Looking further at the debacle of the Zelensky-Trump-Vance White House meeting, something that originally escaped my notice needs some attention, as it gets to the heart of President Trump's views of Vladimir Putin.
Trump has always been susceptible to flattery, particularly from those he considers his equals. In his 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen stated the only discussion he ever had with Trump about Russia was when Trump said to him one day in the office prior to the 2016 campaign, "Did you see that President Putin said some really nice things about me?" After his disastrous 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, I wrote that Trump seemed like a star-struck teenage girl in his presence. At the same time, when acting at a distance, during his first administration Trump was much more aggressive with Russia than either Obama or Biden.
Nonetheless, it seems Trump feels some type of special bond with Putin and that bond was created by the Russia Collusion Hoax. During the recent White House meeting, Trump said to Zelensky:
“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?”
A very revealing comment as the President makes clear he thinks the Russia Collusion matter was something that both he and Putin were put through together, making them "bros" of a sort, a kind of bonding experience. He thinks they have a common enemy in the Democrats and their sycophants in the media who put them through this ordeal. It explains why Putin was his first call to an international leader after the Mueller Report was released.
Having thoroughly investigated the Russia Collusion allegations, I know it is, by far, the biggest American political scandal of my lifetime. But Vladimir Putin is not one of the victims, he is one of the perpetrators, and he has played American politicians, including Trump, and media across the political spectrum for fools.
Putin's goal for years has been to weaken America by creating division. Prior to 2016, the Kremlin supported Occupy Wall Street and the American environmental groups seeking to block energy development, particularly fracking. Through social media, his minions have supported Black Lives Matter and those opposed to the organization. A Facebook executive testified that after the 2016 election, the Russian bots immediately switched to agitation against the incoming Trump administration. Disruption, chaos, and distrust is Putin's goal. In this effort he has been successful and Russia Collusion was his crowning achievement. In perpetrating this hoax, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to trust in our institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.
While we've had many other scandals since, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump's Stop the Steal garbage, and four years of pretending Joe Biden was at the top of his game, so full of energy he was running rings around younger staffers (the NY Times actually wrote a story promoting this nonsense), along with a swarm of fake narratives on other matters, Russia Collusion was the big poison injected into our system; the starting point.
Putin was playing all sides against each other.
It astonished me that those who took the Steele Dossier allegations that Trump and his campaign were collaborating with the Russians on face value, never stopped to ask themselves why that information was coming from what the dossier itself described as Russian sources, including intelligence sources.
Let's look at the players involved in those allegations:
FusionGPS, the company hired in April 2016 to investigate Trump's Russia ties, by a Clinton Campaign desperate to divert attention from Hillary's email fiasco, was at the same time working for Denis Katys, a Russian oligarch, helping him to lobby the Federal government to lift the Magnitsky sanctions, sanctions imposed by the US, after Magnitsky, a Russia journalist exposing Putin's corruption, was jailed and beaten to death by Putin's thugs. Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion, was working closely on this project with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Fredo Trump Jr. Simpson met with her the day before and the day after the Trump Tower event.
Fusion hired Christopher Steele to conduct the investigation. Steele had worked on the Russia desk for MI6 in the UK, before retiring a decade earlier. At the time he was hired by Fusion, Steele was also working for Oleg Deripaska, another Russia oligarch, currently under indictment by the U.S. Deripaska was cast by the media as a "bad guy" because of his connection with Paul Manafort, but the same people, including the Clinton Mob Lawyers working for Mueller, stayed mum about his connection with Steele.
Steele hired as his "major sub-source" Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, who had illegally remained in the U.S. and was being paid, through a cut-out, a monthly retainer by Steele. Danchenko was the subject of a FBI counter-intelligence investigation after allegations made by fellow employees at the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, that he told them if they got jobs in the Obama administration he would pay them for information. Upon investigation, the FBI determined that Danchenko had been in contact with known FSB (Russian intelligence) officers in the U.S. (1)
Given this background, in his final report, Special Counsel John Durham wrote:
"It appears the
FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the
intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele - which, again, according
to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information
in the Steele Dossier reports - was, in whole or in part, Russian
disinformation."
He goes on:
"The failure of the FBI to assess properly the prior counterespionage investigation of Danchenko is incomprehensible."
Another of Steele's sources for the allegations in the dossier, in particular, the most scandalous and one that got much of the initial press attention when the dossier became public, that on a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump insisted on having the same suite at the Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and then had prostitutes come to that room and piss on the bed, turned out not to be a Russian, but an American. Charles Dolan was a DC lobbyist and public relations guy who was representing Russia in the United States. Dolan was in close contact with Putin's press secretary and Russia's ambassador to the U.S. He was also an advisor to the Valdai Club, a Moscow organization which organized events for Westerners and seen as a propaganda outlet for Putin. Along with his Russia connections, Dolan was also the former executive director for the Democratic Governor's Association, had chaired the Virginia campaigns for Clinton-Gore in both 1992 and 1996, been appointed by President Clinton to two four-year terms on the State Department's U.S. Advisory Commission on
Public Diplomacy, was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and a supporter in her 2016 presidential bid. And, in January 2017, Dolan emailed an acquaintance describing Igor Danchenko as a "Russian agent". (2)
One of the bombshells contained in the Durham Report is that an FBI review conducted in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive
U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them
to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have
been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of
the first Steele dossier report". The Review team was then told
"no more memorandum were to be written" and a further meeting held in which
"the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing
down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny".
Deputy
Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Dina Corsi then directed
the Review team not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the
memorandum. Team members described this as "highly unusual" because
analysis is what analysts do. An Office of General Counsel Attorney at the briefing
"remembered being shocked" by Corsi, stating "it was the most
inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at
the FBI". As of last year, Corsi was still at the FBI.
As a reminder, the Durham Report concluded:
"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele
reporting was ever corroborated"
So who was playing who?
Trump's failure to recognize Putin's long-term goals is potentially a disaster. Because Trump personalizes everything he cannot see the bigger picture. What happens next in the Ukraine-Russia war will be a test of whether Trump can drop his illusions about Putin. (3)
Trump's second administration is shaping up much differently than his first. The first time around he was surprised to win and unprepared for the office, floundering around for quite a while, not being astute enough to know much about his own appointees and willing to take advice from DC Republicans.
Russia Collusion took a gullible and conspiratorial Trump and constructed an actual conspiracy against him, leading to a daily media beating for years and reducing his ability to run his administration. They actually were all plotting against him! Including Putin.
The hoax also contributed to the destruction of his relationship with DC Republicans. His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was a good senator and a decent man, but his naivete led him to recuse himself on flimsy grounds from Russia collusion matters, leaving Trump unprotected. Eric Holder and Merrick Garland never would have recused themselves in the same situation, because they viewed themselves, as Holder once described it, as the "wingman" for their presidents.
That left the Justice Department on Russia matters under the weak reed of Rod Rosenstein, who Trump was assured would be just fine by DC Republicans. Rosenstein quickly crumbled under the pressure and appointed Mueller as Special Counsel and then stood aside. Rosenstein would later testify that if he'd known the truth about the Steele Dossier he never would have appointed Special Counsel, and that Mueller knew by September 2017 there was nothing to the allegations, yet the investigation went on for another year and a half.
Finally, when Mueller was appointed, Trump had to retain his own lawyers, who were good litigators, but traditional DC Republicans. They assured Trump that Mueller would be a "straight-shooter" and once he saw the evidence he'd quickly close up shop, so they advised full cooperation with the Special Counsel. Trump agreed, and over one million documents were provided with no claims of Executive Privilege made and he allowed, in an unprecedented move, his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about his discussions with President. All to no avail, as Mueller and his Clinton Mob Lawyers kept going, though they knew they had nothing, it was essential for political purposes and continuing media coverage to keep the pretense up as long as possible. If Bob Barr hadn't come in as AG and forced Mueller to close shop, the farce would have continued until Trump was out of office.
Trump had enough of "honorable" men who played by the rules of DC. That's why he now only wants those whose top priority is personal loyalty to The Boss; their competency and real agendas are of less concern. It's also why, as I predicted three years ago, this is his Revenge Tour. Will the tour bus be driven off the cliff, like he did in 2020? I did not vote on the presidential line in 2024 because of that prospect on the one hand, and the insane and divisive policies and growing authoritarian streak of the Democrats on the other.
The bottom line is that however we got here, and however unfair it was to Trump, at the end of the day Donald Trump is fully responsible for his own actions and decisions. He's the President of the United States, after all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) The full Danchenko story is even more damning. The allegations against him arose in the first Obama administration. When the FBI learned that Danchenko had returned to Russia in 2011 it suspended the investigation. In December 2016, FBI analysts identified Danchenko as Steele's major sub-source and then learned that while his wife boarded the flight to Moscow five years earlier, Danchenko had not, remaining in the U.S. Durham discovered the rest of the story. Danchenko was desperate to find employment after losing his Brookings job because if he failed his visa would no longer be valid. An arrangement was made that he would be hired by a Russian operating an IT company in Virginia, but he would actually be paid by Christopher Steele who would funnel the funds through the IT company. In other words, breaking American immigration law by committing a fraud. According to Durham, "Danchenko Employer was merely a front
to allow Danchenko to continue his work on behalf of Orbis [Steele's
firm], while at the same time allowing him to secure a work visa through
alleged employment with a U.S. based company". His employer, an
ethnic Russian, described Danchenko as "boastful . . . having low
credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts
with the Kremlin". In January 2017 Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI and explained he was just passing on gossip and bar talk regarding the allegations and was not aware how Steele would use it. Danchenko said he could not corroborate any of the allegations. That interview concluded the day before FBI Director Comey led President Trump to believe the FBI was not investigating the credibility of the Steele Dossier; Comey was responding to the President telling him that he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the dossier.
Interestingly, Danchenko was hired at Brookings at the instigation of Fiona Hill, later to be an opponent of Trump's and involved in the attempted impeachment of the President over Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings in Ukraine. In a September 2017 FBI debriefing, Christopher Steele stated he was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill in 2011. Steele described Hill as a "close friend" and told the FBI she "has a very high opinion" of Danchenko.
(2) In March 2017 FBI analysts identified Dolan as the source of the Ritz Carlton and other allegations in the Steele Dossier. Two months later those same analysts were transferred to Mueller's team and assigned to the unit working on corroborating the allegations in the Steele Dossier. But wait, you might think, didn't Robert Mueller repeatedly state in his Congressional testimony that the dossier was "outside my purview" with his report omitting any mention of the dossier in the discussion of possible collusion? Yes, he did state that, but he lied to Congress, which is criminal conduct. The FBI agents not only told Special Counsel Durham about the dossier team under Mueller, they testified to it in open court during the trial of Igor Danchenko.
The analysts continued to work on Dolan and in August 2017 briefed several senior people on the Mueller team on their work, and drafted a case opening document on Dolan, including a request he be interviewed. However, on September 7 they were instructed "to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan", According to Dolan the analysts' contemporaneous notes "explicitly state that Mueller investigation leadership directed [them] to dedicate no resources" to Dolan. Their request to open a case on Dolan was denied with them being told it was a "higher level decision" and the document was to be deleted from the Special Counsel's computer system.
The shocked analysts "discussed whether the decision
not to open on Dolan was politically motivated, given Dolan's extensive
connections to the Democratic party", with one of the analysts speculating that "the information on Dolan ran counter to the narrative
that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating".
The analyst believed the decision would eventually be reviewed by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and, after deleting the report from the Mueller system, uploaded
memorandum to three other separate case files on the FBI system to make sure
OIG would have access. That is where the Durham team located it several years later.
Later that month, the analysts were instructed to "cease [all] work on attempting to corroborate the Steele reports" and the unit was disbanded, with members transferred to other teams in the Special Counsel's office.
Durham notes that while the Special Counsel interviewed hundreds of witnesses during his investigation, Charles Dolan was never interviewed.
It is obvious that Dolan was never interviewed, and the investigation halted, because Mueller's Clinton Mob Lawyers did not want to document what he knew because his connections would expose the relationship between the Clinton Campaign and the Kremlin, destroying the narrative they had so carefully constructed.
Though Mueller knew by September 2017 that nothing in the dossier could be collaborated, he never said anything at the time or in the final report, even denying that his office ever investigated it. You can read more about the Mueller team's obstruction of justice here.
(3) The expiration of the Tik Tok ban extension in early April will be another test for the president's ability to see the bigger picture. His extension in January was actually illegal, but no one has the legal standing to challenge it. However, the president has an independent obligation to ensure the legality of his actions.
