For those who have been following this page for a while: my main target is not Trump, my target is Putin. Putin, not Trump, is the most dangerous person in the world. Trump is just a lackey, a small-time crook and bit-time liar whom Putin is using to attack the USA. The problem is not that there is no evidence of Trump-Putin collusion, the problem is that there is too much of it.

I have added some background about the motive of Russia's interference in US politics. In my opinion, it was not only a general attempt at undermining US institutions (that came later) but originally it was a determined effort to make sure that Hillary Clinton did not become president. Putin feared her more than anyone else.

For those who have NOT followed this page from the beginning: this website was one of the first to talk about the Trump-Russia collusion at a time when few dared mention the Steele dossier. I am pleased to report that two years later the whole world talks about this.

Just to be very clear: this is not about whether Russia's interference changed the results of the election (i personally think that the FBI investigation into Clinton's email server had a much bigger impact). It is about Putin's strategy to attack the USA, and, secondly, it is about the extent of Trump's collaboration with Putin.

And, just to be very clear, Putin's Russia is not the only country that ever interfered in US politics. For example, the USA has fought countless wars in the Middle East because of the interference of powerful Israeli and Arab lobbies on US elections. And Trump is not the first president that colluded with a foreign power to get elected: several presidents won narrowly thanks to the help of Israeli and Arab lobbies. The book on the "history of collusion" still has to be written.

You can also go straight to to my conclusions.

(See also my timeline of Russia).

Trump's reaction after every revelation of his dealings with Russia is to deny them categorically and to call them "fake news", followed a few days later (when confronted with overwhelming evidence) by an admission that they were true with an explanation of why they were perfectly appropriate. Then he goes after the people who leaked the "fake news" to the media. His interest is clearly to hide his Russian connections: deny that they exist, and persecute those who expose them (who are often FBI, CIA and NSA agents, who get fired, a fact which leaves the USA ever more vulnerable to foreign interference and terrorist attacks).

Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Cold War spy who defected to the West and is still living undercover, wrote a book about the Russian disinformation campaigns that went largely unnoticed at the time it came out, "Disinformation - Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism" (2013), but that sheds a lot of light on what happened in 2016.

The gathering of "kompromat", compromising material (either sexual or financial in nature), intended for political blackmail is a well-known tactic in Russia. All Russian citizens know that this happens routinely. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many agents of the Russian secret services found themselves jobless. They launched independent careers as domestic spies, ready to prepare dossiers on demand about just about any celebrity. This is a highly lucrative business in Russia, as political blackmail and character assassination are the norm in Russia. There is no doubt that the FSB has dossiers on any foreign businessman and any foreign politician who ever set foot in Russia. Many of them have joined forces with the young generation of high-tech cyber-hackers. If Russia did not have a dossier on Trump, Trump would be pretty much the only Westerner who did business in Russia about whom Russia doesn't have a dossier.

In fact, that's precisely how Putin's political career was launched. In 1999 Russia's prosecutor-general Yuri Skuratov was investigating a big corruption scandal involving president Yeltsin's family and associates when a videotape surfaced of him having sex with two prostitutes. The videotape appeared in April just before the parliamentary debate to impeach Yeltsin was set to begin. Putin was in charge of the Federal Security Agency (FSB) and nobody in Russia doubts that the FSB was responsible for making and leaking the videotape. Skuratov was fired and Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor. You can read Skuratov's story in this 1999 article.

Good introductions to "kompromat" and the way Russia's secret services are known to operate: in the New Statesman, in the Washington Post, in the CNN website.

This is nothing new: kompromat was routinely employed during the Cold War by the Soviet KGB to blackmail Westerners. John Vassall's case was one of the famous traitors of the Cold War: Vassall, a homosexual, was videotaped by Russia while having sex with multiple men at the same wild party, and then blackmailed for seven years. Britain finally found out that he was working for the Russians only after Soviet secret-service agent Anatoli Golitsyn defected to the USA in late 1961. Vassall was arrested in September 1962. You can read John Vassall's story in the British National Archives. Maybe we will finally find out what is in Trump's tax returns and we will see the video of Trump sleeping with Russian prostitutes only when someone from Russia defects to the West.

Trump cheated on his wives countless times and divorced twice. Trump filed for multiple bankruptcies which cost his workers millions of dollars in retirement savings. Based on overwhelming evidence, there is little doubt in my mind that Trump is betraying his country the same way that he betrayed his wives and his workers. Note that former Trump mistresses and even a former Trump doorman have taken lie-detector tests to prove that they are not lying, but Trump has never accepted a lie-detector test on himself.

And, just to be very clear: I don't know whether Russia's interference changed the results of the election (i personally think that the FBI investigation into Clinton's email server had a much bigger impact and that Trump was just lucky, since he became president after losing by three million votes). This is about the intention, not the results (which are impossible to determine). And i am fully aware that many other countries interfere in US elections (notably allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, which i don't particularly like any better than Russia). And i am fully aware that the USA has interfered and interferes regularly in the democratic elections of other countries, including Russia itself (and even overthrows their governments). We can argue forever when a country is right to do so (was the USA right to fight Hitler? Japan? Saddam Hussein? the Taliban? ISIS? to interfere in the Soviet Union?) I have discussed and often criticized these facts in many other articles since i started writing about history and politics (see for example The USA is a banana republic).

Dear "Vladimir" Trump, there is an easy way to prove us wrong: release your tax returns.

See also my lengthy investigation: What's in "Vladimir" Trump's tax returns?

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