What does Russia have on Trump? (Source: here)
Kompromat is Russian for 'compromising material'. Kompromat is typically used by intelligence agencies to blackmail or exert influence over politically exposed persons.
There is frequent speculation in the media that Russian President Vladimir Putin has kompromat on US President Donald Trump, i.e. that Trump is a Russian asset (see here)
The speculation has received extra impetus recently by Trump’s policy pronouncements about Russia, Ukraine, and America’s NATO partners; his position appears to be very closely aligned with Russian interests (see here).
Specifically, since he assumed power for the second time Trump has turned decades of US foreign policy on its head with respect to Russia. The US now appears to be allied with Russia and Trump regularly threatens to invade long-standing NATO allies, such as Greenland (Denmark) and Canada.
One of the most dramatic manifestations of Trump’s Russia pivot is his suspension of support for Ukraine as it defends itself against an unprovoked invasion from Russia (see here)
So what do we actually know about Trump’s ties to Russia? Is he a Russian asset? The following is a summy of publicly available information on the subject. I will leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions.
–––––
Trump’s positive disposition towards Russia goes back decades. As far back as 1987, Trump visited Russia and, upon his return, took out full-page adverts in three major US newspapers criticising US foreign policy towards Russia. In his book published in the same year, 'Trump: The Art of the Deal', Trump mentions the possibility of constructing a Trump Tower in Moscow (see here)
Concerns about Trump’s links to Russia spiked earlier this year after Alnur Mussayev, a former KGB officer, said that Trump was recruited as an asset for Moscow in the 1980s (see here). Mussayev's allegation was given additional credence, when former UK Conservative Minister Graham Stuart opined, “We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset” (see here).
This is not first time Trump has been labelled a Putin asset. Similar allegations surfaced back in 2021, when American journalist and author Craig Unger published American Kompromat, a book in which he claims that Trump was recruited by Moscow (see here)
The 2019 Mueller Report similarly established close links between Trump and Moscow. The Report had a narrow remit to only investigate Russian election interference, so it did not dig directly into Trump's Russia ties. Still, the report identified many ties between Trump, his associates, and Russian intelligence staff and other Russian officials. It concluded that several persons connected to Trump had made false statements and obstructed the investigation (see here).
The most specific revelations to date emerged in the so-called Steele Dossier, a collection of raw intelligence reports written in 2016 by Christopher Steele, a senior UK intelligence officer. Many of the allegations made in the Steele Dossier have since been publicly confirmed, others are regarded as plausible, but have not specifically been confirmed, while yet others are deemed dubious, albeit not disproven (see here).
In January 2017, the American news network CNN, citing the Steele Dossier, said Russia possesses "compromising personal and financial information" about Trump (see here). In the same month, BuzzFeed, an American internet media company, published a 35-page article containing "embarrassing material" involving Trump that could be used to blackmail him (see here)
Following this extensive publicity, the Steele Dossier was widely circulated within the highest levels of the American government, including to Senator John McCain (see here). A defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed over the publication the Steele Dossier was dismissed by a US federal judge in 2018 on the grounds that the publication of the Steele Dossier was in the public interest (see here) .
Shortly after the publication of the Steele Dossier, Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, vouched for Christopher Steele, calling him a "very competent professional operator. ... I take the report seriously" (see here).
Among the many allegations made in the Steele Dossier about Trump and his ties to Russia, I find the following particularly interesting:
1. Trump is alleged to have "hated" Obama so much that when he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow he took the presidential suite, where Obama had stayed previously. Trump then hired prostitutes to perform 'golden showers' to defile the bed used by the Obamas during their earlier visit. The incident was filmed and recorded as kompromat by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the successor agency to KGB. The tape is now often referred to as ‘Pee Gate’.
2. Trump paid bribes and engaged in unorthodox and embarrassing sexual behaviour many times over the years, including in Saint Petersburg, providing Russia with plenty of kompromat to make him vulnerable to blackmail by Russia intelligence.
3. Russia has not felt the need to publish the ‘Pee Gate’ tape and other Trump kompromat, because Trump has always voluntarily co-operated with Russia.
In my personal opinion, (3) is the most interesting insight from the Steele Dossier. Based on Trump’s evident warm relations with Putin, it seems entirely plausible to me that Trump has voluntarily co-operated with Russia all this time. I think he admires Putin’s authoritarian methods and appreciates Putin’s advice as he too seeks to obtain absolute power (see here). In other words, it has not been necessary at all for Putin to leak Kompromat to get Trump to kowtow.
–––––
Another interesting line of inquiry in the public record is that Trump had strong financial incentives to cooperate with Putin, although here the public record is, unsurprisingly, even more circumstantial. The most compelling hypothesis revolves around Trump real estate, Deutsche Bank, and the laundering of stolen money from Ukraine.
According to various reports, one of which I reference below, Trump needed money to finance his campaign in 2016. His early pledges to entirely self-fund the campaign were quickly abandoned and he turned to Super-PACs for help. He may also have taken out an illegal loan to beef up his campaign finances - see here.
It is also a matter of public record that at the time of the 2016 election, Trump already had a USD 300m loan with Deutsche Bank for investments in US real estate. By 2020, the loan amount had increased to USD 330m and was still outstanding (see here)
Trump's relations with Deutsche Bank go back decades. Over the course of those years, Deutsche Bank is supposed to have loaned Trump a total sum of around USD 2.5bn, while Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, her husband, also had accounts at Deutsche Bank (see here).
The USD 300m Deutsche Bank loan is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, prior to getting the loan Trump had defaulted on a USD 640m obligation to Deutsche Bank. Trump had even sued Deutsche Bank. Most investment banks would simply have refused to deal with Trump. Indeed, other Wall Street banks did exactly that in the 1990s, when Trump was declared bankrupt no fewer than four times. But Deutsche Bank did not walk away (see here).
Second, Deutsche Bank happened to have a lot of Russian money to ‘put to work’ at the time. We know this because in 2017 Deutsche Bank was fined more than USD 600 million by US and UK regulators for so-called “mirror trades” in which the bank, via its Moscow branch, undertook sham FX transactions worth a whopping USD 10 billion on behalf of Russians wishing to convert rubles into pounds and dollars, i.e. money laundering (see here).
This is where Ukraine enters the picture and the evidence becomes even more circumstantial. In the Steele Dossier, Trump’s link to Ukraine is established via the American political consultant Paul Manafort, who, in December 2004 began to work for then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich (see here). Manafort continued to serve Yanukovich until 2014. He then became Trump’s campaign chairman in June, 2016.
The links between Trump and Yanukovich via Manafort are fascinating. When he was thrown out of Ukraine in 2014, Yanukovich is rumoured to have stolen as much as USD 70bn from the Ukrainian Treasury. At least 7,000 Ukrainian companies were attacked by Yanukovich during his time in office. The companies were forced to pay tributes to the Ukrainian leader amounting to 30-50% of their profits, or be subjected to involuntary corporate take-overs (see here).
Yanukovich also stole so much money from the public sector that Ukraine's government, unable to service its obligations, defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2015.
All the stolen money – and Yanukovich himself – ended up in Russia. So the obvious question is this: was the 2016 Trump campaign financed in part by the money stolen from Ukraine by Yanukovich and funnelled into Trump real estate for money laundering purposes, with Deutsche Bank as intermediary, all under the watchful eye of Putin?
No definitive proof exists to substantiate this claim. However, a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in a report published in August 2020 that Manafort's presence on the Trump campaign and his proximity to Trump created opportunities for the Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump Campaign (see here).
The Steele Dossier corroborates this observation, claiming that "Paul Manafort managed" the "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership”. Yanukovych, according to the Steele Dossier, told Putin he had been making untraceable "kick-back payments" to Manafort, while he was Trump's campaign manager (see here)
I have not been able to find documentation to support the hypothesis that Yanukovich funelled his ill-gotten money to Trump. This is hardly surprising, because had such transactions taken place they would have been arranged in Moscow under the watchful eye on Putin and all traces of such deals would surely have been destroyed.
–––––
Still, fast-forward to February 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Yanukovych is suddenly spotted in Minsk, Belarus (see here). Some say he was in Minsk, because Russia intended to put him back in his old job as president of Ukraine in case Russian forces managed to take Kiev. In the end, of course, Russia did not take Kiev, but, interestingly, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still felt the need to strip Yanukovich of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2023. Why did Zelensky do this unless he feared Yanukovich could stage a return?
The re-emergence of Yanukovich makes an interesting backdrop to Trump’s recent suspension of US military assistance to Ukraine and his very public attack on Zelensky in the White House (see here). Trump is clearly pushing for regime change in Ukraine. Was this Trump’s way to help his buddy Putin pave the way for Yanukovich to return to power in Ukraine?
There may not be much direct evidence on these suppositions, but there is strong and continuing circumstantial evidence tying Trump to Putin, and Yanukovich. To a complete outsider like me, they ties appear deeper than mere relationships of convenience. How is it the saying goes... if it walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck…
The End