I received a fascinating, unsolicited email recently from a source who clearly has access to the highest levels of special counsel Robert “Bob” Mueller’s Russiagate investigation. Either that or the source has a very common name and I can’t discover who he is. A university professor? The man who lives next door? Yet another possibility is that it’s down-on-her-luck-and-plenty-of-free-time Hillary Clinton using a pseudonym.
Whatever, I didn’t ask, but this person has some pretty interesting thoughts on Russiagate, which I thought I’d post here. I’m not sure I agree with his assessment, but it’s definitely worth publishing information any time a whistleblower comes forward. So here we go:
Trump got cut off from banks and went to the Russian oligarchs and their friends for cash. He’d dealt with the NY and NJ mob families, NY pols and other pols, did fine.
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I don’t think he realized that dealing with the Russian mob was playing in a a different league. They’re an arm of the state; i.e, Putin’s instruments. A candidate for president of the U.S., who has never expressed much interest in Ukraine, just happens to want to further a competitor’s main European strategic goal?
Through a “deal” in which the US would appear to get nothing important in return? That’s like a candidate talking about ceding the South China Sea to China in return for sending them more frozen chicken wings.
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Trump and his gang’s bizarre fixation on Ukraine, cutting some kind of deal with Putin to neutralize it and, in the process, all but shatter Transatlantic unity, just doesn’t make sense outside of some kind of debt-to-be-paid-things-go-bad-
Trump’s collusion with Putin damaged democracy, yes. But it also undermined American sovereignty in a way that has yet to sink in, and could be historically unique. A ruler or faction in a small client regime seeks assistance from a far more powerful state to gain or retain power. A contender for the throne in a hegemonic power does not. Trump didn’t appear to actually want power that badly to hand the country’s fate to a rival state. That leaves much narrower interests.
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Any proof on all this? Who knows. We’ll see what Mueller squeezes out of Manafort et al. But none of this is amenable to the usual political analysis.
One question with Manafort: Why did he become Trump’s campaign manager? He had to know his dirty doings, which you and others have documented, would come under the scrutiny they never had.
Did someone have his balls in a vice? The same someone who has Trump’s there?
