Donald Trump may be Vladimir Putin’s stooge, or he may be so thoroughly compromised he’s doing the dictator’s bidding. (Photo: Getty)
Donald Trump lost all plausable denability about his deep connection to Jeffrey Epstein after reports proved true that he sent a salacious birthday card to the pedophile sex trafficker in 2003.
But one of the upshots has received very little attention in the United States.
The latest Epstein revelation is adding fuel to claims — heatedly noted overseas — that the Russians have equally damning “kompromat” on the President of the United States.
U.S. allies in Europe have been at a loss to explain Trump’s second-term reticience to do or say anything that might offend Russian President Vladimir Putin or deter Putin’s terror campaign in Ukraine.
Donald Trump’s salacious birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was confirmed by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Finally, last month, Portugese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa stated out loud what had become painfully obvious to many foreign leaders.
“The top leader of the world’s foremost superpower is, objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset. He operates as an asset,” de Sousa said at a Portugese political event.
“Objectively, the new American leadership has strategically benefited the Russian Federation… They have shifted from being allies on one side to referees of the challenge,” the Portugal Pulse reported him saying.
The statement was stunning on its face, especially coming from the leader of a founding nation of NATO, the 32 member military alliance between the U.S. and European nations.
“No one outside the Kremlin has done more to support Russia, its aggression in Ukraine, and undermine American democracy than Donald J.Trump,” wrote Alnur Mussayev, the former chief at the State Security Service of the Republic of Kazakhstan during its time as a Soviet satellite.
“There was “no other reasonable explanation for Trump,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Putin’s long-stated goals are his desire to disband NATO and the European Union and help secure Ukraine’s surrender. Trump’s actions since taking office have fostered all three.
“This is no longer a Ukrainian or American issue. It is a concern for all people who believe that Russia is a global scourge,” Mussayev added.
Related: Blood-Soaked Brands: These U.S. Firms Are Still in Russia, Despite Sanctions, Putin Genocide
In international diplomatic circles, where discretion and restraint are the hallmarks of discourse, de Sousa’s comments resounded like a cannon shot. But they brought into focus an issue that has dogged Trump for a decade.
Has the president been compromised by damning information — both sexual and financial — held by the Russians?
Overseas the issue has never really gone away. Since the start of Trump’s second term — and subsequent deference to Russia — it’s now a major topic of discussion.
de Sousa’s comments were certainly a catalyst, but the latest Epstein revelation is a major factor as well.
Despite years of evidence to the contrary, Trump has always played down his connection to the sex trafficker and even started calling it the “Epstein hoax.”
Trump heatedly denied a July Wall Street Journal report that he was one of the close associates who sent salacious birthday cards to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. He even sued the outlet for defamation.
But the card surfaced in a 268-page “birthday book” compiled by onetime girlfriend and fellow convicted child-sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell. The Epstein estate provided the book under subpeona by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (See the book here)
The card included an outline of a prepubescent, small-breasted nude girl, signed by Trump in a spot that suggestively looked like pubic hair.
Related: Trump Epstein Scandal Screws Tighten as Victims Speak Out, Demand Justice
What he wrote was eye-opening: “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey… Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” it stated. But the most damning part was his closing:
“Happy birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Taken together, it’s hard to conclude anything other than Trump reveled in their shared secret — having sex with underage girls. It’s as close to a contemporaneous admission as you can possibly get.
The card caught the attention of overseas journalists because it dovetailed with reports by exiled, former Soviet and Russian intelligence officials that Russia has similar compromat on the president.
In August, Musayev said Trump had been recruited to the Russian KGB (State Security Committee) in 1987. He also revealed that Trump was given the code name “Krasnov.”
The kompromat file on Trump is “comprehensive,” the former Kazakh intelligence officer said, “extensive, meticulously documented, and designed not to destroy Trump—but to control him.”
They include details of Trump’s sexual crimes and criminal money laundering from Russia, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics.
Particularly damning, Musayev claims Putin has in his possession videos of Trump “assaulting underage minors,” the same allegation he faces in the Epstein scandal. (See the video)
The Kazakh connection to Trump and underage girls, can be traced through alledged money laundering by Kazakh businessmen involving the Trump SoHo hotel and other projects. In 2006, a company called Bayrock, owned by two Russian emigres, Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, began construction on the hotel.
“Tax evasion and money laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model,” one 2010 lawsuit alleged.
The Trump SoHo was billed as “a monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion,” NPR reported in 2017.
Tofik Arifov, a Kazekh businessman was prosecuted for economic crimes in the 90s. But Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, the successor to the notorious KGB, arranged to have charges dropped. In exchange, Arifov agreed to become a Russian agent of influence.
Prostitutes were reportedly one of the tools Arifov employed to collect kompromat on people of interest to the Russian spy agency. Musayev asserts that Arifov and three other Kazakh businessmen “delivered girls to Epstein’s island and to Mar-A-Lago” on orders of the FSB.
Related: Donald Trump Could be Linked to Putin Money Laundering Through Denmark Bank
Mukhtar Ablyazov, another Kazakh businessman also prosecuted for economic crimes in the ’90s, allegedly controled a $440 million fund, and spent $3 million to buy three condos in the Trump SoHo.
Sater, a former Trump advisor, and another former Trump Organization employee, Daniel Ridloff, reportedly were middlemen in the deal, according to the Organized Crime Reporting Project (OCRP) in Europe.
The “investment” essentially helped bail out the hotel, which was plagued by vacancies and financial troubles soon after it opened in 2010, the OCRP reported.
Two of Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, reportedly narrowly avoided prosecution after allegations were raised that they tried to boost condominium sales in the building by lying to prospective investors.
In 2013, Trump told the BBC, he was unaware of Sater’s background or involvement in the hotel, which he called “a licensing deal… a very simple licensing deal.”
But Sater was reportedly involved in unsuccessful plans to build a Trump tower in Moscow, as well as a 2017 back-channel scheme with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to broker a Ukraine peace deal, the OCRP reported.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Trump signed a nonbinding “letter of intent” for the project in 2015. Cohen said he discussed the project with Trump three times. But nothing ever came to fruition.
Related: Trump Tied to Rogue German Bank Accused of Laundering Russian Money
Trump’s vulnerability to recruitment dovetails with his wild spending spree in the 1980s financed by the operation of three Atlantic City casinos.
His casinos were throwing off cash so fast and furiously during this time, Trump suffered from a gluttony of excess and splurged on “toys” only a billionaire could love.
He bought Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, the Eastern Airlines shuttle for $365 million. a 282-foot superyacht, the “Trump Princess,” for $30 million, plus $10 million refitting it, a controlling interest for $10 million in a struggling USFL football team, The New Jersey Generals, and the Miss USA and Miss Teen pageants.
In 1988, Trump used lines of credit from 19 U.S. and foreign banks to buy the landmark Plaza Hotel in New York City for $407 million. It marked the pinacle of his real estate empire. The project went into bankruptcy two years later.
Then, catastrophe struck, the 1990-91 recession. Trump’s shuttle defaulted on $135 million in personal guarantees; he was forced to unload his boat for a distressed $20 million; In all, his vastly over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses filed bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009.
During that time, Trump had borrowed an estimated $4 billion from 70 banks. After the casino fiasco, none would touch him.
Trump’s prolifigate spending in the 1980s, struggles with debt, and his taste for young girls allegedly caught the attention of what was then the KGB, according to Musayev.
KGB defector Yuri Shvets told American author Craig Unger, who wrote the book “American Compromise,” that Trump was actually identified as a target in 1977 — a full decade earlier.
While the contradictory dates have often been cited to attack the credibility of both claims, it would have been KGB standard operating procedure to identify Trump as a target and begin the slow process of recruiting him.
“Recruitment wasn’t a one-day operation. It was a process — the KGB’s entire playbook was built on the slow-burn. They’d spend years laying groundwork, testing vulnerabilities, and planting ideas,” writes Maltese journalist Julian Delia, who has extensively covered organized crime in Europe.
“It’s built on a timeline that fits, from Trump’s targeting in 1977, to his grooming in 1986, to his recruitment in 1987.”
The year 1977 is a key date. Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech citizen whose country was under Soviet control at the time. According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan for the duration of their marriage.
Luke Harding, a foreign correspondent at the Guardian, wrote in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win that the Czechs would have shared their intelligence with the KGB in Moscow.
That included the contents of Ivana’s letters to her father, which he turned over to Czech agents. In some of those letters, she wrote about Trump’s interest in politics, which definitely would have piqued the KGB’s attention.
Trump’s pivotal trip to Moscow in 1987 was actually set up a year earlier. In his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” he even recounted broaching the subject with then-Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin.
The talk occurred at a luncheon in the fall of 1986 hosted by fashion mogul Leonard Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter, Natalia, had read the book, in which Trump expressed a desire to build a tower in Moscow, Trump said.
“One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government,” Trump boasted.
But Natalia later told a different story to Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, as Harding detailed in his book:
Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. A seasoned world traveler, Dubinin had seen many skyscrapers and feined interest in Trump’s.
During his 1987 Moscow visit, Ronald Reagan, a Soviet hardliner, was president. The Soviet Union was enoying Glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, who promoted openness and greater freedom of speech.
Still the Soviets were wary of Reagan and secretly feared he might launch a secret nuclear strike. Having highly placed assets in the United States was considered critical to gauge the administraton’s true intentions.
The trip was arranged by Intourist, a Soviet tourist agency known to be a front for the KGB. The lure was the promise of talks to build a Trump tower in the heart of Moscow, according to one foreign news outlet, Information Warfare magazine.
“For a man obsessed with branding and global recognition, the opportunity was, honestly, irresistable. It represented a unique opportunity to plant his golden monogramed flag in a place where few Western capitalists ever ventured, making a statement that would resonate far beyond the world of real estate development and into the realm of international affairs. (See the video)
Trump, then 41, was treated like a high-level dignitary when he arrived in Moscow. He was chauffered around the city to potential construction sites and feted at lavish banquets.
Trump was housed in the Lenin suite at the National Moscow Hotel, usually reserved for high-level dignitaries, where every intimate conversation with Ivana was likely recorded to build a psychological profile of him.
“The Soviets saw him not just as a builder of towers, but a potential asset, a person, who if properly nutured, could become a friendly and influential voice within the United States, knowingly or unknowlingly serving their long-term strategic interests,” according to the news outlet.
Weeks after his return from the Soviet Union, Trump made another uncharacteristic move.
On Sept. 1, 1987, he spent almost $100,000 to buy full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and major newspapapers. He attacked U.S. allies for exploiting American protection without paying their “fair share.”
The argument echoes today; in both the first and second administration, Trump has attacked NATO and threatened to withdraw from the alliance, in effect, destabilizing the international organization — one of the U.S.S.R’s and now Russia’s long-term goals.
According to Information Warfare magazine:
“This public declaration was his first major foray into foreign policy, and it’s message was strikingly aligned with long-standing Soviet propaganda narratives aimed at weakening America’s international alliances.
“His public commentary echoed key themes of Soviet disinformation, particularly, the idea that NATO and other U.S. alliances were a drain on American resources and should be dismantled.
For decades, the Kremlin had worked to sow discord among Western allies, and he was a prominent American businessman broadcasating that very message across the nation’s most influential publications.
Some international analysts suggest Trump was signaling his willingness to push Russian propaganda, in exchange for a Trump Tower in the Russian capital — an allegation that has also followed him.
During the ’80s, Trump was already vulnerable to compromise.
He and singer/actress Marla Maples had been having an on-off affair behind Ivana’s back at least since 1984. Trump divorced Ivana in 1990. He married Maples three years later shortly before the birth of Tiffany Trump.
He married Slovenian model Melania Knauss on Jan. 22, 2005. The same month, he was caught on an open mic in what became the “Access Hollywood” tape scandal. First revealed in 2014, Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” and made other crude remarks about women.
Less than a year into his marriage to Melania, Playboy model Karen McDougal told a friend that she had an affair with the married Trump for a year starting in 2006, involving “dozens” of trysts.
In July 2006, porn star Stormy Daniels, met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada, and they had a one night affair. It happened four months after Melania had given birth to son Barron.
Both affairs remained a secret for nearly a decade. The McDougal affair became public in 2016 and the Daniels affair followed in the media two years later. Both women received six-figure payments for their silence in advance of the 2016 election.
The payments eventually led to Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of fraud for falsifying business records.
In his early years before his first marriage, Trump had a reputation as a voracious womanizer, including more than two-dozen accusations of unwanted sexual avances or sexual assault.
His friendship with Epstein began in the late 1980s and continued at least until 2007, amid allegations he had sex on more than one occasion with underage girls. Trump has consistently denied the claims.
Trump’s financial picture took a curious turn in the early 2000s. He went from teetering on a precipice amid his casino bankcruptices to paying all cash in another spending spree.
These all-cash transactions began relatively small, according to a 2018 analysis by The Washington Post.
In 2006, Trump paid $12.6 million for land in Scotland where he later developed a golf course. In 2014, he spent $67.8 million in cash to buy Turnberry, another Scottish course.
Amid the new spending spree in 2008, James Dodson, a golf writer, met Trump and son Eric Trump during a golf outing and asked both how they were funding their golf course purchases. Trump “tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”
But Eric said they were getting money from Russia.
‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,” the writer recalled Eric saying. ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”
Eric later denied the comment.
The same year, Donald Trump Jr. said almost the same thing, during a real estate conference. “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he said.
He has also since denied the remark.
Also that year, a Russian businessman paid the senior Trump $95 million for a Florida mansion — more than twice what Trump paid for it four years earlier. A bidding war over the property with Epstein, reportedly led to their falling out.
At least some of Trump’s cash came from the private banking arm at Deutsche Bank, a German bank. In 2012, the bank loaned him $300 million.
In 2013, Trump staged a Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow and talked of friendship with Putin. “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” he tweeted.
The Manhattan mogul watched 86 contestants don shimmering evening gowns and skimpy swimsuits, according to Politico. At his side was Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin, who organized the event and staged it at a concert hall he owned.
“Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” he boasted to The New York Post, after the pageant.
In 2017, Deutsche agreed to pay $630 million in fines to American and British regulators for “mirror trades” that allowed Russian investors to launder $10 billion through the bank over four years, according to the regulators.
Deutsche has refused all requests for comment on its relationship with Trump.
In 2018, questions were raised whether Trump aided Russian money laundering by selling real estate to individuals with ties to Putin, the FSB, or both, through all-cash transactions involving secretive corporations.
Following Trump’s election as president in 2016, 70 percent of his company’s property sales were made to limited-liability corporations (LLCs), according to USAToday. LLCs are often used to conceal the true property owners.
Since the 1980s, more than 1,300 condos worth around $1.5 billion, either owned or licensed by Trump, were bought by shell companies in all-cash transactions. That amounts to 21 percent of the Trump Organization’s condo sales in the United States, according to an investigation by BuzzFeed.
In Scotland, Trump’s purchases raised alarms, alleging he laundered Russian money to build or buy golf courses at Menie estate in Aberdeenshire in 2012 and Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire in 2014.
Last year, in the wake of the Trump Organization’s conviction for bank fraud in New York City, Scottish Greens Party lawmakers renewed calls for Trump to open the golf course’s books.
“We now have indisputable and independent evidence in the public domain that Trump’s business dealings, including those in Scotland, were linked to fraud,” lawmakers wrote in a letter to the Scottish government.
In all, Trump spent more than $400 million in cash in 14 transactions, including for five houses, eight golf courses and a winery, The Post found.
Putin almost assuredly has the details on the transactions, which make up part of the “financial dirt” he holds over Trump, accordng to Mussayev, a career intelligence officer who oversaw those kinds of operations.
Trump’s deference to Putin was not going unnoticed. In 2018, Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times’ longtime foreign affairs columnist, wrote a scathing column about Trump’s behavior toward Russia:
President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.
That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released.
Friedman’s comments about “sexual misbehavior” were a reference to the so-called Steele Dossier, an opposition research report compiled leading up to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. On Jan. 17, 2017, Buzz Feed News reported the findings.
Author Christopher Steele, a former British MI-6 agent and counterintelligence expert, actually produced 35 pages of memos. They contained largely unverified, raw intelligence on a Russian campaign to influence the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.
The most damning allegation was a report that Trump had been filmed during a 1983 visit to Russia cavorting with prostitutes who danced and urinated on a hotel room bed where President Obama and his wife had slept on a previous visit.
Needless to say, Trump and his acolytes claimed the tape was part of the “Russia hoax” and heatedly denied the incident. The tape existence has never been proven or disproven.
Steele said releasing or confirming the tape’s existence was not the point of Russian kompromat.
“It hasn’t needed to be released…” he said. “I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president.”
Trump weathered two “Russiagate” investigations following the 2016 election — one by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the other by the House Intelligence Committee under Republican Devan Nunes.
The Mueller investigation found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 election aimed at benefiting Trump, but found no direct evidence the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia.
The Republican House committee also found that Russia had meddled in the election, but did not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy with the Trump campaign.
For his part, Trump has loudly and frequently called the matter a “Russia hoax.” At one point, he even tied to deflect blame for election interference on Ukraine.
“Of course, it is quite possible that Schvets and Musayev are only part of another Russian influence operation aimed at further destabilizing the United States,” writes Maltese journalist Delia.
“Perhaps Trump is actually just an idiot, who is passionate about Putin and laying flowers at his doorstep like a desperate fan, because he craves the same unbridled power as himself. Perhaps these are just birds from a field of berries.
“None of this explains why a man whose whole scam is built on the “art of the deal” is now suddenly giving out concessions with the same generosity with which a Christian missionary donates blankets full of smallpox.
“The only reasonable explanation is that Trump owes so personally to the Russian state that he has no choice but to cover up Putin’s undisclosed land grab.”
Columnist Friedman wrote the following in 2018. His words are prescient today:
My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son Donald Trump Jr. from back in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” They may own our president.
But whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.
That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.