A Cold War cautionary tale from 1959, “Alas, Babylon,” begins when a Strategic Air command colonel warns his brother that nuclear war with the Soviet Union may be imminent. One data point is the detection of four enemy submarines in the Caribbean. The colonel notes that four is ”a lot when there shouldn’t be any. It’s like shaking a haystack and having four needles pop out at your feet. Chances are that haystack is stiff with needles.”
The quote came to mind recently in regard to the Trump administration and Russia. The president incessantly claims that he knows no Russians, never did business with Russians, didn’t know anything about Russian efforts to influence the election in his favor. in fact it’s a hoax, so how could be have colluded.
And yet, everyday a new Russian needle seems to pop out of the Trump haystack at our feet. Often they are brought to light by Trump himself or his equally loose-lipped fellow colluders — Don Jr., Michael Cohen, and those already indicted by Special Counsel Mueller.
Don Jr. boasted a decade ago that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” In 2013, Trump said he’d “done a lot of business with the Russians.” Many of the Russians in the Trump orbit are oligarchs who got rich at the sufferance of Putin and are expected to do his bidding.
Part of the oligarchic game has been getting money out of Russia and laundering it, often by investing in real estate including dozens of condos in Trump properties. A classic instance concerns Dimitri Rybolovlev who bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump in 2008 for $95 million, $51 million more than Trump paid for it four years earlier.
Rybolovlev was also a major investor in the Bank of Cyprus, an institution notorious for laundering Russian money. The bank was controlled by two men — Wilbur Ross, now Trump’s Commerce Secretary, and Viktor Vekselberg whose Renova Group’s American arm, Columbus Nova, has recently been revealed to have paid $500,000 into the Michael Cohen slush fund out of which $130,000 was paid to Stormy Daniels with whom Trump also claims not to have “colluded.”
Columbus Nova is run by Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater. He donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural and attended the event with Vekselberg. One might wonder what Vekselberg and Intrater have bought from Trump with the $750,000 funneled in the president’s direction. Silence about the theft of the election by Putin’s trolls?
Trump continues to refuse to admit any such thing happened, or to recognize Russia as a dangerous adversary, or to take steps to prevent such crimes in the future. The Justice Department has not been so reticent, having sanctioned Renova in April for election tampering and frozen $1.5 billion of its assets. Perhaps this helps explain why Trump has been increasingly angry at Justice, the Mueller probe and the FBI. Dots are being connected.
Ukraine needles have also fallen out of the haystack, including Paul Manafort’s business dealings with Putin’s Ukrainian stooges, the altering of the Ukrainian plank in the Republican Party platform to favor Russia, and the numerous family and business connections of Michael Cohen to Ukrainian-American mobsters.
More needles? Alexandr Kogan, a St. Petersburg computer professor, received Russian grants to pioneer the weaponizing of Facebook data to influence the outcome of elections. These were tested by SCL, the parent of Cambridge Analytica, in Nigerian elections, and their efficacy demonstrated by Cambridge — run by Steve Bannon, reporting to Kushner’s digital campaign unit, and owned by Trump’s billionaire backers the Mercer family — to Vagit Alekperov, another of Putin’s oligarchs and the CEO of Lukoil.
Soon the techniques pioneered by Cambridge were being used by the Russian trolls of the Internet Research Agency to benefit the Trump campaign. IRA is controlled by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin’s chef.
Roger Stone, Trump’s long time political advisor and Manafort partner, was in communication with both a cyber troll implicated in Democratic Party email theft, Guccifer 2.0, and the publisher of the same material, Julian Assange. Guccifer is now known to have been a Russian intelligence officer in the GRU, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
And then there’s the Trump Tower meeting attended by Kushner, Manafort, and Don Jr. seeking “dirt” on Hillary. They met with three notable Russians. First, Ike Kaveladze of the Crocus Group who reports to its owner Aras Agalorov, another Putin oligarch, who has laundered $1.4 billion in Russian money through American banks and who hosted Trump’s Moscow Miss Universe pageant in 2013.
Next Natalia Veselnitskaya, ostensibly a lawyer but actually an informant for the Russian prosecutor general, a Putin tool. Third, Rinat Akmetshin now a lobbyist, but more akin to a Roger Stone-style dirty tricks artist with “a reputation for boosting the reputations of his clients and sullying those of their enemies,” and incidentally a veteran of the Russian counter-espionage service.
With so many Russian needles spilling out of the Trump haystack, enough to populate a gigantic Russian novel, it’s a mighty big leap to claiming no collusion and no Russians. And even if you can swallow that, the crowd of colluders keeps expanding. Haystacks around the world are now spewing needles.
Trump-branded “pay for play” now appears to be the administration’s default position, from cabinet secretary crony capitalism to Michael Cohen’s influence peddling to the Trump family profiting from violations of the emoluments clause.
Marla Maples, Trump spouse number two, once said, “When that man wants something, he’ll stop at nothing to get it.” Now he’s the president, but he still wants what he has always wanted —money, power, fame and to win. And we are seeing how a president who will stop at nothing behaves. He will stoop to anything.