patrick.net

Photo: A Trump rally yesterday.

The term “unwitting agent” is spy-speak for what Lenin (supposedly) famously termed a Useful Idiot, that is, someone who is duped into spouting propaganda that he may not fully understand. This is a harsh assessment but more charitable than the accusation that Trump’s is a witting agent of the Kremlin.

The case for Morell’s charge is circumstantial but impressive. We have Trump’s repeated business dealings in Russia, dating to the Soviet era, none of them very successful, though that didn’t stop the candidate’s son from declaring in 2008 of the Trump Organization: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Longstanding rumors of less-than-clean Russian money backing the Trump Organization, coupled with the Republican nominee’s steadfast resistance to release his tax returns, would make any counterintelligence officer wonder what’s going on here, particularly given the Kremlin’s willingness to clandestinely throw money at causes in the West it deems friendly to Russia and Putin. ...

His campaign is riddled at top levels by people with troubling connections to Moscow. His business dealings with Russia are not transparent. His casual mouthing of pro-Kremlin propaganda has become routine.

All this is why a lot of American intelligence officers view Donald Trump as a stalking horse, witting or not, for Vladimir Putin. Mike Morell simply said publicly what many veteran spies have been saying privately for a long time.

I know because I’m one of them. During my time in the counterintelligence business, the Trump Organization came up more than once in discussions of American businesses with cozy ties to Moscow. I’m not free to say more—I take my lifetime secrecy oath seriously—but it’s time the American people start to hear the truth.

I was among those who repeatedly warned the GOP that Donald Trump had connections to the Kremlin that needed thorough examination and careful vetting. During the Republican primary, as Trump demolished one rival after another, some of his opponents knew that the real estate mogul turned reality TV star had troubling ties to Moscow.

They did nothing with this information. Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign ignored it altogether. Even Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s most dogged foe in the GOP race, limply brought up rumors of the Trump Organization’s mafia ties. It was too little, too late to matter. Now the Republicans are stuck with a nominee who’s tanking in the polls, who seems programmed to self-destruct, and who’s just been called out by the former head of the CIA as a Russian agent.

Allow me to say to the GOP now: I told you so. And I wasn’t alone. Now Hillary Clinton has come out with a devastating campaign ad highlighting Trump’s dubious ties to Putin and the Kremlin. It’s devastating because it’s based on facts—facts which the GOP knew about long ago but chose to ignore.

http://observer.com/2016/08/yes-american-spies-really-think-trump-is-putins-guy/