Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 26, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 26th, 2016 (Edited/updated slightly September 27th)

Getty Images/Reuters/NY Post

AMMAN — This is too close for comfort, people. And it’s important to understand why. Here are ten reasons why what some call the “Trumpocalypse” is a real serious possibility, one with about the same odds of happening as Hillary saving America, Western civilization, and the world from a President Trump. Any exaggeration in the preceding sentence is slight, if it exists at all, I’m sorry to say.

1.)   This Isn’t like 2012. Or any other year, for that matter; the past cannot provide comfort

Numerous times I’ve experienced liberals who are confident saying “This is just like when it was close with Mitt Romney and Obama. We’re going to win.” Or pointing to this trend or that swing from another election year. This boggles my mind because I thought one of the most obvious—even omnipresent—themes from this year’s election is so much being so unpredictable and so unprecedented. Republicans had 17 candidates running for president, nearly all of whom were better qualified than Trump. And Trump won. A declared “democratic socialist” won about 4 in 10 votes in the Democratic contest. So, please, don’t tell me not to worry because X happened in X past election. This year, the rulebook seems to have been thrown onto a bonfire of the vanities. Obviously, this is because of Trump (and the people backing him) more than anything else, and he seems to pay no long-term prices for his many gaffes and scandals and outrages.

2.)   Republican voters really are a mob and “principled” Republicans actually willing to stand against Trump on principle are a nearly extinct species

I will be giving myself credit, and then say what I got wrong. In August 2015, I was one of the only non-pro-Trump people to recognize Trump’s potential to win the nomination and that important factors favored his chances of doing so. But at the time I predicted he would be a disaster as a general election candidate; that is still possible, but seems very unlikely now; what seems more likely is that it will be very close either way.

How did I get this wrong? I put too much emphasis on “The Republican Establishment” and assumed it actually represented more people in the party than it actually did. One of the reasons both Mitt Romney and John McCain lost is that, unlike George W. Bush, both were relatively unliked by Republican voters for being too moderate. But in both 2008 and 2012, a number of Christian conservatives split the base votes in favor of one main moderate “Establishment” candidate. The “Establishment” elites in backed McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2004, both of whom during important early stretches only won a plurality and not a majority of GOP voters. In 2008, John McCain only won 3 of 7 contests in January, failing to even reach 40% of the vote in any contest, and on that year’s Super Tuesday on February 5th, out of 20 contests McCain only won over 50% of the votes in 3 even though he won 9 contests overall. Then in 2012, Mitt Romney won 2 of 4 contests in January, but did not win a majority of votes in either and won less than 40% in one; for all of February, he won less than half the vote in every contest save one in Nevada, where he won 50.1% of the vote, even though he won 4 out of 6 contests. In both situations, other candidates divided votes that went towards less moderate, less “Establishment”-backed candidates so that solid chances to derail both McCain and Romney and allow a single other candidate to gain clear momentum early in the campaign were lost. Conversely, there were so many candidates in 2016 that were “Establishment”-oriented and moderate that the dynamic worked somewhat in reverse, so that even after the first Super Tuesday in March, such candidates has only won a single state (Rubio in Minnesota), and the rest went to Trump and Cruz, two solidly anti-“Establishment” candidates, with Kasich being the only other candidate to win one of the fifty states, his home state of Ohio.

What I and I think many others thought is that “Well, that crazy base Republican was beaten in 2008 and 2012, and while they weren’t enthusiastic about their candidates, the more typical and moderate Republicans who voted in the general election but not the primaries were more solidly behind McCain and Romney.” What 2016 has taught us is that there are very few “typical moderate” Republicans in any meaningful sense, because such people would not be supporting Trump; I had not realized how far gone the vast majority of Republican voters are down the rabbit hole; the Kasich-Kristol-National Review-wing of the Republican Party is only a tiny fraction of the Party overall and has little sway with Republican voters in general. Sure, when the “Establishment” candidates won in 2008 and 2012, most rank-and-file Republicans had no problem supporting them over Obama but did not do so enthusiastically; yet the assumption that many Republican being rational and principled and unable to support Trump was always a myth, as Trump’s numbers now mean that he has pretty much all Republicans in his camp. The public intellectuals, commentators, and national security professionals who are Republicans and speaking out against Trump are merely a detached intelligentsia who influence the small group of elites like them and, clearly, virtually no other Republicans. I have lost track of the specific items of behavior that should have cost Trump a significant number of Republican voters—from disparaging both John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War and a reporter for being disabled to talking about his penis at a presidential debate to seeming to instigate both violence (repeatedly) and Russian hacking against Clinton—but as we approach Election Day, that support has only increased and is at comparable levels to Clinton’s support among Democrats. In fact, Trump’s behavior has in no way disqualified him from receiving support within his party comparable to levels of what other recent Republican nominees have enjoyed.

In other words, I foolishly believed that enough Republicans would be better people than to be able to support Trump. But if anything, enthusiasm is higher for Trump than Clinton. Granted, I didn’t expect this number of Republicans to be large (and knew it didn’t need to be that large to still make a big dent in Trump’s support level), but it’s pretty much nonexistent relative to other candidates, and thus, the race is basically a dead heat.

3.)   Millennials

Much has been written of Millennials’s lack of support for Clinton. It’s not a fading thing: it dogged Clinton all through the primaries and it’s still a major problem six weeks before Election Day. Echoes of Brexit—when an outcome that a vast majority of Millennials in the UK did not desire and that has drastically negative long-term consequence occurred because Millennials pathetically couldn’t motivate themselves to get out and vote—can be heard now in America, with not only worries about whether or not Millennials will turn out and votebut worries about who they will vote for even if they do turn out. Clinton’s relatively and notably strong weakness with Millennials compared to Obama is evident across all ethnic, racial, and gender groups, including with African-Americans and women. It’s not that they support Trump more, it’s that they often tend to support other third-party candidates or seem less likely to vote for Clinton or vote at all: polls tend to show Clinton’s support among Millennials from being close to significantly behind the combined Johnson-Stein vote, and the trendline for Clintons’ Millennial support is (mostly) moving down. 

In a close election, Millennials are a key part of the Obama coalition that Clinton cannot afford to do without. But perhaps even most frustratingly, such behavior on the part of Millennials is something the country and especially they themselves cannot afford. In the words of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, “As Bernie Sanders himself said last week: “This is not the time for a protest vote.” Protest voting or not voting at all isn’t principled. It’s dumb, and childish, and self-immolating. I know you’re young, but grow up!” James Kirchick, writing for The Daily Beast, echoes a similar sentiment: “…[M]illennial opposition to Clinton and the attendant blitheness toward the prospect of a Trump presidency…[can] best [be] described as a mix of moral relativism, historical ignorance, and narcissism.” However, some good news below…

4.)   Sanders Supporters

There is a lot of overlap here with the Millennials section above, but here, we must ask why so many Millennials think of Clinton as a soulless hack, the epitome both of corruption and a selfish “Establishment,” and a “warmonger.” Where, you ask, did they get such an impression? Easily more than any other source, the answer is Bernie Sanders. I have laid all this outin detail in the past, but what is important to note here is that before Sanders began his presidential campaign, this narrative of Clinton was basically nonexistent. Then he repeated it over, and over, and over, and over, and over again at every rally over many months, skillfully blaming Clinton for an entire system implicitly at first with a guilt-by-association campaign, then progressing to letting surrogates do his dirty work and not reigning them in, then becoming more direct, even to the degree of whipping up crowds into a frenzy and pausing to let them boo Clinton and the Democratic Party, thus creating an atmosphere of hatred of Clinton (as evidenced by many signs and just listening to Sanders supporters talk about her at rallies) that culminated in a mini-riot at the Nevada Democratic State Convention in May that I dubbed a mainly non-violent form of political terrorism. Now, is it any wonder, after claiming before that the contest was “rigged” against him and implying that Clinton was a monster, that many of his backers didn’t still don’t support her, despite his endorsement? 

Of course, many of the earlier discussed Millennials are Sanders supporters, as he was wildly popular with the younger crowd. 

As for that good news: just yesterday, an Economist/YouGov poll was released that showed a dramatic increase in a key stat: 70% of Sanders supporters were now saying they would support Clinton, up from 57% a week ago, which was up from 52% in a poll released on the 15th. The new poll also saw Trump’s support from Sanders supporters increase to 13% from 12%, which was 15% before that, while Stein’s support shrank dramatically to 6% from 11%, which had been 13% before that; as for Johnson, his support dropped dramatically as well, to 4% of Sanders supporters, down from 9% in the previous two surveys. This is welcome news, but is just one pollster’s group of polls and its findings do not seem to fit in the larger patterns that now have the race virtually tied. And despite the increases in these examples, they still show 3 out of 10 Sanders supporters are not backing Clinton, and when factoring in the fact that 13% of them are saying they will support Trump, Clinton is left with a net level of support of only 57% of Sanders supporters over Trump. These specific Economist/YouGov polls notwithstanding, Sanders supporters and Millennials, two groups with huge overlap, are groups Clinton needs to really focus on in the final weeks of her campaign in order to ensure a victory in November.

5.)   Dr. Stein and Gov. Johnson

In most polls, when third-party candidates are factored in, Clinton does worse than when the same poll shows just Clinton and Trump, the clear conclusion is that the two third-party candidates are taking more votes from Clinton than from Trump. When this trend first became clear, it was shocking: obviously the far leftist Stein would be taking virtually all her support from the left, but Johnson has between two and three times as much support as Stein, and he, as a L/libertarian, would be expected to be drawing more support from the right, and yet, the net advantage has been to Trump, meaning Johnson has a considerable portion of his support—roughly half—coming from the left. Since Johnson is “cool,” very independent-minded, very anti-foreign intervention, and very pro-weed, this means he is taking vital votes away from young Millennials all over the country and in key battleground states where marijuana is very popular, especially Colorado but also Michigan, Nevada, surprisingly-close Maine, and New Hampshire; New Hampshire and Nevada are also two of the states with the most libertarian support, and Colorado is also in the top third; in all five states, Johnson’s polling average is 8% or higher, and in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Maine, it’s above 10%; this is all in five states where the polling average gap between Trump and Clinton is 0.2% to 5.4% (and we did not even get into Stein). In other words, there is a very real chance that Johnson and Stein being on the ballot will end up covering the difference if Clinton loses any of these states even when just factoring in their liberal support (according to FiveThirtyEight, she’s currently favored in Michigan, New Hampshire, Maine—which is one of two states that does not award all the electoral votes to the statewide winner but splits some of its electoral votes based on Congressional district, with Trump up in one district and likely to get 1 of Maine’s 4 Electoral College votes because of that—and is favored slightly in Colorado, but is slightly behind in Nevada; Trump has recently closed the gap in the other four, as well). If she loses any of the states where she is favored and Trump holds onto every state in which he is favored, Clinton loses…

The situation of a third-party candidate acting as a spoiler is not merely hypothetical: in 2000, liberal Ralph Nader voters could easily have put Gore in the White House instead of Bush; Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and Nader got almost 100,000 there; in New Hampshire, Bush won by 7,211 votes, where Nader got over 22,000 votes; exit polls told us that if Nader had stayed out of the race, 47% of his votes would have gone to Gore and only 21 percent to Bush. Objectively, then, Nader and his voters cost Gore the presidency, and a similar situation could be giving us a President Trump in a few weeks.

Before Nader, the last time a third-party was a spolier was when Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party run cost Republicans the presidency in the election of 1912.

6.)   Clinton isn’t Obama

Obama was an exceptionally charismatic candidate and came into the public eye with barely a hint of scandal (in part because he was so new). Hillary Clinton simply doesn’t have the same personality and charisma as Obama. Two points here: first, I would hope liberals/Millennials can energize themselves to vote on critical issues concerning our future without needing to have someone with an exceptionally charismatic personality as a candidate. I’ve had it with liberals not supporting the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry who may not have been “cool” but who would have been great presidents and would have spared us the human disaster that was George W. Bush (although if we have a President Trump I will imagine that I will recall the Bush years fondly) had younger voters then been able to put aside “cool” and focus on substance. But especially with liberal Millennials now, I am not sure we can trust them to do their fair share in this election or over time without the dangling of shiny new objects in front of their faces; Clinton is like the perfectly functioning and incredibly useful iPhone that just happens to have the misfortune of being two or even three versions old; there is very little difference between it and newer models, but it’s not the cool-thingy-of-the-moment, and therefore earns something between indifference and scorn from the typical Millennial liberal. It’s more about an individual and their personality that supporting a political party over time. In fact, when it comes to their politics, Millennials are pretty political party averse: about half identify as independents (hence they came out to vote for Obama twice, but voted in significantly lower proportions in both the 2010 and 2014 midterms, helping to give rise to the Tea Party and contributing to the inability of Obama and Democrats to enact key parts of a liberal agenda. The above factors are big parts of the reason why Trump is now competitive and basically even with Clinton.

Second point, related to the iPhone analogy: I would hope liberal Millennials can realize that the iPhone Hillary is much like the iPhone Barack, for even without the cooler design of the iPhone Barack, they are almost the same in many substantive ways; in other words, that Clinton is essentially running for a third Obama term but has a big gap between the level of support he enjoyed and that she is enjoying now is mainly due to a combination of one of three things: 1.) she’s not (as?) cool, 2.) she’s a woman (black men voted before women in America, and we had a black man as president before a woman), so “HELLO, sexism!”, and 3.) negative recent branding of Clinton by her former rival, Bernie Sanders, and by her current and decades-long-enemies, the Republicans. In the end, there IS SO MUCH MORE IN COMMON between Clinton and Obama than any differences that exist between them that it is hard explain the gap otherwise. In fact, it is very telling that Obama is still loved by Millennials liberals, but Clinton gets castigated and deemed evil incarnate for Libya and TPP, among other policies, that were actually Obama’s calls to make and more his than her policies because he was president, not her; listening to elements of the angry left’s denunciations of Clinton, you sure wouldn’t know this.

7.)   Ann Selzer, polls, and momentum.

Who, you ask? Only “the best pollster in politics.”  Her outfit just released a poll, conducted September 21st-24th, which has Trump up 2 points (43% to Clinton’s 41%), Stein with 4% of the vote, Johnson with 8%, and 2% of voters saying “don’t want to tell,” which sounds an awful lot like embarrassed Trump voters to me; the last poll her group conducted had Clinton up 4% (44% to Trump’s 40%), with the same 4% for Stein and Johnson at 9%, meaning their latest poll had Trump up 3 points and Clinton down 3 points from the last one. Oh, and the averages of all the other polling shows a tightening of the race both nationally and in key battleground states. At a time when it would be great for this to not be happening. Trump is gaining support, and Clinton losing support, with only weeks to go and just as the debates are starting.

No pressure Hillary.

8.)   Trump has spent very little money relative to Clinton

Since mid-June, Clinton has outspent Trump more than 5-to-1 ($109.4 million to $18.7 million) on television ads through September 13th and has spent far less than any major-party candidate since at least 2008. The fact that they are basically tied in light of this info is, frankly, terrifying and terrifyingly efficient.

If that isn’t bad enough, Trump’s campaign just announced it will spend $100 million in TV and $40 million in digital ads between now and the election. Imagine the potential difference that could make… and imagine if the billionaire decides to throw a lot more of his own money in as a surprise right before the end…

9.)   The major media outlets have generally done a terrible job covering this election

A whole article can (and will be) written about this, but we should briefly look at the dynamics behind how bad the coverage has been and how important the media is in shaping this race. It basically boils down to this: Trump has so much baggage and spews so many lies and misstatements that the media barely scratches the surface of them before it decides to move onto something else without properly revisiting what it had started exploring, but spends an inordinately disproportionate amount of time going over every little detail of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails/server (since that is basically all that can compete with the scandals on Trump’s side) and yet cannot even provide proper understanding and context for that (which I provided in my last article); there were even times that it seemed the news cycle contained nothing else about Clinton other than her news scandal, not her policies, not her ideas, not anything else, except maybe her falling favorability/trustworthiness numbers. The same can be said for the lazy, facile coverage of the Clinton Foundation arising from content in certain e-mails of Clinton and her staff, content that was anything but scandalous, yet you wouldn’t know this from the coverage. This has created a dangerous false equivalence in the coverage of Clinton and Trump, with the New York Times’ Paul Krugman noting a similar dynamic helped to destroy Al Gore’s candidacy in 2000. As for Trump, I myself wrote an in-depth article on his and his associates’ ties to Russia, making several connections before any major media outlet made them; there is no way that I should have been the one to do this, and not a major paper (but I’ll take it as a freelancer!); this is just one example of the general lack of proper coverage of Trump.

The end result has been that Trump is now more trusted than Clinton, as many Americans are getting a distorted view of Clinton and one that makes her seem in many ways to be on the same level as Trump, where people just seem to shrug off his scandals in part because there has been too little of a focus on really digging deeper, following up on unanswered questions, and getting the full, complete picture. In many ways, the damage is done and attempts at self-correction (some just starting) may very well be too late.

10.)  Americans are stupid

Rationality dictates that Clinton would have a sizeable lead. But we are not a rational country. It’s so glaringly obvious to the rest of the world, which is also increasingly irrational. I seriously have no idea how people will react, decide, or change their mind between now and the election because any rational person would choose Clinton and I do not know if we have more rational than irrational people. I hope we do, but for now, about 6 in 10 voters are saying they will vote for Trump, Johnson, or Stein. I’m not going to cite anything to show how stupid we are a nation; rather, I’ll let you, dear readers, engage in the mental exercise of looking up how bad our public education system is, how ignorant people are about basic history and geography, how crazy are some of the beliefs Americans have (like evolution and climate change), how many people believe in debunked conspiracy theories, and any other number of other topics.

Democracy may be failing in places like the EU, Turkey, Israel, India, & Russia as right-wing, racist, and/or xenophobic demagogues, from Modi to Netanyahu, from Le Pen to Erdoğan gain power, but far be it for the U.S. to be a spectator: it’s trying as hard as it can to follow suit, embrace hatred and irrationality and tribalism as well as groups in Syria, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, just in less violent ways. But such tribalism almost invariably leads to violence, and we are seeing racial unrest and disturbances not seen in a generation in America. If Trump wins, these fault lines can be expected to be the location of earthquakes.

*****

On top of all this, there’s always the room for late-game surprises: terrorist attacks could increase a climate of fear to favor a candidate presenting himself as a strong-man—like Trump is—and push the country to the right as has happened in Europe, Turkey, and Israel; even non-terrorist mass shootings may do more to contribute to fears about security more than add to any support for gun control; there’s also room for one or two bad jobs reports between now and the election, something which would cause the voters to blame Democratic Party of Obama, the sitting president, and of Clinton. Then there’s the promised “October surprise” coming from Julian Assange of Wikileaks, one which will release more Clinton-related hacked files and be sure to keep that topic in the limelight in the final days of the election contest…

And let’s not forget the possibility of Russia hacking our election to put try to put Trump in the White House…

And even amid the litany of well-documented lies and distortions coming from Trump of just the past week, the voters are moving slightly towards him and slightly away from Clinton. Some of these people are liberals who are ignoring political reality and suffer from any of a series of personality syndromes and have no business voting for anyone but Clinton when she is running against Trump. Well, one thing which hasn’t changed this cycle compared with others in the key final months: the left is still great at shooting itself in the foot while the right is making sure to be unified. Do I think Trump will win? I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no either. I feel ever so slightly more confident that Clinton will win instead of Trump, but now that is only by the faintest of margins and accompanied with a sense of dread. Whatever the outcome, shame on America and American voters that it was ever as close as it is now, that someone like Trump can get this far in our political system. 

Even if Clinton wins, we are a country with serious problems and will be an extremely divided nation. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote with perhaps millions of liberals voting with Johnson and Stein, outnumbering conservatives who vote Johnson, even as they are not enough to swing the Electoral College to Trump. It would be a kind of revenge for 2000, but one that at this point in time could really damage the credibility of the system in eyes of voters and greatly harm the ability of Clinton to govern or the government in general to function. I would be shocked if Republicans didn’t try to impeach Clinton on the “scandals” of Benghazi and her e-mails; like the last time a Clinton was impeached, the case will be ridiculous and the motives will be almost entirely political. No matter who wins, it will be difficult, but no question will America still be far better off with Clinton than with Trump. 

But on those hypotheticals another time…

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 3, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 3rd, 2016, also published by StupidParty Math v Myth here

All photos taken from the Clinton Foundation website

AMMAN — If you listen to many conservatives, the Clinton Foundation is little more than a personal, criminal stash for cash for the Clintons (one big “scam,” to quote Trump).  But like so many other things that conservatives claim, upon closer inspection, efforts to tarnish or call into question the Clinton Foundation fall flat, quite like their efforts to dismiss the good work of the United Nations, even for all the UN’s faults.  In reality, the Clinton Foundation is a massive organization, atypical of most charities but one that does a staggering amount of good all around the world.

Love or hate the Clintons’s politics, it is an objective and indisputable fact that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton have been involved in programs that have bettered and save the lives of millions of people.  Even without Bill’s political career, his work with the Clinton Foundation would be enough to make him one of the great philanthropists of our time, and Hillary Clinton has also been getting increasingly involved, as has Chelsea.

What the Clinton Foundation Is and How It Works

The Clinton Foundation is actually a public charity that mainly does direct charity work, which can be confusing since many foundations primarily funnel money to other charities.  While conservative media and political figures (like serial liar Carly Fiorina) have claimed that only a small portion (Fiorina said 6%, hot-air-dispenser Rush Limbaugh said 15%) of the money going into the Foundation goes to charity, this statistic is in reference to the money that the Foundation gives to other charitable groups; the vast majority its money still goes to charity, its own charitable works, with 87.2% of all funds going directly to either their or others’ program activities/beneficiaries.  Unsurprisingly, conservatives myopically failed to do even this basic level of research before making their wildly off-base claims, which is par for the course in these hyperpartisan times. 

What is now the Clinton Foundation began in 1997 as an organization that began helping then-President Clinton set up his presidential library, but since then it has grown to be a global foundation that encompasses eleven initiatives, has raised over $2 billion for charity and development work, and now raises about a quarter of a billion annually.

Let’s look at these eleven parts, and a twelfth that was recently ended:

Clinton Foundation:

2014 expenses: $249,545,030 (12.3% overhead, including management, administrative, and fundraising expenses; 87.2% directly to program activity/beneficiaries; and 0.5% to make up for shortfalls in donation pledges)

Clinton’s Presidential Center (library) (1997-present)

2014 expenses: $13,501,618 (5.4% of Foundation total)

Presidential libraries serve as something of a combination of a museum and an archive for the particular presidency they showcase.  The Clinton Foundation was formed in 1997 to help raise money for Bill Clinton’s presidential library, which it did to the tune of $165 million over some years plus over $11 million in the form of grant of land from Little Rock, Arkansas, on which the library was built (in comparison, Reagan’s library cost $60 million at the time it was built, and George W. Bush’s presidential library cost about $250 million).  Clinton’s library, which includes the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service and provides year-round educational programs and camps for students of all ages, has benefited the city of Little Rock greatly, as well.

Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (2002-2013)

The Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative began in 2002 by helping small businesses in Harlem and grew to focus on promoting entrepreneurs and small businesses in cities across America.  Through partnerships with successful entrepreneurs who acted as mentors and major business institutions like Booz Allen Hamilton and UBS, the Initiative specialized in providing consulting and mentoring to small businesses and small business owners.  The 2012 annual report for the Clinton Foundation noted that the Clinton Economic Initiative had provided 75,000 hours of pro bono consulting and mentoring hours, over $15 million in pro bono consulting, that 92% of businesses that received assistance from its Entrepreneur Mentoring Program said that that assistance had helped them deal with the recession, that all these the businesses assisted had an average of a 16% increase in workforce, and over 600 volunteers provided long-term pro bono services for small businesses in nine different U.S. cities.  Another example of the type of work the Initiative engaged in, as highlighted in the 2009 annual report, was helping to provide banking services to struggling populations in America that were underserved by the banking industry. The program was shuttered in 2013 because the Foundation found that the efforts were too labor intensive and dependent on many too outside factors to be replicated on the larger scale the Foundation had hoped for it.

Clinton Health Access Initiative* (2002-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $143,041,357 (57.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Access Initiative began in 2002 as a big push to provide HIV/AIDS patients with low-cost access to life-saving drugs, and since then has expanded to include treatment for malaria and vaccine access, among other programs; nearly 10 million people have received access to lifesaving treatment at low cost through the Initiative since 2002, to name its most significant achievement.  It now operates directly in more than 33 countries benefiting over 70 countries overall.  Its 2014 annual report noted that it was also heavily involved in assisting Liberia with its recent Ebola epidemic.

Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation (2005-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $16,436,262 ($2 million from Clinton Foundation, 0.8% of Foundation’s total expenses; rest is (presumably) raised by Alliance on its own, outside of the efforts of the Foundation)

The Alliance for a Healthier generation was founded by the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association in 2005 to fight America’s childhood obesity epidemic by providing alternatives to soft-drink sodas in schools and other facilities used by children, all through making deals with the soda industry.  It is the nation’s largest effort to fight childhood obesity, and in large part because of the Alliance’s efforts, the calories of drink products sent to school locations fell 90% from 2004-2010.  Through 2015, the program has spread to help affect 18 million students in over 31,000 schools in all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, as well as over 6,300 locations used by children outside of school grounds.  There is also an effort to help students improve health in other ways, engaging over 56,000 doctors and health professionals.  The Alliance also engages companies like McDonald’s to improve the level of healthier offerings within their product lines, in McDonald’s case covering 85% of its worldwide sales.

Clinton Global Initiative (2005-present)

2014 expenses: $23,544,381 (9.4% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Global Initiative began as way for President Clinton to bring together world leaders and thinkers as only he can together in one place and to get them to make substantive commitments towards tackling major global problems.  Through 2015, it has engaged over “180 heads of state, 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media, which has resulted in $90 billion in commitments representing over 3,100 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 430 million people in more than 180 countries,” spanning issues as diverse as job creation, training, education, human rights, gender equality, health, medicine, conservation, ecology, endangered species, and international development, among others. 

Clinton Climate Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $8,293,416 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Climate Initiative has been working for years to address fundamental drivers behind dangerous man-made climate change using easily replicable and cost-effective methods that the Initiative is spreading throughout the U.S. and the world.  The Initiative’s Forestry Program is helping governments together with other partners to better manage their forests and forested lands and to help plan and enact forest restoration, with major programs in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. The Islands Diesel Replacement program helps small island countries transform their energy sectors into ones that involve far more clean energy and far more sustainable practices, and also assists with waste and water management, which all, in turn, spur new jobs and markets for the green energy sector.  An energy-consumption-reduction program and a Home Energy Affordability Loan (HEAL) program that both began in Arkansas have both spread to six other states—California, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin—and allowed both employers and employees to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce costs, with the HEAL program alone helping over 5,600 people and both programs together reducing U.S. carbon emissions by over 33,500 tons every year.

Clinton Development Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $4,482,714 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Development Initiative has been helping small farmers in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda by leveraging knowledge, resources, and partnerships to help over 105,000 small farmers improve their efficiency and access to markets.  In addition, its Trees of Hope program in Malawi has helped over 2,300 farmers plant more than 2.6 million trees to help offset their carbon footprint and create a new opportunity in tree farming, where it is also helping local farmers and their families by establishing local health clinics.  In Rwanda, the Initiative recently helped to create two local businesses based on producing soy in one case and coffee in the other that are combined expected to create hundreds of jobs and help 150,000 farmers with their livelihoods.  With a New Seeds to Sale Project in Myanmar, the Initiative also helps to reach some 15,000 farmers there over the first 3 years of implementation.

Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (2007-present)

2014 expenses: $7,358,967 (3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership seeks to implement the best of non-profit and for-profit approaches to help emerging-market-nations around the world deal with major gaps in either supply chains or distribution chains in ways that improve both the social and financial situations of poorer, underserved populations by bringing them into one of three-market driven approaches: supply chain enterprises, distribution enterprises, or training center enterprises in the hopes of providing economic opportunities through which people can find social mobility and lift themselves out of poverty.  Distribution enterprises can make a huge difference in rural areas where many small villages and towns and farmers often find it very difficult to obtain basic supplies.  The Partnership in one instance found almost 3,000 women in one of the most remote parts of Peru and trained and equipped them with the help of major corporations to be able to sell many basic, in-demand products to their own communities; these women are expected to double their income within a year of beginning the program.  Supply chain enterprises help small farmers in developing countries obtain ways to get their products to the right markets and improve their business as a result as well as help developing markets fill their shelves with appropriate and better quality products.  A Partnership enterprise in one region of India was able to help small farmers get cashew products to new customers, and another Partnership program set up many small farmers with PepsiCo’s local juice operations; along with efforts to help local farmers become more efficient and produce better crops, the Partnership hopes to see these farmers’ incomes double within 5 years and to spread these models to encompass some 15,000 local farmers in the region in the near future.  Another project is helping over 12,000 peanut farmers in Haiti get their crop to markets.  Finally, training center enterprises help to provide youth in developing countries the skills needed to get decent jobs in places where there is often a skills mismatch.  One such enterprise in Cartagena, Colombia, is training some 20,000 young people to be able to find jobs in the hospitality industry.  The Partnership will be expanding to new regions and countries soon, and thus far has helped to train and empower more than 450,000 people in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (2012-present)

2014 expenses: $3,696,323 (1.5% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Matters Initiative works in the United States through a wide variety of public and private, local and national entities to reduce the occurrence of preventable health problems, conditions and diseases, while also working to bridge inequality in health and healthcare access and to improve access for all Americans.  Its national-level programs focus on “employee health, military and veteran health, health disparities, access to nutrition, access to sport and physical activity, and prescription drug abuse,” while a variety of local and regional programs (mainly focusing on working through many hundreds of partners to help some 8 million people in specific regions in the U.S.: California’s Coachella Valley, Central Arkansas, Northeast Florida, the Greater Houston Area, and, most recently, Adams County, Mississippi) combine with the national programs to be projected to be able to benefit some 85 million Americans.  The initiative has also created over $200 million in partnerships with various organizations to help improve Americans’ health, is helping to innovate new technology to improve healthcare across the country and access to information about health and healthcare, is improving substance abuse and mental health programs on over 60 college campuses, is pioneering fitness programs, is working with 40 different organizations to improve employee wellness, and is bringing together experts from many different organizations to plan new ways to tackle health problems in America.

The following programs fall under the “other” category as listed in the Foundations’ financial statements/annual reports, as is (presumably) the $2 million grant that goes to the Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation; the “other” category comprised $13,789,165, or 5.5% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses; minus the Alliance grant, these below programs would be part of $11,789,165, or 4.7% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses.

Clinton Foundation in Haiti (2009-present)

The Clinton Foundation in Haiti began in 2009 as a way to specifically help the beleaguered Caribbean nation, but when a major earthquake devastated the nation in 2010, the program focused for some time on disaster relief, recovery, and rebuilding but is now back to its original intent: helping to empower the people of Haiti through education and economic opportunity by engaging a wide range of actors.  Since its inception, the program has raised some $36 million for Haiti (including $16.4 million in for immediate relief after the earthquake tragedy), and has also been instrumental in bringing about $120 million in direct investment to Haiti, including in Haiti’s agricultural, artisan, and environmental sectors, helping some 117,000 Haitians and creating some 11,200 jobs.

No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project (2013-present)

The No Ceilings: Full Participation Project, led by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, aims to bring women and girls around the world to points of full participation and equal opportunity in their societies using data-driven methods.  To this end, the Project partnered with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce a detailed global report on the status of women and girls worldwide, identifying specific areas of concern that can be targeted by various organizations around the world.  As part of this process, the Project began a global conversation about the status of women involving over 12,000 people, and conducted a survey about the status of women of over 10,000 people in over 150 countries.  The Project also teamed with The Brookings Institution to secure pledges from over 30 partners to provide $600 million to help girls get access to and do well in secondary school, which has since been increased to $800 million through 50 partners with plans to reach 15 million girls.  Another initiative plans to facilitate access to mobile technology for women in Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Arab Gulf States in order to help empower disempowered women in those locations.

Too Small to Fail (2013-present)

The Too Small to Fail project, also led by Hillary Clinton, seeks to help different parts of society to come together to provide solid heath and growth environments for children from when they are born to age 5, focusing in particular on interactions involving talking, reading, and singing.  Such interactions foster vital early brain and language development among our youngest children, ensuring that they enter school not in a mental state behind that of their follow classmates and in a better position to succeed in life.  This helps to fight the “word gap” in which lower-income kids by age 4 hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their better-situated counterparts, causing their brains and language skills to develop more slowly.  With partners like Sesame Street, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Univision, Text4baby, and Scholastic, Too Small to Fail was a major force in efforts to donate some 500,000 books, reach 700,000 parents regularly with parenting information and tips through text messaging, use television programming to get important information and tips out to parents, get over 20,000 families to take pledges, and distribute 62,000 literacy toolkits to pediatric professionals.

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In addition:

In America, the Clinton Foundation has also helped to organize thousands of volunteers for “Days of Action” that have resulted in over 18,000 hours of volunteer service since 2012, at first in response to Hurricane Sandy and later to include other projects.  There is also the Job One initiative, designed to help young Americans find meaningful employment in the wake of the Great Recession; so far, the initiative has secured promises from 13 companies to focus on mentoring and hiring young people, has generated commitments worth $37 million, and expects to be able to help some 150,000 young Americans in the near future.

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All in all, The Clinton Foundation is a unique thing in the world, one of the world’s largest charities on its own, but then transcending even that status when the extensive action it has led indirectly through its special partnerships and relationships is taken into account, amplifying its already staggering scale of impact on people all over the world.  It’s time the media and even the Clintons’ critics clearly acknowledged this basic truth.  And for Trump to criticize the Clinton Foundation, when nothing he has done has even come close to a fraction of this level of charity, is shameful.

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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EXCLUSIVE analysis of information not yet reported in the necessary context shows that Trump the businessman, at best, was an unwitting tool used for Russian (mafia and government-tied) money laundering and that Trump the president is, at best, an unwitting tool for Vladimir Putin; at worst, Trump the businessman was a partner in Russian (organized and governmental) crime and Trump the president is the biggest scandal in American history. Even if Trump is an extraordinarily stupid leader with spectacularly terrible judgment and he is totally innocent of knowing what was really going on, it has been clear for some time that key associates of Trump are far less likely to be innocent when it comes to complicity and collusion and therefore treason, with the latest reports only confirming fire when the smoke was already suffocating. However the fire finally comes to light and whatever his personal involvement, since the best case scenario is that Trump is easily duped and manipulated, Trump is clearly unfit to be president.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 28, 2017 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981) March 28th, 2017 (Updated 4/3; Update of my pre-election piece.); War is Boring version in two parts

Built on part on these earlier pieces from July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

See major follow-up piece:July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Tevfik Arif, & Felix Sater (of whom Trump testified under oath: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like”) © Mark Holden/WireImage

AMMAN — This information concerns business dealings over the last decade and then some of Donald Trump, who at the time was hurting for investors and investment as Wall Street had all but shut down its loaning operations to him; this information involved criminal dirty money laundering coming from Russia, Russian organized crime, and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Putin, his government, his close associates, and future associates of Trump—most notably Paul Manafort, his future Campaign Chairman—were involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and criminal money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars that was part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine. Updates also discuss context involving lobbying efforts, financing for Trump’s projects, and new or related developments that, in terms of Russian intrigue, incriminate even further both associates of Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign (and, therefore, perhaps even his very presidency).

At best, Trump himself may have had no knowledge of this money laundering and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with and how he did business and politics, pillars of his management style and of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.   

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings when it comes to laundering money or tilting a U.S. election with Russian help, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players in these crimes, combined with his positions and public statements as a presidential candidate that are the most pro-Russian of any major presidential candidate or sitting president, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely—not less—that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin. 

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation; with so many questionable people, actions, and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions and no one else’s, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light. After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden is on a sitting President with so many questionable connections to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what, when put together and given proper context, what that information makes clear and what it suggests.

Executive Summary

In earlier work, I revealed significantly deeper relationships than previously understood from all other previous public reporting between associates of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and entities related to them on one hand and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Russian government, and entities related to them on the other hand, relationships concerning efforts to advance the Putin’s interests, Russian government interests, and Russian organized crime interests. 

Two figures in particular, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page, were involved in major geopolitical events and entities that convulsed Ukraine beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution and through a massive Eurasian gas and money laundering scheme designed to facilitate Russian dominance of Ukraine whose effects are still being directly felt up through today with the war in Ukraine. 

Manafort and Page were linked by lines of power and influence connecting them through a short chain of major players and entities, and their presence and roles in the region overlapped in key areas for several years as they worked for Putin’s key allies to enact a plan designed to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian state and to serve the purposes of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western, anti-American agenda. 

Page operated on one end as an advisor not only to the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose pipes much of the gas involved in the scheme passed through on its way to Ukraine (a fact well-reported), but also to another major Russian company, a large domestic power company called RAO UES (which I was the first to report in the context of Putin’s gas scheme) that ended up using some of the Gazprom gas—after passing through Putin-allied middlemen—to power its Russian power plants in a circular scheme returning the fruits of the gas to their country of origin.

Manafort’s part—far more pivotal, central, and direct than Page’s—was working with pro-Russian, pro-Putin Ukrainian political elites (especially Ukrainian on-and-off-again President Viktor Yanukovych, which the Orange Revolution had exposed and deposed, and his Party of Regions, for whom Manafort was the top political advisor) and business elites (especially oligarch Dmitry Firtash) and with Russian political and business elites (especially oligarch Oleg Deripaska); Firtash was linked to Putin friend and Russian mafia godfather Semion Mogilevich, who worked together to launder billions to profit themselves, Yanukovych, and Yanukovych’s political allies so they, flush with cash, could be bribed to do Putin’s bidding, bribe others to do the same, outspend rivals, and thus, overall, dominate Ukraine’s political system.

Manafort himself worked with Firtash and Mogilevich to set up a massive money laundering scheme in 2008 involving a Manhattan development project that defrauded its partners of millions and for which all of them were later sued by the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose loss in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential race to Viktor Yanukovych and subsequent politically motivated imprisonment at the hands of his government were facilitated in part by the Manafort-led Manhattan scheme. Manafort also worked with Deripaska to help launder millions in order to hide/protect the personal fortunes of Yanukovych and his allies. For these efforts, Manafort was paid many millions. A partner of Manafort’s—Richard “Rick” Gates—was also involved with burnishing his efforts there and in efforts to lobby U.S. official to help Yanukovych’s comeback government and hurt the imprisoned Tymoshenko’s reputation.

Manafort, Gates, and Page ended up on Trump’s campaign, from which they are easily among the prime suspects responsible for Trump’s and his campaign’s unprecedented pro-Putin, pro-Russian positions that have made them the most pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate and campaign in American history.

Additionally, but hardly of least concern, Mogilevich is the link from the realm of the first scandal set to another roughly concurrent scandal set that ties directly to Trump at the time it unfolded (a fact not reported elsewhere before my earlier piece): a series of at least three real estate deals—one in Manhattan, one in Fort Lauderdale, and one in Phoenix—all spearheaded by a company called Bayrock and that all ended in scandal and disaster. One of the point-men for Trump on all of these deals was the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky—AKA Michael Sater—an alleged Mogilevich capo (an allegation not reported by any major news outlet before my previous piece); this son, one Felix Sater, has a mysterious but clearly Russian mafia-linked violent criminal past of his own that may have even involved working for Mogilevich. Sater and his Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif helped bring in significant financing and financiers who were either Russians/former Soviets with Putin and/or Soviet ties and/or people with shady and/or criminals pasts, often tied to money laundering, especially Tamir Sapir, Alexander Mashkevich and the now-notorious FL Group of Iceland.   

Through Mogilevich and cores of illicit Russian funding and financiers, then, three international illegal money laundering schemes—the Ukrainian Eurasian laundering plot, its related Manhattan money laundering deal, and the series of Bayrock deals with Trump that all either involved, likely involved, or were likely set up for money laundering—are all linked together at roughly the same time for the first time here.

But in this case the devil—and the Trumps—are in the details.

Setting the Stage in Ukraine: Page & Manafort Arrive

To begin to understand the big picture, one has to go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page moved to Moscow and set up Merrill Lynch’s branch there. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life. 

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician that first attracted global attention in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Victor Yanukovych as his prime minister late in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate in the 2004 election, even to the point of trying to rig and steal the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court-ordered redo election that resulted in the defeat of Yanukovych and victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident (with poisoning hardly an unheard-of fate for opponents of the Kremlin and Putin). 

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Paul Manafort from running Yanukovych’s campaign late in 2004 for the redo election. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions, helping them helping them over the ensuing years to gain power at the expense of Ukraine’s pro-U.S., pro-Western, post-Orange Revolution government.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, as his client list includes dictators like the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi (the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA), and the Kashmiri American Council (a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious activities).

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press (AP) just a few days ago revealed a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed (through a formal memo, no less) a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly help promote Putin, the Russian government, and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe, and former-Soviet republics and targeting government officials, political groups, the news media and journalists, and businesses by acting to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

The proposal was pitched to Oleg Deripaska in 2005, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good—if not always great—relationship with Putin and who, as I noted before, was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro in a campaign designed to get Montenegro to secede from its union with Serbia and allow greater Russian (and Deripaskan) influence with that result (Montenegro would secede anyway in 2006 but not under Russian auspices, and it is quite telling that only a few months ago a Russian plot to overthrow Montenegro’s government and assassinate its prime minister, who is now trying to join NATO, was exposed and foiled). 

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and Manfort used a Delaware shell company—LOAV Ltd.—of his to conduct official business and transactions.

AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story. 

Later, as I also wrote about before, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out c. 2014 that resulted in a Cayman Islands court battle over $19 million related to their efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established. The recent AP story broke just hours before CNN reported that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.,” and AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. 

If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part I: Manafort & Putin Allies Oversee Flooding of Ukraine with Dirty Gas Money to Establish Russian Dominance

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to some of Ukraine’s and Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, at least ones allied with Yanukovych and Putin. Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background. In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman, and Putin ally Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, according to court documents. Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to the essential head, or “boss of bosses”, of the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich, also a friend of Putin’s and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list from 2009-2015.

A Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE) was created in mid-2004 by the outgoing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Kuchma and the not-going-anywhere Putin to replace the company represented by Firtash that was handling Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports. The imports ostensibly came from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan but through shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant company then dominated, and soon to be majority-owned, by the Russian Government and close Putin allies; additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory. But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45% of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. A total of 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand: Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price; Firtash would then sell billions of dollars of the gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine; the profits would then be used to fund pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine with billions of dollars; and, finally, bankers that were close Putin allies would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so that Firtash could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence even further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate and as that candidate-turned-president’s relatively pro-Western government was trying to limit Russian influence in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in a January, 2006, shut-off of Russia’s gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory. 

Soon after the shutoff, a new arrangement was made: RUE would now be the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan) and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s export subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), it would sell to the Ukrainian market to all of its industrial customers through a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, the joint venture being called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo), and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES—Russia’s major and majority-state-owned power company—would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan into Ukraine that had been purchased by the joint-venture UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; the government of Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in exchange for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE (or another Firtash firm) apparently acting as the intermediary, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo; that gas would then be delivered to Ukrainian power plants, which would produce the electricity that would then be sold to RAO to sell in Russia. One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians—who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices and allowing entities with little (or no?) supervision in a process that presented opportunities for massive corruption—that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway. This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

A Page-Manafort Connection Through Gazprom, RAO UES, Firtash, & Mogilevich?

It is important here to note that Carter Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004-2007; the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an advisor on “key transactions” of theirs; it is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe and being sold to both, than the creation of RUE, than RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine; if Page is telling the truth about his role, it is virtually inconceivable—considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006—that he would not be aware of what was going on. 

After all, as someone with a PhD and an MBA and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to align itself with America and Europe and thus escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page and people who did know (of) him suggesting he was actually a nobody (though the veracity of their claims are unverifiable as well, some perhaps being of the sour-grapes variety, others perhaps not wanting information on him to get out and acting to throw the curious off his trail, others saying nothing to confirm that they had actually worked closely or directly alongside Page); maybe Page himself deliberately kept a low profile, staying under the radar purposefully. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is; even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time—even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal (he was apparently often tasked with meeting and greeting, setting up meetings and seeing them through, presenting opportunities for many informal conversations and meetings)—it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally (and I raised this possibility last July), if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that another American in Manafort was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being able to be said of Manafort, and that interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, contact that may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The question of about a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part II: Manafort & Putin Allies Use Dirty Gas Money to Prep Yanukovych Comeback

Russian Government

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the popularly unpopular 2006 deal itself. 

A former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to become prime minister again in December 2007, and it was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall: this meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE. 

The first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash (and thus Mogilevich and the mafia) out of the loop, an admittedly more ambitious step, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. But in October of 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to another shutdown on the part of Russia of gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January. But on January 19th, a long-term, ten-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter; additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics…

Criminal Scheme #2: Manafort Key Agent in Laundering Dirty Gas Money to U.S. During Crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko kill RUE, his agents—including Firtash, Mogilevich, and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)—were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts; some of these involved setting up a fake U.S. investment fund that was initially capitalized with $100 million; Firtash (acting on behalf of himself and Mogilevich) paid Manafort and his people—including Rick Gates, (who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006)—$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of said fund was to act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash/Mogilevich gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various fraudulent deals they went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million towards the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later laundered through the project, but rather than truly move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased: the deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister (remember this model, it will return…).

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich, and their backers, unlike money, natural gas is not something that can be laundered: in early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz—a seizure allowed under the agreement she made with Putin—of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans. 

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit: unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had groomed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a party that campaigned using modern, highly effective techniques and tactics; in both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties. Of course, Manafort and The Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage: the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam. All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party and in making them together a smoother political machine with more power and influence.

The distance would close, and that strike would happen, in 2010.

Uniting Criminal Schemes #1 and #2: the Downfall of Tymoshenko & Setting the Stage for War

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race (with a lot of money from Firtash, who had made over $3 billion from these crooked gas deals), defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned(including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011. 

Manafort and Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. Incidentally, in these efforts—paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, one of Yanukovych’s main patrons, and a client of Manafort’s since Manafort’s earliest days in Ukraine and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney—they utilized the services of two Washington, DC, lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures (the day after this information was made public in mid-August, 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the Campaign Chairman of the Trump campaign during a week in which his role had already been eclipsed by the addition of Kellyanne Conway and extreme-right-wing Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon to run the Trump campaign; as for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign was refusing to clarify the matter). 

Lobbying efforts throughout this period for this circle were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts for years having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole—for whom Manafort had been a strategist—was paid over half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia. 

Yuri Boyko, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who is a close Yanukovych ally, former minister of several energy related sections of Ukraine’s government, and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme, paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans. 

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, co-founded by the former Republican Governor of Mississippi and major GOP insider/activist Haley Barbour, was paid over $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas scheme. 

Though he had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Mogilevich strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of Republican William Sessions, who was the FBI director from 1987-1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges; those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingstone, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russians and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen; GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holding(s) used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for his money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme; Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, Firtash’ relationship with several Conservative MPs in the UK may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden, as once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas, now only too happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash; it was clear in this matter that the Yanukovych government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people; without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June of 2010. 

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom (the corruption is so blatant that the companies apparently do not care that their names announce it to the whole world); Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower; Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings (especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries) and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout Europe; when reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.” From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE (but RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints); the suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud, and money laundering enterprises in the U.S. designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment. After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015; while not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met; still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

*****

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich, and their teams, but, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR: the people had other ideas. 

Many Ukrainians—especially younger ones—realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, towards Europe and the U.S. and less corruption. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the EU.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired EU trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer. In particular, protests erupted in a main square (the Maidan Square) in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, protests that did not go away and came to be known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on February 20th, 2014; in response to the government’s use of violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed, and by the end of February 22nd, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office, security forces had melted away in Kiev, protesters had taken over the capital, Tymoshenko was freed from prison (in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities), and Yanukovych has fled the city; soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin; today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally. 

Putin had overplayed his hand: his royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him; that joker lined up with four 2s consisting of many of the Ukrainian people to make five of a kind, the people beating Putin’s flush. But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years, into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas, Yanukovych, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Manafort: faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him and his intentions once again in place after a decade of effort designed to restore and maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, Putin went to Plan B: the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Which is exactly where the situation is today (and, of course, gas is in the middle of the conflict).

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme; he was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court (the ruling is almost unappealable), though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, as well as the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, his relationship with the Russian mafia, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years. And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mafia will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much, especially as they have demonstrated a willingness to act through any means necessary to silence individuals who put them at risk.

In the end, Manafort made millions and Gates profited too to the tune of who knows how much off the activities mentioned here (e.g., hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the Party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007-2012 alone; Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him the fate of that $19 million is still unknown; all this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal), profiting to an obscene degree all while helping to weaken and corrupt Ukraine’s democracy, assisting massively crooked international energy deals, undermining U.S. interests, helping Putin and his allies profit enormously, and helping Russia dominate Ukraine. The culmination of their work for over a decade can be seen in the first war on European soil in two decades. And it was this resume which earned them spots on Trump’s campaign as he sought to become the leader of the free world and succeeded. For some time it even seemed Manafort had more influence on Trump than anyone whose last name was not Trump.

Manafort and Gates have plenty of other questionable dealings, including one particularly scandalous piece of drama with a Russian oligarch featured in the Panama papers revelations and close to Putin. There are at least two U.S. government inquiries into Manafort and one into Page, and Trump associate and Republican political operative Roger Stone is being investigated by the FBI for his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who have questionable ties to Russia and who the whole world knows is receiving information stolen by Russian government hacks related to Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic party. There are also other Trump campaign staff and/or associates with questionable ties to Russia: Michael Caputo and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and one American ex-spy alleges a plot by the Kremlin to co-opt Trump against the backdrop of all this.

Less is known about Gates and his role, but after he was brought onto the Trump Campaign by Manafort), he was important enough to be trusted with the vetting of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech—Donald Trump’s wife’s introduction to the nation as a whole—a task at which he famously failed, and failed miserably. It was not clear what the status of Gates was once Manafort resigned, but recent reporting has shown that kept a low profile after and acted a link between the campaign and the RNC; once Trump won, he was apparently planned Trump’s inauguration, and since then he was shipped off to a pro-Trump and strangely quiet-ish nonprofit called America First Priorities (which also landed Trump All Star Katrina Pierson), where he has stayed until this the new reporting on Manafort, after which it seems he was deemed too much of a liability and was nudged out just days ago.

As for Page, it still isn’t even clear who brought him into the Trump Campaign (Julia Ioffe’s account of Page, the most exhaustive yet, illustrates how multiple answers have been given and none have been confirmed, but people sure seem angry about being asked about him); what is known (and it isn’t much) is that he was one of only five foreign policy advisors Trump could actually name in a Washington Post interview from a year ago, suggesting his influence on Trump could be far from insignificant. As his relationships with important Russians are being looked into by the U.S. government, to simply dismiss him as being a charade would be premature, indeed—especially in light of information on Page apparently meeting with Russian officials coming out of the as of yet only partly-substantiated dossier from an ex-MI6 intelligence officer—despite questions of how serious his role was at Merrill and how deep his ties to Gazprom and RAO UES actually were. What is certain is that questions about his role remain, questions which need to be answered, especially in light of his incredibly anti-American, pro-Russian views that could just as easily be coming from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or a “pundit” on RT and his continued investment in Gazprom. 

Direct Trump Involvement

Trump might have enough to worry about were it just for what has been described above; still, while both of the previous schemes are relevant to Trump insofar as three future Trump Campaign staff—Page, Gates, one of the most important and powerful people in his entire presidential run: Manafort—were involved in various ways in the just-outlined past criminal schemes and/or in the future acted to further the interests of Putin and his Russian government, now we get into territory where Trump himself was directly involved, and in not just one, but roughly a half-dozen situations linked to Russian organized crime.

A piece of context that is important to note for all of the following cases is that the setting for the following suspicious deals was a Donald Trump and a Trump Organization that was reeling financially.

By the mid-2000s Trump was having a hard time finding investors: he had just declared bankruptcy in 2004 for one of his major casino businesses to the tune of $1.8 billion in debt (and would declare another business bankruptcy in 2009, his fifth and sixth overall business bankruptcies, respectively) and all major Wall Street lenders—whose relationships with Trump had been souring for years—stopped offering Trump loans, in part because of his frustrating and suspicious business practices.

That is, all but one: Deutsche Bank, yet even that relationship “frayed” starting in 2008 because of Trump’s untrustworthiness as a business partner (Deutsche itself would later become involved in major money laundering scandals involving Russia, but more on that later).

So Trump was clearly hurting for investment after that 2004 bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [i.e., the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when Trump was aggressively courting Russian business (it should now be obvious why Trump has not released his taxes and why that information could, and likely will be, so crucial to the investigations into his Russia ties and to the public’s evaluation of Trump).

In fact, a report from Reuters from less than two weeks ago noted how in just seven Trump luxury towers in southern Florida, 63 Russian passport/address-holders have bought $98.4 million in property; they include “politically connected businessmen and other elites,” though “none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle;” one buyer, Alexander Yuzvik, was senior at Spetstroi, a Russian state-owned company that has done construction for Russian military and intelligence, including the G.R.U. and the F.S.B. intelligence agencies that were heavily involved the 2016 American election hackings, with Yuzvik only stepping down in March 2016, after the hacking operations had begun, though as of now, no evidence has surfaced linking him to these operations.

The above figures may even be a conservative estimate: at least 703 out of 2,044 of the units in the seven towers were owned by limited liability corporations (LLCs), often designed to mask their owners’ identities; many owners’ nationalities could not be identified; and Russian-Americans without a Russian passport/address were not included.

*****

At the same time the aforementioned Eurasian gas and Manafort-led New York real estate dual schemes were taking place, and while Donald Trump was losing investors in the U.S., Trump was cultivating Russian/former-Soviet business relationships. One of his point men in these efforts was Felix Sater, the son of an alleged mob captain of Mogilevich’s Russian mafia operation; the offices of Bayrock, Sater’s real estate company where he was Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within, were even in Trump Tower itself.

Sater, a man with a violent, criminal, mafia-rife past of his own, had himself previously been caught up in an elaborate 1990s $41 million stock fraud scheme on Wall Street that had used the Russian mob to launder money at a time, it should be noted, when Mogilevich was active in large-scale stock fraud and laundering in North America. Sater ended up assisting U.S. authorities for years, even, apparently, on CIA-related national security issues involving missile terrorism-related purchases in either Afghanistan or Russia, and the details on all this remain something of mystery: his operations with the government remain secret and the juiciest details of the Wall Street case were sealed and remain so despite repeated efforts to unseal them (they were sealed at the time, interestingly enough, by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, who just stepped down as U.S. Attorney General the day Trump was inaugurated president). 

As a result, there is also virtually no information on the specifics of the Russian mafia’s activities in Sater’s Wall Street scam, but there is a reasonably good chance or even higher that Mogilevich was running the Russian mob’s involvement in it, or was at least involved, since he was actively pursuing similar schemes in the U.S. at the time, possibly had a connection to his alleged old capo in Sater, and since Mogilevich was already such a major figure in the Russian mob at this point, keeping in mind that hierarchy matters quite a bit in organized crime; in fact, it is far less likely that the Russian mafia would be involved without Mogilevich when considering the points just mentioned. 

Now, that last point should not be taken lightly, considering that, just a few years later, Mogilevich was a primary actor in laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Firtash, Manafort, Yanukovych, and Putin; is it more or less likely that he would turn to an old connection—one with experience laundering money who had come to have the favor of the U.S. government, no less—to help with the laundering? Even without the Wall Street capers, Sater would have been an attractive candidate based on (possible) family ties alone, as would his nominal entry into real estate, as the real estate market in the U.S.has been an ideal avenue for money laundering for some time and is a top concern of U.S. officials, in part due to lax state, local, and federal laws.

Sater began working with Trump in in the early 2000s, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka and Donald Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through…

Criminal Scheme #3: The Trump/Sater/Bayrock Deals

But a number of deals in the United States between Trump and Bayrock produced a far more interesting—and incriminating—history. 

Perhap’s Sater’s most famous partnership with Trump was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, and two other partners from former Soviet states: one was Bayrock chairman Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan who’s rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable; the other was Tamir Sapir from Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well been (once) part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose source of his wealth had long been subject to rumor-fueled suspicion, who introduced Trump to Bayrock, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family (incidentally or not, at the time of the SoHo deal, it seems Sapir was not exactly mentally fit).

It turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater-and-Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million specifically approved by Trump for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland, FL Group, linked to the Panama Papers revelations and one apparently known as a hub for the money of Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from Alexander Mashkevich (or Machkevich), a Kazakhstani billionaire with a history of money laundering.

Considering Sater had helped pave the way for this investment and recalling his possible Mogilevich connections, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that there is a high probability that some of the money coming in from Russians was in one way or another tied directly or indirectly to the giant Eurasian gas scheme worth billions, as this period was especially a time when Russians tied to Putin and operating through Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich were aggressively trying to funnel money away from prying eyes of the likes of Tymoshenko. Besides the Russian financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited. Furthermore, the SoHo deal was structured to cheat the U.S. government out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans (not incidentally tax-free) to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time. 

In the end, the deal went terribly for Trump, who was sued for fraud—his children Eric and Ivanka had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers—and in a 2011 settlement, he refunded 90% of the deposits on the building’s condos. 

One must wonder why likely Russian investors were so eager to invest $50 million in this deal, and if it was an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Park Avenue deal involving Manafort & Co, and that model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again, Repeated in deals with Trump and with Sater serving again as a point-man.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, another of the Trump/Bayrock projects was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and led to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; Sater and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and several others—including the SoHo deal—in a deal with the aforementioned Icelandic firm, FL Group. Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing Trump and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and Trump refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

Another Bayrock partnership with Trump in Fort Lauderdale (not part of the FL Group ventures) was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by Arif in 2003, and from that point, Sater and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; as in the SoHo deal, they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October 2007.

Another deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then Trump himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with Trump, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point Trump himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project for himself. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to FL group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to FL’s “investment” involved a Waterpointe property in Queens (apart from approving FL’s money, Trump was otherwise not involved as far as we know). Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a 2013 NY State Supreme Court lawsuit rising from a process that began in 2008, former and then-business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michal Ejekam—sued Sater and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a vehicle for criminal activities; in it, Donald and Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing Sater’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from 1998 scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of the other above schemes of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to the Trumps, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning the removal was no comment on their guilt/responsibility/innocence and that they could be sued again on the same grounds later. 

*****

Taken together, these examples amount to catastrophic losses and colossal mismanagement on the part of Sater and Bayrock and, at the very least, gross negligence and incompetence on the part of Trump; at most, he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye, or, even worse, he might have been in on it, though no evidence exists that proves this).

Actually, the performance of Bayrock was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they did not care at all about performance. And that seems to be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition, but that would benefit Sater, Trump, and others high-up in the deals, but rarely if ever the investing partners outside this upper echelon; it seems these other duped partners and especially Trump would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes that were so poorly managed that the only logical conclusion is that Sater and his friends at Bayrock did not care about the future success of the projects nearly as much as they cared about laundering money and skimming from the top. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking there was something more going on there than met the eye. We may never know all the details or whose money was laundered and for what reasons—and if I had a magic wand I’d love to see if any the Manafort/Yanukovych/Firtash/Mogilevich Eurasian gas scheme money made its way into any of these Trump ventures—but it seems clear a lot of dirty Russian money was involved.

When considering Sater, it is important to remember that he has been busted multiple times by law enforcement and yet has not served jail time in America (with the exception of one year for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass and severing a nerve in the man’s face, or, as Trump put it under oath, Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) and enjoys the favor of the U.S. government, suggesting he is anything but a generally and especially stupid person; also remember that Sater has a long history of money laundering. 

So, in fact, once you look at the Bayrock deals and Sater assuming Bayrock’s primary reason to exist is for RICO money laundering, these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid all of a sudden make a lot of sense, and, in series of lawsuits beginning primarily on behalf of two of Sater’s Bayrock partners—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who weren’t in on the fun—for money they say is owed to them, Bayrock is precisely described as a RICO criminal organization, of which money laundering is one of its primary activities (in the main complaint, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times in the document).

Sater Saga

After Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to Sater still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to Sater, with Trump lying repeatedly about his relationship with Sater and Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 list its three Trump-named projects discussed above before all others and lists The Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), Donald Trump as its first “reference,” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

The Huffington Post also recently discovered just a few days ago that Sater owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; Sater used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Tital is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president. .

Sater even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House is even using Sater as a back-channel diplomatic go-between for Trump’s person lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a heavily-pro-Russian/pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko, who are discussing a Ukraine “peace plan” being pushed by close Putin aides; Artemenko also claims he has information damaging to Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s anti-Russian president facing off against Putin and his proxies in the Ukrainian Civil War. In an only partially-verified-by-U.S.-officials 35-page dossier on Trump and his people compiled by a respected ex-MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, Cohen is said to have secretly met with Russian government officials during the late stages of the presidential campaign, though it is not clear if this—or what—specific information has been corroborated by U.S. officials, with journalists having been unable to thus far verify the information on Cohen, who denies playing this role.

The reason a lot of what is known about Sater and his past misdealings is publicly available, besides a then-revelatory late-2007 New York Times article, is because of the intrepid efforts of two of the lawyers who often represented plaintiffs against Sater in court: Richard Lerner and Frederick Oberlander.

Going back to that 2013 lawsuit, because Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky was included in these accusations for allegedly illegally aiding and covering up for Sater, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara (more on him on in a bit) ended up being involved tangentially in defending him in his capacity as a U.S. Attorney, playing a role in trying to moving the suit from the state court system to SDNY jurisdiction, but it was ultimately moved because of Sater and his ties to the government, not Kaminsky. Once in the hands of the federal court, Kaminsky was removed without prejudice from the proceedings.

Which brings us to one of the untold stories of this election, and one which may never be told in full: how Sater’s cooperation with the government gave him government protection from being held liable in many cases for his misdeeds while also helping to suppress information about him and these misdeeds, and how, had his past and crimes been front and center over the past decade, this knowledge could have done much to derail and discredit Donald Trump, his brand and family at a time when he was building a national following with his hit show The Apprentice, which he even used to promote his fraudulent, money-laundered SoHo deal. 

That the public, including Trump’s and Bayrock’s clients and customers, were kept in the dark about Sater—a fact which undoubtedly helped all of these related deals and others advance, which was not lost on partners of Sater’s, and which is at the heart of much of the legal action against Sater—and were kept in dark because Sater cooperated with the U.S. government, adds quite a what-if twist to the tale of Trump and his dramatic rise over the last decade to become the most powerful man in the world: what if the government hadn’t protected Sater, and all that evidence was out in the open while Trump and Bayrock were courting buyers and were fighting court battles? What would that have done to Trump’s reputation if he became most known for defrauding customers and money laundering with a Russian mafia-deluged violent felon, to his hit show The Apprentice (one can just imagine NBC saying “You’re fired!” to Trump), and to his political aspirations? 

In a much less chaotic, less exciting world than the insanity that confronts us today, one can be sure such a salacious story involving a playboy New York tycoon would have been front, center, and dominant in national and international media coverage; lawsuits, trials, and investments may also have gone differently for Trump if such information was common knowledge, too; he may have just faded away in disgrace, or least into a sideshow, if not landing in jail.

Yes, if not for the favors the U.S. government did in protecting and, thus, abetting, Sater, it is far more likely that Trump would have collapsed in scandal than risen to be our current president. This abetting may very well be unwitting, but the two aforementioned lawyers—Lerner and Oberlander—believe differently, that the government cooperation with Sater yielded disappointing results, that Sater fooled and tricked the government into helping him in exchange for dubious assistance of questionable value and that this arrangement may have been such an embarrassment for the government that they covered up this and his past to save face and protect the careers of those involved. No court rulings have affirmed these assertions, yet it is notable that in the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involved in arguing over Sater’s information being withheld from the public, the Court tacitly admitted that at least some of the points made by Lerner and Oberlander were valid when they ordered many of the documents surrounding Sater be made public, the only reason that much of information about him is now publicly available.

Epilogue of Intrigue

As for Arif and Mashkevich, two other major players in the whole Trump/Bayrock/FL Group saga, Arif was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with apparently underage girls on board a Yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.

Going back to Trump’s sole major Wall Street lender, Deutsche Bank, since 2012, it has loaned trump over $300 million, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President Trump in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that might have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, but DoJ was not part of this and is still investigating, raising the question of the independence and impartiality of Trump’s own new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, himself under fire for possible improper interactions with Russian officials and forced to pledge to recuse himself from any investigations of into the 2016 election and Russian interference in it. Deutsche itself is under pressure to allow an independent investigation into Trump’s accounts with the Bank (his family also has accounts with Deutsche), even after its own investigation apparently found no link to Trump’s accounts and Russia. 

It was just revealed that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money to the tune of $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, with the overall laundering scheme—known as the Global/(Great) Russian Laundromat—involving dozens of Western banks and a sum ranging from $20-$80 billion through the years 2010-2014; the hundreds involved in the scheme include Russia’s notorious oligarchs and Russia’s F.S.B., the main successor to the famed Soviet K.G.B. intelligence agency, with Putin having longstanding intimate ties to both and with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

As if there weren’t enough bad connections to Trump Tower, Mogilevich-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Trump himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 

An indictment naming Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, mentioned earlier, and the same Preet Bharara fired controversially by Trump just last month after Trump had promised Bharara he would not fire him, and it should be noted that several of the past and ongoing cases involving Trump and/or his associates occurred in the jurisdiction of SDNY and that a number of potential future cases would also occur there if they moved forward and would have been handled by Bharara if he had not been fired. It was Bharara’s indictment that led to a 2013 raid on Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

We also have the curious case of the Trump’s fabulously ostentatious mansion—the “Maison de l’Amitie”—in Palm Beach, Florida, that he bought back in 2004 for $41 million. A representative of Trump claimed Trump put $25 million of his own money into renovating the house, but this is doubtful; plans obtained who improvements were relatively minor, and, Typical of Trump, he seemed to be lying through his teeth: when taking a local reporter on a tour, he claimed he installed gold fixtures in bathroom, but when the report scratched a faucet, gold paint came off to reveal not-gold underneath. Trump set his asking price at $125 million when he listed early in 2006, but had trouble finding a buyer; then, in March 2008, he brought his price down to $100 million, but it still wasn’t until that July that he got Russian oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to buy the mansion for $95 million after some haggling in a deal said to be the largest U.S. residential real estate deal ever. If you’re thinking that Trump might have swindled Rybolovlev, that’s very possible: he has a habit of falling for tricksters, especially when it comes to art deals; the house was appraised at less than only $59.8 million in 2013, and though it rose to $81.8 million in the summer of 2016, that was still about 15% less than what he had paid. Just months after he bought the house, he ended up in a messy divorce drama with his wife, who was after the house; there are plans to demolish the house, and Rybolovlev has not even physically entered the house, which may be demolished.

But unlike other major Russian oligarchs doing business with Trump or his allies, either directly or indirectly, Rybolovlev is no apparent friend or ally of Putin or the Russian mafia, which seems to put this story in the category of mere trivial.

But then, multiple reports that Rybolovlev’s private jet had repeatedly been tracked to cities where and when candidate and later president Trump was: Las Vegas in October, just five days before Election Day in North Carolina, and in Miami in February, creating a sense of intrigue. One might be tempted to say this is meaningless, yet on top of this, his accounts of the mansion deal have changed, making people wonder if he has something to hide.

At the very least, this Palm Beach mansion saga is a good reminder that Trump is a swindler and a liar, and if you’re still not convinced, google Trump University, Trump Steaks…

And oh, we just found out that during the campaign, Republicans paid a private intelligence firm that works closely with an ex-K.G.B. officer to dig up dirt in Clinton.

Putting the Pieces Together: Not a Pretty Picture

Sorry, Trump fans, but it’s time a reality check: it’s more likely that you will soon be struck by lighting than that all of these threads together and tied together by a Russian mafia godfather end up as innocent, harmless coincidences when it comes possible connections between Team Trump and Team Putin.

It is also crucial to note that the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political elites of neighboring and other countries along with hacking and (mis/dis)information operations—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do much the same thing throughout Europe, and it was clear he successfully threw his weight around last year during our election to help Trump win in what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, part of his overall war on Western Democracy and promotion of what I call democratic fascism.

The question is now about whether or not there was treason going on during that (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. If (and we don’t know yet) Putin was able co-opt agents people Manafort, Gates, Page, and/or others, this would simply be current Russian standard operating procedure for how it spreads its power throughout the world in the era of Putin; such hybrid warfare and “Cold War”-type or non-hot warfare being directed at America should not only not surprise Americans, it should be expected. And it seems that, along with Manafort and Page, the record-fast-recently-resigned-due-to-Russian-related-stuff Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and longtime Manafort and Trump confidante Roger Stone are all under an official FBI “counterintelligence”—to use FBI Director James Comey’s exact word—investigation, and Manafort, Page, and Stone all just volunteered to testify before Congress.

Should those hearings be public, that would be epic.

Conclusion originally a Part II published here

Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Ivanka Trump on stage for a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention- NBC

Conclusion: Trump Has Terrible Judgment or Is a (Treasonous) Criminal or Both

I will never forgive the news media or the American people for not caring enough about the aforementioned information when it mattered most and had the chance to change the outcome of this election, since any one of these main three threads alone carried more weight than Clinton’s and yet got only a fraction of the coverage that red-herring of a “scandal” got. Nor will I forgive Comey for his political tone-deafness, the politically-suicidal liberals who empowered Trump by myopically and narcissistically not voting for Clinton, or the Republican Party for so willingly spreading its buttocks for Putin; anyone who doubts me on that last point can watch the disgraceful behavior of Republicans on the supposedly relatively non-partisan House Intelligence Committee, especially its Chairman Devin Nunes and shallow grandstander Trey Gowdy, the latter of whom led the partisan witch-hunt that was the last “Benghazi”—really Clinton e-mail—investigation. Yes, I have no faith in Trump—Team Trump has lied at least 20 times about its ties to Russia as of early March and only continues to do so in the most outlandish and unprecedented and Orwellian of ways, making the possible reality of a serious cover-up more and more likely—but seeing Nunes as the Intelligence Committee Chairman act in such an unprecedented way—blatantly covering for the president—made me tear up and almost cry because his behavior is such a dramatic sign of how our government is failing us and how the last bastion protecting this country from what I call democratic fascism—that bastion now being that the party in power won’t twist every organ of government it can to benefit itself politically no matter the cost—may be crumbling. As historian Douglas Brinkley (who implored the public after Trump won to “give…[Trump]…a chance”) said of all of this: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

Trump repeatedly claimed during his campaign he would surround himself with “the best people;” I’m sure he believed himself, and that is the problem. What has been outlined here is probably one of the strongest cases (if not the strongest) against Trump’s judgment as leader, whether in business or in politics; if you surround yourself on a regular basis with mobsters and criminals and those who favor the worldview (or purse) of America’s greatest enemy over America itself, there is no more discussion to be had: Donald Trump is too stupid and too incompetent a leader to be president as he simply cannot be trusted to make decisions about whom to give power to (for every supposed hit there are far more misses and we can’t delegate the fate of our nation a game of chance; sorry, but I’m nearly convinced that Trump picked Gen. Mattis to run the Pentagon simply because he like Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog”); Trump’s selection of Paul Manafort alone would be disqualifying enough, and that’s just the beginning.

And that is the best case scenario that he was too stupid to see that his people were playing him for a fool or were abusing their power in a way that could destroy his potential presidency and do the nation irreparable harm. But if Trump himself in any way knew about any possible collusion with Russia, that takes us from disqualifying incompetence into the realm of treason. Even if that is not the case, the newest revelations are making it more and more likely that some sort of treason from within his camp will be uncovered—Comey recently noted that this counterintelligence investigation began in July, some ten months ago, and if it was clear there was no collusion it would probably have ended long ago—and it is increasingly likely that this issue will cripple Trump’s presidency in ways not seen since the later nineteenth-century, when Reconstruction’s war between President Andrew Johnson and Congressional Republicans, as well as the scandals of the Gilded Age, dramatically weakened the presidency.

Russia is as defiant as ever, just in recent months and weeks assassinating—or trying to assassinate-—opponents, arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters and Russian’s main opposition leader (Alexey Navalny, again) during Russia’s largest protests in five years, trying to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments (Montenegro), hacking foreign politicians in ways designed to sway elections (from Hillary Clinton to France’s Emmanuel Macron and beyond), fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, slaughtering civilians in Aleppo, and assaulting the world of norms the West has known since the end of WWII.

And Donald Trump is in the White House and wants to be Putin’s friend.

*****

Sometimes, if there’s enough smoke, it’s undeniable that there is a fire even if the flames are obscured or not visible from afar. Back in July, when I began my in-depth exploration around the same time the FBI did, I wrote that

… it’s possible there is  some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here  acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact,  almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be  hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the  Russian interference is so obvious…

Sometimes I hate being right.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

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*****

The story of how Russia won the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar because American President Barack Obama did not fight back and failed to protect America’s democracy from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s well-orchestrated, wide-ranging cyberassault, part of Russia’s wider war on Western democracy

 January 21st, 2019. Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 7, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook) December 7th, 2016 (a condensed, edited version of this article is featured on War Is Boring, and that version was quoted in another article by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [RFE/RL] here and was also mentioned in a morning briefing here by that article’s author; here are the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and ePub eBook versions)

Support Brian and his work by donating here.

Reuters

AMMAN — It is fitting that, on the anniversary of Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack, I am publishing an article discussing an attack far worse in its overall effects on America than Pearl Harbor: if December 7th, 1941, is “a date which will live in infamy,” 2016 is a year which will live in infamy.

All things being equal in an election that was decided by, at current count, less than 38,600 votes spread across three states (a few over 22,150 in Pennsylvania, slightly more than 5,350 in Michigan, a few under 11,100 in Wisconsin) out of over 136 million votes cast (under 0.0284% of all votes cast), it is certain that without Russia’s political cyberwarfare offensive in the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—and Obama’s stunning lack of response to it—Hillary Clinton would now be President-elect.

Full disclosure: I am a liberal Democrat who proudly voted twice for Obama, but I will make clear what no one seems to want to, though it pains me: I tried making excuses before and after the campaign—he thought she would win anyway, he wanted to play it safe, maybe he has something secret in store, etc.—but as the days turned to weeks after the election and I spent more and more mental energy thinking it through, the stubborn truth reared its ugly head: Obama failed miserably in his role as Commander in Chief, protector, and defender of the United States of America in the final months of his eight-year presidency. In doing so, he ensured his own legacy would be destroyed, likely along with the American political system as we know it and possibly (likely?) the U.S.-led international system that has been a bulwark of great-power peace since WWII.

Here is the story of how Obama lost the war.

*****

First Strikes

In June of 2015, a unit of elite Russian hackers known as Cozy Bear, or APT 29, working at the behest of the main security service of the Russian government—the F.S.B., main successor to the famed Soviet-era K.G.B., where Vladimir Putin had served for over 15 years—successfully hacked into the systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the national governing body of the Democratic Party, completely unbeknownst to DNC staff.

The FBI contacted the DNC in the fall of 2015, warning it of possible hacking and asking its people to look for suspicious activity, but not providing any specifics; when DNC staffers responded with a sweep and found nothing, they asked the FBI to provide specifics, but it declined, keeping from them then and in future meetings the fact that U.S. officials suspected the Russian government; if the DNC had known this, it would have taken additional steps that could have limited the damage that came later. Only late in March 2016, did the DNC realize its systems were compromised and later bring in private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in April for help.

Also that March, another group of elite Russian hackers known as Fancy Bear, or APT 28—working at the behest of the G.R.U, Russia’s military intelligence service—targeted the DNC as well, in addition to targeting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, namely the e-mail accounts of senior campaign officials, including Chairman John Podesta. The FBI warned the campaign in March about possible hacking, but, again, did not mention anything specific about the hackers; only in April did the campaign realize its systems had been penetrated, something U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper publicly hinted at vaguely in May.

It took until June for the DNC to expel the Russians, and on June 14th, DNC officials and CrowdStrike experts informed the Washington Post of the successful hackings. The next day, CrowdStrike released an analysis that detailed ample evidence of Fancy/Cozy Bear’s involvement. The following day, the Clinton campaign hacks were first reported.

Only days after this, a hacker/hackers going by the moniker Guccifer 2.0—an homage to the Romanian hacker made famous by publicly outing Clinton’s private e-mail server—began publicly posting DNC documents, but it was quickly clear from a consensus of experts citing overwhelming evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was actually a front for Russia’s Fancy Bear.

Soon after, it was also reported that government officials realized in June that the Clinton Foundation was also the target of attempted Russian hacks. The same month, the Russians tried to breach voter databases in Arizona but apparently failed; in July, the Russians succeeded in hacking into Illinois voter databases, stealing information on some 200,000 voters; experts suggested it was likely other states’ voter databases had been hacked undetected.

*****

Information Bomb

The hacking stories largely receded until the evening of Friday, July 22nd, just after Donald Trump’s official nomination and days before Clinton’s Democratic National Convention, when WikiLeaks posted close to 20,000 e-mails from the DNC that had been hacked by Russia. The grossly overblown fallout from that release has been well-documented.

The leaks could not have come at a worse time for Clinton, who was desperate to rally liberals (particularly the conspiratorially-minded among hardcore Millennial Bernie Sanders supporters, whose emotional state demanded an alternate reality where the only possible explanation for their savior’s loss was that Clinton “cheated”) wary of her to her banner for the coming fight with Trump and to display Democratic Party unity at her convention; the leaks slowed and partly prevented this process, creating remarkable public displays of disunity at the Convention and in the streets outside of it and reopening wounds that had only just begun to heal. By the time a later round of leaks came, the ability of Clinton to have built up enough goodwill among many of these people to stay with her in the face of such new leaks playing into their negative stereotypes of her was greatly diminished by this first round of DNC-related leaks.

This was not a coincidence, and it was clear from the beginning that WikiLeaks and the Russians who gave WikiLeaks the hacked information (either directly or indirectly) had designed the release to have a maximum negative impact on Clinton. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ extremely anti-American founder and leader, made no secret of his intent to harm Clinton’s campaign and his visceral dislike of her, even while refraining from criticizing Trump, Republicans, and Russia, as he and his organization have a complicated but largely beneficial relationship with Russia.

Putin had far more reason to fear a Clinton presidency than one led by Trump, who has spent many years courting Russian favor, whose positions were the most pro-Russian for a major party candidate in American presidential campaign history, and whose campaign manager at this time, Paul Manafort, was notoriously known to have for years been on Putin’s payroll, even if indirectly.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, it became even more obvious how intent the Russians were on damaging Clinton and the Democratic Party, and Trump even publicly called on Russia to hack Clinton. That week, it was reported that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a voter database used by the Clinton campaign and other Democrats were also targeted by Fancy Bear. It was also reported during the same period that both cybersecurity experts and U.S. government officials had determined that that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the DNC (including a consensus of FBI officials), that officials saw this as a full-blown national security issue, and that U.S. government officials had shared this conclusion—and evidence that Russia was responsible—with the White House, which had discussed the hacks prior to the WikiLeaks DNC release; some officials had also concluded that the DNC e-mails’ release was part of a Russian attempt to hurt Clinton’s chances and help make Trump president. 

Numerous Obama Administration officials were concerned enough with the lack of response that they anonymously shared their frustrations with the media. Apart from serious internal pressure on Obama from some of his advisors, the day Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination a bipartisan group of dozens of prominent former military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials and experts called on Obama to act swiftly and forcefully to counter, deter, and punish those responsible for the hacking, describing the attempt to hack and influence the American electoral process in the gravest, starkest of terms. In addition, senior Democrats on congressional intelligence committees called on Obama to publicly name the attackers. 

Later it was discovered that the hacking efforts were on a wider scale than initially thought, including the Democratic Governor’s Association, left-leaning think tanks tied to the Party, and other Democratic insiders and organizations.

Presidential Pensiveness and Paralysis

Despite all of this, Obama was steadfastly refusing to publicly name Russia as the culprit, in part because of fears of igniting a conflict and uncertainty as to how to respond to such attacks. 

The most absurd part of his rationale was that he was worried naming the Russians and taking a strong stance against them would harm John Kerry’s then-ongoing diplomatic efforts to win cooperation with the Russians on Syria, as all recent diplomatic talks with them on Syria had been a farce. The same officials noted that Obama “fear[ed]” additional cyberattacks by Putin, additional military harassment in the Black and Baltic seas, and further aggression in Eastern Europe. 

Yes, incredulously, Obama imagined that turning a blind eye to Russian interference in domestic American elections would somehow invite Russian compromise on other fronts, frustrating some on his team.  I am reminded of the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when the heroes are trying to convince Théoden, King of Rohan, to stand up for his people against the disinformation and aggression of Saruman; Théoden responds by saying “I will not risk open war,” to which Aragorn retorts “Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not;” in the real world, we had Obama playing the role of a Théoden in denial.

His maddening naiveté manifesting hardly for the first time during his presidency, Obama, demonstrated how poorly he understood his adversary, and unsurprisingly, Putin was emboldened on all these fronts.

Even during Kerry’s fastidious diplomacy, on September 19th Russia deliberately bombed a well-known UN aid convoy heading for an Aleppo, Syria, civilian population that was under siege and desperate for supplies; a few days after, Russia and Syria launched a “ferocious” indiscriminate air offensive against Aleppo, an “unrelenting assault” that quickly became the most intense campaign to date in the war and involved systematic targeting of hospitals (today, Russia and Assad are, with impunity, threatening whole parts of Aleppo with mass slaughter); Ukraine also saw Russian escalation.

Kerry’s talks failed because the Russians were never serious about them, much like previous negotiations on both Syria and Ukraine had repeatedly failed. After some two weeks of these Russian war crimes, the U.S. formally broke off negotiations on October 3rd; the day after, the Guccifer 2.0 APT 28 front released fake documents it claimed proved corruption at the Clinton Foundation.

In the face of Russian mockery of Obama’s diplomatic efforts and his continued non-response to Russia’s cyberwarfare, some of Obama’s “top national security officials” grew furious with him and felt U.S. credibility was being severely damaged, especially in the intelligence community and State Department, while even top Democrats in the House and Senate intelligence committees were either criticizing Obama’s caution (Rep. Adam Schiff) or publicly stating that Russia’s goal could be to harm Clinton’s candidacy and empower Trump’s (Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein). Calling on Obama to do more, they issued a joint statement on September 22nd publicly blaming Russia and stating its intent was to influence the election; incredibly, the White House had repeatedly urged them to delay the statement.

In fact, for all of 2016, Russia’s own media was decidedly pro-Trump and anti-Clinton. Additionally, all throughout the campaign, up to and through Election Day, it is now quite clear that Russia’s propaganda machine of hundreds of websites and many thousands of social media accounts—some unwittingly duped, others complicit or even an army of paid agents—posted many thousands of anti-Clinton, pro-Trump, pro-Russian, and anti-American comments, posts, and stories. Sometimes they amplified true stories like the DNC hacks, often they promoted only partly true or even totally false stories that were seen hundreds of millions of times by American voters, with a core of some 15 million Americans regularly consuming the propaganda and sharing it with much larger audiences on Facebook and Twitter, to the extent that in the final months of the election, fake U.S. election news produced greater engagement and shares than real U.S. election news, a period for which Trump had just placed the despicable Steve Bannon—a major American master of creating and promoting fake news—in charge of running his campaign. I can personally tell you from my own experience that Russian trolls even have ample time left over to direct their blatant propaganda at someone of my own lowly status often, repeatedly, and energetically.

*****

Bloodless Victory Against a Passive Opponent

Even considering all this, Obama waited the better part of a week after the Syria talks formally ended, and some two-and-a-half months after his administration had reached a consensus that Russia was behind the hackings and at least involved in the passing of the information to WikiLeaks, to finally formally accuse Russia on October 7th, explicitly asserting that the aim of its operations was to “interfere” with our presidential election, the conclusion of 17 American governmental intelligence agencies. 

Later the same day, a recording from 2005 of Donald Trump vulgarly bragging about committing serial unwanted sexual advances appeared; “almost immediately after” it surfaced, Russia and WikiLeaks came to play defense for Trump and offense against Clinton, with WikiLeaks beginning a series of releases of many thousands of Clinton campaign Chairman Podesta’s e-mails, obtained earlier by Russia; they highlighted campaign infighting, transcripts of Clinton’s paid-by-Wall Street-banks speeches, and Clinton’s ties to political and financial elites, all of which generated negative publicity for Clinton. The batches were released almost every day from October 7th through Election Day on November 8th, ensuring they would constantly be in the headlines in the closing month of the election, even as U.S. officials were coming across even further evidence that Russia was feeding them directly to WikiLeaks. Exit polls—especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and others—showed that voters who made their time up during this period broke overwhelmingly for Trump; additionally, they showed that far more voters broke for third-party candidates in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—as well as every swing state that Trump won—in the final weeks and month than before. For those who had been deeply angered by the DNC leak but were trying to give Clinton a chance, these new Podesta leaks were a reminder of the previous controversy and played into many of the same negative emotions and perceptions these people had harbored about Clinton.

At this point, Obama was considering a “proportional” response to Russia, but such a response still has not materialized, as any appropriate response of any proportion would have sent a public message that the world would unmistakably have heard, being that this Russo-American conflict is playing out very markedly on the global public stage; what has materialized instead is a deafening silence of action from Obama, causing Western democracies to despair. To add insult to injury, weeks before the election Trump claimed America “had no idea” if Russia was behind the hacks at the final presidential debate and Russia even requested it be allowed to send election observers to several U.S. states, which rejected the requests.

Pathetically, Obama warned Putin directly on October 31st on a sensitive nuclear-related hotline not to hack the electoral process (but making no mention of the WikiLeaks DNC and Podesta leaks), only eight days before the election and long after so much damage had already been done, clearly enough to shape public opinion and achieve Putin’s aims without direct election hacks, and the WikiLeaks leaks still continued after this message was delivered. 

Obama laughably claimed the warning amounted to successful deterrence, yet even if Clinton had won, the U.S. was possibly facing massive unrest and a Congress intent on impeaching Clinton, its constituents incensed in part by Russian propaganda. 

In charge of a relatively weaker Russia taking on the most powerful nation in the world and regardless of the election’s outcome, Putin had already won: he took to heart von Clausewitz’s maxim that “War is the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means,” something that Obama seems to have missed. Putin had essentially “weaponized” WikiLeaks (and, in the process, the unwitting U.S. news media) against Clinton, the Democratic Party, the U.S. electoral process, and American democracy itself. And almost overnight, he has largely silenced the Republican Party’s hostility to him and his regime: most Republicans seem to prefer not to attack their new benefactor, while the most vocal GOP critics of Putin are mostly a fading old guard (as a case in point, just a few days ago, all Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called for the Obama Administration to declassify information on Russia’s interference in the U.S. election; not one single Republican on the Committee joined the call). 

Russia’s hacking and disinformation campaigns coupled with Obama’s dismal failure to respond appropriately to them were themselves certainly more than enough to explain Clinton’s razor thin loss, even as other factors—Clinton’s e-mail server scandal, the way FBI Director James Comey engaged with the public (or did not) during the FBI’s multiple investigations, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon and the behavior of Bernie Sanders, polling errors, the style and focus of media coverage, and, of course, many Americans’ irrational, visceral hatred of Clinton born largely out of still-pervasive sexism and misogyny—undeniably also played a role. Any one of those alone not becoming a factor could have swung the election to Clinton, but they were largely out of the hands of the Clinton campaign. President Obama could have declassified most or all of Hillary’s e-mails and shown the public how innocuous they actually were; he could have reigned in Comey and the rogue actors within the FBI, as they were part of the Executive Branch, though this would have carried considerable political risk and could have at least created the appearance of a president interfering in an official investigation for political reasons; but the single area where the president could have had the most impact and been able to act in a way least tainted by questions of propriety was concerning all things related to Russia.

*****

The Worst Defeat in American History and a Serious Blow to Western Democracy

Russia had simply waltzed into America’s national election, President Obama’s political party, and the campaign of President Obama’s chosen successor Hillary Clinton, did what it pleased for all the world to see, stared us down at our own gala, grabbed the microphone, repeatedly endorsed the savage critic of Obama and rival of Clinton Donald Trump, repeatedly badmouthed both Obama and Clinton, took a crap on the dance floor, the dropped the mic and laughed hysterically while doing a slow waltz out the door.

Wars have been fought for far less, and yet Obama’s response was to avoid confrontation with his legacy and the future of the nation, even the future of Western democracy, very much at stake.

In a follow-up piece, I shall deal with the many options Obama had as Commander in Chief besides doing virtually nothing. But for now, perspective:

The most successful cyberattack in world history also involved the weakest response by any American president ever to foreign aggression. It was also the worst foreign attack on American soil since the War of 1812: neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11 resulted in a regime change that put in place a President of the United States who is so unwitting a mole for Russia, grossly unfit for high office, and oblivious to how much he will undermine critical institutions and values as Trump. It is the first time a party in power in America was toppled by foreign interference and the first time a foreign power toppled the political leadership of a long-reigning first-tier power since arguably Alexander the Great took over Persia. 

Additionally, Russia’s activities have greatly helped to diminish confidence in the American system, further fan the flames of cynicism, and normalize fake news, making America overall more divided, less governable, and more confused than at any time since the Civil War/Reconstruction period; these acts have also damaged the U.S.-led international system that has been in place since WWII.

It can only said of Putin’s resoundingly successful cyberwar that he played so many segments of American society to his ends without their knowledge that it was a masterful orchestral performance and that Putin was a legendary conductor. This (First) Russo-American Cyberwar will be studied for generations, for centuries, as a brilliant way for a state to take down a democratic nation, no matter how powerful, if its people are divided, and to do so without actually firing a single shot but by turning that nation’s strengths against itself. 

This is part of a larger Russian war against the West that is becoming increasingly brazen: until this year, Syria and Ukraine were the most glaring centerpieces in Russia’s disinformation campaigns; then, Russian disinformation caused a faux scandal early this year in Germany that weakened Merkel and her party ahead of key regional votes; Russia’s propaganda machine went intensely against Remain and for Brexit in the UK’s big vote this year and its efforts were clearly crucial in swaying votes in what was an intensely close decision; Russia has also been active in non-NATO Sweden this year, particularly when it was voting on closer ties with NATO; Finland, which shares a huge border with Russia, has also seen a surge in Russian disinformation; early in November, it even became apparent that Russia may have even been involved in an attempted coup in Montenegro, which is on the verge of ascending to membership in NATO.

Since Trump’s election and just this week, Russia’s tool WikiLeaks is already unleashing its might against Angela Merkel and her party in Germany, which fears far more interference in its 2017 national elections, and Russian propaganda was active in supporting the right-wing parties in Italy’s big vote that was a stinging defeat for it centrist pro-EU leader and his party (he will now soon resign), though efforts were less successful in Austria, where the pro-Russian far-right candidate failed by only a modestly large margin in an election that still signaled a significant weakening of Austria’s political center and in which fake news (not yet directly linked to Russia) played a major role during the campaign. In Russia, lawmakers cheered the developments in both Italy and Austria, seeing them as further signs of the demise of the current European system. Also since Trump’s victory, pro-Russian presidential candidates won in Moldova and Bulgaria, where Russian political meddling has been a significant force in shaping the political climate in the years preceding the recent votes. Additionally, Russia’s neighboring three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—already subject to heavy Russian disinformation operations—have seen a significant increase in Russian disinformation since the U.S. election and many there fear what is to come next. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the leader of close U.S. ally South Korea is now facing impeachment during a period of massive unrest in part provoked by Trump, even as a politician known as “Korea’s Trump” is rising in the polls.

Today, right-wing extremists—now that the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is not a champion of communism and the international left—admire Putin’s authoritarianism and see him as a defender of the West, a newly increasingly illiberal, rather than liberal, West, and Russian support for right-wing pro-Russian parties in Europe is hardly limited to propaganda and disinformation: Russia has been orchestrating loans to right-wing parties all over Europe, including (but hardly limited) to France. And Trump and his advisor Bannon have made no secret that they want to ally with and support the same far-right, anti-NATO, pro-Russian parties in Europe that Putin wants to see succeed. Even in just four, let alone eight, years of a Trump presidency, the damage such a coordinated effort could do to the EU and NATO as institutions should not be underestimated, especially as Russia’s successful disinformation and propaganda operations increase Putin’s standing and support across Europe. 

Putin sits on Europe’s eastern border, part wolf, part vulture, both inflicting wounds and picking those wounds apart, weakening the body politic of the West. And by any standard, 2016 was a year of spectacular success, with Russia’s desired outcomes being achieved in the US, the UK, Italy, Bulgaria, and Moldova, while seeing trends favorable to its interests significantly increased in places like Germany and Austria. Furthermore, U.S. and NATO “ally” Turkey has taken a decidedly sharp anti-democratic and anti-Western plunge and is clearly cozying up to Russia. 

2017 may be even better for the Kremlin, and even worse for what is still referred to as the West.

This is the new face of warfare, one in which the lines between politics and war are erased and in which Russia is dominant and ahead of everyone, and this should be terrifying all of us. I am not going to write that this is a fatal blow for the U.S. or the West, but it is a grievous one, and that it is one that the public and news media seem unable to discover or acknowledge, let alone comprehend or respond to appropriately, makes it all the more dangerous and all the more likely to happen again… and again.

AP

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

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