Wif historians look back at Donald Trump’s presidency, they are likely to choose two defining themes. One is the coronavirus pandemic. It dominated his last year in office and saw the president become the virus’ most celebrated victim with the White House Super Distributor.
The other is Russia, a subject that has cost American public life four years. The question only came up when Trump was a longtime candidate for president. Why was Trump’s behavior toward the Russian leader in a Republican party that once considered Vladimir Putin a cold-eyed KGB assassin?
There were Trump’s flattering public statements about Putin on the campaign. And his blatant appeal to Moscow in July 2016 to track down emails that he said removed Hillary Clinton. “Russia, if you listen, I hope you can get the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he told a Florida news conference.
It seems that Russia is indeed listening. That evening, a group of hackers working for the GRU’s military intelligence returned to their Moscow office after hours. They tried unsuccessfully to break into the Clinton assistants’ accounts. A rival spying agency once led by Putin, the FSB, has launched its own electronic attacks.
Throughout 2016, the Russians conducted an aggressive and versatile operation to help Donald Trump win. In the spring, the GRU stole tens of thousands of e-mails from the Democratic Party, including from Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. These were fed to WikiLeaks and given to reporters via a GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.
Meanwhile, the troll from St. Petersburg launches unprecedented anti-Clinton social media operation. The Russians – employed by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin – posed as Americans, organized pro-Trump rallies and even hired an actor to dress him as Clinton and put him in a cage.
Moscow rumors
During the 2016 campaign, there were rumors about Trump and Moscow. No media traffic could get them completely up, but the topic erupted in the public domain in January 2017 when BuzzFeed published a dossier by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by the Democratic Party. That would worry Trump for the rest of his presidency.
The dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been cultivating Trump for at least five years. It claims Putin’s spies have collected compromise, filmed Trump and two sex workers in secret at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.
Trump has vehemently denied the allegations. He and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill and within the Department of Justice sought to discredit the British author and erase his sources. Steele was a “failed spy” and “lowlife,” and conspiracy allegations were a “witch hunt” and a “joke,” Trump insisted.
‘Russia thing’
Hoax or not, Trump’s attempts to make the “Russia thing” disappear. In May 2017, he fired James Comey as FBI director. This led to the appointment of former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special prosecutor. Mueller’s assignment was to investigate whether Trump and his inner circle conspired with Moscow during the election. To answer yes, a criminal standard of proof was needed.
For almost two years, the workings of Mueller’s team remained secret. The prosecutor was both Washington’s most current personality – endlessly discussed – and a ghost. From time to time, his office issued accusations. This was against 26 Russians, including GRU hackers. And against Americans: Trump’s former campaign president Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn, attorney Michael Cohen, and others.
When it arrived in the spring of 2019, Mueller’s report was a disappointment to liberal Americans who hoped it would sweep Trump to power. It has identified numerous ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, but found no conspiracy on a criminal level. Nor did it decide whether the president had obstructed justice. Mueller said he did not consider collusion, which was not a ‘legal term’.
We learn that Trump secretly negotiated in 2015-16 to build a Trump tower in Moscow while praising Putin at the same time. Cohen even sent an email to Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov asking for help and spoke to Peskov’s assistant. When asked by Congress, Cohen lied. The cover-up led to a feud with Trump – and, for Cohen, to federal prison.
Rear channels
The main return channel to Moscow was Manafort and his one-time Russian assistant Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of secret meetings, Manafort gave Kilimnik internal ballot box information, including from the rust belt states that were crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men used surfing phones, encrypted chats and a secret email account, with messages shared in drafts.
Mueller identified Kiliminik as a Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimink did with the information he received from Manafort is unknown. He refuses to cooperate with the FBI and flees to Moscow.
Critics said the Mueller investigation was hampered by excessive legal caution and the failure to meet face-to-face with Trump. The biggest shortcoming was probably the lack of Russian witnesses.
Much of the Trump-Russia story is still unknown. Does the Trump Organization, for example, have financial ties with Moscow? After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump was only able to borrow cash from one lender: the German Deutsche Bank, which gave him huge credit. At the same time, its Moscow branch facilitated a $ 10 billion money laundering scam for the benefit of VIPs in the Kremlin.
The American public never found out when Putin ordered the DNC burglary operation and why. It also did not disclose what the Russian and US presidents discussed during their private meetings, including during a notorious meeting in Helsinki in 2018. A good guess is that Putin flattered Trump rather than threatened him. He fed Trump’s ego and fueled his resentment over the American ‘deep state’ and other ‘enemies’.
‘Graphic counter-intelligence threat’
In August 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee published its own Trump-Russia report. Manafort’s willingness to transfer confidential material to Kilimnik is said to be a “serious counter-intelligence threat”. And it gives some credence to Steele’s allegations in Moscow and notes that an FSB officer was stationed in the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Putin’s spy had a live video stream from guests’ bedrooms, the report said.
In the end, Russia did not interfere in the 2020 election in the same comprehensive and systematic way. But in other ways, Moscow was busy. Since the spring, it has carried out a massive cyber-attack against US federal government institutions. Russian state hackers have inserted malicious code into a software update made by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds.
At least six U.S. government departments have been affected, as well as the Department of Defense’s extensive communications network, and the body that manages the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The hackers worked for Russian SVR foreign intelligence, and possibly also for the FSB. It was the same Cozy Bear outfit that the DNC and the U.S. State Department had hacked before.
Did Trump Condemn Moscow? Nope. He blamed China in one of his last tweets before Twitter kicked him off the platform after the January 6 Capitol attack. The cyber attack was a reminder that Putin saw the United States as an eternal adversary in an endless quasi-war. The National Security Agency spent billions on cyber defense, and yet it was unable to deter intruders from Moscow.
Russia would have chosen it if Trump had won the election. Despite the victory of Joe Biden, however, the Russian leader has much to celebrate. Over four polarizing years, Trump has achieved many of the KGB’s long-standing goals. This included alienating the US from its western allies and NATO; deepening domestic strife; and conduct a Putin-style disinformation campaign against the 2020 outcome.
Manchurian candidate or not, Trump has done more than any previous president to discredit American democracy and suck up the Kremlin. In the 1980s, the Soviet government invited Trump to Moscow. Apparently, this identified him early on as a person without scruples, who may have time and opportunity to bring down the republic.
The invasion of the Capitol was the culmination of this cold war fantasy; a perfect series finale.
Luke Harding’s latest book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West is available at the Guardian Bookshop