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?