Richard Lourie: Putin

Russia also drew nearer to Trump in the person of Paul Manafort, his campaign manager from April to August 2016, who lost that position “after his name surfaced … in a secret ledger listing millions of dollars in payments from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine.” [14] Andrew E. Kramer, “Paul Manafort, Former Trump Campaign Chief, Faces New Allegations in Ukraine,” The New York Times, March 20, 2017. Those payments reportedly ran to $12.7 million. “I don’t think he represented Russia … I think he represented the Ukraine or Ukrainian government or somebody, but everybody knew that,” was Trump’s defense. [15] “Here’s the transcript of Trump’s repeated evasions on whether his campaign had contacts with Russian officials,” The Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2017.

Some questions arise here. Isn’t it odd that of all the possible candidates to run Trump’s campaign, it was someone so lavishly rewarded for serving the pro-Russian party that ended up with the job? And what were the services Manafort provided that warranted such extravagant compensation? One possibility was reported in a Daily Beast article of 11/7/16: “Trump and Russia: All the Mogul’s Men,” by James Miller:

In 2006, a series of protests forced the cancellation of a scheduled NATO exercise, dubbed Sea Breeze, which was planned to take place on the Crimean Peninsula. A leaked legal memo shows how [pro-Putin Ukrainian politician] Yanukovich organized that protest, part of a strategy to raise ethnic fears that NATO was somehow making a move that could endanger the Russian-speaking population of the peninsula. Yanukovich organized the political response to the protests…. The memo cites a senior Ukrainian prosecutor whose investigation determined that the organizer of those protests was none other than Paul Manafort. [16] James Miller, “Trump and Russia: All the Mogul’s Men,” Daily Beast, November 6, 2016.

Manafort protested such charges saying: “I am trying to play a constructive role in developing a democracy. I am helping to build a political party.” [17] Ibid.

And it is while Manafort was still running Trump’s campaign that the Republican Party platform underwent a curious change—its plank about “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian armed forces now became “appropriate assistance,” it being unclear how you kill an enemy with that.

Stopping a NATO exercise and changing a plank in the Republican platform to a more pro-Russian position would have been worth several millions, by any standard.

Selling a house to a Russian oligarch for a tidy $50 million profit, developing a SoHo property with a Russian-born businessman who may have beat a racketeering rap by buying back missiles on the Russian and Central Asian black market, and hiring a man to run your campaign who had profited mightily from supporting pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, might seem like a lot of things Russian for one presidential candidate but it was only the tip of the iceberg, one that might yet sink the Trump Titanic.

There is the also the issue of Trump’s suspiciously fulsome praise of Putin, who in 2007 he said, “was doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia, period.” Trump often compared Obama to Putin unfavorably, saying of Putin that, “at least he was a leader unlike what we have in this country.” [18] Jeremy Diamond, “Timeline: Donald Trump’s Praise for Vladimir Putin:, CNN Politics, July 29, 2016.

Praise is all fine and dandy but by 2005 Manafort had figured out a way to monetize it. According to an AP report, “Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government…” [19] Jeff Horowitz, Chad Day, “Manafort Had Plan to Benefit Putin Government,” Associated Press, Bloomberg News/Politics, March 22, 2017. In the plan Manafort states: “We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success.” Manafort signed a $10 million contract, not with Putin, of course, but with aluminum magnate Oleg Derepaska, a likely candidate to do the Kremlin’s bidding. While Manafort denies he was acting for Putin’s benefit in his relationship with Derepaska, the political side of the relationship reportedly lasted from 2005 to at least 2010, though elements of the purely business side continued through 2014 when they had a falling out that ended up in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court.

Manafort, sadly, did not stay with the campaign long enough to taste sweet victory in November. But the Russian connection issue got even more snarled and tangled once Trump was elected.

Ten days after his election, Trump appointed three-star Lt. General and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn to be his national security advisor. And that gave Felix Sater an idea. His face-stabbing, fraud-committing, missile-retrieving youth was behind him and in the best American fashion he had reinvented himself as a patriot and philanthropist, having twice been chosen as Man of the Year by the Orthodox Jewish religious group Chabad in Port Washington, New York. To that impressive new list of attributes, Sater would now add peacemaker. Working with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who styles himself his country’s own Donald Trump, they hammered out a peace plan that would settle the problems in Ukraine and Crimea once and for all. Sanctions would be lifted on Russia, which would withdraw all forces from Eastern Ukraine with Crimea now, instead of being a possession, would be rented to Russia for the next fifty to one-hundred years, a long kick of the can. The plan was “hand-delivered” to the desk of National Security Advisor Flynn. Aside from its inherent unworkability, there was another element that would doom it immediately—Flynn’s career was busily imploding.

Michael Flynn had been paid handsomely by the Kremlin’s media propaganda arm, RT, but it was lying about his secret conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak that brought him down.

John Schindler, former NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer, says: “Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.” [20] John R. Schindler, “The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins,” Observer.com , February 2, 2017.

But perhaps clarity could be achieved and justice done by the right appointment for attorney general. Except that at his own hearings, Jeff Sessions failed to tell the Senate about his own meetings with the Russian ambassador at the Republican convention, but also at a more private meeting in his office. Exposed, Sessions had to recuse himself from any relationship to his own justice department’s investigation into the possibility of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign for which he himself worked. The situation begins to hover at the fine line between the hilarious and the nauseating.

The Trump administration betrays a lack of intelligence about how intelligence works. That, along with the damage done by Trump’s earlier contemptuously disparaging remarks about the intelligence community and the obvious connections with the Russians, have caused some members of the intelligence community to begin withholding information from the White House. Schindler says of his former NSA colleagues with whom he is apparently still in touch: “A senior National Security Agency official explained that the NSA was systematically holding back some of the ‘good stuff’ from the White House … Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed … a senior Pentagon intelligence official … stated that ‘since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM’ meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. ‘There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,’ the official added in wry frustration.”