Donald Trump Is a Russian Asset…
…even if he doesn’t realize it. The president remains the foremost threat to our national security.
It’s right there in black and white in the Mueller Report:
The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. The Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered…principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second…the investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign…[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency…and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…
Mueller Report
Here’s Donald Trump speaking to reporters on Air Force One after the disastrous summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018 in Helsinki, Finland:
He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times…He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.
Donald Trump
Russian War Games
This past Sunday on 60 Minutes, there was a segment memorializing NATO’s 70th anniversary with a focus on Norway, a proud NATO member while Sweden and Finland remain neutral. Norway shares a border with Russia, and is therefore NATO’s eyes and ears as “Guardians of the North.”
Lately, according to Norway’s joint force commander Lt. Gen. Rune Jacobsen, Russian military aircraft have been flying up and down the Norwegian coastline in ways that are not routine. Jacobsen: “What we have seen lately is aggressive flying and simulated attacks against Norwegian exercises.”
“It’s not something you should do to your neighbor,” smiled Jacobsen.
This goes to show the importance of NATO as the gold standard of military alliances: If one member country gets attacked, all other NATO members are obliged to come in its defense.
Trump Not a Big Fan of NATO
For reasons that vaguely suggest that some members, Norway included, aren’t paying their fair share, President Trump on many occasions has suggested that the US withdraw from NATO…which would be tantamount to destroying the alliance.
Trump has been talked out of it each time by “the adults in the room,” which significantly included former defense secretary Jim Mattis.
The US leaving NATO would be a gift wrapped with bows and ribbons for Vladimir Putin, who would love to see the US walk off the world stage and deliver Europe for Russian adventurism. Remember that NATO was founded in 1949 at the dawn of the cold war…against the Soviet Union.
“The move would be the most damaging thing that any president could do to US interests,” said Michele A. Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense.
Is Trump advancing Russian interests to our detriment? Trump’s performance at that memorable press conference in Helsinki in July 2018 provides a clue. The three minute video is publish by The Guardian via YouTube:
Taking Putin’s Side Over America’s
And what could be worse than watching an American president desperately flattering a foreign adversary, taking a murdering thug’s word over the American intelligence community and not holding the adversary accountable for verifiable attacks on our country?
A member of a state Republican organization:
I just kept watching…and I just kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for him to do something. Anything. I yelled [at the TV], Stand up for your country, for the love of God! And nothing. Not even a peep.
Tom Nichols, a professor of national security writing on the History News Network website:
We have now witnessed the very worst humiliation of a president of the United States ever, and one of the lowest points in the history of the American presidency.
Money Laundering, Lies, Secrecy
Donald Trump’s repeated assertion–“I don’t have any business with Russia”–is laughable, especially in light of the groundbreaking investigation by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait into the extensive financial ties between the Trump Organization and Russian cutouts:
From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases–a red flag for money laundering–of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during that same period…’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.’
New York Magazine
Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress was partially about concealing Donald Trump’s 2016 pursuit of building a Trump Tower in Moscow with the help of a top Putin oligarch.
And why did Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort share polling data with Russian oligarch Konstantin Kilimnick?
Finally, what should be worrisome to every American patriot is Trump’s penchant for secrecy when it comes to face-to-face meetings with the Russian president. According to the Washington Post, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the details of his conversations with…Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.”
As with everything else with the Trump presidency, it does beg the question: What has he got to hide?
