Trump, Putin, and the Election

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

18 January 17

 

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ast summer Republican opponents of Donald Trump for president hired a crack ex-MI6 British foreign spy specialized on Russia, Christopher Steele, to investigate Russian president Vladimir Putin’s secret activities to befoul Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump win the presidency. Upon Trump’s nomination, supporters of Clinton paid for Steele’s investigations.

During his nearly 20 years as a secret British foreign agent, Steele had been at one point the Second Secretary in Britain’s embassy in Moscow. He is said to have been the “top expert on Russia” in MI6’s London headquarters. Having resigned from MI6 in 2009, last year, on hire from a US spy shop, FS Fusion, Steele was using his contacts in Moscow and presumably also his large internet of sources in Europe through his private international investigative consultancy in London, Orbis Business Intelligence.

Inquiring about Putin’s scheme last summer, Steele was so shaken by what he was finding out that he gave copies of his early memos to British intelligence and to a contact at the FBI. He had cooperated with the FBI investigating bribery in the governing board of world soccer. The FBI trusted him, and – reacting, Steele has said, with “shock and horror” – asked him for more information, which he provided.

His memos were leaked, also, perhaps by GP Fusion, to a number of reporters. On October 31st, a week before the voting, the magazine Mother Jones reported the existence of his memos and the shocking gist of them, but until then, for about five months no one had reported to the public what Steele said he had learned. The voters of the United States were kept in almost total darkness about Steele’s sequence of memos on the Kremlin and Donald Trump which finally comprised his 35-page “oppo” intelligence document.

Early this month with Trump’s inauguration approaching, the chieftains of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA were providing President Obama and the president-elect proof that Putin and his government had hacked both sides of the American election and had directed the stolen information on Clinton, especially her private email system while secretary of state, into the American press to help elect Trump. At the very same time, however, the “First Clients” of the two presidents also secretly slipped them a two-page “addendum” about Steele’s intelligence product.

Why had they waited so long?

Why did they continue to keep Steele’s’s memos secret from the people?

What does the Steele report so dangerously contain?

The Monday evening of January 9th, CNN dramatically broadcast to a startled world the Steele report’s existence and the fact that the top U.S. spy chieftains had secretly provided Obama and Trump their two-page report about it. The rest of the week was a swirl of shock and consequences. On January 11th BuzzFeed News posted Steele’s entire 35 pages online. In London the press blared out that Steele, learning he was about to be identified, was “terrified” for his family and himself and had fled his home in great haste and gone into hiding.

The media in a scattered-voice chorus hastened to explain that they had not reported about Steele’s work because they had not been able to verify it. This excuse was accurate, but misleading without two ignored additional facts: (1) that Steele’s and his associates’ explosive inquiries had to be aimed, often as bank shots, into the midst of Putin’s inner circle, his closest aides in his Presidential Administration (the “PA”), and (2) the careers and destinies of Steele’s sources into Putin’s innermost circles would have plummeted like bricks falling if Steele had named them. Any reporter, however nimble, would have to try to zig-zag through the same Putin labyrinth, as well as Trump’s.

The big stories’ insistence on the one excuse, often in the headlines, at once became the basis of almost unanimous rush-to-judgement discreditings of Steele’s work. Major stories in the mainstream press correctly and repeatedly called his document “unverified,” “unsubstantiated,” and “unproven.” A source told The New York Times that Steele was aware the Russians might be feeding him “disinformation.”

So what here is both true and fair? The stakes in this are far-reaching and very high.

The Times, in the 17th paragraph of one of its online stories after the CNN scoop, said that if some of the Steele document’s claims are true, “they are extremely serious, potentially treasonous acts.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, in his column on Reader Supported News, wrote that if “Trump or his assistants colluded with Russian agents to tilt the election his way … that’s treason,” for which the statutory penalties are death, prison, or fines, and that the offender “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

The Wall Street Journal commented in an editorial on January 12th that Trump’s vehement denials of the Steele report also mean “that if we learn in the future that Russia does have compromising details about him, his Presidency could be over.”

Over an op-ed comment published in the Times by Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations (in which he said the claims in the Steele report, if true, are “sensational” and called for a “911-style commission” to investigate its allegations and publicly report), the Times headline asked, concerning Trump: ”A Modern Manchurian Candidate?”

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Here, then, using the text on BuzzFeed News, is an analytical, substantive description of the most salient contents of Steele’s 35-page paid-for “oppo” intelligence report, true or false, that was secretly described to Trump and Obama by the heads of the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Responses from the Trump quarter follow this section.

(All statements described or quoted in this section’s report should be understood to come from Christopher Steele, and all the direct quotations here come from his document. Names in that document, intelligence-memo style, are capitalized, but not here. Data on one subject that are contained in several of the memos are drawn together.)

Steele’s “Source E,” “an ethnic Russian close associate of Trump,” “admitted a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” was active between the Trump side and the Russian leadership, managed for Trump by his campaign manager then, Paul Manafort, acting through Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and others as intermediaries.

“The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating … Clinton, whom President Putin apparently both hated and feared.” Information hacked from the Democratic side was passed to “the Wikileaks platform.” In the Kremlin liaison with the Trump campaign, “a stream of further hacked Clinton material had been injected through Wikileaks and other conduits” and would continue “up to the election,” according to “a senior Russian leadership figure.”

The operation had “the full knowledge and consent of Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return the Trump campaign had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in the Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine, a priority for Putin who needed to cauterize the subject.”

At a meeting last June 7th or 8th between a Trump representative (whom I will not name here) and the CEO of a Russian corporation, the Russian offered “the [American]/Trump associates the brokerage up to 19% (privatized) stake in [the corporation] in return,” the American has confirmed that if Trump is elected, “then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”

When Manafort left Trump’s staff, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen replaced Manafort as the leader in “secret liaison with the Kremlin” in “the Trump campaign-Kremlin operation.” With the U.S. election then five or six weeks away, a secret meeting including Cohen was held in Prague “between the campaign team, Kremlin, and associated hackers in Prague” concerning “how to process desirable cash payments to operatives, cover-up operations,” and what to do if Clinton won. [Cryptically,] “Anti-Clinton hackers and other operatives paid by both Trump team and Kremlin …” The hackers to be paid “had worked in Europe under Kremlin directions against the Clinton campaign.”

A source says the exchange of information in the “extensive conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin runs “in both directions.” “Trump’s team using moles within the Democratic National Committees and hackers in the U.S. as well as outside in Russia.... Russians receiving intel from Trump on Russian oligarchs and their families in U S.” Source E said “much” of the information flowing from the Trump team to Russia concerns the quirks, families, and assets of Russian oligarchs in the U.S, “with which Putin and the Kremlin seemed preoccupied.”

According to a “suggestion close to Trump and Manafort,” the Trump team were “happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive business ties to China and other emerging companies.” Per Source E, Trump and his team were “relatively relaxed” about media attention to alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election “because it deflected media and the Democrats’ attention away from Trump’s business dealings in China and other emerging markets. Unlike in Russia, these were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.”

The Kremlin’s operation to support Trump in the election, according to Source E, entailed three elements, “agents/facilitators in the Democratic Party structure itself, Russian émigrés and associated offensive cyber operators” in the U.S., and “state cyber operators working in Russia.” The pension payment system for Russian émigrés in the U.S. was also entailed as a cover. Tens of thousands of dollars were involved.

From March into September last year Russian operatives did “transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data, and conduct ‘altering operations’” against the Democratic Party leadership. Two hacking experts, including one “recruited under duress by the FSB” [the Federal Security Service, which is the successor to the old KGB], were “significant players.” In Prague, Cohen and others made plans to pay off operators, including some from Romania and Bulgaria, “to go … to ground to cover their traces. Ivanov’s associates said that the operatives … had been paid by both Trump’s team and the Kremlin.”

By one report, Trump and Manafort “were happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive business ties with China and other emerging countries.” According to Source E, “unlike in Russia,” those ties “were substantial and involved the payment of bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.”

A formerly top Russian intelligence officer claims the FSB has enough on Trump in Russia “to blackmail him,” including [a word omitted here] “sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.” Source B says the same thing: the Russians “could blackmail him if they so wished.” In Russia kompromat means compromising information. “A source close to Presidential Administration chief I. Ivanov” believed they had some of that on Trump “which he should bear in mind with his dealings with them.” (Ivanov was high in Putin’s PA.)

A source “with direct knowledge” said Trump, while in St. Petersburg exploring the real estate market, had to “settle for” sex services with local prostitutes.

Sources D and E state that in 2013, when President and Mrs. Obama had been staying in the Ritz Carlton Hotel near the Kremlin, Trump hired prostitutes and had them urinate on the bed the Obamas had slept in “to perform a ‘golden shower’ (urination) in front of him.” The FSB was “known to be in control of the hotel” with hidden microphones and cameras “in all the main rooms.”

On Putin’s direct orders, “A dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian intelligence service over many years,” but it did not entail personally embarrassing information and was mainly from telephone tapping and when she was in Russia; but as of that memo this dossier had not been given to Trump or sent outside Russia.

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In the U.S., Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, responded that he has never even been to Prague. Trump said there is a Michael Cohen in Prague and the sources may have gotten that Cohen and his lawyer mixed up.

Trump had tweeted previously that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” Now he totally rejected Steele’s document. “It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” put together by opponents, “Sick people … put the crap together.” Agreeing that Putin had interfered with the U.S. election (“I think it was Russia”), Trump said about that only that Putin “shouldn’t have done it” and won’t do it any more. Trump specifically denied Steele’s item about the “golden shower” in the hotel near the Kremlin, saying he knows very well to be careful in foreign hotel rooms and that he is a “germaphobe.”

As also widely reported, Trump called the CNN report “fake news,” damned the intelligence services if they leaked it (“Are we living in Nazi Germany?”), called BuzzFeed “a failing pile of garbage,” and berated the press for reporting such falsehoods.

Asked by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden if any of his staff had met with Russians about the election, Trump dodged the question, not answering it.

Russians responding officially to the Steele document generally dismissed it as propaganda from the West. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said its “main goal was to complicate the process of normalizing relations with Russia for the new team.” Some officials close to Putin feared at one point, when anger was rising in the U.S. about the Kremlin campaign for Trump, that he would blame them, but Ivanov, then his top aide, was quoted saying that ”Putin was generally satisfied with the progress of the anti-Clinton operation to date.” As alarm in the U.S. about Russia’s election interference rose higher, though, Ivanov was replaced.

Last September, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had written to FBI Director James B. Comey declaring that “you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”

Although Comey has refused to say whether the FBI is investigating the matter, it is obvious that they and other intelligence agencies had to be and have been doing that, finally cryptically reporting on it to their bosses the president and his imminent successor while telling the public nothing about it.

A week before election day David Corn, writing for Mother Jones, the circulation of which is above 200,000, revealed that he had interviewed Steele, whom he quoted extensively without, then, giving Steele’s name. “A senior U.S. government official” familiar with Steele had told Corn that Steele “has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U S government.” Steele told Corn that according to his sources, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.”

“This is something of huge significance, way above party politics,” Steele opined. He said then that he had recently given his Trump-Russia intelligence products to a contact at the FBI; that the FBI, reacting with “shock and horror,” had requested more information on it; and that “there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on.” When, as the election neared, the agency’s inquiry seemed to halt, Steele stopped trying to help them.

In his story Corn summarized Steele’s report – that the Russian regime had been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years, that Putin’s aim was “to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance,” that the Russians had “compromised” Trump and could “blackmail him,” and that they had bugged Hillary Clinton’s conversations and intercepted her phone calls.

A committee of the U.S. Senate is reported to be preparing to conduct an investigation pursuant to Steele’s report. Last Wednesday, January 11th, The Washington Post reported that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, said he told Trump that “U.S. spy agencies do not believe the information was reliable” and that he doubted the news leak came from intelligence agencies. The chair of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Devin Numes, R-Calif. and a Trump supporter, said the Steele report “didn’t look like a very good intelligence product to me” after glancing at it, but he would be “asking for all the underlying data” behind broader intelligence reports he has seen.

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Ronnie Dugger, recipient of the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism, has published biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, other books, and hundreds of articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. He is writing a book on nuclear war and working on his poems in Austin, Texas. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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