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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Russians Were Involved. But It Wasn't About Collusion.
New York TimesHaving long considered the United States its main enemy, the Kremlin deploys a full quiver of intelligence weapons against America and its national security agencies, political parties and defense contractors. Its intelligence services, though best known for clandestine operations to recruit spies, also run covert influence operations that often use disinformation to try to affect decisions or events in rival countries. A central tool of those operations is kompromat, compromising material: things of seemingly great value that are dangled, at what appears to be no cost, before unwitting targets. This is the free cheese that ensnares victims in a trap.
I know all this from having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the C.I.A., observing Soviet, and then Russian, intelligence operations. I came to realize that President Vladimir Putin, who spent his formative years in the K.G.B., the Soviet Unions main intelligence agency, and served as director of its successor agency, the F.S.B., wants, as much as anything, to destabilize the American political process. For all his talk of desiring friendly relations, Mr. Putin favors a state of animosity between our two nations. By characterizing the United States and NATO as Russias enemies, he can attack within his own borders what threatens him the most the ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy, of which the United States has been a defender.
This background is necessary for understanding the real meaning of the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Kremlin-connected Russians and three representatives of Donald Trumps campaign: his son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager. The evidence that has emerged from this meeting strongly suggests that this was not an effort to establish a secure back channel for collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign but an influence operation with one simple objective: to undermine the presidential election.
Pholus
(4,062 posts)I don't think he can. He's such a tiny little man who is sooooooo out of his depth. Besides, as far as leading the country is concerned there is no difference between being dirty because you're crooked and being dirty because you're too stupid to know you are being used.
RestoreAmerica2020
(3,435 posts)Pholus
(4,062 posts)Look I think Mark Cuban has it right. Vlad is too smart to trust Trump as a witting participant. He's pulled the strings the whole time and dumbass Donald played along with his little man-crush. Trump's inability to take a challenge to his face from an underling means he's surrounded by a group of weak-minded idiots who couldn't help but be fooled the same way. Lock him up, but it isn't for being a traitor it's for being a dumbass who was completely unqualified.
The GOP didn't prevent it despite knowing because they thought they could use him -- see what Robert Reich after the election. He claims his GOP friends were saying about using Trump to front the unpopular things (wealthcare, tax cuts) they wanted but then after he signed they said they planned to dump him and look like heroes for doing it and then pretend they couldn't UNDO anything.
Apparently they were laboring under the delusion that they knew how to govern after 8 years of pouting, holding their breath and stomping their feet.
Didn't work out too well.
Egnever
(21,506 posts)Not so much for his campaign staff.
That said Trumps fatal mistake was firing Comey. While Trump may not have colluded directly with the russians I think it is more and more obvious by the day that he has been laundering money for them for decades. In firing Comey he has opened up his financial ties to the scrutiny that will expose it all.
I think in the end it wont be the collusion that gets him it will be the money laundering.
RestoreAmerica2020
(3,435 posts)rockfordfile
(8,702 posts)Everything with Trump's group comes from him.
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)The media helped as well.
Botany
(70,504 posts).... it was collusion.
Xolodno
(6,390 posts)The "collusion" was the free cheese.....their aim, destabilize American politics to the point it retreats from the world stage. Have to say, they accomplished it.
triron
(22,003 posts)Jim__
(14,076 posts)Now that's a proverb!