So here's a thing...

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I've brought this up previously (most notably in my "conspiracy" thread imported from Sec Caf), but thought this deserved its own thread, so forgive if someone else has also noted this.

From Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone, we get a better accounting of the massive size and reach of the Russian campaign, but also a better indication of the initial timeline (my emphasis):

In its prepared remarks sent to Congress, Facebook said the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin, had posted roughly 80,000 pieces of divisive content that was shown to about 29 million people between January 2015 and August 2017. Those posts were then liked, shared and followed by others, spreading the messages to tens of millions more people. Facebook also said it had found and deleted more than 170 accounts on its photo-sharing app Instagram; those accounts had posted about 120,000 pieces of Russia-linked content.

So, at least in regard to Facebook (and as it's linked to this one company), it started as early as January, 2015.

Here's the thing...Trump formally announced his candidacy in June, 2015. So the Russians started six months before Trump officially announced.

When did Trump initially let it leak that he might be running? Well, according to TV Guide at least:

February 2015: Trump decides not to renew his Apprentice contract, fueling speculation that he's mulling a run for president.

So, the Russians begin their cyber attack in January of 2015 and the next month Trump dumps his most lucrative baby yet, but on the down low. Cyber attack starts in January, Trump makes a definitive life change the next month.

But, of course, such a campaign by the Russians would also necessarily needed to be planned out, so the fact that they started in January of 2015 means they had to have been planning it earlier (i.e., in at least 2014).

Likewise for Trump, the idea of running didn't just start in February of 2015. So when did it? Well, we have this from TVGuide (again, but I see no harm in using it):

2013: Trump forms a presidential exploratory committee and, despite a strong backing from Republican voters, announces that he has no interest in running for governor of New York in 2014.

Ok. So that's interesting. Here's more from on that from NYT:

In late December 2013, after Donald J. Trump had met with a number of Republicans to discuss a possible run for governor of New York, he received a memo from an attendee, a freshman assemblyman from upstate.

The four-page briefing outlined the challenges that most first-time political candidates face, including “endless chicken dinners” and a high probability of a “loss of income from serving in government.”

But the document also had the particular interests of Mr. Trump in mind: It was titled “Springboards to the Presidency.”

Mr. Trump has a long history of musing about running for office, and then abandoning the idea. His flirtation with the 2014 race for governor was viewed then as another headline-grabbing stunt, much as his current presidential bid had been initially dismissed.

But unlike previous dalliances, Mr. Trump’s deliberation on whether to challenge Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, would be far more than a public-relations trifle.

An examination by The New York Times of contemporaneous documents and emails, as well as interviews with people who met with Mr. Trump during that period, found how he carefully weighed a run, measuring whether the governor’s office was a necessary steppingstone to his long-held goal: the White House. His calculations at the time run contrary to the seat-of-the-pants image he projects on the campaign trail, and offer a look at a formative stage of his presidential ambitions.

He discussed with state Republican leaders the idea of using the governorship as a platform to run for president, a situation in which he would serve for a year or so and be succeeded by his lieutenant governor.

Mr. Trump also foreshadowed themes that have surfaced on the campaign trail, giving a blunt assessment of what he felt was ailing New York State and the country: jobs going overseas, crushing taxes, restrictive gun laws.

During another meeting with state Republican leaders at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the conversation migrated to the nation’s future. Mr. Trump told them he did not think the country could withstand eight years of Hillary Clinton after eight years of President Obama, according to a document summarizing the meeting. Mr. Trump added that he wanted to “save the country” from debt and felt the political left was going to destroy the American work ethic.

“He made it clear he wanted to run for president,” said Daniel W. Isaacs, then the Republican Party chairman in Manhattan, who attended the meeting. “Our pitch was if he runs for governor and makes it, he would be the presumptive front-runner.”

For his supporters, the recruitment drive offered an unexpected look at Mr. Trump’s budding strategy to capture the White House, which he predicted he would begin in 2015.

Mr. Trump ultimately opted not to run, in part because he was irked that party leaders would not clear a path to his nomination. But in hindsight, supporters said, the experience helped inform his presidential bid as a populist with little regard for conventional politics.

Mr. Trump confirmed in a statement that the state Republican Party’s inability to assure an uncontested race was a deal-breaker, though he played down his interest. “I never looked seriously at running for governor,” he said, adding, “If I ran, I would have won.”

He said that “even then, what I really wanted to do was run for president, and obviously, now that I am the substantial front-runner, I made the right decision.”

Remember, this is in December of 2013 that all of the above is going on. And note that it was actually Trump that sought this out, but in a back-room way:

David DiPietro, a Republican lawmaker from the Buffalo area, said he and Mr. Nojay were on the floor of the State Assembly that June, lamenting the corruption in Albany, when they first hit on the idea of encouraging Mr. Trump to run for governor.

“We have to find someone to clean up” this mess, Mr. DiPietro recalled telling Mr. Nojay.
...
The memo was leaked to The New York Post [on October 14, 2013], and Mr. Trump used Twitter to tell Mr. Nojay thanks, but no thanks.

Behind the scenes, another story was playing out. A member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle contacted Mr. Nojay, and in early November he and Mr. DiPietro found themselves meeting Mr. Trump for the first time, at Trump Tower in a large conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park.

The meeting, scheduled for roughly 30 minutes, stretched beyond two hours. The group denounced the Safe Act, far-reaching gun-control legislation that Mr. Cuomo signed into law, and bemoaned job losses and economic erosion.

Intrigued, Mr. Trump agreed to keep talking about a possible bid for governor. A larger meeting was convened in early December.

Ok, so...? (you may be asking if you've still continued to read this far)

So dis:

May 31, 2013
Emin Agalarov released a music video featuring 2012 Miss Universe Olivia Culpo. This collaboration led Golstone to meet with the head of the Miss Universe Organization, Paula Shugart, according to Mother Jones.

June 15, 2013
"Fun meeting with Donald Trump," Rob Goldstone posted on Facebook.

If you've forgotten who Goldstone is:

It was Goldstone who would contact Trump’s son Donald Jr during the 2016 presidential campaign with a sensitive message, revealed in emails released last month. The “crown prosecutor of Russia” – assumed to be Goldstone’s garbled billing for Yury Chaika, the Russian prosecutor general – wanted the Trump campaign to have some documents that would “incriminate Hillary”, he said. And the Agalarovs would deliver them.

“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone wrote. Rather than express surprise or question the apparent Kremlin operation Goldstone was describing, Donald Jr pressed ahead and arranged the meeting. “If it’s what you say I love it,” he replied.

But back to the timeline:

June 16, 2013
During the Miss USA pageant, Trump announced the location for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant: Crocus City Hall in Moscow, Russia. Trump was joined on stage by Aras Agalarov, president of Crocus Group, and his son. The elder Aras later told a Russian news outlet that Trump greeted him warmly, saying, "'Look who came to me! This is the richest man in Russia!'"
...
June 18, 2013
Trump tweeted about the upcoming pageant. "Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?" he wrote.

November 9, 2013
Miss Universe took place at Crocus City Hall in Moscow, Russia. Emin Agalarov performed at the event.

November 13, 2013
In an interview with Forbes, Emin Agalarov said Crocus Group, "may theoretically consider a possibility of building a Trump Tower as one of our skyscrapers."

November 20, 2013
Emin Agalarov released his music video for "In Another Life." The video features him at a dull business meeting, daydreaming about Miss Universe contestants. His fantasies are suddenly interrupted by the man running the meeting, Donald Trump, who barks, "You're fired!" The pop musician would later tweet about the video, after a controversial dossier was leaked making allegations about Trump's Russia visit.

February 4, 2014
Ivanka Trump visited Crocus City Hall in Moscow. Emin Agalarov gave her a tour.

Now insert the fact that in late December of 2013--just after returning from Moscow, iow--we know that Trump--for the first time seriously decides to plot out his strategy for President and takes clandestine steps to see what one particular strategy would be--NY Governorship--and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not his coronation could simply be guaranteed by the RNC (i.e., avoiding as much as possible any issues with voters and therefore too much scrutiny and the like).

As I have previously stated, none of this started with Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower. The timeline literally could not be more exact in how the initial "activation" of Trump began with the inexplicable bikini contest in Moscow in November--with a ridiculously lucrative $20 million "fee" for Trump--for no ratings benefit.

But here may be the (or "a") smoking gun (emphasis mine):

Before leaving the US for his big Russian show in 2013, Trump made an unusual public appeal.

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” he asked on Twitter, and “if so, will he become my new best friend?” A source in Moscow told the Guardian that a meeting with Trump was indeed pencilled into Putin’s diary by aides, but fell off his schedule a few days beforehand.

Agalarov later said that Putin sent his apologies to Trump in the form of a handwritten note and a gift of a traditional decorative lacquered box. It is not known whether Trump met any associates of Putin in lieu of the president himself, but he certainly claimed to have.

“I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people,” he said in a radio interview in 2015. “I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.”
...
It is plausible – but unproven – that attempts were made to surveil Trump during his trip.

“If you are in their field of interest then the FSB will absolutely attempt to carry out surveillance,” said a Russian hotel industry source, who did not want the name of his hotel mentioned due to the sensitivity of the topic.

The source said there was little that hotel managers could do about FSB demands, and that they are sometimes forced to provide access to rooms for agents. “In the bigger hotels you also definitely have a number of people on the staff who work on the side for the FSB, so they would have had absolutely no problem getting into the room if necessary.”

Putin said earlier this year that it was absurd to think the FSB would have bugged or secretly filmed Trump’s room in 2013, as he was not even a politician at that point. Russia did not simply bug every American billionaire who visited the country, according to the president.

But Trump very much was exploring being a "politician" at that point, just on the down-low. A fact Putin would no doubt know considering the fact that we now know Trump has been (at the very least) a "person of interest" to Czech intelligence since the 1970s, and most definitely on KGB radar as early as 1987 when he first visited Moscow.

Note this from the Guardian piece (emphasis mine):

In 1988 a further informant working under the cover name “Milos” reported that Trump was being put under considerable pressure to run for the US presidency. The Czech authorities should be made aware, he said, that Ivana was under pressure herself to not put a step wrong during visits to Czechoslovakia, or else she risked putting her husband’s potential candidacy in jeopardy.

“Any false step of hers will have incalculable consequences for the position of her husband who intends to run for president in 1996,” Milos wrote. He added that Trump was convinced he could win the presidency.

An earlier report on the 1988 US election campaign noted that Trump had donated two payments of $10,000 each to the Democrats and the Republicans. Ivana Trump had been convinced that George HW Bush would win and had been proved right, the report added.

The StB went so far as to send a spy to the US to monitor Trump, believing that if he was to succeed in becoming US president it could have a significant impact on Czechoslovak-US relations. A note by an StB spy named “Al Jarda” of 10 October 1989 details a visit made to Trump by a delegation from a communist agricultural production cooperative from Slusovice, the village where Ivana Trump’s father lived.

“They were given a welcome by one of the richest men in New York, Mister Donald Trump. He got them to explain to him extensively about the work of the cooperative and its further plans in the field of trade,” Al Jarda wrote. At the end of the visit Trump was invited to visit Slusovice.

What did Trump say?

Aras Agalarov, president of Crocus Group, and his son...later told a Russian news outlet that Trump greeted him warmly, saying, "'Look who came to me! This is the richest man in Russia!'"

Coincidence that a phrase noted by an early Soviet intelligence operative in the first days of surveillance of Trump would then later be used by Agalarov in a Russian news piece--i.e., something Agalarov would know Putin would watch--about Trump? Too far?

Well, everything else lines up perfectly, why wouldn't a phrase from an early record stick as an operative's code for a long-time asset?

Thoughts to all (not just the last bit, which is admittedly a stretch)?

 

[Trausti]

FFS. The Russia conspiracy nonsense is the loony left's pizzagate.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

FFS. The Russia conspiracy nonsense is the loony left's pizzagate.

Great! Pathetic denigration attempt from a deplorable as a first response is a sure sign I'm on the right track. Thanks for the affirmation.

 

[Elixir]

FFS. The Russia conspiracy nonsense is the loony left's pizzagate.

Precisely the same. Except for 32 indictments or guilty pleas including 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Six of these people (including all four former Trump aides) have pleaded guilty.

Pizzagate got one guy arrested for believing the sham, after he blew a hole in the pizzeria ceiling ... so I suppose that counts as an arrest.Yeh, pretty much exactly the same thing as the Mueller investigation...

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Of note from the Politico piece The Hidden History of Trump’s First Visit To Moscow (which I will quote extensively because I don’t think anyone will read it on their own):

It was around this time that Donald Trump appears to have attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence. How that happened, and where that relationship began, is an answer hidden somewhere in the KGB's secret archives. Assuming, that is, that the documents still exist.

Well, we have a pretty damn good guess from the Guardian:

The secret service of communist-era Czechoslovakia spied extensively on Donald Trump, it has emerged, with one informant alleging in 1977 that the future US president-elect “is completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years”.

The Státní bezpečnost or StB – the then communist state’s intelligence agency which dealt with any activity considered dangerous to the state or of western influence – spied on Trump and his Czechoslovak-born wife, Ivana, in the 1970s and 80s when she made regular trips back to visit her father, Miloš Zelníček.

Stamped “top secret” and bearing the code names “Slusovice”, “America” and “Capital”, the files detail the obsession Czech spies had in gathering as much information about the US property tycoon as possible.

Uncovered by Czech television and the German tabloid Bild, the dossiers include one that concentrates solely on the pre-nuptial agreement made between the Trumps. In the case of a marriage breakdown, he agreed to pay her $1m, according to the StB file.

An informant with the cover name “Lubos” reported to his superiors in 1977 how Ivana had begun work at a petrol station in Austria, where she had met her first husband in 1968. She had then emigrated to Canada, where she married Trump.

Another spy reported in 1977 that Trump’s businesses were “absolutely safe” because they received commissions from the state. The informant added: “Another advantage is the personal relationship [he has] with the American president [presumably Jimmy Carter] and the fact that he is completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years.”

“Another advantage” clearly indicates that they were profiling Trump for purposes of turning him into an asset.

There is also evidence that Ivana was also turned by 1988 (a year after Trump had first gone to Moscow):

In 1988 a further informant working under the cover name “Milos” reported that Trump was being put under considerable pressure to run for the US presidency. The Czech authorities should be made aware, he said, that Ivana was under pressure herself to not put a step wrong during visits to Czechoslovakia, or else she risked putting her husband’s potential candidacy in jeopardy.

“Any false step of hers will have incalculable consequences for the position of her husband who intends to run for president in 1996,” Milos wrote. He added that Trump was convinced he could win the presidency.

Not only had they been up both of their asses for almost a decade at that point, but the fact that an operative is evidently indicating to his superiors that the Czech authorities must be warned—i.e., must essentially stand down—proves that by that point Trump was in fact a Soviet asset.

I’m using the term “asset” to slightly esoterically, as we don’t really know (yet) the full extent. By “asset” I mean someone profiled and followed and considered a dormant tool that could be manipulated/used for whatever purpose deemed necessary at any time (so, less than a willing or converted “agent” but more than just an ordinary citizen).

It’s possible, for example, that Ivana was a straight-up KGB (or StB) agent whose “mission” was to get Trump to marry her, or she was “turned” into such an agent after they had already met, or she, too, was considered an “asset” that they simply watched and protected and groomed from a far. For the purposes of this thread, I’ll use the more ambiguous “asset.”

More evidence that Ivana, in particular, was considered at least an “asset”:

The StB went so far as to send a spy to the US to monitor Trump, believing that if he was to succeed in becoming US president it could have a significant impact on Czechoslovak-US relations. A note by an StB spy named “Al Jarda” of 10 October 1989 details a visit made to Trump by a delegation from a communist agricultural production cooperative from Slusovice, the village where Ivana Trump’s father lived.

Recall one of the code names was “Slusovice.” More:

Details of how the Trumps were to be spied on are also held in the StB’s archives. One order dated 1979 states that the phone calls between Ivana and her father are to be tapped at least once a year and their mail is to be constantly monitored. It is noted that Ivana speaks to her children in Czech even when she is in the US as well as detailing the friends and acquaintances of the Czech branch of her family.

A Czech historian said the fact that Ivana’s father was registered as an “StB confidant” did not mean he worked as an agent for them. “Rather the CSSR authorities forced him to talk to them because of his journeys to the US to see his daughter. If he hadn’t spoken to them he would not have been given permission to fly,” Tomáš Vilímek told Bild.

The note about how she speaks in Czech is another indicator that she was being specially targeted, as Trump didn’t speak Czech, so any messages—instructions—could be sent to her in Czech.

And, again, most of this was after Trump visited Moscow for the first time in 1987, so the surveillance begins a decade before.

So, back to that first visit:

Trump's first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987 looks, with hindsight, to be part of a pattern. The dossier by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele asserts that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for “at least five years” before his stunning victory in the 2016 US presidential election. This would take us back to around 2011 or 2012.

In fact, the Soviet Union was interested in him too, three decades earlier. The top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With assistance from the KGB. It took place while Kryuchkov was seeking to improve the KGB's operational techniques in one particular and sensitive area. The spy chief wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans.

So we now have a clear link to the beginning days of Trump on Soviet radar, starting sometime in the 70’s with the StB, who evidently got to Trump through Ivana, a Czech citizen, either directly or indirectly. That cultivation was clearly known to the KGB as well, who then evidently took it over from the StB (or at least moved it up the chain) to the very top, for the express goal to “recruite more Americans.”

Here’s a breakdown of why that would have happened, with indications of how Putin would have known about Trump, in particular, being groomed as early as 1984 (when Putin was still KGB stationed in Germany with the mission to turn Americans):

In addition to shifting politics in Moscow, Kryuchkov’s difficulty had to do with intelligence gathering. The results from KGB officers abroad had been disappointing. Too often they would pretend to have obtained information from secret sources. In reality, they had recycled material from newspapers or picked up gossip over lunch with a journalist. Too many residencies had “paper agents” on their books: targets for recruitment who had nothing to do with real intelligence.

Kryuchkov sent out a series of classified memos to KGB heads of station.
...
In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.

Money and flattery. Sound like anyone we know?

The Center, as KGB headquarters was known, was especially concerned about its lack of success in recruiting US citizens, according to Andrew and Gordievsky. The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said.

The memo—dated February 1, 1984—was to be destroyed as soon as its contents had been read. It said that despite improvements in “information gathering,” the KGB “has not had great success in operation against the main adversary [America].”

One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks.

And there we have it. The StB (Czech intelligence at the time) had been profiling Trump for years right at the time when the directive came out from the top of the food chain that everyone should report their best leads. Putin was in Germany at the time, so he would have been informed of the directive of course and considering the collective nature of the directive, probably would have picked up (either through the intel “grapevine” or colleagues or directly from the top) that the Czechs had someone very prominent that fit the bill, particulalry in light of the specifics of the directive:

And: “Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”

So, again, this Reagan-reactive shake-up in the entire Soviet intelligence network was in 1984. The Politico piece notes that we have some indication of when the StB first started tracking Trump (in 1977), so by the time of this overhaul and refocusing effort began, the Czechs had a perfect subject already in their sites for several years (meaning it was NOT just a file of newspaper clippings of some marginal businessman).

He was an independently wealthy, morally bankrupt, womanizer playboy, with stated political ambitions (however tenuous) and high connections in the US government and business AND with a Czech wife—who spoke Czech—with family in Czechoslovakia that could be used as leverage.

Keep that in mind when reading this from the Politico piece:

There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case officer would invite a target to lunch. The target would be classified as an “official contact.” If the target appeared responsive, he (it was rarely she) would be promoted to a “subject of deep study,” an obyekt razrabotki. The officer would build up a file, supplemented by official and covert material. That might include readouts from conversations obtained through bugging by the KGB’s technical team.

The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”

The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.

During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow.
...
As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting their wives or other family members to help.

So, now, how did Trump end up in Moscow?

As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.

Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”

Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the U.N.; his daughter Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet U.N. delegation.

Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.

Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.

The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”

Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”

This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.

Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to a foreign intelligence archive smuggled to the West, the Soviet mission to the U.N. was a haven for the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Many of the 300 Soviet nationals employed at the U.N. secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover, including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet U.N. delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.

Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Post was getting too long, so I thought I’d put this concluding part from the Politico piece on its own:

By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future U.N. ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant.

Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was— in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.

Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and Dzerzhinsky.

According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.

That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included, sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for a film festival.

Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural festival.

The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger.
...
Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.

Trump was thinking about running for president.

There are several things there that are only explicable in light of an intelligence agenda, most notably the part about how Trump’s trip was not plastered all over Russian media for propaganda purposes, even if in a positive way (i.e., in light of perestroika and the push for better relations with America or the like). The photo of Trump and Ivana in Palace square alone (one would think) would be front page news in both Moscow and New York.

Then, as briefly noted in the piece, there is the curious pattern of the promise of great deals in Moscow that Trump always talks about—and which evidently motivate him to travel there and interact with high level Russian officials—that end up almost always going nowhere. As if that were just a cover story.

So, we have a timeline of both older and recent events perfectly in place. I mean, perfectly. There’s not a single element that can’t be explained or that comes months too late or years too early in any of this. Everything tracks from the late seventies to when (and why) Trump would first be on Putin’s radar in the eighties leading directly up to Putin’s ascension in the early 90s to the more recent timeline leading up to 2016, starting in (at least) 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant as the most likely “activation” event, if you will.

The next thing I’ll explore is the fact that the Steele dossier notes, however, that in regard to the more recent events, they actually started earlier (i.e., around 2010/2011).

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Ok, so far I’ve found this from WaPo:

Trump's name graces a string of sleek buildings along this strip of coast. First was the Trump International Beach Resort, a complex completed in 2004. Then came Trump Palace in 2006; Trump Towers I, II and III, built in 2007, 2008 and 2009; and Trump Royale in 2008. But Trump's developer friends plunged into Sunny Isles at the wrong time. According to a 2010 article at SouthFloridaCondos.blogspot.com, unit prices at the three Trump Towers buildings dropped nearly 40 percent from the 2005 pre sales period. As the market crashed, the construction loan for Trump Towers had to be restructured. Trump Hollywood, another glitzy project further north, was driven into foreclosure in 2010.

Trump deftly distanced himself from the developers' troubles, telling the Sun-Sentinel that he questioned their "timing." But the condo market gradually improved, thanks in part to Russian buyers. A Reuters investigation found that 63 people with Russian addresses or passports have purchased $98.4 million of property in Trump-branded condos in South Florida.

Trump also had a personal infusion of Russian cash in the liquidity-starved 2008 market. That year he sold for a handsome $95 million a Palm Beach waterfront mansion he bought at auction in 2004 for just $41.35 million — more than doubling his money at a time when much of the South Florida market was underwater. The buyer was Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev.

Dezer Development, the real-estate company that helped attach Trump's name to six projects in Sunny Isles Beach, saw Trump's presidential campaign as a promotion opportunity. "It's a free press release," Gil Dezer told Bloomberg News in August 2016.
...
Helping build the Trump-Russia pipeline in the fragile 2008 market was Donald Trump Jr. He was a keynote speaker at the June 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit in Moscow, where he touted the Trump Organization's plans to build condos and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi. At a New York real-estate conference in September 2008, Trump Jr. was frank about the tide of Russian money supporting the family business.

"In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. . . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia," said the young Trump, according to a Sept. 15, 2008, article about the conference. He said he had made a half-dozen trips to Russia during the previous 18 months.

A project that had significant financing from former Soviet Union investors was Trump SoHo, a 46-story condo-hotel project in Lower Manhattan that opened in September 2007. One development partner was the Sapir Organization, founded by Tamir Sapir from Georgia. Another partner was Bayrock, founded by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born businessman who brought in Sater. As has been widely reported, Sater went to prison in 1993 after stabbing a man, and later became an FBI informant.

For the elder Trump, these ex-Soviet investors were important assets for the future. He said in a deposition in a Trump SoHo lawsuit: "Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors. . . . And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw."

Trump Jr. continued traveling to Russia and Eastern Europe, prospecting for business. He was interviewed in May 2012 before giving a speech to a real-estate conference in Riga, Latvia. His comments, captured on YouTube, explain why the Trump Organization saw the former Eastern Bloc as crucial: "It's a part of the world that now you're starting to see some amazing architecture, some incredible real estate, you're seeing a real big boom in wealth. . . . We have something that's very relevant in that sector."

The piece jumps to 2013 and the Miss Universe pageant from there.

So, not only do we at least know what Trump was doing (and where) during that time period, we also have established that Trump Jr was very much a part of it all as early as 2008, but of course would have also been a target of Soviet intelligence—along with the entire family—since his birth.

At this point, it looks to me like we are seeing a rather blatant money-funneling operation going on that is all designed to build up Trump’s disastrous business failures, and his own private fortune as well.

Here’s a snippet from another in-depth piece in the Guardian in regard to the Steele dossier and what he initially uncovered:

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.
....
In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”

“So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”
...
If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

Note the fact that Trump turned down lucrative deals that seem to be closer to the election (as indicated by the simulataneous mention of receiving information on Clinton in the same time period).

So, Trump turned down whatever those deals were, not the Russians. Why? Because those deals were fake and intended to lay down cover for the numerous other real deals—the money-funneling deals—from 2008-2010, perhaps? Or that those earlier deals themselves were all just fake money-funneling deals, only intended to exist on paper long enough for the transfer of cash?

Point being, Trump already had the funding he would need and his ass had already been saved by Russian money long before and in perfect timing for the 2016 election as far back as 2010 at the very least (i.e., within the time frame Steele refers to).

Whether or not those earlier money-funneling operations were specifically intended to fund a future presidential bid, or were just to bail his ass out and keep an asset happy (or both, depending on exactly when they stopped) doesn’t matter. The deals he “turned down” were clearly meant to give Trump the appearance of disinterest in Russia; to cover everything that came before that as the notion he would turn any such deals down makes no sense considering the lengths he (and his son) supposedly went to in order to make those deals in the first place.

As I have said from the very beginning, none of this started with the Trump, Jr meeting at Trump Tower. This was in the works—dormant or not—for several decades, which, this final bit from the Politico piece linked to in an earlier post proves, was a standard time frame for Soviet intelligence (emphasis mine):

As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a scientist, a “guy with a future.”

Once in Moscow, they would receive lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”

These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not least Africa. After 10 or 20 years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.

Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”