Experts Said for Weeks That Trump Might Get Bonded By Kremlin Allies. Now It’s Happening—Causing a National Security Crisis—So Why Is Media So Silent About the Greenberg Family?
The biggest national security crisis since the Trump administration is being ignored by media—which instead hails a historically suspicious, still unapproved bond proposal by Trump as a legal victory.
You can read this report for free by trying Proof for a week. To do so, click the button below. A free trial also grants immediate access to the breaking news reports linked to this one (1, 2, 3) and every report ever published by Proof—more than 250 in all, across ten sections of content.
Introduction
{This report incorporates the prior Proof reports (1, 2) on the Trump-Greenberg bond proposal.
Major update at 11:26 PM ET on Sunday, March 10: New research into old business articles reveal that Evan Greenberg’s ACE Insurance, which became Chubb in 2016, “does business” with his onetime Russian-bank-owning father’s Russia investment vehicle Starr International. Greenberg’s father—and longtime boss at AIG—Maurice Greenberg, is a Vladimir Putin business associate who has also associated, as discussed in detail below, with Russian spies, other Kremlin agents, and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. If these entanglements continue to exist in 2024, it is highly likely that in fact Evan Greenberg’s company’s business interests are entwined, through his still-living father, with Russian government-owned entities.}
As a journalist, you know a story is time-sensitive when there’s a deadline associated with it—for instance, a deadline of 11AM ET on the morning of Monday, March 11 for E. Jean Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan to challenge a bond proposal issued by defendant Donald Trump on the last day he could have done so in one of the New York civil cases stemming from his rape of Carroll in the latter half of the 1990s.
As a journalist, you also know a story has national security implications when an implied question it provokes is whether the presumptive 2024 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States has been bought off—lock, stock, and barrel—by the Kremlin, a hostile foreign government that is at present invading Europe, threatening nuclear war, and engaging in a hot cyberwar with America.
Though not required, it does help—in assessing the urgency of a breaking news story—if journalists also receive direct warnings about the importance of a story by experts in relevant fields, which is why it’s so significant that this is exactly what happened (see below) with respect to the $91.63 million bond proposal Trump just issued in his New York City Defamation case.
And of course any capable journalist is also capable of seeing when a story is having an immediate impact. For instance, Donald Trump’s securing (if not yet posting) of the aforementioned bond caused him to immediately do something in public that he had not done for weeks: publicly defame his rape victim in exactly the way that had led to him losing the First Carroll Case in New York (a Sexual Abuse and Defamation case that led to a $5 million judgment against Trump) and the Second Carroll Case (this would be the one he’s now trying to get a supersedeas [appellate] bond approved for).
While Trump did also defame Carroll after the second civil judgment against him for defaming a woman he’d raped—this time a judgment for $83.3 million—in a February speech in Waterford Township in Michigan, that new act of Defamation, which could easily lead to a third suit against Trump by Carroll, was brief in comparison to the one his new bond proposal apparently prompted him to launch (reporting below by CNN, though several other outlets, including CNBC, confirm Trump “may have defamed” Carroll yet again):
Should Donald Trump using a surety bond of questionable provenance as a jumping-off point to again defame a woman he raped have been foreseeable to major media?
Yes, absolutely. Warnings related to the national security implications of such a bond implicitly acknowledged, too, the awesome power and license and audacity gifted to Mr. Trump by any entity (such as, now, the insurance carrier Chubb) that underwrites his in-court or out-of-court conduct.
Some of the warnings major media received about this bond—warnings major media is at this very moment ignoring to the detriment of not just E. Jean Carroll but all of the United States—are itemized below. Proof thereafter does an exclusive “deep dive” into everything that’s wrong with Trump’s bond proposal. It’s a story that will shock you, as the entwined story of the Greenberg Family and the Trump Family is truly an astonishing one that at seemingly every stop points directly at Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
What Key Experts Told Major Media About the Carroll Bond Proposal Before Trump and His Legal Team Made It
1
Mary McCord, Former DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security
[Report.]
“Yes, we’re talking about how difficult it might be for Trump [to post bonds]…but he has certainly plenty of people who might want to bail him out on that. Some of those might be foreign [nationals], some of those might be Russian oligarchs, some of those might be people right here in America. Anytime you are talking about someone who’s running for president or holding any elected office and potentially could have some indebtedness or feeling of owing somebody else something, that’s very dangerous. Particularly here, as we know [Trump’s] fondness for Vladimir Putin, his continuing praise of Putin and the way [Putin] governs Russia, and that’s something [due to which] I could very much see people there [in Russia] who have the means to help him out [wanting to do so]. And there’s plenty of other countries that would like to get some favors from Donald Trump should he become the [American] president again.”
2
Virginia Canter, Ethics Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
[Report.]
“[Trump’s bond situation] is pretty scary from an ethics perspective.”
3
John Bolton, National Security Advisor for the United States in the Trump Administration
“[Trump’s bond situation] is one of the demonstrations why Trump is really not fit for office, because he is consumed by these [financial] troubles, his family is consumed by them, and I think foreigners will try to take advantage of it one way or another. They may be doing it already.”
“When I became President Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018, I assumed the gravity of his responsibilities would discipline even him. I was wrong. His erratic approach to governance and his dangerous ideas gravely threaten American security. Republican primary voters should take note.
Mr. Trump’s only consistent focus is on himself. He invariably equated good personal relations with foreign leaders to good relations between countries.”
4
Bert Ely, Cato Institute Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives
[Report.]
“Given the growing reputational risk of doing business with Trump, I suspect he increasingly has to deal with relatively unconventional lenders [in seeking bond assistance], such as wealthy individuals, closely held financial firms, and foreign entities not subject to United States banking laws or regulation. Who they might be is anyone’s guess.”
Concern over Trump’s staggeringly large—and ever growing—debt load is now so significant that there’s even a website that tracks live the amount that Trump owes to state and federal courts.
Having said all this, a review of the last year of stories tracking Trump’s legal troubles, mounting debt, and past history of being an active national security threat presents surprisingly few major-media outlets willing to put these three pressing topics in the same equation or even the same sentence, which appears to explain why it’s been so easy for major-media organizations not to cover the evident issues with Trump’s new bond proposal in New York City. Simply put, if none of a media outlet’s competitors are covering a news story, and that media outlet isn’t itself already conversant in the story at issue, there’s really no internal or external forces pushing that outlet to cover that particular event.
This appears to be particularly true when the prospective report involves complicated financial matters, as most media outlets have separate divisions focusing on financial and political matters—which isn’t to say that there won’t often be crossover events (in which a financial analyst appears on a political program or offers assistance to a crew of political reporters, or vice versa) but simply that political financing isn’t inherently a topic media outlets have a dedicated division always-already prepared to address. One could argue that the presence on the U.S. political stage of a financially compromised politician like Donald Trump should long ago have forced major media to rethink how it structures its coverage of politicians and their eldritch finances; on the other hand, it could just as easily be argued that this exception proves the rule: the fact that the United States has never seen a politician as financially compromised as Donald Trump may have had the perverse effect of convincing media outlets that he’s a generational aberration whose very uniqueness militates for them not altering how they do business.
Where Proof begins to feel significant concern over this longstanding state of affairs, however, is in its contemplation—born of this author’s years as a journalism professor at University of New Hampshire, with an academic focus on the differences between citizen, independent, public, and corporate media—of the advent of 24/7 cable news in the 1980s. This historic development in mass media created a situation in which corporate media was perpetually starved for content, making it readily explainable that almost a decade into Trump’s political career major media still hasn’t grokked just how much high-quality news content can be produced by grafting the structure of news coverage to the sorts of ventures Trump’s perpetual grifting invariably feasts on.
From this view, the need for dedicated media coverage of Trump’s debts and what they mean for American national security, or even just dedicated media coverage of what Trump himself means for American national security and how his debts might play into that equation, would seem to be self-evident. But instead, major media is committed to cover nonsense that either doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter, or only matters because media coverage implicitly or explicitly conspires to make it matter.
So what actually matters? What sort of evidence would we expect, all things being equal, E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan to be asking U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to be looking at on Monday afternoon, the start time for a show cause hearing related to Trump’s bond proposal should Carroll and Kaplan object to it? A good example would be the intertwining of the billionaire Greenberg Family and the billionaire Trump Family, given that the current billionaire scion of the former, Evan Greenberg, is now trying to bail out the billionaire scion of the latter, Donald Trump, at a time it is appears that—for very good reason—no one else in the entire world was willing to do so.
The Trumps and the Greenbergs: A Troubling Timeline
If it turns out—as the sum and substance of this Proof report suggests it might—that Trump and Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg are successful in salvaging the former U.S. president’s financial health and 2024 presidential candidacy through an opaque bond proposal American major media did nothing whatsoever to investigate, what’s to stop the two men from teaming up again on or before March 25, 2024, when Trump owes a nearly half a billion-dollar bond to another court in New York? The answer, of course, is nothing; very bad (or absent) reporting tends to have almost immediate consequences.
For this reason, continued consideration of the Greenberg family is important.
Even if the three days allotted to independent journalists like this author should end up being insufficient to put a stop to the national security-threatening bond deal that will spring itself on a largely unsuspecting America this Monday, the possibility does remain that independent journalists keeping the pressure on Trump and Greenberg and (for that matter) major-media outlets to make transparent what’s presently opaque could put a stop to further suspicious Trump-Greenberg dealings later on this month.
One fact above all in the timeline that follows cannot be missed, and for this reason is here foregrounded: Trump’s new lender, Evan Greenberg, isn’t just the son of famous Republican, banker, and adviser to presidents Maurice “Hank” Greenberg; the elder Greenberg was Evan Greenberg’s boss for a quarter of a century, and at a company he effectively built—making the relationship him and his son much more than a typical father-son one. Indeed, it is best analogizes to the odd relationship between Donald Trump and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. And the fact that both Greenbergs have now spend much of their joint and separate business careers trying to figure out how to extract remunerative value from the former Soviet Union conjoins all four men—the two Trumps and the two Greenbergs—further still, as does the fact that just as the Trumps have long banded together more closely than they might otherwise have done due to investigators and regulators that long gravely threatened the family fortune.
That’s a situation that, as it happens—and as readers will see below—is exactly what the Greenbergs faced during the same period the Trumps did (the 2000s and 2010s).
Even more eerily, both the Trumps and the Greenbergs have faced ruination over the same alleged offense—Fraud—at the hands of the same entity: the New York Attorney General’s Office. And all this has happened in the context of the two NYC families knowing one another well. So to call the current Trump-Greenberg alliance decades in the making is not some melodramatic flourish; it’s simply what history shows us.
With this in mind, here’s a non-exhaustive timeline of interwoven events in the era(s) of two generations of the Trump and Greenberg families, with an additional focus on the secretive pro-Kremlin entity that eventually united them as Kremlin allies: The Center for the National Interest, a Washington, DC think tank (hereinafter “CFTNI”).
Timeline
1992: During a long course of private correspondence with Richard Nixon, Maurice Greenberg, CEO of insurance company AIG, informs the former president that he has created the Russian-American Investment Bank, a partnership of American entities (but primarily AIG) and Russian (and other former Soviet) ones, including, by way of example, both the City of Moscow and The Pension Fund of Russia. Greenberg, who is at this time the boss of future Trump lender—and his son—Evan Greenberg, is keen on using the Soviet Union’s fall to create new wealth for his family and for others.
1994: Nixon, the infamously corrupt and nearly impeached former president, founds a far-right think tank, The Nixon Center. Soviet-born Dimitri Simes—who will be, as of 2018, an acknowledged Kremlin agent and Putin propagandist working for Russian state television—becomes its first CEO.
1998: The Nixon Center is renamed The Center for the National Interest (hereinafter “CFTNI”). By 2009, CFTNI will boast of its very robust U.S.-Russia Relations Program.
May 2000: Vladimir Putin becomes President of Russia, and his autocratic impulses quickly raise doubts for American businessmen like Maurice (“Hank”) Greenberg as to whether or not they’ll be able to continue to extract as much wealth out of Russia as they had been doing for much of the 1990s. Putin’s job is to convincingly woo men such as Greenberg with the promise of lucrative U.S.-Russia partnerships continuing.
September 2000: Future Trump lender Evan Greenberg, who’s by now been working for his father Maurice for 25 years at AIG, leaves the company for new employment.
The younger Greenberg’s departure is something of a surprise. At the time he leaves AIG, he’s its President and COO—and has been designated by his father to become AIG’s CEO upon his retirement, which is deemed not far off. Given that Evan’s start date at his next job (see below) is in 2021, it’s possible that he in fact continues working (formally or informally) for his dad’s company as an executive some distance into 2021.
Early 2000s: Maurice Greenberg’s AIG is negotiating a lucrative consultancy deal with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. Because we don’t know exactly when this negotiation began—though near-certainly it was a product of Putin coming to power and looking to increase his influence in the West starting in early 2000—we can’t know if Evan Greenberg worked on this deal as AIG President and COO, though there’s no doubt that his father, CEO Maurice Greenberg, was lead on the project. Consequently, even if Evan ceased all business association with AIG sometime in early 2021, there is little question about his continued access to information on the goings-on in AIG-Kremlin negotiations through his father.
Maurice Greenberg has, by 2000, already been close personal friends with former Richard Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for decades. Kissinger will become a regular adviser to Vladimir Putin behind the scenes during his term(s) as President of Russia, even as Kissinger is one of the key figures in the CFTNI community in DC.
2001: Evan Greenberg becomes Vice Chairman of ACE Insurance, the company that will (in 2016) purchase The Chubb Corporation and become Chubb—the major global insurance carrier, run by the younger Greenberg, that just signed a $91.6 million bond deal with Donald Trump. ACE Russia is at the time a key piece of the ACE Insurance empire.
2002 to 2003: Financially ruined from his years of business incompetence in the 1980s and 1990s, Donald Trump, who has long been obsessed with the possibility of doing business in Russia, turns his focus to that market on a full-time basis with the aid of self-professed Kremlin whisperer and apparent Vladimir Putin associate Felix Sater. In an attempt to please Putin, Trump personally rigs the Miss Universe pageant to ensure that Putin’s rumored mistress, Oxana Federova, is crowed Miss Universe.
February 2003: Maurice Greenberg travels to Moscow to meet with Putin at the Kremlin. It’s during this visit that Putin announces a longterm consultancy deal between the Kremlin and AIG. The deal confirms that American businessmen can work with Putin and—as noted above—it is a deal that may well have been in the works for several years.
2004: Evan Greenberg becomes CEO of ACE Insurance, putting him in charge of ACE Russia as well.
Also 2004: Kremlin spymaster and Maurice Greenberg associate Alexander Torshin makes his first trip to the United States.
2005: Maurice Greenberg is forced out as AIG CEO as a result of his alleged role in a series of fraudulent transactions. These transactions, and the resultant investigation of them by the New York Attorney General’s Office in what starts as a major criminal investigation, will quickly become part of Greenberg family lore—as well as a telling foreshadowing of the Greenbergs’ future empathy for another New York billionaire (Trump) under investigation by the same office in the early 2020s.
One indication that the NYAG investigation of the elder Greenberg is a central event in the history of the Greenberg family is that the eventual civil side of the investigation continues for twelve years—not a typo—and is only resolved by a universal deal signed by Maurice Greenberg in 2017. In the deal, Greenberg admits to engaging in what also happens to be Donald Trump’s favorite tort, Fraud. Further evidence of how central this case was to the Greenberg family is that the scion of the family spent seven years—from 2013 to 2020—unsuccessfully civilly suing Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General who originally investigated him in the 2000s, for Defamation.
Throughout the 2010s, the elder Greenberg will be involved in civil litigation in the United States involving both his departure from AIG and other issues involved in his NYAG case, underscoring that Maurice Greenberg’s turn to doing business in Putin’s Russia after signing a consultancy with the Kremlin while at AIG in 2003 is in part a circumstance born of necessity. This too mirrors how Donald Trump sees his business dealings in the United States; while, like Maurice Greenberg, Trump always desired to do business in Russia, this ambition became urgent after U.S. and European banks stopped lending to him due to his stint as the worst businessman in the United States.
According to Reuters, Maurice Greenberg has said that what happened with AIG and the NYAG cost him “90%” of his total wealth. Per Reuters, this means that as a result of the same office now pursuing Trump for over $454 million, the Greenbergs’ worth dropped from a net of $3.2 billion to a net of approximately $320 million.
Also 2005: Determined, following his successful signing of a consultancy agreement with AIG two years earlier, to find new and perhaps less savory ways to increase his influence inside the United States, Vladimir Putin—using oligarch and self-admitted Kremlin agent Oleg Deripaska as an intermediary—signs a deal with Donald Trump adviser Paul Manafort (a business partner of Trump friend and former Richard Nixon adviser Roger Stone) to have Manafort secretly advance the Kremlin’s interests both in the United States and, even more importantly, Ukraine, which Putin views as little more than a Russian client state readily usable as a nation-sized bank for his schemes.
Manafort’s deal pays him a staggering $10 million a year—roughly half the salary of the then-highest-paid player in Major League Baseball, New York Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez.
2006: The Library of Congress reports CFTNI as having an annual budget of only $1.6 million, which would seem to suggest it’s being almost entirely bankrolled by Maurice Greenberg—who by 2019 is being said by the New York Times to have given $1 million a year to CFTNI for a very long time. This explains why Greenberg is Chairman of the Center for the National Interest for many years. While this author has not yet been able to determine when the elder Greenberg began in this role, it’s clear that in 2014 (when Maurice Greenberg is 89 years old) he steps down as the Chairman of CFTNI and becomes Chairman Emeritus. Greenberg, who is now 98, appears to give up his position at the pro-Kremlin CFTNI to his son Evan, the future Donald Trump lender.
June 2008: The now-disgraced Maurice Greenberg, whose reputation in American business has in some quarters been shattered due to events at AIG, does what Trump is doing at the very same time due to his inability to borrow money in the United States: he turns to Putin’s Russia. The difference is that whereas (according to Donald Trump Jr. in a speech to investors in 2008 and Eric Trump in an interview with a golf reporter in 2014), the Trumps spend the mid-2000s to 2014 borrowing from Russian banks, the cannier Maurice Greenberg does something better: uses an investment fund focused on Putin’s Russia that he had created after his public AIG ouster, Starr Russia Investments III, to buy a huge chunk of a Russian bank.
The bank in question is Investtorgbank, and the Greenberg scion’s ownership share at a time his son (and future Trump lender) Evan runs ACE Russia insurance is 20%.
August 2009: Maurice Greenberg is charged with Fraud as an outgrowth of the NYAG case that’s now been plaguing the Greenbergs for four years. The charge is brought not by a state entity, however, but a federal one: the SEC. Greenberg eventually signs a deal to resolve the allegation in which he admits no fault but pays a $15 million penalty.
November 2013: Trump visits Moscow and signs a Letter of Intent with Putin’s personal architect, Aras Agalarov, to build a Trump Tower Moscow. During his trip Trump reveals to his hosts and to the Kremlin agents he self-admittedly meets with (who he still refuses to name, but includes at least one Putin lieutenant in charge of permitting new buildings in Moscow) that he’ll be running for President of the United States in 2016, a fact he hasn’t yet disclosed domestically. He will begin doing so in private conversations with New York Republican Party officials the following month.
2014: Maurice Greenberg steps down as CFTNI Chairman. It appears, though it is oddly difficult to confirm this, that Evan Greenberg becomes a member of the CNI Advisory Council—a prominent position he retains to this day—at about this time.
By 2014, Maurice Greenberg is heavily invested in his post-AIG-comeback vehicle, the aforementioned Starr Investments, which he admits is deliberately secretive about who it’s dealing with and what it’s doing with them—a result of Greenberg’s by-then years and years of dealing with the same office Donald Trump is now dealing with, the New York Attorney General’s Office. “We have a rapidly growing insurance arm, we have a real estate business, and we also have a unit that helps Chinese companies invest in the United States”, Greenberg says in 2014. “We are private, we don’t advertise what we are doing, and we will stay private.”
February 2014: Vladimir Putin invades Europe—a unilateral act of aggression against Russia’s western neighbor, Ukraine, that is definitionally a war crime. Significant U.S. sanctions are placed on Russian businesses and individuals by U.S. president Barack Obama, who by this date Trump has come to see as his arch-nemesis, and U.S. vice president Joe Biden, who Trump will run against for POTUS in both 2020 and 2024.
Also 2014: Things start going south for Maurice Greenberg’s native Russian bank Investtorgbank, almost certainly due in part to the sanctions on Russia leveled by Obama and Biden. The elder Greenberg finds himself needing extraordinary aid to attempt to fend off a series of investigations of his business practices in Russia.
In 2014, Evan Greenberg is the head of ACE Insurance, which has a Russian division known as ACE Russia that is a major piece of the ACE Insurance empire.
2015: Evan’s father Maurice begins using known Kremlin agent Dimitri Simes, long his CNFTI colleague, to reach out to people now known to be Russian spies for help with his business troubles in Russia. Two people that Simes and Greenberg target in particular are Maria Butina, who desperately wants to use Simes and other powerful Republicans to get close to Donald Trump, and her mentor, Kremlin spymaster Alex Torshin.
2016: Evan Greenberg’s ACE Insurance purchases The Chubb Corporation and soon renames itself Chubb. Chubb Russia continues as a major Chubb subsidiary, even as many U.S.-based businesses are trying to divest themselves from Russia due to the war crimes being perpetrated in Europe by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin—including the illegal seizure of the entire Crimean Peninsula. Describing Evan Greenberg, an associate says, “He’s probably wired the same way as his dad [Maurice] and thinks there’s opportunity [in buying Chubb]. The old adage is that the fruit doesn’t fall very far from the tree.” Speaking of the Chubb purchase, Greenberg himself says, in response to a journalist noting that he seems focused on “expansion” of his insurance empire to “emerging markets”—exactly the way the Trumps had spoken of Russia for years, with a focus on building in Moscow—“We are, first and foremost, builders.”
Donald Trump Jr. meets with Maria Butina in either 2015 or 2016, even as his father is publicly opposing the Obama-Biden sanctions on Russia; meeting with Alex Torshin; meeting with Torshin’s boss, Kremlin spymaster Sergey Kislyak, eagerly approving George Papadopoulos creating a secret Trump-Putin backchannel through Kremlin agent Josef Mifsud, changing the GOP platform to water down its commitments to Ukraine in its defense against Russian war crimes, and being advised on all matters Russia by none other than Maurice Greenberg’s associate at CFTNI, Kremlin agent Dimitri Simes. Trump also makes Kremlin agent Paul Manafort his campaign manager.
Trump’s pro-Kremlin foreign policy is written by a man who works with his future lender Evan Greenberg as a member of the CFTNI Advisory Board, Richard Burt. As part of a grand collaboration between Kissinger, Kushner, Manafort, Burt, and Simes, Trump’s announcement of his anti-Obama-Biden-sanctions platform is made at an event at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016 that is hosted by the CFTNI. The CFTNI coordinates a VIP event preceding the speech at which he is introduced to Kremlin spymaster Kislyak (who as a diplomat isn’t supposed to be attending campaign events).
While he initially supports Jeb Bush in the 2016 GOP primaries, Maurice Greenberg eventually comes around to supporting Trump, and the former Russian bank owner—his Russian bank stake having apparently evaporated in 2014, likely due to the Obama-Biden sanctions the Greenberg scion would naturally have blamed both Democrats for—is seen at the Trump Transition Offices in Trump Tower a day before Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner secretly meets in the same space with a Russian banker, Sergey Gorkov, who’s also a Kremlin agent and Russian intelligence asset trained by the FSB.
A week before Maurice Greenberg’s visit to kiss Trump’s ring, the Kremlin spymaster Kislyak had done the same thing; Kislyak was the ultimate supervisor of both Kremlin spymaster Alex Torshin and his mentee Maria Butina, both of whom Maurice had met with in 2015 to try to get help from the Kremlin over the disastrous situation of his business interests in Russia following the introduction of the Obama-Biden sanctions.
2018: Butina is charged, convicted, incarcerated, and deported from the United States as a Russian spy. Her arrest leads the Maurice Greenberg associate and CFTNI CEO Dimitri Simes to immediately flee the United States and begin now-public work for the Kremlin; incredibly, he doesn’t give up his role as the CEO of the CFTNI after announcing himself as a Kremlin agent—a fact that underscores that the CFTNI has essentially been a Kremlin instrument from the start. Simes therefore continues working with Trump lender Evan Greenberg, who by now has taken his father’s place on the CNI Advisory Board.
April 2022: Trump lender and Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg reveals that Chubb Russia has been “separated operationally” from the rest of the company, forcing it to book an impairment charge of $87 million. While the younger Greenberg is quick to claim that $87 million is a “de minimis” loss in his view—even for a multibillion-dollar firm, a somewhat odd statement—it seems clear that (a) the troubles Evan Greenberg is now dealing with because of the Russia-Ukraine War and the Obama-Biden sanctions match those his father experienced when Putin invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014.
And yet it’s hard to tell whether Chubb’s arguably extremely delayed response to the U.S. sanctions Donald Trump had vowed to eradicate when he first announced his presidential run in 2016—just weeks after Evan Greenberg’s father Maurice met with Kremlin agents to seek their help in dealing with the fallout of those sanctions—is the cart or horse in this situation. While we can conclude that Chubb only announcing the operational separation of Chubb Russia in 2022, a full eight years after Russia became a rogue actor on the world stage, was notably tardy, we also know that Evan Greenberg had followed in his dad’s footsteps as a leader of the pro-Kremlin Center for the National Interest, which (given its decades-long obsession with a crowbarred normalization of U.S.-Russia relations, even in the face of grave Russian misconduct) suggests Trump’s new lender may have intentionally and even quite mindfully stayed his hand as Chubb CEO, with respect to Chubb Russia, by failing to d what he might otherwise have done many years earlier.
By April 2022, Donald Trump had been under investigation for 18 months by the very same entity that nearly destroy Evan Greenberg’s father Maurice. It was foreseeable, at that point, that Trump might one day seek significant financial assistance from a company and (dare we say it) a family with whom he fundamentally had many aligned interests. While of course no one would say that Evan Greenberg jettisoned Chubb Russia only to douse suspicion of future Trump-Greenberg surety deals—that would be taking matters too far by half—it can at least be said that Greenberg, as the CEO of Chubb and Chubb Russia, would have been aware once Trump was found liable in his NYAG case (the same thing that had happened to his father, again at the hands of the same state agency) in 2023, that Chubb was a likely financial partner for the now cash-poor Trump (and that if Trump were reelected in 2024, he would likely pursue the very normalization of relations with Russia that both Greenbergs, dad and son, had wanted for decades). And that normalization would also at least minimize Chubb’s losses over Chubb Russia (by 2022, as noted, a sum of $87 million) and perhaps win future profits.
What seems obvious, in all this, is that while Evan Greenberg lending to Trump is by no means suspicious simply because Chubb Russia exists—as skeptics claim is the only issue here, creating a straw man they can quickly bat down—it is telling that Chubb waited so long to separate itself (and only “operationally,” at that) from Chubb Russia.
The Obama-Biden sanctions on Russia were first leveled over its invasion of Ukraine in 2014; additional Obama-Biden sanctions were leveled in the two years thereafter; a massive new round of sanctions arose after Putin’s February 2021 second invasion of Ukraine; and yet it wasn’t until 2022 that Trump lender Evan Greenberg was able to announce the aforementioned “separation” of Chubb and Chubb Russia, and did so at a time he and America didn’t know for certain if Trump would run for POTUS again.
In other words, Evan Greenberg’s executive decision-making at Chubb certainly does suggest a man who, much like his father, believed that backroom machinations could perhaps install leaders in the United States who‚ like Trump and unlike Biden, would pursue the normalization of U.S.-Russia relations whether Vladimir Putin’s conduct warranted it or not. This would certainly explain Trump’s lender waiting eight years to do something that, as a matter of honor and corporate diplomacy, probably should have been done in 2014.
Indeed, there’s a reason Chubb is signaled out on the Leave Russia website as a U.S. company that has conspicuously chosen Russian profits over international principles.
Of course, none of this has been reported on by major media. It is being exclusively reported on here at Proof. This despite the fact that experts in national security have, as noted above, been warning major media for weeks if not for months to prepare to investigate any financial arrangements Trump may make in evading paying civil fines in his many pending and just-completed civil cases in New York and elsewhere.
All those warnings were willfully ignored, it seems. Why? To this we have no answer.
So What Is Media Covering Instead of a Major National Security Emergency with a Springing Monday Deadline?
If you’re wondering what American major media focused on instead of the countdown toward federal acceptance of a bond green-lit for Trump by possible allies of a hostile foreign power, here’s a taste of top headlines from around the county this weekend.
NBC News Covered Attacks on President Biden Over His SOTU Speech
CNN Amplified a Would-Be Dictator’s Scheme to Grow His Following
ABC News Covered Attacks on President Biden Over His SOTU Speech
CBS News Amplified Disingenuous GOP Attacks About Laken Riley
I’m very much not a believer in the “he-did-X-to-distract-from-Y” school of breaking news analysis, as I think that framework leads to extremely questionable and thinly supported theses in virtually every case. But it doesn’t take such thinking to say that—while Trump may have been willing to mention his $91.63 million bond proposal in Georgia this weekend as a doorway to indulging himself in more complaints about E. Jean Carroll (in the bargain spreading the false claim that his bond has already been “posted” rather than just “secured” and “proposed” to the court by Alina Habba)—it is certainly better for Trump, politically, to focus this weekend on matters other than his appeals of findings of Sexual Abuse and Defamation. He might for instance prefer to focus on the dubious premise (though one AP notes “some” have been all too eager to get behind) that President Biden mispronounced the name “Laken Riley” in his SOTU speech, though this manufactured talking-point pushed by GOP politicians who willfully misheard Joe Biden smacks of a similar political stunt in which the very same people claimed to hear Biden say “I’m Joe Biden’s husband” when, while he was standing next to his wife Jill Biden, he in fact said (of course), “I’m Jill Biden’s husband.”
Yet major media, which has ignored the Trump-Greenberg story, appears to be, as we see above, all over the Biden-Riley non-story.
When major media engages in its “newsworthiness” and “story selection” processes, it almost never suffers from the sort of rank partisanship we see from (say) the GOP after a hugely successful Democratic SOTU followed by a hugely embarrassing GOP rebuttal. But it can inadvertently mislead news consumers and—in an election year of unparalleled importance—American voters by misdirecting them away from actually important breaking news stories to (say) horse-race-oriented reporting that gets clicks and takes minimal journalistic resources but has very low nutritional value as “news.”
A Caution About the Fallacy of Universal Media Coverage
We assume American major media will cover anything that’s true, and therefore that if something doesn’t appear in major media that likely means it’s untrue. Certainly, this is at times the case—especially (if not exclusively) on the right wing of American media.
But as I taught journalism students as a tenure-track professor at University of New Hampshire, sometimes corporate media decides not to re-report or work to augment a story that was first reported elsewhere for anodyne reasons: it has no one interested in (re-)reporting it; or it has no one qualified to research it; or it has no one available to retrospectively fact-check it. And sometimes corporate media fails in its journalistic duties for less noble reasons: because a given report is unlikely to be profitable for the company; because a given report is unlikely to be popular among its core readership or viewership; or, less commonly—but it does happen—because a prejudice within the corporation prevents a given report from being aired, either a prejudice against the media outlet or journalist who first reported the story, a prejudice against the themes or meta-narratives undergirding the report, or even (much less commonly) a prejudice against the perceived real-world outcome(s) that might accompany widely reporting the story.
And then there are reasons for evading reporting a story that are so sordid that not even an outlet’s status as corporate media or an institution peopled by flawed humans can justify it—the sort of journalistic preclusions that call into question why anyone involved in the corporate media organization at issue is involved in any journalistic endeavors at all. Such reasons include competition (the media outlet buries the story as a means of burying, hopefully permanently, what it sees as a competing outlet); collusion (the media outlet buries the story because it is secretly in cahoots with one or more of the parties who would either be harmed by it or doesn’t want the story to get out); or confusion (the media outlet is at first glance confused by the story and is as a result unwilling to credit it for fear of revealing it doesn’t properly understand it).
Fortunately, the above three reasons are, comparatively speaking, very uncommon.
Other reasons for major media evading a story lie somewhere between anodyne and nefarious. These include asymmetry (an anxiety that covering one story will create an unbalanced view of what’s going on in the larger narrative to which a report belongs); advertising (an anxiety caused by, behind the scenes, a corporate outlet’s advertisers opposing a report by refusing to be associated with it, which refusal creates a cash-flow problem for the company); and aloofness (which occurs when the media outlets in question are in fact working quite hard on other stories, so much so that a story of potentially even greater historical significance has escaped their notice).
Not to be coy about this—and I certainly never used this particular mnemonic device in teaching the ideas above—but, for our present purposes here at Substack, we can remember the most blessedly rare reasons for media failures in the face of breaking news stories of abiding national importance via this slightly salty mnemonic device:
C
Collusion
Competition
Confusion
R
Reporting (resource failure)
Research (resource failure)
Retrospective Factchecking (resource failure)
A
Asymmetry (anxieties)
Advertising (anxieties)
Aloofness
P
Popularity
Prejudice
Profit
So, yes—there’s admittedly a lot of crap in the media industry that can get on rare occasions get in the way of even a vital story whose dissemination would be in the national interest getting buried. And yes—social media users who blithely assume that anything not widely reported must be inaccurate are going to repeatedly find themselves only as well-informed as their current corporate media diet will allow.
And while that literacy level as to current events isn’t low by any means, it’s suboptimal.
Conclusion
The Trump-Greenberg bond proposal story is a perfect storm of sorts: (1) major media only had three days to report on it before a springing legal deadline; (2) those three days fell over a weekend, when major-media coverage of basically everything falls off; (3) major-media coverage of Donald Trump is at times a function of the C.R.A.P. cited above, so even if the Trump-Greenberg bond story didn’t demand a quick turnaround we might fear that coverage of it would be slow, cautious, conspicuously passive, and lacking critical historical context; (4) this is the sort of major news which, in not being reported properly, can affect the news directly (as a legal team is slightly less likely to take action on a given matter if the matter is being covered by national media but no one in national media seems to think, as a matter of legal issue-spotting, a given issue within that matter is worth litigation); and (5) there are national security implications to the story that can only be addressed on a tight timeline—as if E. Jean Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan allow Trump’s bond proposal to proceed, the only venue for the ways it threatens America to be litigated would be via a counterintelligence investigation that could take years and, if past is precedent, be hidden from us anyway.
It’s also tempting for American news consumers to conclude that the Kremlin holding massive financial leverage over Trump is nothing new, and therefore the possible fact of it holds little new meaning in 2024. After all, we already know that Trump spent all of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign in secret negotiations with the Kremlin over what would have been the most lucrative real estate deal in Trump’s professional life—the Trump Tower Moscow deal—and what were the consequences of that for Trump?
Nothing.
In fact, at the end of this historic course of deceit, in which Trump hoodwinked U.S. voters into believing his quid pro quo pro-Kremlin foreign policy—intended to secure business for him in Russia—was patriotic, voters bought his lie and made him POTUS.
As president, Trump engaged in a degree of kowtowing to Russia (which kowtowing, critically, he’s promising to bring back to the White House if reelected) that helped provoke the Second Russia-Ukraine War. Trump’s election also led to the disastrous Abraham Accords, an open conspiracy between Trump and longtime Trump Family friend Benjamin Netanyahu to so alienate and isolate Hamas (who Netanyahu was funding at the time) in Middle East peace negotiations between Israel and its biggest neighbors that it would push the terror group to do something audacious Israel could respond to with a military campaign approximating a genocide. (And fortunately for Netanyahu, that’s exactly what happened on October 7, 2023—with a near-term result of 30,000 Palestinian dead, 12,000 of them children.)
The point here is that yes, Trump has long been compromised by the Kremlin. Indeed, as one of the few New York Times bestselling Trump biographers I will say that one of my peers in this regard, the wildly talented and shrewd Craig Unger, has made a very compelling case for the premise that Trump has likely been subject to certain leverage by the Kremlin since at least the 1980s—well before Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. One of the many things Craig and I would agree on is that whatever the date on which Trump first became subject to Kremlin pressure, whether it was due to his financial entanglements or prurient kompromat or something else, the result has been disastrous for American national security.
Sadly, each new piece of leverage only adds to that disaster. Kremlin allies apparently having just saved Trump from financial ruin, preserved the viability of his severely encumbered 2024 presidential campaign, and therefore likely again purchased for Putin—indirectly, perhaps even non-criminally—America’s foreign policy doesn’t become non-threatening to American national security just because it isn’t novel.
As it was one of the subjects of two of my “Proof” books—Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019)—I’ll also note that Trump’s subjugation to the Kremlin last decade was less serious than his present one for two reasons: (1) then, it was only a promise of future financial benefit (along with possible prurient kompromat) at issue, whereas if the Kremlin is currently saving Trump from financial ruin it’s a present and entirely non-hypothetical financial benefit to him; and (2) Trump’s chances of election in 2024 are worse than they were in 2016, and his designs for the murder of NATO and the opening of Europe to Kremlin adventurism there so much more vile than anything he’d conceived of by Election Day in 2016 (an election Trump didn’t expect to win or feel compelled to win in the way he now does, as losing in the 2024 election almost certainly means his incarceration on his criminal charges), that the consequences of Trump being compromised by the Kremlin in 2024 are almost exponentially worse than they were eight years ago.
Many of us in independent journalism had hoped that major media would have spent the last eight years figuring out how to cover ethically cover Donald Trump. It did not, and it appears to have no designs on doing so. The amount of suffering its failure may cause in the years ahead is inestimable. Proof will continue to do what it can to report on this issue, knowing at least that the Proof Project is followed by so many domestic and international figures in politics and media that—at a minimum—very few people in a position to have done something about all this will be able to say that they weren’t warned.
Addendum
Not long before press time for this report, a faint glimmer of hope that the Trump-Greenberg bond might be challenged in court tomorrow emerged. It’s just a glimmer— we’ll have to see what happens on Monday in New York—but it’s at least worth seeing.
If you’re interested in reading more research and writing from Seth Abramson, you can check out his Top 20 History substack, Retro, by entering your email address in the space below:
I’m so grateful to have access to this research and reporting on Substack. This Proof read was quite substantial and incredibly informative. I get why the MSM can’t/wont get their collective heads around it in order to report on it to the “MSM-spoonfed-masses” while keeping advertisers writing checks. It’s a lot.
The more I read, the more I thought this should be a breaking news, taking over all regularly scheduled programming-type event.
This is the most I’ve ever posted on any site. I’ve been provoked. Excellent reporting.
Seth, have you shared this with the FBI or whoever is the right folks in the government? Maybe even send it to POTUS?