Putin

If Sater, who it must be remembered came to the U.S. at the tender age of eight, was able to return to Russia and the former Soviet republics and work to buy up missiles on the black market, it would not have been too difficult for him to help raise significant funds for Trump projects, especially since at that time Russia’s prosperity was at an all-time high, with oil reaching nearly $150 a barrel in July 2008.

Trump would later disavow any real connection with Sater, saying, under oath, that if he “were sitting in the room tight now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” But other Russians were taking a closer look at Trump as the first decade of the twenty-first century came to a close, at least according to the Christopher Steele dossier whose sources allege as of June 2016 that “the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting … TRUMP for at least 5 years … the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance, which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests.”

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.” 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.

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.

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.”

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.”