TRUMP’S DEADLY GAME OF RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Fake news. A total hoax. A charade. The Donald’s denial of ANY links to Russia is absolute . . . and cost the FBI boss his job. So how does he explain this dossier of shady deals and Moscow money?
IT’S clear: the White House is in a state of deep panic. There’s fevered talk of impeachment in Washington and of blood on the walls among Donald Trump’s inner circle, with even his closest aides said to be fearing for their jobs. Within hours of Air Force One taking off for Saudi Arabia for Trump’s first international visit of his presidency, dramatic scenes were unfolding in Washington.
Trump reportedly described James Comey, his sacked head of the FBI, as a ‘nut job’ during an Oval Office meeting where he allegedly shared classified information with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
According to a White House summary of the meeting which was read to the New York Times, Trump told the Russians: ‘I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.’ Trump added: ‘I’m not under investigation.’
The President’s spokesman did not dispute the account, and even appeared to add fuel to the fire by releasing a statement that read: ‘ By grandstanding and politicising the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia.’
It is the latest in an increasingly tense investigation into Trump campaign’s links to Russia. But if Trump hoped that by firing Comey his troubles would dissipate, he was wrong.
The investigation took a further unexpected twist late on Friday when the Washington Post reported that a current senior White House adviser close to the President is a ‘significant person of interest’ – meaning the probe has reached the highest levels of government. Current administration advisers who have acknowledged contacts with Russian officials include Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
DE MOCRAT S s me l l blood and they’re not alone. Trump critics from within the Republican Party are also eager for the newlyappointed special prosecutor Robert Mueller to provide answers over whether the President pressured the former FBI boss to go easy on the Russian links of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
They also want to know whether, as they believe, the intemperate firing of Comey constitutes an obstruction of justice.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the veteran Republican senator John McCain likened the crisis swirling round Donald Trump to the last days of Richard Nixon. ‘We’ve seen this movie before. It’s reaching Watergate size and scale,’ he said. ‘ Watergate took many months – this thing seems to be taking hours.’
After firing Comey, the President tweeted: ‘ James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ Clandestine White House recordings, of course, were i nstrumental in f orcing Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 after the Watergate crisis. But the dismissal of Comey was not Nixonian, it was pure Donald Trump: Trump the bully, Trump the t hi n- s ki nned des pot who demands t hose near him kow-tow.
In three decades of covering the rise of Donald Trump, I have reported his dictatorial control over t he Trump Organization, where he used bully-boy tactics and litigation to cover his tracks, and required staff to sign lifetime non- disclosure agreements. Now he has brought this modus operandi of ruthlessly dismissing those who defy him to the White House.
Trump’s response to much of the criticism is to bluster and attack. He tweeted last week: ‘This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!’
But even if Trump’s team is not found to have suspicious links with Moscow, there is persistent speculation that his long-standing business links to Russian oligarchs may provide a smoking gun. It was Russian money that bought Trump apartments, allegedly financed Trump golf courses and arranged the refinancing of the Trump SoHo Hotel project in what a current lawsuit alleges was a quarter-ofa-billion dollar tax fraud.
It is these Russian links that an increasingly panicked Trump would like to keep hidden. And that’s becoming a full-time job.
His response to his critics has been typically dogmatic. Trump tweeted before his inauguration in January: ‘Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!’
It’s a family mantra, it seems.
TRUMP’S son Eric has desperately tried to discredit a three-yearold interview in which he said his father boasted of having access to $100 million for golf developments. Eric was quoted saying: ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. We just go there all the time.’ He then tweeted earlier this month: ‘This story is completely fabricated and just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media in our country.’
But Donald Trump himself told TV host David Letterman in 2013 that he had ‘a lot of business with the Russians’. In the White House, as in business, he has shown that he is quick to fire those who cross him. As well as terminating Comey, he sacked Sally Yates, the former Deputy Attorney General who warned him that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was compromised by the Russians. He also fired Preet Bharara, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who had been asked by campaigners to investigate Russian activity around the Trump campaign.
The firings, however dramatic, betray a deeper fear. The official line that Comey was axed over his handling of the Hillary Clinton emails scandal was barely credible, but it exploded within hours when Trump told NBC News: ‘When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story…” ’
Whether FBI investigators agree with that remains to be seen. It has already been established that Russian hackers stole damaging Clinton emails before the election and state officials passed them to WikiLeaks. The FBI is also investigating links between Trump’s inner circle and Russian diplomats, including the fact that Flynn was paid $60,000 in 2015 by Russian firms linked to the Kremlin, according to records released by the House Committee on Oversight.
After being forced to resign, Flynn retrospectively registered as a foreign agent, a legal requirement in the US for those acting on behalf of foreign governments.
Documents filed with the Department of Justice confirmed his firm received $530,000 for lobbying for Turkey before the election.
His request for immunity has not been approved and the debacle raises troubling questions about the vetting of Trump’s team.
Paul Manafort, for instance, was Trump’s campaign manager for five months until he resigned last August. He allegedly had a $10 million a year contract with a Russian billionaire to spread Putin’s influence in politics and news coverage in the US, Europe and former Soviet republics, according to the Associated Press news agency. Manafort denies this, as does Trump.
Then there is the disputed intelligence dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele alleging that Trump’s former foreign policy adviser Carter Page and associates were offered the brokerage of the sale of a 19 per cent stake in Rosneft, the Russian state-owned energy company, in exchange for lifting US sanctions. Carter says he did nothing ques- tionable and there is no suggestion that a deal was completed. In addition, the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak is a known confidante of many senior figures at the court of King Donald. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the Trump/ Russia investigation after it emerged he met the ambassador twice – despite swearing under oath he had not met representatives of the Russian government.
Trump’s son- in- law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has also had undisclosed meetings with Kislyak.
So what are the Russian links that Trump so vehemently protests are ‘fake news’?
THE MIAMI CONNECTION
THE 2008 property crash left Donald Trump in deep financial trouble. It was widely reported that Wall Street had stopped lending to him and he was embroiled in legal action against Deutsche Bank over a $32.5 million guarantee against a failing hotel project in Chicago.
His problems were solved when Russian fertiliser king Dmitry Rybolovlev paid an astonishing $95 million for the waterfront Florida mansion Maison de’Amitie, which Trump bought four years earlier for $41 million. In addition, a Reuters investigation earlier this year found that at least 64 Russians had bought $100 million of property in seven Trump- branded tower blocks in southern Florida.
TRUMP TOWER
THE gaudy New York skyscraper is possibly Trump’s most iconic building. But it was built of Mafialinked concrete by illegal immigrant labourers.
It was also the headquarters of a high-level money-laundering and gambling ring run by Russian mafia boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov until the operation was busted by the FBI in 2013. The FBI probe did not implicate Trump, who has said he knew nothing about it.
Trump also said during court proceedings that he barely knew Felix Sater, a Moscow-born, moblinked former Wall Street trader, despite Sater having a desk in Trump’s offices in Trump Tower.
Sater carried Trump Organization business cards and the pair often flew together on Trump’s private jet. Court papers allege that Sater and Trump first met in 2003, though Trump professed in a sworn deposition not to ‘know him well at all.’
In 1993, Sater was jailed for a year for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass. In 1998 he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the prominent Genovese and Bonanno crime families.
TRUMP SOHO
SATER also worked for Bayrock, a property firm run by Kazakh billionaire and former Soviet government apparatchik Tevfik Arif.
Together with a now-failed Icelandic investment fund popular with Putin-friendly oligarchs, they built the Trump SoHo hotel and apartment block in Manhattan. For five years, Sater and Bayrock did licensing deals with the Trump Organization across America.
Trump is described as ‘a material witness’ in a huge tax fraud case involving the profits of Trump SoHo. The lawsuit alleges Bayrock executives, including Sater, sought to evade tens of millions of dollars in taxes. It is alleged Trump ‘signed off’ the transaction, but he is not named as a defendant and it is not suggested that he was aware of the alleged fraud. His lawyers insist the lawsuit is ‘baseless’.
THE UKRAINE U-TURN
THE Trump campaign was last year accused of trying to water down a Republican policy to arm Ukraine in its conflict over Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
The move was seen by many to be the work of Paul Manafort, who had worked for the pro-Kremlin former Ukrainian regime.
In addition, Felix Sater and Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen met far-Right Ukrainian MP Andrey Artemenko to draft an abortive ‘peace plan’ to oust the current Ukrainian president and lift sanctions against Russia.
How did Trump respond? He took to Twitter: ‘The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer- funded charade end?’
But Trump has long had a cavalier attitude to facts. After all, this is a man who posed as his own PR agent to spread ‘ fake news’ about bedding some of the world’s most beautiful women, including Carla Bruni, Kim Basinger and Madonna.
SO WHAT message was Trump trying to send when he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and a mbassador Kis l yak in the Oval Office and allegedly shared classified information? Surely Trump was doing what he has always done: seeking to show he’s the boss.
It’s a formula that has served him well in business, but it does not transfer easily to public life – as is seen from accounts which emerged this month of a private dinner at which Trump hosted James Comey just seven days into his White House reign.
Over dinner, Comey associates say, Trump repeatedly asked the FBI head to pledge his loyalty. Comey said only that he would tell the truth.
Co mey’s friends have also revealed that the FBI man – who took meticulous notes of all their encounters – felt ‘disgusted’ when Trump tried to hug him in public, and uncomfortable about the President’s repeated attempts to draw him into his inner circle.
Trump has frequently stated that he will go out of his way to extract revenge on anyone who fails to do his bidding.
As President however, he now inhabits an unfamiliar world of grand politics, rather than business. His new adversaries are not workers, suppliers and banks who will cut a deal, but the American intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the power of subpoena and the threat of jail.
They are guided by honour and patriotism. And with the sacking of Comey, they have a score to settle.
But Trump has never been a quitter. If the storm breaks, he is unlikely to follow Nixon’s lead and resign.
A clue to what lies ahead came in a speech he made last week to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy. ‘You will find that things are not always fair,’ he said.
‘You have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight.’
Hold tight. It could be a bumpy ride.