Before Donald Trump was president or a candidate, and when he was hurting for investors as Wall Street had all but shut down loaning operations to him, his businesses established extensive ties to Russian oligarchs, including some allegedly affiliated with organized crime.

At the same time, associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government and future associates of Trump — most notably Paul Manafort, his future campaign chairman — were allegedly involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars, and part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine.

At best, Trump may have had no knowledge of this scheme and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with — and it is of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players, combined with his public statements as a presidential candidate, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely — not less — that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin.

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation.

With so many questionable people, actions and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light.

After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden on a sitting president with so many questionable connections is for him to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what that information — when put together and given proper context — makes clear and what it suggests.

To begin to understand the big picture, let’s go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page — later a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser — moved to Moscow to set up a branch for the New York investment firm Merrill Lynch. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life.

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician who first attracted global attention during the 2004 Ukrainian elections. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Yanukovych as his prime minister in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian — and pro-Putin — candidate to succeed him in 2004.

Kuchna’s support extended to trying to rig the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident.

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Manafort from running Yanukovych’s 2004 campaign. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, and his client list over the years has included dictators such as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi. Other clients included Jonas Savimbi of the Angolan guerrilla group UNITA, and the Kashmiri American Council, a front group for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press recently published a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed in 2005 — through a formal memo, no less — a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly promote Putin, the Russian government and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics.

Manafort sent the proposal to Oleg Deripaska, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good — if not always great — relationship with Putin and who was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro.

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and used a Delaware shell company — LOAV Ltd. — to conduct official business and transactions. AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story.

In 2014, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out, resulting in a $19 million Cayman Islands court battle related to their alleged efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established.

The AP story broke just hours before CNN would report that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

The AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs allied with Yanukovych and Putin.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background.

In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman and Putin ally, according to court documents.

Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to Semion Mogilevich, the essential head, or “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. Mogilevich is also a friend of Putin’s and was one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted fugitives from 2009–2015.

In mid-2004, Putin and outgoing Ukrainian president Kuchma created a Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo [RUE] to replace the company represented by Firtash that handled Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports.

The imports ostensibly came from Turkmenistan, but also involved shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom dominated by Putin allies. Additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory.

But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45 percent of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. Gazprom owned 50 percent of RUE, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand.

Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price. Next, Firtash would sell billions of dollars of gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine, with the profits directed to funding pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Finally, Putin’s allies in the financial industry would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so he could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in January 2006 when Russia shut its gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory.

After the shutoff, Firtash and his allies rearranged their business.

First, RUE became the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport — a subsidiary — it would sell to Ukrainian industrial customers via a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company.

The new joint venture was called UkrGazEnergo, and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES — Russia’s state-owned power company — would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan. And again, RUE would act as the intermediary.

One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians — who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices by entities with little supervision and with opportunities for massive corruption — that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway.

This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

Carter Page in February 2017. PBS NewsHour screen capture

Page-Manafort connection

Which brings us back to Carter Page. It is important here to note that Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004–2007, and the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an adviser on “key transactions” of theirs.

It is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving natural gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe, the creation of RUE, and RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine.

If Page is telling the truth about his role, then it is virtually inconceivable — considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006 — that he would not be aware of what was going on.

And after all, as someone with a Ph.D. and an MBA and a graduate the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals, and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and her story is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page — and people who did know of him suggested he was a nobody.