Not seeing the forest for the trees
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Money, Future, Intelligence, Russia, Donald Trump

There is a new and steady stream of opinion in the American media and here at Medium calling into question the accusations of involvement with Russia. This has picked up and included new sources and authors over the last few months while others have retired or moved to other topics. Most of this now claims that there is no “Russiagate” and that the Russian involvement with the 2016 election and the hacking of the DNS email server, etc. is all misdirection from the “deep state”, i.e. the US intelligence agencies centered on the CIA.

The assumption here is not directly in support of Trump but in support of the “deep state” as the real perpetrators of a conspiracy to push military action against Russia. Since I’m laying this out from my position let me say that there is probably some truth to that. The problem we have in America is a major disruption of the old ruling order with a very different and decentralized new order being born. The old order and the billionaires who became billionaires on the back of predatory capitalism and the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned had come out of the US victory in WWII is coming to an end. We know that these people and their successors are the cause of the current economic collapse of the middle class and the political disaster typified by Trump. They are up to no good and have been for many, many years.

But there are rarely neatly defined and packaged collections of evil in the collapse of major empires and paradigms. These things, particularly at the planetary or just international level, are usually layers of evil and ancillary players conniving for the same things as well as their own special focus. And, we should know, that the good guys are often in cahoots with at least some of the bad guys. That is what makes it some damn hard to figure out. We also have bad guys who do some good things and good guys who do some things that prove to be very bad indeed. That is reality and it applies to motivations also.

Then there are the evil shits who have no qualms and no limits on what they will do for what they want. And there are times when these people work themselves up to some serious badness. The problem there is that serious badness usually locks them into relationships with similar people or worse. Up to this point we are dealing with the usual run of bad people but the last stage makes them into deadly rats and truly evil pieces of shit.

Let’s look at this a bit more carefully. All of the noise has been about Trump being aided by Russia in his election win. There is talk about the Steele Dossier from January 2017 that has elements that have been proven and elements that have not been proven as well as people constantly claiming that everything the dossier said was false and dictated by Hilary Clinton and her campaign. The later does not appear to be true and that document came from an agent of MI6 along with bits of intelligence (usually all you get) from other European agencies. It looks as if at least some of the Steele Dossier is true. In any case it anticipated the overall path of and was accurate in what has been found out and confirmed.

The really hard part of all these pieces is that they began to show up in the intelligence world back between 2012 and 2015. Intercepted telephone conversations, not by the US but by other agencies, that were collected because they were between Trump officials and known Russian intelligence agents. No one was interested in Trump then. But now it is very interesting indeed.

But let’s go back a little farther in time. Trump and his talkative son have publicly admitted that they survived the last very big bankruptcy, after which they were cut off by all American banks, courtesy of Russian money. In fact hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through Trump properties that could not be sold from the Russian oligarchs from 2002. There is a talk of money laundering. In fact this is classic money laundering. The assumption is that Mueller will probably take Trump out on New York money laundering charges. We will see.

I have said for much of the last year that all of the election tampering talk and the related issues are too hard to prove as anything. The money is where things show. The Russian techniques for recruiting agents is a combination of influence, blackmail, and loans. If you work with Russians they will always try to get something that they can use to corner you. We were taught that back in the 1970s in intelligence training. Trump was in Russia ‘being saved’ from 1987. That is when this started. There is always a very big delayed bill with semi official Russian help.

It appears to me that Trump has been a direct Russian agent since sometime in the late 1980s when he was still young. Why does he like Putin? He has absolutely no choice. Putin took over in 1999 and made money a primary tool of Russian intelligence. He has years of data on Trump going back to his first wife who was a Czechoslovakian citizen who was able to leave Czechoslovakia when no one could leave. She was able to move to Canada and then New York where she married Donald. She worked with Czech state security in order to visit her father. So these things go.

The connections are long and deep. Trump was not known to be political and was certainly not a hard right wing nationalist but somehow now Trump’s attitudes and policies bear a striking resemblance to Russian techniques for manipulating other countries. This is based on inflaming racial and ethnic tensions, and attacking allies. This is the model that was used in the take over of Ukraine partially orchestrated by Paul Manafort who then became Trump’s campaign manager and is now in jail pending trial.

One more piece, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, we know that Putin suggested to Trump last summer that he should stop holding military exercises with South Korea. Trump’s staff talked him out of issuing that policy. Trump had to have a meeting with the North Korean dictator and was able to suddenly announce the new policy to the amazement of his staff as a token to Kim Jong Un.

Jonathon Chait has put this into a coherent whole for New York Magazine. I have simply summarized my views of this with the assistance of his excellent compilation. This is the question that needs to be asked. Please read the whole thing. It could all be coincidence or have harmless other meanings. I don’t think so.