Proof of Collusion, Chapter 3: Kompromat
Proof is publishing the entirety of 2018 New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion for free. Sign up for Proof as a free subscriber to get each chapter in your inbox. The comment fields are public.
If you would like to become a full subscriber to Proof for just $5/month, click below:
{Note: The thousands of endnotes—each pointing to major-media citations—that appear in the print edition of this book are exclusively in that volume. Click here to purchase Proof of Collusion (by Seth Abramson, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2018) in print. If you would like to comment in the comment fields below, feel free to do so whether you are a paid Proof subscriber or not. Comments may be lightly moderated if/as it becomes necessary. Note that Proof of Collusion is only 300 pages of a four-book, 2,500-page series, so this volume is just one piece of a massive trove of evidence relating to the political career of Donald Trump.
This text has been carefully reviewed by a team of lawyers and professional fact-checkers at a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. See the print edition of this book for all citations and endnotes, which are implicitly incorporated into this re-publication. This re-publication also incorporates all five volumes of the 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election and the two-volume Mueller Report, which can be found here and here, respectively. Any disparity between this book and those reports—though this author isn’t aware of any, and indeed these texts can and should be read in concert with one another—should be resolved in favor of the latter two federal reports.
Any typographical errors in the text below have been accidentally introduced as a result of the transition of the text from a print to a digital format, and do not appear in the print edition. The text here is otherwise identical to the text of the print edition, excepting a small number of minor edits made solely to maximize clarity. The substance of the work remains untouched.}
Table of Contents
The chapter you are now reading is in bold. Any chapters already published are active links to those chapters as published here at Proof in 2023.
Introduction: A Theory of the Case
Date: October 2018
Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps
Dates: 1987 to 2012
Chapter 2: Trump and the Agalarovs
Date: 2013
Chapter 3: Kompromat
Date: November 2013
Chapter 4: The Campaign Begins
Dates: 2013 to 2015
Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee
Dates: January to March 2016
Chapter 6: The Mayflower Hotel
Date: April 2016
Chapter 7: The Back Channels
Dates: May to June 2016
Chapter 8: The Republican National Convention
Date: July 2016
Chapter 9: The Hunt for Her Emails
Dates: July to September 2016
Chapter 10: The October Surprise
Date: October 2016
Chapter 11: The Transition
Dates: November 2016 to January 2017
Chapter 12: The Firings of Flynn and Comey
Dates: February to May 2017
Chapter 13: Testimony and Plea
Dates: June to December 2017
Chapter 14: A Nation in Suspense
Date: 2018
Afterword: The Death and Rebirth of America
Date: 2019
Chapter 3: Kompromat
November 2013
Summary
When Donald Trump arrives in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, he checks into the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow. That night he is allegedly surreptitiously recorded asking multiple women to urinate on the presidential suite bed President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had slept in on their trip to Moscow.
Multiple active-duty CIA officers responsible for the case file on this incident, speaking to the BBC’s Russia correspondent through an intermediary, say that the recording does indeed exist. BBC reporter Paul Wood reports that at least one allied European intelligence agency has the same information.
The CIA officers Wood interviews also tell the BBC that there is at least one other recording of Trump “of a sexual nature” from a different location (St. Petersburg) and a different time. Any such recording would be considered national security–endangering kompromat—potential blackmail material—if it is now in the possession of the Kremlin.
Numerous witnesses in contact with British media confirm individual elements of the Ritz-Carlton allegation, which was originally published by BuzzFeed in January 2017 as part of a thirty-five-page dossier of raw intelligence now commonly known as the Steele dossier.
The Facts
Donald Trump arrives in Moscow on November 8, 2013, for a full day of business meetings. A number of Russian businessmen attend the meetings; among them is Artem Klyushin, a Russian billionaire whose close friend Konstantin Rykov will post on social media the day after the 2016 election that he and Klyushin were part of a clandestine campaign to get Trump elected.
Rykov also runs Dosug, a website that functions as Moscow’s largest brothel and most logistically dexterous supplier of prostitutes to locations around the Russian capital.
At one of Trump’s first meetings, a Russian attendee—possibly Emin Agalarov (see Chapter 2), possibly Klyushin or a third person present—tells Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, that if Trump wants, a group of prostitutes can be sent to his room at the Ritz-Carlton that night. According to Schiller’s testimony to Congress in November 2017, he declines the offer and tells Trump about it immediately; the two men laugh about it, Schiller testifies.
That night, Schiller stands outside Trump’s door as he normally does. After a few minutes, however, he goes to bed. Trump is aware—by his own subsequent admission at a January 2017 news conference—that his room is likely filled with clandestine recording equipment and that he must be “careful” about what he does there.
Schiller tells Congress that he “could not say for sure what happened during the remainder of the night.”
According to the dossier compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele—using Russian intelligence sources he developed during his time as head of the Russia desk at the British intelligence agency, as well as local Moscow sources and American sources alleged to be close to Trump—prostitutes were indeed sent to Trump’s room on November 8, 2013, and the room was being recorded as Trump says he suspected.
The dossier cites for this intelligence “several of the staff [at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow]”, as well as “Source D” and “Source E.” The dossier sources allege that, to show disrespect to President Obama and his wife, Michelle, Trump asked a group of women to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite that the Obamas had slept in during a prior official visit to Russia.
{Addendum, 6/8/2023: In his book Disloyal, Michael Cohen confirms that Trump viewed a “golden shower” performance at the Las Vegas club Emin Agalarov had taken him to several months earlier. Cohen reports that Trump was visibly enraptured by the urination-themed performance, a reaction that neither Emin nor his father Aras could have missed—and one that might well have informed the activities the Agalarovs imagined women could perform in front of Trump in his wired-for-audio-and-video hotel suite in Moscow in November of 2013.}
Over the course of the next year there will be several reports of witnesses who saw a confrontation in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow lobby between hotel staff and a group of women who wanted to go up to Trump’s room without signing in. Paul Wood of the BBC, in an article for the Spectator, will say he was told by an unnamed source that a hotel employee and an American tourist saw the row happen.
In October of 2017, an editor at the Guardian will contact this author to say that the Guardian has heard “there are witnesses to a confrontation in the hotel lobby, when security wanted the girls to sign in and DJT [Donald Trump] objected. . . . [O]ne [witness] is [a] former Trump Organization [employee].”
The editor adds that the Guardian source is a trusted one but “two layers away. She talked to a top Republican who talked to the witness. Her understanding is that the witness had talked to the FBI and given an interview to a local paper that never printed it.”
There is speculation, after the Steele dossier is published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, that Belarusian businessman Sergei Millian (born Siarhei Kukuts) is both Source D and Source E in the Steele dossier, a claim made unlikely by the dossier’s contention that Source E “confirmed” raw intelligence provided by Source D as to the incident in Trump’s hotel room.
Shortly after the dossier’s publication, Paul Wood reports that a retired spy told him in August of 2016 that an eastern European intelligence agency had confirmed the existence of a tape of the Ritz-Carlton incident. “Later”, Wood writes, “I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file” to determine whether the intelligence community credits the allegations. According to Wood, he received a response through that intermediary that there was “more than one tape” of the then president-elect, with “audio and video”, on “more than one date” and in “more than one place”—specifically, Moscow and the Russian city of St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Putin was an official in the Mayor’s office, at a level equivalent to “deputy mayor”, in the mid-1990s—and that the material was, in all instances, “of a sexual nature.”
{Addendum 6/8/2023: When Putin left his government employment in St. Petersburg, it was to work as a “deputy chief” in the Kremlin department focused on “property management”—one of the offices an American real estate developer like Donald Trump might expect to have to negotiate with, or perhaps even bribe, in order to build any substantial structure in Moscow.}
The day after BuzzFeed publishes Steele’s dossier of unprocessed intelligence, the Kremlin calls the dossier’s findings “a complete fabrication and utter nonsense.”
Trump thereafter cites the Kremlin’s response nearly word for word, calling the raw intelligence “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE”, and adding, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
He then compares the United States to Nazi Germany and himself to a victim of Nazi oppression, writing on Twitter, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
Defending himself against the allegations, Trump claims that it would be impossible for him to watch a third party urinate on a bed because he is a germaphobe. Yahoo News reports in April 2018 that Trump told FBI director James Comey, at a January 27, 2017, dinner, that he never slept overnight in Moscow—a claim that is later found to be false. The Washington Post reports, in January 2017, on Trump’s contention that he would never have acted inappropriately in his Moscow hotel room, writing, “[T]he president-elect professed an awareness that the hotel rooms he visits overseas may be bugged with tiny cameras.”
At a press conference the day after the dossier (without Steele’s permission) is put out by Buzzfeed, the then-president-elect says, “When I leave our country. . . . I am extremely careful. I’m surrounded by bodyguards. I’m surrounded by people. And I always tell them . . . ‘Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras.’” He adds, “I would certainly put [Russia] in that category.” Addressing specifically the possibility of being caught on camera doing something compromising, Trump says, “I always tell [my bodyguards and entourage]. . . . ‘I hope you’re gonna be good anyway. . . . [But you] better be careful, or you’ll be watching yourself on nightly television.’ I tell this to people all the time.”
Trump’s claims of having acted cautiously in Moscow are challenged by an interview on Hungarian television—aired long before Steele’s dossier was made public—in which a former Miss Hungary, Kata Sarka, says that Trump approached her shortly before the 2013 Miss Universe pageant and propositioned her for sex in his hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow.
Another of Trump’s defenses against the dossier’s allegations is that he would never sleep with a prostitute. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy “Playmate,” says that the first time she slept with Trump he tried to pay her afterward.
According to a January 2017 Daily Caller report, an unnamed former Trump adviser’s initial defense of Trump contended that it was Emin Agalarov who raised the matter of prostitutes and did not offer them so much as tell Schiller they would be sent. The same former adviser said that there were multiple “people” guarding Trump’s door all night. In his testimony to Congress, however, Schiller will say that it was a “Russian or Ukrainian” person, not the Azerbaijani-Russian Emin Agalarov, who made the offer of women for Trump, and that the only person assigned to Trump’s door that night was Schiller himself—and he left the door unguarded for much of the night.
Agalarov denies the allegation that he arranged for prostitutes and claims that Trump could not have been with prostitutes at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. on November 9, 2013, because at 7:00 a.m. that day he was filming part of a music video for Emin as a favor. However Trump himself often says he sometimes sleeps as few as three hours a night.
In January 2017, Stanislav Belkovsky, a Muscovite who is the director of the National Strategy Institute in Moscow, a sometime freelancer for publications such as the Guardian and the Moscow Times, and a host at independent Russian network TV Rain, tells the Daily Beast that “[p]rostitutes around [Moscow] say the ‘golden shower’ orgy story is true.”
In July 2017, independent journalist and surveillance expert Andrei Soldatov, while accompanying CBS’s Stephen Colbert on a brief sweep of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow presidential suite bedroom in which the recording of Trump was allegedly made, tells the Daily Beast that “Colbert and I look[ed] for surveillance cameras behind the large mirror [in the presidential suite] and to our astonishment we discovered an electric cable, which could not have any clear purpose, as the mirror had no electronic illumination.”
According to the New York Times, “Russia has a long and well-documented record of using kompromat to discredit the Kremlin’s foes and to lean on its potential friends. For decades [at least sixty years following the end of World War II], hotels across the former Soviet Union visited by foreigners were equipped with bugging devices and cameras by the K.G.B.” Experts on Russian hospitality-industry tradecraft say that, historically, “‘interesting’ . . . foreign businessmen” are put in a “handful of rooms” in the hotel in which they are staying that are wired for audio and video.
In March 2018, former CIA director John Brennan tells MSNBC that the Kremlin “may have something on [Trump] personally”: “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump, and may have things that they could expose.”
In April 2018, former FBI director James Comey, one of the original recipients of the Steele dossier in 2016, tells CNN, “I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible.”
When Vladimir Putin is asked in Helsinki, Finland, whether the Kremlin has a tape of Trump from his November 2013 stay at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, he does not deny the existence of such evidence. Instead, he says that he was unaware Trump was in Moscow at the time. Noting that there are too many “high-level [and] high-ranking” businessmen coming to Russia to try to collect compromising material on all of them, he adds that “when [Trump] was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow [in November 2013]. . . . Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.”
On August 10, 2018, Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer and an intelligence columnist for Time, tells a crowd at an event in Colorado that prior to the release of the Steele dossier in January 2017 he spoke to a former KGB officer who told him, “We have a tape of Donald Trump.”
While according to Baer the Russian didn’t say when the tape was recorded or what it depicted, Baer concluded, after the Steele dossier was published, that whether the tape referenced by the ex-KGB agent was from 2013 or not, based on the dossier’s allegations and his own familiarity with Russian intel operations, “the Agalarovs are KGB [FSB] agents.”
Annotated History
(with excerpts from the above chapter in italicized bold, followed by regular-font annotations; this section is key to understanding certain of the facts delineated in the Facts section, above)
1
Donald Trump arrives in Moscow on November 8, 2013, for a full day of business meetings. A number of Russian businessmen attend the meetings; among them is Artem Klyushin, a Russian billionaire whose close friend Konstantin Rykov will post on social media the day after the 2016 election that he and Klyushin were part of a campaign to get Trump elected. Rykov runs Dosug, a website that functions as Moscow’s largest brothel.
Konstantin Rykov is a member of Putin’s political party who previously served in the Duma, is one of the Russian leader’s most trusted confidants, and is widely considered by journalists and Kremlinologists as a member of the “propagandist arm of the Putin government machine”, according to Washington Monthly. PRI (Public Radio International) has noted his expertise in click-bait messaging, viral communication, and digital technology, and referred to him in May 2018 as “the man who taught the Kremlin how to win the internet.” He also, according to a 2016 Daily Dot article entitled “This Dark Net Brothel Makes Finding Sex as Easy as Hailing an Uber”, founded Dosug, now the largest brothel in Moscow.
Rykov created a pro-Trump website, Trump2016.ru, in 2015, and he published a pro-Trump endorsement just a few weeks after Trump’s surprise announcement of his candidacy for president that June. Pictures and text from Klyushin’s Twitter account suggest Klyushin attended a Trump rally in Iowa in late 2015. In a March 2016 Reuters article, Rykov, who is well known in Russia and among American journalists as a “pro-Kremlin blogger” and “Putin supporter”, is quoted as saying, “Trump is the first member of the American elite in twenty years who compliments Russia. Trump will smash America as we know it, we’ve got nothing to lose. Do we want Grandmother Hillary? No. Maybe it’s time to help the old brigand [Trump].”
2
The dossier sources allege that, to show disrespect to President Obama and his wife, Michelle, Trump asked a group of women to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite that the Obamas had slept in during a prior official visit to Russia.
At one hotel in former Soviet republic Estonia, according to the New York Times, during the Soviet era “60 of the hotel’s 423 rooms were bugged and reserved for ‘interesting persons’ like foreign businessmen. Guests who were judged vulnerable to blackmail were put in a handful of rooms with holes in the walls through which special cameras would film dalliances with prostitutes. All the prostitutes . . . worked for the K.G.B.”
In a conversation with FBI director James Comey in early 2017, Trump allegedly said that Putin told him in Moscow in 2013 that “[Russia had] some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.” The comment echoes a letter Trump sent to Putin in the months before he went to Moscow, in which Trump had added a postscript indicating that “he looked forward to seeing ‘beautiful’ women during his trip”, according to the Washington Post.
As noted by CBS’s Stephen Colbert when he traveled to the Ritz-Carlton Moscow to investigate the allegations in the Steele dossier, Trump stayed in the nicest room in the hotel—the presidential suite—while in the Russian capital. In July 2017, Colbert rented out the room Trump had stayed in and videotaped his discovery of “an unexplained power cable . . . dangling from a section of the bedroom wall that was hidden behind a non-illuminated mirror.” Colbert would later recount for Conan O’Brien, on the latter’s show Conan, how “I actually looked behind the mirrors of the presidential suite room where they supposedly had filmed this happening, and there were electrical wires going into a mirror.”
As for the motivation behind the acts Trump allegedly observed at the Ritz-Carlton, reports suggest that Trump has hated Obama ever since Obama made fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2011 in front of the most powerful and influential figures in American media. According to a September 2015 article by eyewitness Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, “Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him. . . . No head-bobbing or hand-clapping or chin-shaking or sheepish grinning—he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage.”
According to a Washington Post report, “reporters for major news organizations say Trump was so humiliated that it triggered a deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge [against Obama].”
ABOVE: Then-U.S. president Barack Obama roasting Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Despite a fleeting grim smile, witnesses report that Trump became livid during the highly embarrassing several minutes of nationally televised ribbing.
3
Over the course of the next year there will be reports of witnesses who saw a row in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow lobby between hotel staff and a group of women who wanted to go up to Trump’s room without signing in.
Per Paul Wood—a Russia correspondent for the BBC at the time he filed his report—an American Ritz-Carlton Moscow guest alleged that prostitutes went up to Trump’s room.
As Wood wrote in an August 2017 article for the Spectator (emphasis supplied), “Steele is not the only source [on the alleged Ritz-Carlton Moscow tape]. I heard of Russian kompromat—compromising material—on Trump from two sources months before the Steele dossier came to light. . . . There are . . . reports of witnesses in the hotel who corroborate Steele’s reporting. These include an American who’s said to have seen a row with hotel security over whether the (alleged) hookers would be allowed up to Trump’s suite.”
Besides the (minimum) two hotel witnesses he referenced, Wood also directly or indirectly received information from intelligence agency contacts who confirmed Steele’s reporting. As Wood wrote for the BBC on January 12, 2017, in an article entitled “Trump ‘Compromising’ Claims: How and Why Did We Get Here?”:
Steele is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by “the head of an East European intelligence agency.” Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file. . . . I got a message back that there was “more than one tape”, “audio and video”, on “more than one date”, in “more than one place”—in the Ritz in Moscow and also in St. Petersburg—and that the material [in the tapes] was “of a sexual nature.”
Steele’s dossier offers us another person who could corroborate the alleged events of November 8, 2013. According to Steele, a Trump friend described as being in his early forties—either Felix Sater, Russian-born Republican strategist Boris Epshteyn, or (most likely of the three) Sergei Millian—knows that a compromising tape of the sort described above exists. Steele doesn’t allege this witness spoke directly to him about the existence of a tape; rather, he wrote in his dosser that a man in Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant entourage spoke out of turn to a Russian source Steele had reason to trust.
Another possible corroborator is Aras Agalarov, father of Emin. A Western diplomat in Moscow, speaking to the Daily Mail, observed that “if there are skeletons in Trump’s dealings with Russia, Aras is the man who will know where they are.”
Just three days after Steele’s dossier was published, NBC News called Steele a “real-life James Bond”, quoting British tradecraft expert Rupert Allason.
4
Multiple active-duty CIA officers responsible for the case file on this incident, speaking to the BBC’s Russia correspondent through an intermediary, say that the recording does indeed exist. BBC reporter Paul Wood reports that at least one allied European intelligence agency has the same information. These officers also tell the BBC that there is at least one other recording of Trump “of a sexual nature” from a different location (St. Petersburg) and a different time. Any such recording would be considered national security–endangering kompromat—potential blackmail material—if it is now in the possession of the Kremlin.
Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University who “has studied the Russian use of kompromat”, described to the New Yorker in July 2018 the political environment in Russia as being one where “kompromat is routinely used . . . to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion. Intelligence services, businesspeople, and political figures everywhere exploit gossip and damaging information.”
Darden even coined the term “blackmail state” to describe the “uniquely powerful role” kompromat has in what was once the Soviet Union, and how “pervasive” it is. In September 2017, a Russian hotel industry source told the Guardian, “If you are in their field of interest then the FSB will absolutely attempt to carry out surveillance. . . . In the bigger hotels you also definitely have a number of people on the staff who work on the side for the FSB, so they would have had absolutely no problem getting into the room if necessary.” Added the source, “I’m pretty sure Trump would have been of a sufficient level to warrant [surveillance]. I’ve seen people of lower levels than him watched [in their hotel rooms] for sure.”
{Addendum, 6/8/2023: In 2019, the year after Proof of Collusion was published, the United States Senate launched a bipartisan effort to interrogate David Geovanis, a Trump friend who was also an employee of Russian oligarch and self-described Kremlin agent/Vladimir Putin ally Oleg Deripaska. Readers may know Deripaska as the longtime employer of Paul Manafort, Trump’s ex-con former campaign manager and the man who shared proprietary 2016 Trump campaign data with Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik in New York City in the summer of 2016 and spent all of the 2016 general election under a standing contract with Deripaska to advance Putin’s geopolitical goals inside the United States (see generally Proof of Corruption, Macmillan, 2020). In 1996, when future Deripaska employee and business partner Manafort was advising Trump through the consulting company he then ran with Roger Stone, future Deripaska employee Geovanis was Trump’s host as he made his second visit to Russia, specifically to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to seek Kremlin-sanctioned real estate deals with Russian oligarchs. At the time, Vladimir Putin was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, having a few years earlier ended his long career surveilling powerful Americans as a KGB agent. Geovanis, playing the role in 1996 that Aras and Emin Agalarov would play in 2013, allegedly sought to enmesh Donald Trump in videotaped sexual escapades in Russia.
As CNN has reported of Senate Democratic and Republican investigators’ strong interest in Geovanis, “Geovanis may be valuable in the mystery of whether Russia has material on Trump that could be personally embarrassing to him….After starting his career in finance, Geovanis went to Moscow to work for a Russian venture of a company called Brooke Group, which owned land earmarked for the site of a proposed Trump Tower. When Trump came to town to promote the project, sources say, it was Geovanis’ job to show him around. Also on the trip were Brooke Group’s owners, the real estate moguls Bennett LeBow and Howard Lorber, who went on to become substantial donors to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Lorber is said to be one of Trump’s two closest friends, and is one of the two men Donald Trump Jr. immediately called from Trump Tower when he learned that he would be meeting with several Kremlin agents in his father’s home in New York City in June 2016. The Trump Tower Moscow project Geovanis was trying to shepherd in 1996 was the very same project that Aras Agalarov, Putin’s lead architect, would seek to shepherd in November 2013.
Geovanis is married to a Russian woman; has a Russian passport; lives in Moscow; and, per CNN, has stayed away from the United States entirely—making it impossible for investigators to access him—ever since Trump became president. The company Geovanis worked for when he hosted Trump in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the latter the location of the alleged second tape of Trump “of a sexual nature,” eventually changed its name from Brooke Group to Vector Group. One of the major shareholders of Vector Group is Robert Mercer, a man described by CNN as “the conservative donor who was once a patron of business and political ventures of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.” After the indirectly Geovanis-linked Paul Manafort left Trump’s campaign in August 2016, he was effectively replaced by the indirectly Geovanis-linked Bannon, who became the Trump campaign CEO in the late summer of 2016.
When the U.S. Senate released its bipartisan report on ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian security services, it revealed an unsettling but in retrospect perhaps unsurprising fact: David Geovanis “[has] links to the Russian security services.” Readers may recall that among the controversial pardons Trump issued before leaving the White House in January 2021 were pardons for Paul Manafort, Manafort’s 1990s business partner Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and both of Trump’s other alleged top Kremlin-backchannel coordinators, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. Trump also surprised many by pardoning Charles Kushner, the father of the presidential adviser who’d interfaced the most on Trump’s behalf with Kremlin agents at Trump Tower before and after the 2016 election, son-in-law Jared Kushner.}
If Trump has indeed been caught up in Russia’s “blackmail state,” the implications for America’s national security are significant.
Whether any material in the Kremlin’s possession is of a personal or financial nature or both, it throws into doubt the authenticity of Trump’s Russia policy—which has included characterizing Putin in glowing terms, refusing to denounce the Russian strongman’s role in the murder of journalists, opposing critical sanctions on Russia, challenging the authority and viability of NATO in a manner that echoes Kremlin propaganda, advocating Russia’s immediate return to the G7, and remaining open to acknowledging Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
"Urine trouble now, Trump!!"
For all those who respond, "Russia, Russia, Russia!" I would say the same back to them. I wouldn't doubt Russians have groomed him for possible presidency starting around the Ivanya years. And Melania? Is she his handler? Sounds nutty, but nothing would surprise me. My God, is the world ever getting mobbed up.
Thanks Seth. I did order your book - hard copy - looking forward to reading.