Kompromat?
The Guardian newspaper out of the UK has a bombshell story this morning:
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
There are many fascinating angles to this story. Who leaked the documents, and why? It seems someone wants to undermine Vladimir Putin, as his gambit with supporting Donald Trump has left Russia in a worse position than before 2016, with a new and vigorous American president in office wanting to remind Russia of the true power dynamics between it and the US. If these documents are real—and the piece states that analysts have concluded they are—they're the smoking gun we've all been waiting for: documentary evidence from the Russians themselves that they waged a clandestine intelligence war against the US.
Then there's the kompromat:
There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.
The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.
A bureaucratic document wouldn't blare out "We have watersports recordings of Trump", but this is the first confirmation that the Russians have something on him.
The documents also peg Trump's psychology:
There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
As to the veracity of these documents, the piece states that Western intelligence agencies are said to have possessed them for several months and have determined they're real.
Russia has been waging a psy-op war against the West, and particularly the US, since we and our allies started putting economic pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. The interference in US democracy was a direct result of the tensions caused in Russia by the Western response to its Ukraine intervention. And the orders came from Putin.
Putin gambled that four or eight years of Trump would destroy the US. He sees this country as decadent and ready to collapse. He made the mistake every dictator makes, which is underestimating our resilience. He agrees with Adolf Hitler's assessment of the US as a weak "mongrel" nation, which will topple over. With Joe Biden in office, he's about to learn how wrong he was.