Eighteen facts support idea of Trump as a Russian asset

Max Boot, a highly respected, conservative political analyst, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which he gives 18 reasons to support the case that Trump is a Russian asset.   Here are some excerpts.

*     *     *     *     *

Boot begins by referring to the FBI's investigation into whether President Trump may have been working on behalf of Russia.  That investigation was subsequently subsumed within the Mueller investigation, and no public information about findings has been released.    But, Boot says, "we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation."    He then lists his 18 supporting reasons:

"— Trump has a long financial history with Russia.  As summarized by Jonathan Chait . . . :  'From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. . . Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.' . . .   These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

" — The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

" — Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails . . . on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

" — There were . . . 101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives, and the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.  The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower . . . 

" — The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

" — Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

" — Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. . . . 

" — Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the 'Russia thing' — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. . . . 

" — Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

" — Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI . . . 

" — Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO . . . the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

" — Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

" — Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else . . . . [even] congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

" — Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, . . . Trump 'has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin . . . taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials . . . 

" — Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

" — Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

" — Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

" — Trump is sowing chaos in the [U.S.] government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown . . . 

"Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . . 

"[A page intentionally left blank]

"I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. . . .

"This is hardly a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' case that Trump is a Russian agent . . . But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is 'an unwitting agent' . . . or a 'useful fool' who is 'manipulated by Moscow' . . .  If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one."

*     *     *     *     *

Thus wrote the conservative journalist Max Boot.

As journalist and Russia specialist Natasha Bertran noted:   If we were not so infiltrated on a daily basis with news -- often shocking news -- about Trump, some of the recent stories reported would be "the biggest news . . . ever."

We must not get so lost in the fog that we cannot see clearly what is happening today.  For example, perhaps Trumps refusal to really negotiate with Democrats to resolve the government shutdown is part of the plan to weaken our country and our democracy.

Ralph