Exactly eight years ago this week, the Obama administration formally accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and many others for the intended purpose of interfering with the US elections. The government said, “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." The assumption was that the administration was pointing the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. And because it was only the Democrats who were hacked it was obvious that the intended beneficiary of this interference was Donald Trump.
The suspicion had been out there for a while. Hillary Clinton even brought it up in the presidential debate and Trump denied it saying it could just as easily be “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” But this was an official acknowledgment that the Russian government was behind all the hacking and if it hadn't been for the fact that the press was hysterical that FBI Director James Comey had inexplicably announced that the agency was re-opening the inane email investigation, it would have been another scandal potentially derailing the Trump campaign.
As it was, just before the election, the New York Times ran a piece headlined Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia and everyone went to the polls on Election Day believing that Hillary Clinton was caught up in a neverending scandal that would cripple her presidency. In contrast, Donald Trump was cleared of wrongdoing. That story should have been seen as an in-kind gift to the Trump campaign.
We all know what happened after that.
From the moment Trump received Clinton's concession and began his transition, he was weirdly and constantly involved with Russia in one way or another. It eventually led to the firing of his national security adviser over unauthorized communications with Russia, the subsequent firing of the FBI Director over his unwillingness to let that national security adviser off the hook and the massive special counsel investigation into the whole thing. There's no need to rehash all that now. We all remember it like it was yesterday, which it practically was.
One of the less discussed aspects of the whole Trump and Russia association is the fact that his first impeachment, brought on because he tried to coerce the Ukrainian president into announcing a bogus investigation into his then-top rival Joe Biden, stemmed largely from his sycophantic "friendship" with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The trained KGB operative Putin is a much more sophisticated and savvy judge of character than Trump, who simply loves anyone who loves him back, and he had Trump's number from the beginning. Their private "meetings with no notes" and Trump's embarrassing public genuflecting to the Russian leader over the years had been fully reported. The former president went out of his way to be accommodating to Putin, always against the advice of his national security expert advisers. But a new in-depth report by Mark Mazzetti and Adam Entous of the New York Times reveals that from the get-go, Putin had a plan to invade Ukraine — and he knew that Trump could be manipulated into helping him do it.
The Times reports that at the very first face-to-face meeting between the two men in Hamburg, Germany in July 2017, Putin began disparaging Ukraine and advised Trump not to send them any weapons. Trump listened to him and over time the push-back among the national security professionals became so urgent that Putin realized he needed to pull back a bit or risk blowing up his strategy. So he engaged a "network of proxies" to covertly advance his plot.
Trump already had built a bit of a grudge against Ukraine before the meeting happened, something which Putin no doubt already knew. During the 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, had been forced to resign when a Ukrainian investigation showed that Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments working for a pro-Russia party in the country. Trump was convinced that this was evidence Ukraine was working on Hillary Clinton's behalf. Every time he met with Putin, his beliefs were validated. He ended up being impeached because he'd become convinced that Ukraine was corrupt and subject to his blackmail.
The article goes into much more depth about Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, the belief that the Ukrainians actually hacked the DNC and moved the server to Kyiv. But the point is that Putin had already invaded Crimea and received very little pushback for it. So he was softening up this naive, narcissistic US president to allow his move on the rest of Ukraine. Then the pandemic hit, Trump lost and Putin ended up invading in 2022, perhaps with the knowledge that Trump was planning to run again in 2024.
The new president, Joe Biden, didn't make it as easy for him as Trump would have done. We know that Trump would never have approved the same level of military support and would have actively worked to divide NATO, possibly even finding an excuse to withdraw from the alliance altogether. But if Trump happens to win next month, Putin's work will have paid off anyway. Trump promises to "end" the war on the day after he declares victory and while he hasn't personally said what he'll do, his running mate, JD Vance and Hungary's President Viktor Orban have shared that he will withdraw military support from Ukraine and "negotiate" a peace deal which, as Vice President Kamala Harris said during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's recent visit, amounts to Ukrainian surrender.
The Office of Director of National Intelligence reported last month that Russian government operatives are once again attempting to interfere in the election and they are more sophisticated than in the past. And yes, they are trying to help Donald Trump win. You can see why. This is one reason why the revelations in Bob Woodward's new book "War" about Trump holding secret conversations with Putin since he's been out of the White House are alarming. It's one thing for former presidents to hobnob with foreign leaders, it's quite another for a former president who is also running for the office again to be secretly conversing with a major adversary without notifying or consulting with the current government. That the same former president has been indicted under the espionage laws for absconding with classified documents, many of which still have not been accounted for, makes it yet another mind-boggling threat to America's and its allies' security at the hands of Donald Trump. The Kremlin denies the two have regularly spoken since Trump left office, but a Kremlin spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg that Trump secretly sent Abbott Covid-19 testing devices to Putin when the machines were in short supply.
Considering the history I just outlined it's not hard to imagine what Trump and Putin are discussing in these little clandestine chats. How many lives have been lost and will be lost as these two pals plot the future of Ukraine and Europe? How many more will be lost if Trump manages to eke out another Electoral College win with the help of Vladimir Putin? It won't stop with Ukraine, we can be sure of that.
