It started with Alnur Mussayev putting a post up on Facebook about Donald Trump being groomed as a Russian asset in 1987.
The story took off like wildfire on social media and around the rest of the world news media, but not in the United States. The Daily Beast had the story up, then took it down. Thanks to archiving, here's what it looked like:
Here's the link to the archived page.
It says in the story that they reached out to the White House and Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment. We would all like to know what the White House reaction was. Same for the Russian Ministry. Then the article disappeared.
There is a link to The Daily Beast Facebook page about the story, but it takes you to the Facebook login page. I haven't found an X post link.
The Daily Beast still has an article up about Anthony Scaramucci saying that the Russians have some sort of hold over Trump.
I haven't found any more deleted except on Yahoo! News.
Community member Speede18 reports that he couldn't do a comment on Yahoo! if he included "Krasnov," in it.
In Russian, Krasnov means beauty, but Trump's alleged codename could have been chosen after Pyotr Krasnov, who was a Nazi collaborator. It fits.
Alnur Mussayev is what he says he was from multiple sources. He's Kazakh, was in the Kazakhstan National Security Committee, the KNB, which came about after the fall of the USSR, when it was the KGB. While in government service he was awarded two medals and the Order of the Red Star, which was a high honor.
Order of the Red Star.
Here's the original Facebook post:
He fled to Austria in 2007 over his allegations that the Kazakzstan President was taking bribes from oil companies.
In 2008, he avoided a kidnapping attempt, which seems to have been initiated by the Kazkhstan government.
Couldn't get Google to translate.
In 2015, he faced charges in the abduction and murder of two bankers. The main suspect was found hanged in his cell before the trial began.
From 2015 until now, Mussayev is a blank page.
Trump did take a trip to Moscow in 1987 with his wife at the time, Ivana.
Donald and Ivana in Red Square in 1987.
He went to look at building a hotel there, which is confirmed in his book "The Art of the Deal."
There was also this article at the time.
Newsweek 1987.
This is from Newsweek, when they interviewed him in 1987.
1987 matches up for both people. Would Mussayev just have done some internet research, found Trump's trip to Moscow and made it up? Usually some news agency would pay for a story like this. But all he did was post it on Facebook. It looks like The Daily Beast was first with the scoop. Who spotted the post and alerted them? I'd ask them, but it's obvious there would be no response.
Then I found this article in Politico from 2017. It's excerpts from a book called Collusion:Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and how Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by Luke Harding. You would think Trump would file a lawsuit against the author and publisher just from the title.
Just searching to see if Trump sued Harding, apparently not, turned up still more information on Harding's adventures covering Russia for The Guardian. This led to information that Trump was known by the KGB as far back as 1977, when he married Ivana, from Czechoslovakia. It was a communist country under the USSR's thumb since the Warsaw Pact group invaded it in 1968 to stop the liberal reforms that were turning the country into a democracy.
Declassified Czech spy records showed that Ivana's father was in contact with spy agencies that kept an eye on the Trump's during the 1980s. Whatever Czechoslovakia found out was passed on to the KGB. So, there is a file on Donald Trump in Moscow that was already pretty thick before he even ran for president the first time.
In an interview with NPR, Harding said the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Dubinin, worked to "kind of charm Trump, to flatter him, to woo him almost."
In "The Art of the Deal " Trump talks about getting an invitation from the Soviet government to go to Moscow.
"Dubinin's daughter, who was sort of part of this process, said that the ambassador rushed 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."
We all know that this is one of Trump's character flaws. He is impressed by authority. He loves to be flattered. He's easily manipulated. The stories all add up.
Harding again. "... 2 months after his trip, actually less than 2 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." If the ad is unreadable because of compression, you can look at it here. It sounds exactly like what Trump says today about NATO and other allies: pay for it yourself. Playing right into the Russians' hands.
Reagan was a hawk about Russia. They were looking to help someone else be a pliable president.
Then Trump, "...says he's thinking about politics, not as a senator or a mayor, but he actually goes to New Hampshire and he actively floats the idea of running for president. It doesn't happen then. But he has this thought in his head. This is a strategic thought he has after his Moscow trip"
Then Harding talks about the Christopher Steele dossier. Which, he says, one can't take for fact on everything, but there's a lot of it that makes sense.
In 2008, "...what began was sort of a transactional relationship where Trump was feeding to Moscow, according to Steele, details of Russian oligarchs living in the U.S. who have property or assets or business ventures in the United States, and in return he was getting politically useful stuff."
We all know, and so many have said, that Donald Trump is nothing but transactional. Read the rest of the interview here. It's very long, detailed, and sets the stage for Trump either knowingly or unknowingly, being an assest to the KGB and later to the FSB. Harding's book tells even more.
There' also the Mueller report titled: Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.
The American Constitution Society has "Key Findings of the Mueller Report" to save you time. 37 people were indicted, and a good number went to jail for their participation in what was collusion by the Trump campaign and Trump himself. Trump can claim innocence for as long as he wants to, but he never testified to refute anything.
Put all this evidence together, and does Mussayev's post seem out of place? No, it's line with everything Trump has done from before and after he got into politics. Remember Trump asking Russia to find Hillary Clinton's "missing emails" publicly so everyone could see his involvement?
Alnur Musseyev's allegation could use some evidence to back it up, but a whole lot of other people have done that for him.
Mussayev also said, "Today, the personal file of resident 'Krasnov' has been removed from the FSB. It is being privately managed by one of Putin's close associates." How Mussayev would know that, being in Austria, is probably still another spy mystery. He still must have contacts from his old job.
The FSB wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't have a file on Donald Trump, just like they would on leaders of every country. There's also the one still in the Czech Republic.
It surely would be a fascinating read.
