Putin

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…” 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.”

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.”