WWhen historians look at Donald Trump’s presidency, they will likely choose two defining themes. One is the coronavirus pandemic. He dominated his last year in office and saw the president become the most famous victim of the virus and the White House super-spreader.
The other is Russia, a subject that has consumed American public life for four long years. The question first came up when Trump was an unlikely candidate for president. In a Republican party that once considered Vladimir Putin a cold KGB killer, why was Trump’s behavior towards the Russian leader so insinuating?
There were flattering public statements by Trump about Putin on campaign. And his blatant plea in July 2016 for Moscow to locate emails he claimed Hillary Clinton had deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said at a news conference in Florida.
It turns out that Russia was really listening. That night, a group of hackers working for GRU military intelligence returned after hours to their office in central Moscow. They tried unsuccessfully to break into Clinton’s adviser accounts. A rival spy agency formerly led by Putin, the FSB, launched its own electronic attacks.
Throughout 2016, the Russians carried out an aggressive and multifaceted operation to help Donald Trump win. In the spring, GRU stole tens of thousands of e-mails from the Democratic party, including from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. These were sent to WikiLeaks and given to reporters through a GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.
Meanwhile, trolls working in St. Petersburg launched an unprecedented anti-Clinton social media operation. The Russians – employed by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin – impersonated Americans, organized pro-Trump demonstrations and even hired an actor to dress up as Clinton and sit in a cage.
Moscow Rumors
During the 2016 campaign, rumors emerged about Trump and Moscow. No media was able to defend them, but the matter came into the public domain in January 2017, when BuzzFeed published a dossier by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by the Democratic Party. That would torment Trump for the rest of his presidency.
The dossier claimed that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for at least five years. He said Putin’s spies had collected kompromat, secretly filming Trump and two sex workers inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel during his visit to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty contest.
Trump vehemently denied the decaying allegations. He and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill and within the Justice Department sought to discredit his British author and disclose his sources. Steele was a “failed spy” and “scoundrel”, and the collusion allegations were a “witch hunt” and a “farce”, Trump insisted.
‘Thing from Russia’
Hoax or not, Trump’s efforts to backfire the “Russia thing”. In May 2017, he fired James Comey from the position of director of the FBI. This resulted in the appointment of former FBI chief Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor. Mueller’s mission was to investigate whether Trump and his inner circle conspired with Moscow during the election. To answer yes, a standard of criminal evidence was required.
For almost two years, the operation of Mueller’s team remained secret. The prosecutor was Washington’s most present personality – endlessly discussed – and a ghost. From time to time, his office issued accusations. They were against 26 Russians, including GRU hackers. And against the Americans: former Trump 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 could bring Trump out of power. He identified several links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, but did not find a criminal-grade conspiracy. Nor did he decide whether the president obstructed justice. Mueller said he had not considered collusion, which was not a “legal term”.
We learned that Trump had been secretly negotiating in 2015-16 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, while praising Putin. Cohen even wrote an email asking for help to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, and spoke to Peskov’s assistant. When asked about this by Congress, Cohen lied. The cover-up led to a rivalry with Trump – and, for Cohen, to federal prison.
Background channels
The most significant support channel for Moscow involved Manafort and his former Russian adviser Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of clandestine meetings, Manafort provided Kilimnik with internal research data, including the rust belt states that proved crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016. The two men used recorded phones, encrypted chats and an e- account. secret mail, with shared messages in drafts.
Mueller identified Kiliminik as a career Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimink did with the information he obtained from Manafort is unknown. He refused to cooperate with the FBI and fled to Moscow.
Critics said Mueller’s investigation was hindered by excessive legal caution and not meeting face to face with Trump. His greatest deficiency, without a doubt, was the lack of Russian witnesses.
Much of the Trump-Russia story is still unknown. For example, does the Trump Organization have financial ties to Moscow? After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump was only able to borrow money from one lender: Germany’s Deutsche Bank, who gave him a generous credit. At the same time, its division in Moscow was facilitating a $ 10 billion money laundering scam to the benefit of the Kremlin’s VIPs.
The United States public never knew when Putin ordered the DNC hacking operation and why. Nor did he discover what Russian and American presidents discussed at their private meetings, including during a notorious 2018 meeting in Helsinki. A good guess is that Putin flattered Trump more than he threatened. He fed Trump’s ego and fed his resentment towards the “deep state” of the United States and other “enemies”.
‘Serious Counter-Intelligence Threat’
In August 2020, the Senate intelligence committee published its own Trump-Russia report. He said that Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential material to Kilimnik was a “serious counterintelligence threat”. And he gave some credence to Steele’s claims in Moscow, noting that an FSB officer was stationed inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Putin’s spy had a live video broadcast from guest rooms, the report said.
In the end, Russia did not interfere in the 2020 elections in the same comprehensive and systematic way. But Moscow was busy in other ways. In early spring, it carried out a massive cyber attack against US federal government institutions. Russian state hackers inserted malicious code in a software update by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds.
At least six departments of the United States government have been affected, as well as the Department of Defense’s extensive communications network and the body that manages the United States’ stockpile of nuclear weapons. The hackers worked for the Russian foreign SVR intelligence and possibly for the FSB. It was the same Cozy Bear unit that had hacked the DNC and the US State Department.
Trump condemned Moscow? No. He blamed China on one of his last tweets before Twitter kicked him off his platform after the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. The cyber attack was a reminder of Putin seeing the United States as an eternal opponent in an endless quasi-war. The National Security Agency spent billions on cyber defense, and yet, under Trump’s supervision, it was unable to stop Moscow intruders.
Russia would have preferred Trump to have won the election. Despite Joe Biden’s clear victory, the Russian leader has much to celebrate. Over four years of polarization, Trump has fulfilled many of the KGB’s long-standing goals. This included alienating the United States from its Western and NATO allies; deepening of domestic struggles; and waging a Putin-style disinformation campaign against the 2020 outcome.
Manchurian candidate or not, Trump did more than any previous president to discredit US democracy and suck the Kremlin. In the 1980s, the Soviet government invited Trump to Moscow. Apparently, this identified him from an early age as an unscrupulous person, perhaps capable, with the time and the opportunity to overthrow the republic.
The Capitol invasion was the culmination of this Cold War fantasy; a perfect series ending.
Luke Harding Shadow State’s latest book: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West is available at the Guardian Bookshop