By the book

Nick Anderson

Comrade Krasnov, aka Donald Trump

America Kompromat

Daily Kos:

It was Alnur Mussayev that identified Donald Trump with the codename Krasnov, but years before, there was Yuri Shvets, a Major in the KGB. He was stationed in Washington DC In 1985 to 1987, with his cover being a correspondent for TASS, a Soviet news agency.

He featured prominently in the 2021 book American Kompromat, by Craig Unger. Kompromat means compromising material.

Here are some relevant parts from that exerpt. You all remember the July, 2018 Helsinki news conference where he agreed with Putin that there was no Russian interference on the 2016 election and ignored 17 national security agencies?

"Why did he pull out the troops from Syria --- as Putin wanted? Why did he cut back troops in Germany --- as Putin wished? Why did Trump say nothing when it was widely reported Russia was offering bounties to be paid to Afghan troops who killed American soldiers?"

"In a New York Times op-ed written 3 months before the 2016 election, the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Morell answered the last question in the affirmative (about Trump being an 'asset'), writing, 'In the intelligence business, we would say Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.'"

Others said Trump was ​​​"a useful idiot," and "a clear and present danger."

"In December 2017, former National Intelligence director James Clapper asserted that Trump was, in effect, an intelligence 'asset' serving Russian President Vladimir Putin. And in 2019, the former CIA director John Brennan declared Trump to be 'wholly in the pocket of Putin.'"

Glenn Carle, a former CIA intelligence officer, in January 2016 "was deeply alarmed by the various connections he saw between Trump's team and the Russians, but he wasn't sure who to talk to. 'I was hopping up and down about this. I couldn't sit here without telling someone that they were about to have The Manchurian Candidate realized.'"

"There was already plenty of evidence that Russian intelligence had focused enormous amounts of attention on Trump, his family members, and people who had access to him."

These are our own expert intelligence people telling us that Trump was an asset in 2016 and since. We don't even need Mussayev and Shvets to add to the mix, but they confirm what was done on the Russian side....

See also Appeasing Russia is U.S. policy

Trump and Repugs roll over for Putin

The New York Times:

How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia

By Jonathan Mahler

April 12, 2025

In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia — visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying array of meats and vegetables on offer. “What have we done to our poor people?” he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism.

Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson provided a mirror image of Yeltsin’s supermarket visit, only this time the supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic interview with President Vladimir Putin. While he was there, he went grocery shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and affordable prices. 

The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism. “Coming to a Russian grocery store — ‘the heart of evil’ — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said after passing through the checkout line. “That’s how I feel anyway — radicalized.”

President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia’s president against his own intelligence agencies. 

But in the first few months of his second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russia and berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. 

His administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a “comrade” by Russian state TV.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out:

“If in fact we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that”....

See also Trump works for Putin, No traiff on Russia, Trump's Russian Ties, and Is Trump a Russian asset?