Is Donald Trump a Putin patsy?

[Merneith]

Headline lifted from this Washington Post article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/25/is-donald-trump-a-putin-patsy/
I mentioned this in one of the other threads, but people are starting to notice some disturbing connections between Putin and Trump, aside from the megalomania.

Here’s an article from Talking points Memo a few days ago that lists several connections between them.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing

There’s a number of conerning things there, including secret Russian financing of a recent project in Manhatten, Trump’s reliance on Russian banks (since he’s been blackballed so many other places) and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort having worked for the pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych.

That last is especially troubling. Russia’s current adventure in Ukraine started when Yukanovych was ditched by pro-Western Ukrainians.

Additionally, the one item that Trump’s people insisted on in writing the GOP Party Platform was to change language softening their support for the Ukrainian resistance.
There’s been some pushback against TPM’s original article, which can be read here.

Marshall has written a response-to-the-response as well:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-trump-and-putin-thing-a-detailed-response
But this article in the NYT, by David Sanger, concerns me even more. It alleges that the hacking of DNC email and release of the embarrassing details of its disdain for Bernie was accomplished by two Russian agencies.

@NYT

The emails, released first by a supposed hacker and later by WikiLeaks, exposed the degree to which the Democratic apparatus favored Hillary Clinton over her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and triggered the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chairwoman, on the eve of the convention’s first day.

Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

This raises the spectre that Putin’s government hacked the Democratic National Committee in order to get damaging information to aid Donald Trump. Given Trump’s overt connections to Russia and his repeated statements praising Vladimir Putin - I am deeply troubled by what looks like Russian State meddling in our elections.

In fact, the evidence that Russian state agency’s are responsible for this hack is greater than the evidence that Debbie Wasserman Schultz sandbagged Bernie.
Here’s a link to the Washington Post article gathering responses to the NYT revelations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-emails.html
It’s telling, I suppose, that Sanger didn’t accuse Trump of asking Putin to hack the DNC, but honestly, Trump probably wouldn’t have been smart enough to think of this.

[Count_Blucher]

Absolutely!

Watergate 1 - The GOP breaks into the DNC to steal files to gin advantage.

Watergate 2 - “Someone” bribes / coerces Putin to do the same, so there are clean hands.

its very much “Iran-Contra” but with a 2016 Spin.

---

Suggested because SO many people refuse to believe Putin might be playing Chess on his own.
A Hint to my countrymen who can’t spell: “Putin” isn’t spelled Y-E-L-T-S-I-N.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Kevin Drum provides a useful summary.

Are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin really BFFs?

Forensic cyber-evidence indicates Putin is backing team Trump. It’s not conclusive, but apparently the meta-data in the hacking attack was in the Russian language. Also the Russian media has been tilting is a pronounced pro-Trump direction recently. More at the link.

More interestingly, Trump has been pro-Putin. He’s surrounded himself with people who lobby for Russia (or rather their Ukraine patsy Viktor Yanukovych), most prominently Paul Manafort. And he’s taken positions and has contacts that really don’t have support in either party, such as being wobbly on the international obligations of Nato (Nato!) and having close ties with Russian investors.

Then there’s the fact that Trump hasn’t released his tax returns - his business interests are the opposite of transparent.

That’s a summary. Where to start?

[Merneith]

@Count_Blucher

Suggested because SO many people refuse to believe Putin might be playing Chess on his own.
A Hint to my countrymen who can’t spell: “Putin” isn’t spelled Y-E-L-T-S-I-N.

It’s entirely possible that Putin is manipulating Trump rather than working with him. If I was Putin, that’s what I’d do.
It’s … not actually an improvement to suggest that Trump is a patsy rather than a participant.

[Johnny_Ace]

I don’t see how this isn’t obvious. Trump is far more malleable for Putin than Hillary would be. Of course Putin’s gaming it.

[DerekMichaels00]

He’s a Putin toadie. Amazing how one of the GOPs stronger legacies, vociferous opposition to Soviet communism is now led by a political Robert Hanssen.

[iiandyiiii]

It’s possible. If so, hopefully they’ll find evidence, because otherwise it sounds a bit like wingnuttery and won’t be a very effective attack.

[Sherrerd]

I’d been considering making a thread with the title

Trump Bent Over for Putin with Remarkable Speed; Will He Bend Over for N. Korea as Quickly?

… but Merneith’s marshalling of sources in the opening post is better than mine would have been.

[Count_Blucher]

@Merneith

It’s entirely possible that Putin is manipulating Trump rather than working with him. If I was Putin, that’s what I’d do.

I’ve long held that, even though I personally dislike the man, Putin is One Smart SonOfaBitch. One who has chopped up Russo Capitalists and Russian Mafia Shits regularly and often and has served them in their home towns as cheap sausage.
Trump is no different (and I’m too damn old to be learning Cyrillic).

[WillFarnaby]

I hope so. Putin is an evil authoritarian, but to antagonize, encircle, and destabilize Russia is not a good idea. Moreover, if Trump is as trigger-happy as many think, I’d rather him shake hands with Putin than play chicken with him.

Clinton has compared Putin to Hitler. Victoria “Phone Coup” Nuland will no doubt be a person with power in her administration, and that’s a scary thing for humanity.

[WillFarnaby]

Or Clinton could be a simple crony ( my preferred Clinton identity)

Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal (Published 2015)

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Count_Blucher

I’ve long held that, even though I personally dislike the man, Putin is One Smart SonOfaBitch. One who has chopped up Russo Capitalists and Russian Mafia Shits regularly and often and has served them in their home towns as cheap sausage.
Trump is no different (and I’m too damn old to be learning Cyrillic).

I’m not sure if you mean Trump is no different from Putin or Trump is no different from the various people that Putin has “chopped up” and “served them in their home towns as sausage”, but if I had written what you wrote, I’d have meant the latter.

Because Trump may be a smart and he may be a king of bluster and bravado and know how to work the legal system in his favor… but Putin is smarter and Putin is, I think, more used to less civil and less civilized situations.

Every bad thing a bad guy has ever done to a helpless rival or victim in a movie is something I can easily imagine Vladimir Putin doing; Trump elicits no such thoughts.

So I think that Mr. Trump may think that he and Mr. Putin are a lot alike, etc. and that they all get along, but Putin is smarter and more powerful than Mr. Trump, even if he becomes POTUS, because he has a lifetime of being a connected intelligence and political mover and shaker.

[Merneith]

@iiandyiiii

It’s possible. If so, hopefully they’ll find evidence, because otherwise it sounds a bit like wingnuttery and won’t be a very effective attack.

I think it’s the work of the security firms connecting the breach with Russian intelligence agency that lifts this above regular wingnuts. Trump’s flirtation with Putin has long been remarked.

Here’s a quote from the NYT about the security firms investigations:

@NYT article by David Sanger

The experts cited by Mr. Mook include CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that was brought into the Democratic National Committee when officials there suspected they had been hacked.

In mid-June the company announced that the intruders appeared to include a group it had previously identified by the name “Cozy Bear” or “APT 29” and been inside the committee’s servers for a year. A second group, “Fancy Bear,” also called “APT 28,” came into the system in April. It appears to be operated by the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms. The first group is particularly well known to the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence unit, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies. It was identified by federal investigators as the likely culprit behind years of intrusions into the State Department and White House unclassified computer system.

Russian intelligence agencies went to great lengths to cover their tracks, investigators found, including meticulously deleting logs, and changing the time stamps of the stolen files.

Officials at several other firms that have examined the code for the malware used against the Democratic National Committee and the metadata of the stolen documents found evidence that the documents had been accessed by multiple computers, some with Russian language settings.

[orangeapples]

@WillFarnaby

I hope so. Putin is an evil authoritarian, but to antagonize, encircle, and destabilize Russia is not a good idea. Moreover, if Trump is as trigger-happy as many think, I’d rather him shake hands with Putin than play chicken with him.

Clinton has compared Putin to Hitler. Victoria “Phone Coup” Nuland will no doubt be a person with power in her administration, and that’s a scary thing for humanity.

Are you suggesting that we’d be better off if Trump is installed as Putin’s puppet? I’ve read that through a couple of times and that’s my…bemused inference.

[Count_Blucher]

It IS the latter, and against Putin, Trump has only two futures: Smoked or Ground Fine.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@WillFarnaby

I hope so. Putin is an evil authoritarian, but to antagonize, encircle, and destabilize Russia is not a good idea.

So you hope that Trump is a Putin patsy, and that the Russians have hacked into political party servers in the United States in order to influence a presidential election.

You hope so.

You are espousing an opinion that is clearly and openly traitorous. I guess you must be one of those “real Americans” we keep hearing about who support Trump.

[Tom_Tildrum]

Given what we have learned in the past few days about the ability of the Russians to hack into imperfectly secured private email systems, it hardly seems that Trump is the one to worry about. The much more entertaining conspiracy theory is that Putin knocked down Wasserman-Schultz as a warning to Clinton to remember who’s boss, or else they’ll release whatever they have from her files that’s much more explosive.

[DerekMichaels00]

Putin is a communist at heart, served the evil KGB against freedom seeking East Germans, helped build Iran’s nuclear weapons program, won’t help much in the war on radical Islamic terrorism, and continues to aim nukes at us even tho America won the Cold War. Such evil has no place in the White House.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Now that we have established one libertarian’s hopes that Trump is Putin’s patsy, I’d like to take a step back from the fringe.

Trump’s relationship with the Russians hasn’t been comprehensively and conclusively established. There’s a fair amount of back and forth going on. As relations between the two major nuclear powers are central to US national security, it makes sense to get this right. It also makes sense to summarize it properly, where “Proper” varies with context.

I repeat that Kevin Drum gives the best summary:

Are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin really BFFs?

Josh Marshall has been devoting resources to the story.
Here is his first take:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-russia-connections

Here is his reply to a constructive critic:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-trump-and-putin-thing-a-detailed-response
It’s worth wandering into the weeds a little, if only to make a Nat Sec threat assessment.

[Rick_Kitchen]

Trump and Clinton begin getting security and intelligence briefings as soon as the Democratic convention is over. How long till Putin gets his hands on those? I hope the government somehow tags their briefings so that they can till just whose briefing gets compromised.