Evidence mounting on Russian support for Trump campaign

by Tom Maertens

Tom Maertens served as a White House National Security Council director during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

On Sept. 10, Trump’s Treasury Department publicly labeled Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach “an active Russian agent for over a decade.” Derkach has provided Russian disinformation, including doctored videos, to Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Ron Johnson to damage Joe Biden, which Trump has promoted.

Derkach told the press in July that he had provided Johnson information, which Johnson denied, but the Senate has a mail receipt showing he did. The Washington Post reported that Putin himself, through Derkach, was directing the campaign to discredit Biden.

The report Johnson issued in mid-September was dismissed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post as heavy on innuendo but containing no evidence that Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a 1,000-page investigative report in August, compiled over four years. It states unequivocally that Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Paul Manafort for years, was a Russian intelligence agent, and that Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, secretly provided him with sensitive information. The report makes clear that Manafort and Roger Stone were Trump’s liaisons to the Russians and Wikileaks respectively.

According to the Senate report, “the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of the release, and encouraged further leaks.”

The Senate report confirms Robert Mueller’s conclusion: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

Intelligence officials warned the White House and lawmakers this February that Russia was actively interfering in the 2020 election to re-elect Trump. The Washington Post recently cited “swarms of online, false personas” from Russia pushing misinformation — more than 2 million tweets in three weeks.

The intelligence community in 2017 had assessed that Russia intervened in 2016 to aid Trump. The Russians retweeted Trump’s Twitter account at least 470,000 times, posted thousands of political ads that were seen by at least 126 million Americans, organized dozens of false-front rallies in the U.S. and hacked into Democrats’ emails. Russian government hackers reportedly had some 500 million false-flag interactions with Americans over the range of social media platforms. The four-hour HBO documentary “Agents of Chaos” documents Russian intervention.

Microsoft confirmed Sept. 10 that Russia is continuing to attack our elections but with more elaborate deception than in 2016. Trump immediately denounced it as a hoax; he has lied about this repeatedly and refused to hold Putin responsible.

Instead, Trump and Barr are investigating the investigators in order to discredit them. They have ordered eight investigations into the Russia probe, including by a prosecutor whose mission is transparently to undermine the Mueller investigation.

Three former CIA directors, John Brennan, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell, have labeled Trump a useful fool or Russian agent, and now a fourth, Leon Panetta, who ran the CIA and the Pentagon under Obama, told the Washington Post that he has no doubt that Trump is a Russian agent of influence.

Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin is so egregious, there is no real doubt that he is facilitating Putin’s efforts to dismantle Western institutions such as NATO, the Paris Accord, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union.

Based on the evidence above, the conclusion is unavoidable: Trump is working with Putin, who is trying to reelect him.

Equally ominously, Trump and the Republican Party are reportedly planning to steal the election, as Barton Gellman details in the Atlantic. He reports that Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for extralegal or illegal election maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states.

Trump even announced it publicly: “We wanna get rid of the ballots and we’ll have a very peaceful transfer. There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

Republican-led violence and voter suppression was restrained by a court order for forty years that prohibited Republican operatives from using a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques, including stopping/questioning voters in minority neighborhoods, blocking voters from entering the polls, forcibly restraining poll workers, challenging people’s eligibility to vote, and warning minorities of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot.

That court order was rescinded and the Republicans are now recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to monitor polling places and challenge “suspicious-looking voters,” meaning, no doubt, Black and brown voters.

As historian Michael Beschloss said, “We have seen this all before, in Italy, when Mussolini seized power.”