). See more in Chapter 30.
We provide specifics here about a few of the many contacts with the Russians immediately after the election.
While President Obama was still in office, several of Trump’s top aides, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, apparently established a back channel for communications with the Russians without the knowledge of the State Department. This was a violation of the Logan Act, which requires diplomatic contacts made on behalf of the United States government to go through official channels. (Because of First Amendment and other considerations, the Logan Act is extremely difficult to enforce but at a minimum it establishes the widely recognized rule that Americans do not engage in freelance diplomacy. We have one president at a time.)
Kushner and the other officials apparently didn’t care.
During the final week of January 2017 we learned that Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice as national security advisor, had his own connections with Russia. US counterintelligence agents accused Flynn of secretly meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to discuss the impact of President Obama’s promise of additional American sanctions of Russia. Flynn told the Russians that when Trump became president, he would have those sanctions lifted. Flynn denied this twice in discussions with the FBI. Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman at the time, also denied that Flynn had talked about sanctions.
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates called White House counsel Don McGahn and told him that Flynn was lying. That same day, Yates and McGahn met again, at McGahn’s request.
The next day Trump fired Sally Yates. The reason given was a smoke screen. She was fired ostensibly for refusing to enforce Trump’s travel ban against Muslims. But she had also called out Flynn’s lying in the Russia investigation, incurring Trump’s wrath.
The Washington Post then reported that Flynn had indeed discussed US sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn resigned and is now a convicted felon.
PRO-RUSSIA POLICY
As for policy changes that Russia wanted, the Trump administration, and even more so Trump himself, has displayed a pro-Russia tilt.
As a candidate, Trump early on signaled his sympathy for Russia even if he had no idea what he was talking about.
One of Putin’s aggressive moves as Russian president was his plan to annex Crimea. In an interview on ABC, candidate Trump discussed the annexation and supported Putin. “But you know,” Trump said, “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also.”
Critics knew Trump was ignorant of world affairs. They wondered, Did Trump make up that assessment on the spot out of thin air? From whom did he form that opinion? They suspected Putin or one of his aides had said this to him.
Trump’s first pick for secretary of state was well liked by Putin. Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, had previously done a lot of business in Russia. If Trump could get rid of the sanctions imposed on Russia after the Ukrainian civil war, Tillerson could help Putin extract Russian oil at a significant cost savings. And Russia needs revenue from oil exports to fix its struggling economy.
Undermining NATO, which was founded to contain Russian aggression during the Soviet era, was another issue important to Putin, who wished to return to Russia’s nationalist ways and to regain some of the territory it lost after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. If Putin could regain his access to the Balkan countries, he could ship millions of cubic feet of natural gas and oil into Eastern Europe. NATO stood in the way.
For whatever reason, Trump has gone out of his way to tear asunder as much as possible the relationship between the United States and NATO. Trump has even gone so far as to describe some NATO members as being hostile to the United States. Deterioration, if not the formal breakup, of the NATO Alliance may very well be the crowning achievement of both the Trump and Putin presidencies.
Although Congress, including Republicans, has made it clear that economic sanctions against Russia will not be lifted any time soon, the Treasury Department has used its authority to shorten and in some ways alleviate the sanctions against key Russian oligarchs, including Putin ally Oleg Deripaska.
On February 2, 2017, the United States added sanctions to Russia for their annexation of Crimea. Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador, vowed that the “US Crimea–related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.” The Trump administration had no choice; congressional Republicans in early 2017 made it clear that they needed the administration to at least feign a strong stance against Russia. (Several leading Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham, would later change their hawkish stance.)
Two days after these sanctions were announced, Trump made clear his personal views when, instead of condemning the actions that triggered the sanctions, he defended Putin. He told Fox News, “I do respect him,” and when asked about the atrocities Russia had brought to the war in Ukraine, Trump replied, “What, you think our country is so innocent?”
His statement made a lot of people wonder: Why is our president taking the side of a foreign adversary, comparing its culpability favorably with that of the United States? What hold does Putin have over him?
The checks and balances in our constitutional framework, particularly the power of Congress, have somewhat limited Trump’s ability to help Russia. But it is clear that, compared with all of his post–World War II predecessors, Trump’s sympathies lie with Russia, a country that has helped him get where he is today.
Trump has favored the Russians despite the hostility to Russia in Congress and the considerable power Congress has to limit Trump’s actual Russia policy. Where he has the power to act unilaterally to help Russia, Trump has used it. He has picked multiple quarrels with our longtime allies in NATO, knowing that undermining the NATO alliance has been a Russian priority since the end of World War II. Where possible, his administration has gone easy on the economic sanctions imposed on Russia because of its 2016 election meddling. In 2019, Trump withdrew US forces from Syria, abandoning Syria to Russia and Turkey, and inviting the slaughter of many of our Kurdish allies. Some Republicans in Congress are furious at these developments, but not so much as to acknowledge the fundamental problem—the divided loyalties of the president of the United States.
SECRET TRUMP-PUTIN MEETINGS
Trump very much seems to enjoy meeting secretly with Vladimir Putin.
Trump has had five secret meetings with Putin since the 2016 election. They’ve had at least nine phone calls. The first time they met, during a G20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, Trump and Putin talked for two hours. The other people in the room were Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. That day it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and various Russians had met in Trump Tower to discuss dirt on Hillary Clinton. Tillerson said that Trump and Putin had a long talk about Russian hacking. After the meeting Trump took the interpreter’s notes and ordered the interpreter not to reveal their conversations. At dinner that night, Trump sidled over to Putin and they talked—alone. Putin’s translator handled the conversation.
When questioned afterward, Trump said that three times he had asked Putin whether Russia hacked Clinton’s emails, and three times Putin said he hadn’t. Trump said that Putin told him, “If we did, we wouldn’t have gotten caught because we’re professionals.”
“I thought it was a good point,” said Trump, “because they are some of the best in the world [at hacking].”
On the flight back to Washington that night, Trump told reporters that at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, his campaign officials were talking about adoptions.
National security experts questioned out loud whether Trump and Putin were both hiding what they had said and done.
Marina Gross, a translator, was the only other American in the room when President Trump for two hours met privately with Russian president Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. All other Americans were excluded.
On June 26, 2019, Trump bluntly told reporters that what he and Putin said to each other is “nobody’s business.”
TRUMP’S EXTREME DEFENSIVENESS ABOUT RUSSIA
Finally, Trump is so defensive about the Russia investigation that he appears to be psychologically disturbed whenever he discusses it.
It could take hundreds of pages to reproduce all or even a substantial portion of Trump’s tweets and other statements about the Russia investigation, James Comey, Robert Mueller, or congressional Democrats investigating Russian interference. A very few examples follow (see Chapter 30 for more).
On February 15, 2017, CNN reported that both President-Elect Trump and President Obama had been briefed on the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the election. The New York Times also had reported the story the day before. In response Trump called the Russian controversy “fake news” and said the Times story was “a joke.”
“I have nothing to do with Russia,” said Trump. “I told you, I have no deals there; I have no anything. Now, when WikiLeaks, which I had nothing to do with, comes out and happens to give, they’re not giving classified information.”
Trump added, “I didn’t do anything for Russia. If we could get along with Russia, that’s a positive thing. I would love to be able to get along with Russia. If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
When Trump was asked if anyone advising his campaign had contacts with Russia during the campaign, he said, “No. No. Nobody I know of.”
Likely story.
That same day George Papadopoulos, a member of Trump’s campaign staff who had several meetings with Russian officials, was being interviewed by the FBI. A week later, the Washington Post reported that Jeff Sessions had spoken with Russian ambassador Kislyak during the campaign. Sessions had “forgotten” about this meeting in his confirmation hearing when Senator Al Franken (D-MN) asked if he had any contacts with Russians. When Democrats called for Sessions’s resignation, Trump declared he had total confidence in his attorney general.
On this day Sessions announced he could not be impartial with respect to the collusion charges against the Trump campaign, and thus he would recuse himself from the investigation. The assistant attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, would take over.
Trump was furious. Going on the offensive, Trump posted an old photo of Chuck Schumer eating donuts with Putin and posted an article of a meeting Nancy Pelosi had with Putin.
“I hereby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi, for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it,” Trump wrote.
Clearly rattled, Trump then made up a whopper of a story to deflect the heat being directed at him. He accused President Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower during the campaign in a series of tweets: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! … Just out. The same Russian Ambassador that met with Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone … Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire-tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! … How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Americans at this point, if not before, had good reason to worry about the psychological stability of the president of the United States.
The “spying” accusation was false. Obama would have had to petition the Justice Department to get permission for such a wiretap. There are longstanding laws and procedures to ensure that presidents cannot wiretap rivals for political purposes. There is no evidence that Obama spied on anyone in the Trump campaign.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen.”
Trump, it turned out, based his accusation on an article in Breitbart News, famed for its outrageous conspiracy theories and ridiculous accusations against those not on the far right. Trump jumped on the made-up story to deflect criticism coming his way.
At about the same time, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway backed up Trump’s claim about Obama spying on him. She suggested that domestic spying could be accomplished in many ways, even through microwave ovens. Memes of President Obama holding binoculars leaning out of a microwave oven went viral. Amid all the insanity, there had to be some humor.
On March 20, 2017, FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI was looking into the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
That day Trump tweeted, “This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it! … The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College and lost!”
Two days later CNN reported that Trump’s associates communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This was the reason for Comey’s investigation.
Trump tweeted, “Trump Russia story is a hoax. #MAGA.” He asked why the FBI wasn’t looking to see whether Hillary Clinton had ties to Russia.
On April 1, 2017, Trump brought up the fake wiretapping charge again.
“When will Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd and @NBCNews start talking about the Obama SURVEILLANCE SCANDAL and stop with the Fake Trump/Russia story? … A total scam.”
On April 25, 2017, the Senate voted ninety-four to six to confirm Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general. With Sessions having recused himself, Rosenstein would now oversee the investigation looking into Trump’s ties to Russia.
On May 8 Trump tweeted, “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”
For over three years, followers of the president’s Twitter page have been exposed to daily, often hourly, rants about the Russia “hoax” and just about everything to do with Russia.
With respect to all topics Russia, President Trump has lost it.