Collusion

Luke Harding is the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian. He has a new book called Collusion that documents the numerous connections between Donald Trump and the Russians. His interview with Terry Gross is very interesting.

What's most interesting is the sheer volume of connections that Trump has to Russia, both direct and indirect, that go back 40 years. The first of course, is his marriage to Ivana, a Czech immigrant (at the time Czechoslovakia was a Soviet puppet state). As Harding tells it:

Well, the KGB really forever has been interested in cultivating people, actually, who might be useful contacts for them, identifying targets for possible recruitments possibly to be agents. That's not saying that Donald Trump is an agent, but the point is that he would have been on their radar certainly by 1977 when he married Ivana, who came from Czechoslovakia, a kind of communist Eastern bloc country. And we know from Czechoslovak spy records de-classified last year that the spy agencies were in contact with Ivana's father, that they kept an eye on the Trumps in Manhattan throughout the 1980s. And we also know, from defectors and other sources, that whatever Prague learned, communist Prague, would have been funneled to the big guys in Moscow, to the KGB. So there would have been a file on Donald Trump.

But I think what's kind of interesting about this story, if you understand the kind of Russian espionage background, is Trump's first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987. He went with Ivana. He writes about it in "The Art Of The Deal," his best-selling memoir. He talks about getting an invitation from the Soviet government to go over there. And he makes it seem kind of rather casual. But what I discovered from my research is that there was actually a concerted effort by the Soviet government via the ambassador at the time, who was newly arrived, a guy called Yuri Dubinin, to kind of charm Trump, to flatter him, to woo him almost. And Dubinin's daughter, sort of who was part of this process, said that the ambassador rushed up to the top of Trump Tower, basically kind of breezed into Trump's office and he melted. That's the verb she used. He melted.

After Trump's visit to Moscow, he suddenly got interested in politics:

There was no randomness about this. I mean, we know from Dubinin's daughters that they picked on Trump. And there's a kind of curious coda to this, which is, two months after his trip - actually, less than two months, he comes back from Moscow and, having previously shown very little interest in foreign policy, he takes out these full-page advertisements in The Washington Post and a couple of other U.S. newspapers basically criticizing Ronald Reagan and criticizing Reagan's foreign policy. Now, Trump is many things, but he is not an expert on international affairs, and this is curious. 

Trump's Anti-Reagan Ad

Trump coincidentally began being political, right after coming back from the Soviet Union. He spent almost $100,000 on ads in the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe slamming Ronald Reagan.

It's almost as if Trump was acting on orders from the Russians. Or was being manipulated by them through flattery.

After several disastrous bankruptcies, American banks would no longer lend Trump money. So Trump turned to foreign banks, including Deutsche Bank -- which coincidentally was fined $630 million this past January in a Russian money-laundering scheme.

Trump's secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, is coincidentally involved with the Bank of Cyprus, which coincidentally involved with Russian money-laundering.

And then there's the $90 million Trump coincidentally got from a Russian Putin Pal for a moldy Florida mansion at the height of the financial meltdown:

It was a kind of seaside mansion bought by Trump in 2004 and then sold by him for $95 million at the height of the financial crash and giving him a profit of about $50 million. And I've tried to interview Rybolovlev. He won't meet with me, but I've talked to his press guy and - who says that Rybolovlev basically donned a pair of swimming trunks and never set foot in the mansion but kind of paddled along the territory and saw it from afar, decided to buy it.

When he did buy it, he realized it had a mold problem. He never, ever lived there. He demolished it, and it seems a kind of pretty disastrous piece of real estate acquisition, but one that massively enriched Trump. Now, his press guy says, nothing to see here, this was a reasonable investment, you guys are all conspiracy theorists. But it's very strange.

If Trump were a Democrat Republicans in Congress would be screaming bloody murder, calling Trump a Russian puppet and spy. They would be demanding his impeachment and execution for treason. They've called for Hillary Clinton to be jailed for far more tenuous connections to a Russian company that bought a Canadian company that owns uranium mines across the world, including the United States.

Trump has hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of financial dealings with Russian investors, Russian oligarchs who own condos in Trump Tower, as well as connections to Russian mobsters. He (and Ivanka) has made hotel deals with several oligarchs across the world, including Canada and former Soviet Republics (most have failed to materialize or went into bankruptcy -- Trump is a bad businessman). He doesn't have any direct investments in Russia (though he has tried to build a hotel there for the last three decades), but Russians have literally put hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in his pockets.

This is why Trump will never say anything to piss off Putin and the Russians. They kept him afloat when he was down. They made him what he is today. And they've got all the dirt on him. Even if there isn't a golden shower video.