Foreign Policy: year -round "Kremlining"

The scandalous summer ended, but the hot autumn for Donald Trump is just beginning, writes in Foreign Policy Max But. The Insider offers a complete translation of the article.

Last summer, there were many high -profile stories in politics against the backdrop of the ongoing destruction of the presidential authorities Donald Trump. The failure of the bill on healthcare reform in the Senate. The abolition of the legalization program of immigrants who arrived in the country in early childhood. The pardon of the disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpayo. Bloody chaos in Charlottsville and its sad consequences. The resignations of Stephen Bannon, Sebagaga Gorki, Rainsa Subes, Sean Spicer, and - just ten days after his appointment - the Skaramucci, adorned by Anthony Scaramucci. But among all these events, the Russian scandal should not be lost - “Kremliningate”, against which all this turns pale.

Certificate of conspiracy between the election headquarters of Trump and the Kremlin, as well as Trump's attempts to hide this fact, look more and more murderously every week. If you remember, the summer began with information that appeared on July 11 that representatives of Russia offered Trump's headquarters compromising evidence to Hillary Clinton, and the most important persons at the headquarters enthusiastically agreed to the meeting. “I like it,” wrote Donald Trump Jr. in a infamous letter. As it usually happens in such cases, an attempt to hide these exposing facts put the president in a legally risky position, especially after it turned out that he personally wrote a false statement in which he argued that at a meeting with the Russians it was only about adoption.

And how did this summer end? The message that in October 2015, Trump signed a letter of intention to build a skyscraper in Moscow, in which there will be apartments, hotel, offices and even a spa center, which should be called the name of his daughter Ivanka. The scandal accepted a new revolution, and a letter came to the surface with an even greater murderous force than “I like it” Trump Jr. Felix Sater, the Russian-American partner of Trump with a rich criminal past, wrote to Trump's lawyer Michael Coen, trying to convince him to make a deal: “The buddy, our boyfriend can become the US president, we can arrange it. I will connect the entire Putin team to this, I will lead this process. ” Sater even stated that he received financing from VTB - a bank closely connected with the Kremlin and under American sanctions (not to be confused with VEB, other Russian bank under sanctions, whose leader met with Jared Kushner after the elections).

The fact that the Moscow project did not take place, in no way reduces the importance of this exposure: it shows that Trump, dazzling in front of Vladimir Putin, hoped to get both financial and political benefits. In addition, this information once again convicts Trump in a lie, which he repeated constantly - that he has no business with Russia; As he wrote on Twitter on January 11, "No deals, no loans, nothing at all!"

In fact, the history of Trump's business relations with Russia began back in 1987. The most noticeable result of his hunt for Russian rubles was the Miss Universe-2013 contest in Moscow, organized by the same Russian developers and Agalarovs, who in 2016 arranged a meeting of the Kremlin emissaries with the headquarters of Trump. There is also reason to suspect that Trump received significant funding from wealthy Russians associated with the Kremlin. They were at least large buyers of a real estate Trump built by Trump, and it is very possible that their relationship was not limited to this. In 200, Donald Trump Jr. said: “The Russians belong to a disproportionately large share in many of our assets ... great money flows from Russia from Russia.”

The scandal will not end until Trump leaves the post of president. Or maybe even this will not become its end.

And here we must recall the notorious dossier of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steel, the purpose of which is to show that the Kremlin had compromising evidence for Trump. In January, Buzzfeed published a report on 35 pages, which included a sensational story about how Trump paid Moscow prostitutes to urinate the bed in the room of the Moscow hotel, where Barack Obama stopped before. Trump and his defenders claimed that this fake; Even the veteran of journalistic investigations Bob Woodword called it “garbage”. But taking into account what we know now, some experts in espionage work now decided to take a closer look at what is said in the dossier, and they come to the conclusion that at least some statements look quite believable.

British intelligence veteran, Bill Mcyntair, in his dialogue with writer John Le Carre, published in The New York Times, said: “I can say:“ Mi6 veterans believe that Trump's incrimination was really. Of course, compromising evidence is assembled on everyone. And, according to this version, they found these materials and are now starting to publish some of their fragments. They found a guy who once worked in Mi6, Christopher Steel, who, in essence, was simple-up, and fed him some materials, quite truthful, and some other, false, as well as some obvious lie. That is, Trump can now deny all this, although he knows that in fact it is true. And until the end of the presidential term, he will have, as they say, a pebble in a boot. It is important to remember that Putin is an employee of the KGB who has undergone special training, and he has a traditional thinking for the KGB. ”

Le Carre, who was a spy before the literary career, added: “As for Trump, I suspect that they have compromising evidence because they deny it. If they have it and they really set up Trump, they should say: “No, no, we have nothing like that.” But Trump understands that in fact this means "Are we not kind to you?"

The 28-year-old former CIA National Secret Service John Cypher also believes that the styl dossier compiled by order of the Orbis Business Intelligence London Bureau, “generally reliably”, although it contains some “actual inaccuracies”-those that should be expected from any unprocessed intelligence. - Cypher writes in his Just Security blog - in the ORBIS report, numerous components of the Russian operation were established, including cybercardia, leakage of documents related to Hillary Clinton, meetings with Trump's sex and other partners to discuss the transmission of the stolen information. They considered ways to use it as a weapon during the election of the US president, but all this was described with amazing accuracy. ”

If Makintira, Cypher and Le Carre are right, this definitely helps to understand the inexplicable other reluctance of Trump at least in one word to respond not to respond to Putin, even when it would be politically profitable for him.

Of course, in the end, it is possible to decide whether there really is real evidence of offenses or all this is only visibility, there will be a special prosecutor Robert Müller and his “team of inviolable”. But even if Müller cannot prove the existence of a conspiracy directly between Trump and Putin, he has a great opportunity to press the president for obstructing justice-due to the dismissal of the FBI director James Komi, which Steve Bannon rightly called one of the biggest mistakes in modern political history. Everything indicates that Müller’s investigation is developing in this direction, given his requirements for interrogations of current and former assistants of the president who were related to the dismissal of Komi and the story with an unreasonable letter in which Trump and his main assistant tried to explain their catastrophic decision.

But Trump should potentially disturb the fact that Müller took up the history of his business with the help of an elite investigative division of the tax service specializing in financial crimes and, of course, having access to tax deductions, which the president keeps in the strictest secret. Information, which has already become public, looks quite murderous. Imagine only that Müller already knows or is about to find out. The summer of Kremliningaite will most likely go to the fall of the Kremliningaite, then in the winter, spring and so on.

The scandal will not end until Trump leaves the post of president. Or maybe even this will not become its end.