Author links Trump, Russia, yet proof is lacking

In Craig Unger’s “House of Trump, House of Putin” (Dutton, 368 pp., ★★g☆), Russian names rush past the reader faster than the Cossack cavalry in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” starting with Vladimir Putin, Felix Sater and Semion Mogilevich.

Putin is, of course, the Russian president for whom President Donald Trump has a bizarre fixation.

Sater is the developer whose Bayrock Group was part of several attempts by Trump to develop property in Moscow. Trump has said repeatedly that he barely knows Sater despite appearing in multiple photographs with him. Mogilevich is the money launderer known as the “Brainy Don” of the Russian Mafia, for whom Sater ran errands.

All three Russians seem to float comfortably in a pool covered with the toxic algae of corruption, violence and murder. The list of Russians and Ukrainians jailed, murdered or dead through mysterious circumstances at the alleged direction of Putin is long indeed. Many of them, Unger writes, have funneled money into Trump’s properties through veiled transactions with laundered money.

Unger takes the reader on a veritable tour of sleazy night clubs, restaurants and resorts frequented by Russian oligarchs and criminals.

Often, that tour leads to the doors of the White House and Trump Tower, and the implication is clear: Trump is in Putin’s pocket and those of the financiers who have grown immensely rich through their associations with the putative dictator.

Then the trail often runs cold. At one point, Unger recalls a conversation with an anonymous source “who had direct experience with the Russian underworld” in which Unger asked if Mogilevich has blackmail-worthy evidence – kompromat – on Trump. “Does the Mafia know?

“‘Of course they do,’ he told me. ‘Everyone talks about it, Seva (Mogilevich) and Mikhas (Sergei Mikhailov),’” another gangster.

“But my source cautioned that he had not seen any kompromat first-hand, only that he had heard about it, and his allegations have not been corroborated,” Unger writes.

The standard of proof when writing about the president of the United States, even someone as polarizing as Trump, needs to be higher than that. As in his July news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump often acts as if he’s under Putin’s spell, but the proof so far has lagged the speculation.

Perhaps the greatest evidence is what we already know. The June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, Trump’s sonin-law, with a lawyer who reputedly had “dirt” on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, is fact.

Also during that Helsinki news conference Putin himself said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. intelligence community has verified that the Russians meddled in the election and worked on Trump’s behalf.

Unger touches on all of these points. He’s weak, however, on the primary sources needed to sway a skeptical reader, much less a jury.

As it often is with Trump, there is a volcano’s worth of smoke in “House of Trump, House of Putin,” which so far has obscured the fire.