Donald Trump’s connections to Russia go way beyond his hero worship of Vladimir Putin and the influence of former campaign director, Paul Manafort. While Putin has presided over both a collapse of the Russian economy and the move of Russia from democratic elections to corrupt elections dominated by fraud, Trump sees Putin as a better leader than the American president. A view that is shared by Mike Pence. It’s enough to make a former CIA chief say that Trump has been recruited as an unwitting agent of Putin.
But “unwitting” implies some level of innocence, and there’s nothing innocent about this.
U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.
Trump’s adviser, Carter Page, has already gone to Russia to make a speech that praised Russia and trashed the United States.
A month later, Page dumbfounded foreign policy experts again by giving another speech harshly critical of U.S. policy — this time in Moscow.
But this time, it’s more than just speeches.
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... U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that ... Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials because the Treasury Department in August 2014 named Sechin to a list of Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia’s “illegitimate and unlawful actions in the Ukraine.”
In his meeting with Sechin, Page reportedly discussed the possibility of lifting sanctions.
If Trump is making promises about lifting sanctions, what is he getting in return? It could be immediate help.
U.S. intelligence agencies have also received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide while in Moscow — Igor Diveykin. A former Russian security official, Diveykin now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election, the Western intelligence source said.
One of the men Donald Trump has named to his team of advisers on foriegn policy traveled to Russia, met with a man under sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine, and then with the man believed responsible for hacking US election data.
A month ago, in reviewing the long list of connections between Trump and the Russian government, the verdict was that, while Trump was engaging in both reckless behavior and rhetoric that weakened the American position …
Right now, there’s no proof that Trump and Manafort have been involved in a quid-pro-quo arrangement with Vladimir Putin. However, this whole thing stinks to high heaven. This isn’t just a hint of smoke on the horizon, this is a raging forest fire of connections between a United States presidential candidate and a foreign power.
Not only is that fire still burning, the shape of the deal between Trump and Putin may be visible through the smoke.
The questions about Page come amid mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and state election databases in Arizona and Illinois. In a rare public talk this week, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence Mike Vickers said that the Russian cyberattacks constituted meddling in the U.S. election and were “beyond the pale.”
Donald Trump delivered one invitation to Vladimir Putin to hack this election publicly, then put that statement off as “sarcasm.” Is Carter Page conducting the next round of negotiations in person—and offering something in exchange for the Kremlin’s help?