The Verity Courier
Trump Bona Fides
By Ron Estes
29 December 2022
According to the Washington Post in May 2017, Trump disclosed highly-classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during a meeting with them a week earlier. In addition, the media has reported that Trump had 5 meetings, and over 20 telephone calls with Putin, and demanded that there be no note takers at the meetings. It is unprecedented for a President of the United States to have a meeting with an antagonistic foreign head of state and have no record of the meetings. Was Trump trying to hide something? Never in the history of the nation have the bona fides of a president been the subject of such speculation. There are many reports of Trump being compromised by Russian intelligence in 2013 cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, and now, the removal from the White House of 15 boxes of classified documents.
Russian intelligence services have for decades mounted operations in the USSR, and now Russia, to compromise and recruit foreign targets who could gain positions which influence public opinion and direct foreign policy to produce results beneficial to them.
This from the Guardian: From Kremlin documents assessed to be “leaked.” They say Putin personally authorized a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council on 22 January 2016, with the Russian president, his intelligence chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They reportedly agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US, and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.”
The documents, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin. The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”
A KGB defector, Yuri Shvets, who served in the KGB Rezidentura (Station) in Washington in the 1980s, said that in 1987, Trump and his then wife, Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics. The KGB played as if they were immensely impressed by his personality, and that he should be president of the United States. Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president, and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This report goes on…
The Washington Post in September 2021 wrote, “The FBI faced a national security nightmare three years ago: It suspected that the new President of the United States was, in some unknown way, in the sway of Russia. Was an agent of a foreign power in the White House? Should they investigate Donald Trump? “I can’t tell you how ominous and stressful those days were,” Peter Strzok, then the No. 2 man in FBI counterintelligence said. He continued, “despite the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and despite the work of congressional intelligence committees, and inspectors general — and despite impeachment — we still don’t know why the president kowtows to Vladimir Putin, broadcasts Russian disinformation, bends foreign policy to suit the Kremlin, and brushes off reports of Russians bounty-hunting American soldiers. We still don’t know whether Putin has something on him. And we need to know the answers — urgently. Knowing could be devastating. Not knowing is far worse. Not knowing is a threat to a functioning democracy.”
And yet, responsible people still condemn the FBI for raiding the Trump Mar-A-Lago residence. Perhaps they should be commended. Garland Smith, joined other columnists, when he wrote in The Nation, “The DOJ prosecutors ‘are cowards if they don’t indict Trump.’” Conceivably time will tell.
Ron Estes served 25 years as an Operations Officer in the CIA Clsndestine Service.