Donald Trump displays plenty of madness, but at least occasionally there is also some method. As the Atlantic points out, when it comes to Trump’s concentrated effort to clear out threats at the FBI and DOJ, the one thing the targets of his tweets have in common is a particular set of skills. Not for tracking down missing relatives. For unraveling plots by Russian mobsters.
Trump’s daily attacks on Bruce Ohr may play against the idea that Ohr was friendly with Christopher Steele. But there’s a reason why the Justice Department official and the former British intelligence agent were in contact, and it has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton or Fusion GPS. It’s because both were experts on Russian organized crime. Ohr was directly involved in a case against Paul Manafort’s boss and benefactor, oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Before Ohr moved into the center of Trump’s crosshairs, there was a focus on former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe. By utterly no coincidence, McCabe had more than a decade of experience in going after crime syndicates centered in Russia. Before moving into the deputy role, McCabe supervised the team of agents focused on that area.
Lisa Page — the “lovely” Lisa Page in the many tweets Trump has issued playing up the relationship between the Justice Department lawyer and former FBI agent Peter Strzok — is also an expert on the Russian mafia with a particular history dealing with money laundering. And Strzok was a Russian counterintelligence expert.
It’s only natural that in an investigation centering on crime related to Russia, the law enforcement cast would include a lot of experts on … crime related to Russia. But Trump seems to be unerringly picking out those with experience in getting to the bottom of these schemes, an in particular the kind of money-laundering of which Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was accused.
Donald Trump may be shouting “no collusion,” at every opportunity, but the special counsel’s office has already demonstrated that it will go after cases involving money laundering for the Russian mob … and that’s an area where Trump has a lot to fear.
Trump’s connection to Russian money laundering goes back decades. In particular, a series of studies from the Financial Times showed how, following the bankruptcy connected to a string of casino failures in Atlantic City, Russian organized crime offered Trump an easy out. Taking advantage of lax real estate laws, the same criminals who had previously run a record amount of money-laundering through Trump’s casinos, turned to his apartments and condos as a way of getting dollars into the country. Donald Trump went from massive debt, to a miraculous recovery. Or at least that’s the way it was presented in the papers and in Trump’s ghost-written books.
But the truth of what happened with Trump in that post-casino period is the truth that Trump least wants anyone to discover, and the reason why Trump is particularly eager to draw a target on anyone with expertise in dealing with Russian crime and money-laundering.
The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources.