The attempts by some Republicans and media outlets to normalize Russian-style autocracy is making even some of the MAGA faithful uncomfortable. It should be terrifying to all. Yes, you can find the nice grocery store in Moscow that Tucker Carlson showed us (actually a French chain that is still, unfortunately, operating in Russia). Go a bit farther afield in Russia and you will encounter the all-too-common pit toilets. There is a reason Russian troops in Ukraine carry off every tub and washing machine they find. I have been to Russia multiple times. I enjoyed the art and ballet and concerts but was always grateful when I successfully made it through customs and my plane took off to come home. There is an eerie sense that you are never really safe, always being watched. To those who think Russia is to be emulated, I encourage you to go there and see if you feel the same way when you return (assuming you are not arrested and held for ransom). Check out the subway stations for yourself. The ones in St. Petersburg are just as ornate as the ones in Moscow. They are deep underground and doubled as bomb shelters during the cold war (the dimly-lit escalators feel like a descent into Hades). But Tucker Carlson did not have to deal with the bands of roving youth who accost Westerners (recognizing them by the shoes they wear) whenever they try to catch a train there. See what it is like to live in a land where the slightest misstep can bring death by defenestration, Novichok, or slow decline in a Siberian gulag.
The association of TFG with the Russians will not shock anyone on these pages. However, I am reminded of articles I have read in the past listing many of the relevant events and links. Sometimes, when you have a list in front of you, the Trump-Russia association can be breathtaking. So as a public service, I will try here to put as many documented incidents or relevant clues as I can gather into one place. It seems to fit with this somber anniversary of the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. I have made use of multiple sources and note the most important ones at the beginning, although much of this information is common knowledge and widely reported. I acknowledge that I have borrowed some of the text from the various articles listed, with extensive editing to condense and have them make sense in 2024.
Note that no accusation of collusion or direct cooperation is implied here. There does not need to be. Putin and Trump each know very well what the other one wants.
Major sources include:
An article from Max Boot, “Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian Asset” New York Times, Jan 19, 2019.
An analysis by Marshall Cohen, “37 times Trump was soft on Russia” reported on Nov 17, 2019 in CNN and updated Aug 4 2020.
The website of Representative Eric Swalwell Congress CA14th
Analysis by Philip Bump, National columnist “The dishonest spending rhetoric that masks Trump’s Russia sympathies.” Washington Post February 12, 2024
Article on the missing binder by Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez and Zachary Cohen, CNN December 15, 2023
Jeffrey Toobin article in the New Yorker, Feb 19, 2018, on Trump and the Miss Universe Pageant
My list is currently 30 items long. I will be happy to update it periodically.
1. Miss Universe. Trump owned the Miss Universe pageant from 1996 to 2015. He generally held the pageants in warm locales. The one exception was the pageant in 2013, held in Moscow.
“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2013.
Trump was more or less forced to sell the pageant in 2015 after his comments about Mexicans and other minorities sparked outrage as he began his run for the presidency.
2. Financial Ties. Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in a New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘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,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.” Trump has traveled to Russia extensively, done business there often, and has ties to Russian interests. For example, in 2008 he made a real estate sale to Russian billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev. Trump bought a Palm Beach mansion in 2004 during a bankruptcy sale for $41 million, and less than four years later, without ever having moved in, Trump sold the mansion to Rybolovlev for $95 million. According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide. These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners.
3. Election Interference. The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president in many ways. So says the CIA and the Mueller Report.
4. Hillary’s hacked emails. Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers. Trump capitalized on the hacking and used the emails to attack Clinton on a near-daily basis in the final stretch of the campaign. The Mueller report said Trump’s campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts” and that top officials believed they had inside information about WikiLeaks, so they planned a strategy around the expected release of hacked emails.
5. Contacts between Russia and Trump 2016 Campaign. There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.” The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and a Kremlin emissary promising dirt on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.’s reaction to the offer of Russian assistance? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
6. Links between Trump campaign and administration and Russia. In his 2016 campaign and subsequent administration, Trump surrounded himself with individuals who had close links to Moscow. Just say Paul Manafort. We can throw in Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn. The next few items will help jog your memory about some of the details.
7. Paul Manafort ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch. He admitted to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump. Manafort spent a decade working for pro-Russian politicians and parties in Ukraine and cultivated close relationships with Putin-friendly oligarchs. Manafort was sentenced in 2019 to 7.5 years in prison for, among other things, evading taxes on the $60 million he had made in Ukraine. Manafort was pardoned by Trump in December, 2020, just prior to leaving office.
8. Roger Stone was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks and reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. (Stone denied it.). In February, 2020, Stone was convicted of lying to authorities, obstructing a congressional investigation and witness intimidation. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison. In July of that year, the sentence was commuted by Trump. In a tweet, Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called the commutation “Unprecedented, historic, corruption”.
9. Michael Flynn: Flynn, President Trump's former National Security Advisor, was asked to resign just weeks after he was sworn in after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his communications with Russian officials, specifically Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
In 2015, Flynn delivered an address at a Moscow event honoring RT, Russia's propaganda arm, where he was seated next to Putin. Flynn was paid $33,750 for this speech by RT, and and did not report the payment, thus concealing payment from a foreign government. Altogether, Flynn was paid more than $67,000 by Russian companies before the 2016 presidential election.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators but was also pardoned by Trump.
10. Carter Page: Page, hired as a foreign policy advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign, was known to have ties to Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas company. In July 2016, Page traveled to Moscow to make a speech. The Trump campaign approved this trip, saying he would not be traveling as an official representative of the campaign. In the speech he delivered in Moscow, he criticized American foreign policy as being hypocritical – remarks which ultimately led to his resignation from Trump's campaign. But he stuck around. Page met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in 2016. Buzzfeed reported that Page had met with a Russian intelligence agent named Victor Podobnyy in 2013, who was reportedly trying to recruit Page. Podobnyy was later charged by the U.S. for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
11. Rex Tillerson: Tillerson, President Trump's former Secretary of State, worked on energy projects in Russia for two decades during his career at Exxon. He has publicly described his “very close relationship” with President Putin and was awarded Russia's Order of Friendship in 2013, the highest state honor possible for a foreigner.
12. Jared Kushner: Let’s not forget Trump’s immediate family. Along with Michael Flynn, Kushner met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Presidential transition. The White House later acknowledged that following that meeting, Ambassador Kislyak requested a second meeting, which Kushner had a deputy attend. However, at Kislyak's request, Kushner later met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Russia's state-owned development bank, who has close ties to President Putin. The U.S. placed this bank on its sanctions list following Russia's annexation of Crimea. On April 6, 2017, the New York Times reported that Kushner failed to disclose dozens of contacts with foreign leaders on his application for top-secret security clearance -- one of those contacts being Ambassador Kislyak.
13. Donald Trump, Jr.: President Trump's son met with Fabien Baussart, a leader of a Syrian opposition group backed by the Russian government, and others about how the U.S. could work with Russia on the Syrian conflict weeks before Donald Trump was elected President. He has also been quoted saying that had had visited Russia on business over a half-dozen times. In June 2016, he met with a Russian billionaire, Emin Agalarov, under the premise that Emin had "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" from the Crown prosecutor of Russia, and that this was part of "Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
14. The 2016 GOP party platform. Ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump campaign aides removed language from the GOP party platform that called for the US government to send lethal weapons to Ukraine for its war against Russian proxies. Mueller investigated this for potential collusion but determined the change was not made “at the behest” of Russia. (The Trump administration ultimately gave lethal arms and anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainian military.) Of course, there is no longer a need for a GOP party platform.
15. Impeding investigation into Russian election interference. Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. As Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes argues, “the obstruction was the collusion” — Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.
16. Softening Russian sanctions. After the 2016 election, the Trump transition team asked Russia not to retaliate too strongly against new US sanctions imposed by then-President Barack Obama. The sanctions were intended to punish Russia for interfering in the election, but then-Trump aide Michael Flynn asked the Russian ambassador not to escalate the situation so they could have a good relationship once Trump took over.
Trump privately complained about US sanctions intended to punish Russia after one of its ex-spies was poisoned in the United Kingdom, according to Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. The US and UK blamed Russia for trying to assassinate the defector, Sergei Skripal. After the sanctions were announced in August 2018, Trump tried to rescind them and said the US was “being too tough on Putin,” according to Bolton’s memoir.
The Treasury Department in 2018 sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, along with three companies linked to him, over his support for Russian interference in the 2016 election. But by January 2019, the Trump administration lifted some of these sanctions. In response, 11 Senate Republicans supported a Democratic resolution calling for the sanctions to remain.
17. No acknowledgement of Russian election interference. Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.
18. Giving Russia classified intelligence. Trump gave Russia classified intelligence at least once. In a move that rattled even Republican allies during the early months of his presidency, Trump shared highly classified information with two senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting in May 2017. The intelligence, which was about ISIS, was sensitive enough that it could have exposed a vulnerable source.
Was there more? There is no direct evidence but the prospects are obvious and truly scary. Trump is now indicted for illegal hoarding of classified documents after he left office. When he was asked to return them, he fought the authorities for many months before Mar-a-Lago was finally raided and searched by federal agents. Some of the documents were extremely sensitive. Why did he work so hard to keep them?
A CNN report on Dec 15, 2023, described a large binder of classified material that went missing at the end of the Trump administration and that has still not been recovered. The CNN report stated: “The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN. The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.” Where is that binder now?
19. Undermining law enforcement. Trump does not like to be held accountable for anything. So he attacks. Like no previous president, Trump attacked and undermined the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.
20. Undermining the EU and NATO. The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe. Given early 20th century European history, the E.U. is arguably the most important political and economic movement in the last 200 years. Trump consistently attacks both, thereby assisting Russia. He has suggested that France should leave the E.U. and that the United States should leave NATO, reportedly saying, “NATO is as bad as NAFTA.”
21. Defending Putin and other autocrats. Trump has refused to condemn Putin’s use of violence against his opponents. His comment in 2017: “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?” Trump has called Putin a “strong leader” and said Putin has done “a really great job outsmarting our country.” Trump also claimed he’d “get along very well” with Putin. The death of Navalny and the murder of the defecting Russian helicopter pilot has made no dent in Trump’s admiration for the Russian leader. Trump’s talk about vengeance seems to reflect his fantasies of one-upping Putin by systematically eliminating his own opponents should he get the chance.
In summer 2018, Trump blocked his administration from releasing a statement on the 10th anniversary of the Russia-Georgia war, according to Bolton’s memoir. Bolton said European leaders noticed Trump’s silence and “became even more concerned about American resolve.” Russia invaded its neighbor Georgia in 2008 and still occupies two breakaway territories. Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, just as the Russians do.
22. Subservient manner in meetings with Putin. In his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki, Trump was (in the words of Max Boot) “utterly supine”. The video from the meetings was hard to watch.
23. Secret conversations with Putin. Trump went to extraordinary lengths to conceal 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 anyone. Several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.
24. Trump sides with Russia against Ukraine. During his impeachment proceedings in 2019 and early 2020, Trump lied repeatedly about Ukraine, aligning himself with Russian disinformation about the country.
Trump temporarily froze US aid for Ukraine, leading to his impeachment. Previously, the Trump administration had slow-walked sales of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine because of concerns that it would upset Russia, according to a State Department official.
Trump attacked Marie Yovanovitch, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine until he recalled her in spring 2019. Her ouster was a major part of Trump’s impeachment.
Trump did nothing in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian ships in international waters (in the last 2 years of his administration), thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.
When Russia prepared to launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Trump’s immediate response was to praise Putin’s “genius.” After the invasion began, he called the move “smart.”
The people of Ukraine do not want to be part of Russia. They know exactly what that association means; they have lived it. It is a horrible existence that the MAGA adherents who have never been outside the U.S. cannot begin to understand. Ukrainians are willing to fight and die for their own freedom, rallying around an inspirational leader. Their resolve is deeply based on their experience. If we are complacent, that experience could one day be ours. To say we are failing not just Ukraine but ourselves with the critical aid bill hung up in Congress is an historical understatement.
25. Trump ignored warnings of Russian bounties. The President was repeatedly told during in-person briefings and in written intelligence reports in 2019 and 2020 that the US government believed Russia paid bounties to Afghan militants to kill Americans, as reported by multiple outlets. Despite being given this information, Trump did not publicly condemn Russia or take any retaliatory actions. Trump has denied receiving any briefings on the topic. Trump said allegations that Russia paid Taliban militants to kill US troops were “another hoax” that was “made up by fake news.” Trump never brought up the issue in conversations with Putin.
26. Trump repeats Russian talking points. Besides Ukraine, Trump has defended the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, in spite of the US efforts to support the Afghan resistance in the conflict.
27. Trump weakened U.S. positions around the world. Trump pulled U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran. In June 2020, Trump also approved plans to significantly reduce U.S. forces in Germany.
28. Trump sows chaos in government, then and now. Trump triggered a record-breaking partial government shutdown and put “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department when Senate confirmations stalled or appeared unlikely. This benefited Russia indirectly. The strategy continues to play out as Trump orchestrates inaction in Congress via his acolytes. The current Congress is setting a record for lack of accomplishment.
29. Russian interference in 2024 election. This will probably take many forms. Misinformation will be plentiful and some great part of it will originate in Russia. At present Alexander Smirnov, the Republicans star witness in the effort to impeach Biden, has confessed to lying and says he got the information from Russia. He may be lying about the latter as well but the impeachment effort is falling apart. Smirnov has been rearrested as a flight risk. The National Rifle Association, a recent conduit of misinformation and Russian funds (remember Maria Butina?), seems to be stymied for now. Other organizations, perhaps a Lara Trump-run RNC, will take its place.
Butina illustrates our vulnerability, perhaps part of the Russian effort in the 2020 campaign. Paul Erickson, Butina’s intimate partner and co-conspirator, was convicted of fraud and then pardoned by Trump during his last week in office. Butina, meanwhile, was convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, briefly imprisoned, released and deported, and is now a member of the State Duma in Russia.
30. “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” Trump’s most recent rant (South Carolina, 02/10/24) on Russia, expressing his lack of support for NATO and affinity for Putin. No need to repeat the implications here.
The conclusion from Max Boot in 2019 was:
“If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.”
It only gets worse. The association between Trump and the Russians is coming to a head with the bill to support Ukraine now being blocked by Johnson and the Putin wing in Congress. The larger war is now two years old. Trump is working overtime to do Putin’s bidding and block any aid going to Ukraine. The stakes are very high for Putin. If Russia loses this war and is forced out of Ukraine, how long will Putin be able to remain in his position? The stakes are thus very high for Trump himself. How far are Republicans willing to go down this path? Do any Republicans remain who still value life in an open and democratic society?