August 21, 2020--Miss Moscow

Earlier this week the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a nearly 1,000 page bipartisan report about Trump's involvement with the Russians, including details of the ways in which he, his campaign, and members of his administration colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. 

The repot included information and hints about Trump's sexual escapades in Moscow during the 2013 Miss Universe contest.

Is there any possibility that former KGB colonel, Vladimir Putin, does not have all sorts of documentary evidence about these liaisons? Video and audio tapes, photographs, and taped testimony about what Trump was up to?

As I have been suggesting for years, these goods the Russians have on Trump may be at the heart of his political corruption and support of Putin and his regime.

Below are the opening paragraphs of Michael Schmidt's New York Times article about the report: 

Two decades before he ran for president, Donald J. Trump traveled to Russia, where he scouted properties, was wined and dined and, of greatest significance to Senate intelligence investigators, met a woman who was a former Miss Moscow. 

A Trump associate, Robert Curran, who was interviewed by the Senate investigators, said he believed Mr. Trump may have had a romantic relationship with the woman. On the same trip, another Trump associate, Leon D. Black, told investigators that he and Mr. Trump “might have been in a strip club together.” Another witness said that Mr. Trump may have been with other women in Moscow and later brought them along to a meeting with the mayor. 

Mr. Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time. 

April 10, 2017--Trumpology

In the old days of the Soviet Union, since it was a closed system impervious to Western snooping, one way to read the currents and countercurrents of Soviet leadership--who was in, who was rising, and who was about to be disappeared--was to analyze the pictures of the fur-hatted inner circle arrayed on the top of Lenin's tomb during May Day and other revolutionary celebrations.

Kremlinologists in Washington were tasked to figure this out and they did so by comparing from year to year who was moving into closer proximity to Lenin or Stalin and who was about to slide off the picture plane and soon thereafter into the literal abyss.

Where is the notorious Lavrentiy Beria, head of the fearsome KGB, this year? What about Molotov? Is he losing or gaining power and influence? And who is this upstart Nikita Khrushchev who's star seems to be rising--last year he was nowhere in sight; this year he's only four places from Stalin?

With the inner circle of the Trump White House in turmoil, with the Steve Bannon faction trying to oust son-in-law Jared Kushner and his allies, with Reince Priebus struggling to hold on as chief of staff, and with others close to Trump denying that anything of this sort is going on, with everyone spinning and lying, to get to the truth, as with the Russians, we are left with having to analyze images of the president's unruly team in action. We need to do a content analyst of them in much the same way that we used to try to figure out what was happening in Moscow.

Look carefully of the picture below. It is of the Mar-a-Lago situation room where Trump and his team retired Thursday afternoon to discuss the missile attack on a Syrian airbase.

Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

Seated at the adult table, of course, are Trump at its head and an assortment of Cabinet secretaries. To Trump's left is Rex Tillerson, the almost mute Secretary of State who up to now, nearly three months into the Trump presidency, has not spoken many more than 200 words in public. Across from him, at the president's right are fellow billionaires Wilber Ross, Secretary of Commerce and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, who is not quite at the table. And then it gets interesting.

To Mnuchin's right, decidedly at the table is Jared Kushner and across from him, not at the table but leaning aggressively forward is Gary Cohn, Trump's favorite economic advisor and Kushner ally, who is being discussed as Reince Priebus' replacement. At the table, with the growing bald spot or tonsure is Priebus himself who appears to need to be careful because Cohn is eyeing him ominously and is about about to pounce on him and seize both his chair and job.

Most interesting to Trumpologists is where Steven Bannon is relegated. Earlier in the week he was unceremoniously dumped from his self-assigned seat on the "Principals Committee" of the National Security Council. Here, about as far away from the adult table at a small children's side table of his own, is the dramatically deflated Senior Strategist. And because of the nasty way in which the picture is framed it looks as if Bannon is wearing a lampshade on his head.

 Moscow, Palm Beach--a picture is worth at least a thousand words.

And, oh, my advice-don't bet against the son-in-law.

January 17, 2017--Kompromat & the Honey Pot

Still reluctant to publish the salacious details of the "intelligence" memo BuzzFeed posted last week about Donald Trump's alleged indiscretions while in Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, because everything in it remains "unverifiable," the New York Times continues to cover the coverage, as I wrote last Friday, in an attempt to remain above the sordid fray while one-off writing about the sordid fray.

On Thursday, for example, the Times wrote about Trump without writing about Trump by doing another thing it prides itself in doing--setting even indelicate things in historical context. This times in a background piece titled, "The Soviet Union Died, But Russia's Use of Sexual Blackmail Lives On."

The Times piece reports about the decades-long history of the Soviets enticing Western officials, diplomats, and corporate leaders into acts, mainly sexual ones, they would not want to be publicly known. And then, with the goods on them--film and videotapes and other forms of recording of their transgressions--they used these for blackmail purposes.

This in Russian is called kompromat--"the collection of compromising materials as a source of leverage."

The implications of the article are clear--this is what the Russians possibly/likely did after entrapping Donald Trump in his suite at the Ritz-Carleton in Moscow and that this explains his soft approach to Vladimir Putin. Trump doesn't want his sex tapes on TMZ.

Trump's choice of hotel in Moscow is significant because the Ritz, in the Soviet era an Intourist hotel, was the one most notorious for having every square inch bugged and also, allegedly, was the hotel Trump wanted for himself because the Obamas stayed there and he, according to the BzuzzFeed dump, wanted to sully the bedroom they slept in with unprintable behavior.

     And though the Times does not get into any details about what Trump might or might not have done while there for the pageant, they get quite graphic, again covering the coverage, when describing in detail the testimony of a Russian activist who was lured into a Soviet honey pot situation. A honey pot, in the world of espionage, is the code name for a woman who is supposed to seduce a man in order to pump secrets from him.

Ilya Yashin is the compromised activist. He was approached by the well-named Mumu, a prostitute on the K.G.B.'s payroll who has successfully managed to seduce at least three journalists and members of the Russian opposition.

She used an apartment wired with recording devices and, the Times reports, it was "stocked with cocaine and sex toys."

Mumu, according to Yashin, contacted him on line and they "dated" for three weeks. "One evening, she called and asked him to come over for a 'surprise' which turned out to be a second woman who wanted to engage in a menage a trois."

The Times quotes Yashin--

"What startled me when I came over is how the two girls basically attacked me sexually once I came inside the door. Later, I became more suspicious when one of them took out a big bag of sex toys. Katya got a whip and started whipping me. I told her to put it and all the toys away."

Left unsaid by our paper of record is that one of the BuzzFeed-reported accusations is that Trump did much the same thing at the Ritz with two prostitutes.

Get it?

December 30, 2016--Bad Cop, Good Cop

Not that any of this is necessarily intentional, but Barack Obama finally deciding what to do to "punish" Russia for hacking into our electoral process, could offer Donald Trump an opportunity to reset relations with them. With "them" meaning Vladimir Putin.

Here's how it could work--

Clearly no-drama-Obama wanted nothing to do with this, looking to run out the clock on his presidency by not getting entangled in any last minute messes. If he was eager to retaliate, he would have done so weeks ago and not required relentless prompting and criticism by members of Congress from both parties.

And, of course, his move yesterday to expel 35 so-called Russian "diplomats," who are in fact spies, was at least equally motivated by a desire to poke president-in-waiting Donald Trump in the political eye as another form of retaliation for managing to get under even unflappable Obama's skin by dominating the news and not leaving the stage to Obama alone who is entitled to a un-interfered-with final bow.

As David Sanger reported in this morning's New York Times, Obama's move may effectively "box" Trump in.

What is Trump supposed to do with this in his desire "to make a deal" with Putin? Three weeks from today tell the Russians never mind, your 35 spies are welcome to return to the United States?

Republican leaders such as John McCain who hate Trump and are chomping to reset the Cold War while Democratic hawks such as Chuck Schumer are calling for more sanctions would have strokes if Trump were to reverse Obama's actions because, as he put it in his statement about this, it's "time to move on to bigger and better things." Whatever that means.

Trump wants a clear path to a deal with Putin but may now be flummoxed by a cagy Obama, having the last laugh and reminding the upstart that a presidency isn't over until it's over..

So here's the possible Trump trump move--

It's dawn the morning after the inauguration. Trump is as usual not sleeping. Rather than sending out a tweet, he somehow manages to restrain himself and rings Putin on the phone. After a few affectionate exchanges he says to Putin that he has an idea for a deal that would benefit each of them.

"Let's move quickly to reset things before the anti-Russians set in motion by bad-cop Barack Obama, who finally showed some cojones, pushes both of us into a new bankrupting arms race.

"Let's make the centerpiece of that resetting a solution that the two of us impose in Syria. Forget Turkey, they are a ridiculous country and not trustworthy allies. Let's take a chance and trust each other. Your economy is in a state of collapse and the congressional parties here are working to dominate the agenda even before I shake the confetti from that stupid parade out of my hair.

"You are looking to assert power and with us again become a dominate nation, even though, I don't have to remind you, your economy is the size of pathetic Italy's.

"What do you say, Vlad? Let's make a deal."

Who know? It just might work.

On the other hand, Putin might be loving things just the way they are and is playing Trump like the old KGB officer he was.

August 8, 2013--Boys . . .

Barack Obama's decision to cancel his summit meeting scheduled for September with Vladimir Putin is a sad example of how even silly emotions can get in the way of acting wisely.

Obama is upset that the Russians refused to extradite Edward Snowdon, the Booz Allen contract worker who downloaded and distributed thousands of documents that reveal how the NSA and CIA extra-legally gather data about virtually all of us and many citizens of other countries as part of the war on terrorism.

Yes, Putin should have found a way to fudge things, including swallowing some of his own pride and sense of manhood and turned him over to American authorities. But he is so angry that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War (he was a KGB spy during those years) and is no longer a true superpower, that he is emotionally primed to behave like a child with a temper tantrum whenever an American president wants to talk about making mutually-advantageos deals. And in Obama, in that regard, he has found his macho-challeneged match.

Just look at the mopey pictures of the two of them at the recent G-8 summit. This is no way for grown men to act. Particularly seemingly grown men who in many ways hold the fate of the world in their hands.

These leaders do not have to like each other, but they need to talk and talk and talk with each other to see if through persistence, if nothing else, they can agree about a few things.

Things such as nuclear arms limitation. Though this is not a sexy subject at the moment, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of warheads that are relics of the Cold War that are hardly needed in today's world unless Putin and Obama, in their mutual petulance, stumble into restarting it.

Then, there is Syria. Russia is Bashar al-Aasad's main backer, supplying sophisticated arms to prop up his genocidal regime as a way of Russia maintaining its influence in the region.

And Russia, an ally of Iran's, is well-positioned to help broker a deal to get them to back away from their self-destructive nuclear weapons program. Again, currently refusing to do so, Putin does not want to appear to be an instrument or lap dog of the West (particularly of the U.S.) to friends and foes in that neighborhood.

Big-power diplomacy shouldn't be personal. In this case, it should be about what is in the best interest of each of our countries. Presidents Obama and Putin should take a step back, turn off the frowns and negative body language, and get to work as if they were adults.