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      in US Politics

      American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein … and a lot we just don't know

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      Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.But as Unger himself points out, former CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump an “unwitting agent” of the Russians; former national security director James Clapper has described him “in effect … an intelligence asset”; and former CIA director John Brennan has said Trump is “wholly in the pocket of Putin”. So Shvets’ accusation isn’t really very surprising.Many other Trump-Russia books have dated Trump’s initial contact with the Russians to a visit to Trump Tower by then Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, in 1986. Unger – through Shvets – reports that the association actually began six years earlier when Trump purchased 200 television sets from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Kislin was actually a spotter agent for the KGB. Kislin denies any connection.In any case, the meaning of this transaction – like scores of anecdotes recorded in these pages – is never fully explained. The subtitle of Unger’s book is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery – a rubric that enables the author to throw in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to former British press magnate Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, who was – or wasn’t, depending on which page of this book you’re on – Epstein’s girlfriend as well as allegedly his collaborator in recruiting underage girls to sate Epstein’s seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite.As well as being a publisher, according to Unger, Maxwell was extremely close to the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and the KGB. And perhaps Mossad was actually responsible for killing Maxwell, whose drowning off his yacht was officially ruled an accident.Unger’s sourcing for this is typical of the book. He writes: “According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 November 1991 … an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat. Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing …”Hersh is Seymour Hersh, probably the most famous investigative journalist of his generation, but in the copious source notes of Unger’s book there is no indication Unger ever contacted Hersh to confirm this Australian bulletin. Since Hersh is in the phone book, and he actually answers his own phone, I found it quite easy to reach him.Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory. More

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      in World Politics

      Will the US and Russia Start Over?

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      It’s winter in Russia, which is not a season for the faint-hearted. The pandemic is still hitting the country hard, with the number of new COVID cases hovering around 20,000 a day, which has cumulatively put the country in the global top five in terms of infections.

      Under these inauspicious conditions, if you are brave enough to face down the cold and COVID to protest openly against the government of President Vladimir Putin, your reward may well be a trip to jail. If you’re very good at your job of protesting, you might win the grand prize of an attempt on your life.

      Yet, for the last two weeks, Russians have poured into the streets in the tens of thousands. Even in the Russian Far East, protesters turned out in Yakutsk (45 below zero) and Krasnoyarsk (22 below). Putin has predictably responded with force, throwing more than 5,000 people into jail.

      The US Will Need Turkey to Counter Russia

      READ MORE

      Media coverage of the Russian protests focus, not surprisingly, on Alexei Navalny. After recovering in Germany from an assassination attempt, the Russian opposition leader returned to Moscow on January 17. He was promptly arrested at the airport where his plane was rerouted. His close associates, who’d shown up at the original destination of his flight to welcome him home, were also detained. These arrests, and the government’s desire to lock Navalny away in prison for as long as possible, triggered the latest round of demonstrations throughout the country.

      Putin has ruled over Russia for more than two decades. Because of the constitutional changes he rammed through last year, he has effectively made himself leader for life. Will these latest protests make a dent in his carapace of power?

      Meanwhile, the US and Russian governments this week exhibited a modest form of engagement by extending the New START treaty on nuclear weapons for another five years. Despite this hopeful sign, no one expects anything close to a full reset of US–Russian relations during a Biden administration.

      But as Putin faces protests in the street and US President Joe Biden deals with recalcitrant Republicans in Congress, the US and Russia might at least avoid direct conflict with one another. More optimistically — and can you blame a boy for dreaming? — the two countries could perhaps find common cause against the global scourges of nuclear weapons, climate change and pandemics.

      Putin vs. Navalny

      Although they face each other across the Russian chessboard, Putin and Navalny share some basic attributes. They are both adept politicians who know the power of visuals, symbols and stories. They rely on the media to sustain their popularity, Putin using state-controlled media and Navalny exploiting social media.

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      And they have both been willing to adjust their messages to grow their appeal among everyday Russians by turning to nationalism. Putin started out as a rather conventional Soviet bureaucrat, with a commitment to all of the ethnic groups within the Soviet Union. Even when he became the leader of Russia in 1999, he thought of himself as the head of a multiethnic country. Particularly after 2014 and the conflict with Ukraine, however, Putin began to make appeals to russky (ethnic) Russians rather than rossisky (civic) Russians. He has made the defense of ethnic Russians in surrounding regions — Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics — a priority for his administration.

      Navalny, meanwhile, started out as a rather conventional Russian liberal who joined the reformist party Yabloko. Liberalism, however, has never really appealed to a majority of Russians, and parties like Yabloko attracted few voters. Navalny began to promote some rather ugly xenophobic and chauvinistic messages. As Alexey Sakhnin writes in Jacobin:

      “He participated in the far-right Russian Marches, waged war on “illegal immigration,” and even launched campaign “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” directed against government subsidies to poor, ethnic minority-populated autonomous regions in the south of the country. It was a time when right-wing sentiments were widespread, and urban youth sympathized with ultra-right groups almost en masse. It seemed to Navalny that this wind would fill his sails — and partly, it worked.”

      Navalny used nationalism to wipe away any memories of his unpopular liberalism, but it was difficult to compete with Putin on that score. So, increasingly, the oppositionist focused on the corruption of the Putin regime, publishing exposes of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wealth and most recently a video tour of a huge palace on the Black Sea said to be the Russian president’s (which Putin denies).

      With these critiques of the ruling elite’s corruption, Navalny can bring tens of thousands of angry protesters, particularly young people, onto the streets. Unlike present-day Belarus or Ukraine 2014, the Russian protesters don’t represent the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens. Putin remains a relatively popular figure in Russia. Although his approval ratings have dropped from the 80% range that was common five years ago, they still hover around 70%. US presidents would be thrilled with those numbers. Approval of the Russian government is considerably less — around 50% — which suggests that Putin has successfully portrayed himself as somehow above everyday politics.

      Putin Is Worried

      Still, the Russian leader is worried. In his latest speech at the World Economic Forum, Putin spoke in apocalyptic terms of a deteriorating international situation. “The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and disbalances that have been accumulating,” he said. “International institutions are weakening, regional conflicts are multiplying, and the global security is degrading.”

      His comments on the global situation reflect more parochial concerns. Because of COVID-19, the Russian economy contracted by 4% in 2020. Although the government implemented various measures to cushion the impact, many Russians are suffering as a result of rising unemployment and falling production. The Russian economy depends a great deal on sales of oil and natural gas. Any further reduction in global trade — either because of the pandemic or tariff wars — would complicate Russia’s economic recovery and consequently undermine Putin’s political position.

      The immediate challenge comes from the parliamentary elections later this year. Putin’s United Russia party currently holds a comfortable majority in the Duma. The other two top parties are led by nationalists who are equally if not more fanatical — Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party. But a political force coalescing around a figure like Navalny could disrupt Putin’s balance of power.

      That’s why Navalny returned to Moscow. And that’s why the Russian court decided this week to lock Navalny away for more than two years — for violations of parole that required him to report to the authorities that tried to kill him. Navalny has taken an enormous risk, while Putin is taking no chances. The Russian leader has long deployed a preemptive strategy against any potential rival. Those who dare to oppose him have been killed (Boris Nemtsov), poisoned (Vladimir Kara-Murza), jailed (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) or forced into exile (Garry Kasparov).

      Embed from Getty Images

      Civil society is also under siege in Russia, with activists vulnerable to charges of being, basically, spies and saboteurs under a “foreign agent law.” Yet the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT community and others continue to protest against the country’s authoritarian system. And these protests are not just taking place in relatively liberal enclaves in the western part of the country like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Large-scale demonstrations took place at the end of 2020 in Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, over the arrest of the region’s independent-minded governor. While Navalny gets the press, civil society activists have quietly built up networks around the country that can turn people out onto the streets when necessary.

      Like all authoritarians, Putin uses “law and order” arguments to his advantage. Russians have a horror of anarchy and civil strife. They have long favored an “iron fist” approach to domestic politics, which helps explain the persistent, posthumous fondness for Joseph Stalin, who had a 70% approval rating in 2019. According to polling conducted last year, three in four Russians believe that the Soviet era was the best period of time for Russia, and it certainly wasn’t the dissident movement of that period that made them nostalgic.

      The protesters thus have to tread carefully to avoid losing popular support among a population fond of an iron fist but also deeply disgusted by the corruption, economic mismanagement and social inequality of the Putin era. The Russian opposition also has to grapple with the distinct possibility that getting rid of Putin will usher in someone even worse.

      US-Russia Relations: A New START?

      The extension of New START, the last nuclear arms control treaty in effect between Russia and the United States, is a spot of good news in an otherwise dismal outlook for relations between the two countries. Joe Biden has prided himself on his knowledge of and commitment to arms control. So, if the two countries can agree on terms of selective engagement, the next four years could be profitably taken up by a series of negotiations on military weaponry.

      New START merely establishes ceilings on nuclear warheads for both sides and addresses only strategic, not tactical, nukes. So, as Stephen Pifer argues, a follow-on treaty could establish a ceiling on all nuclear warheads, for instance at 2,500, which would cover battlefield nuclear weapons and result in at least a 50% cut in the arsenals of the two sides. Another option for bilateral negotiations would be to focus on limitations to missile defense or, at the very least, cooperation to protect against third-party missile attacks. A third option would be to focus on conventional weaponry and constraints on weapons sales.

      The Biden administration could even move more quickly with an announcement of a no-first-use policy of nuclear weapons — something Biden has supported in the past — and agreeing with Moscow to de-alert intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) much as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev de-alerted another leg of the nuclear triad, strategic bombers, back in 1991.

      This arms control agenda is only part of a larger potential program of selective engagement. The US and Russia could return to their coordination around the Iran nuclear deal. They could explore ways to cooperate on global challenges like climate change and pandemics. They could even start addressing together the harmful effects of economic globalization, a topic Putin brought up in his recent Davos speech.

      Embed from Getty Images

      To do so, however, the two countries will have to manage the numerous points of friction in their relationship. For one thing, they’ve gone head-to-head in various proxy battles — in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. Russia is legitimately furious that NATO expanded to its very doorstep, and the United States is legitimately concerned about Russian interventions in its “near abroad,” most recently in Ukraine. The US has lots of evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — not to mention Russian involvement in a coup attempt in Montenegro that same year and its meddling in the presidential election in Madagascar two years later — and Russia is pissed off at US “democracy promotion” in the Color Revolutions and within Russia itself. Russia is eager to finish the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring natural gas to Germany, while the US is eager to sell its own gas to its European ally. Then there’s Russia’s penchant for assassinating Russians in other countries and repressing protestors at home.

      Any of these issues could scuttle cooperation between Moscow and Washington. One way of negotiating around this minefield is to delink the agendas of cooperation and conflict. Arms control advocates have a long history of doing just that by resisting calls to link other issues to arms control negotiations. Thus, the Iran nuclear deal focuses exclusively on the country’s nuclear program, not its missiles, not its relations with other countries in the region, not its human rights situation. The same lack of linkage has historically applied to all the arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow.

      This strategy of delinking doesn’t mean that these other issues are completely off the table. They are simply addressed at different tables.

      Those who desperately want a new cold war with Russia will not be happy with such a practical solution. They don’t want to talk with Putin about anything. As repugnant as I find the Russian leader, I have to acknowledge that he heads up an important global player and he has the support (for the time being at least) of much of his population. So, even as we challenge the Russian leadership’s conduct at home and abroad, we must also work with Moscow in the interests of global peace, prosperity and sustainability.

      Of course, there’s another word for all this: diplomacy.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Senate Intelligence Committee to Examine Antigovernment Extremists

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeMurder Charges?The Oath KeepersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySenate Intelligence Committee to Examine Antigovernment ExtremistsSenator Mark Warner, the committee’s new chairman, said he hoped to lead a bipartisan investigation of the groups, their overseas ties and amplification of their message by foreign powers.Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said it was vitally important for the Senate Intelligence Committee to do a “significant dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesJulian E. Barnes and Feb. 4, 2021Updated 7:59 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine the influence of Russia and other foreign powers on antigovernment extremist groups like the ones that helped mobilize the deadly attack on the Capitol last month, the panel’s new chairman said in an interview this week.As the executive branch undertakes a nationwide manhunt to hold members of the mob accountable, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, said it would be vitally important for the influential committee to do a “significant dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States, the ties those groups have to organizations in Europe and Russia’s amplification of their message.With the power-sharing agreement between Democrats and Republicans in place, Mr. Warner took over this week as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after four years as its vice chairman. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warner outlined his priorities, such as the spread of disinformation, the rise of antigovernment extremist groups, Chinese domination of key technologies, Russia’s widespread hacking of government computer networks and strengthening watchdog protections in the intelligence agencies.The White House has ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. on a new analysis of the threat from domestic extremist groups and the support they receive from foreign powers or overseas organizations.Those antigovernment extremists include QAnon, the conspiracy movement, and the Proud Boys, a far-right organization that Canada named as a terrorist group on Wednesday. Supporters of those groups and others were part of the attack on the Capitol building on Jan. 6, which aimed to stop the transfer of power to the Biden administration.The issue is a difficult one for the intelligence community. By law, the most influential agencies, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, are not allowed to collect information domestically. But Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, has some oversight of the intelligence arms of the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, which can collect information domestically. Other intelligence agencies look at foreign attempts to influence American groups.While preliminary work by Ms. Haines’s office is underway, administration officials said that analysis was unlikely to be completed before April. But there appears to be significant interest in moving quickly on the issue in the Senate. At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, a number of lawmakers raised the subject of domestic extremist groups. The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine both white supremacist groups on the right, and antifascist, or antifa, groups on the left, though Mr. Warner was quick to say that the danger the groups posed was not the same. “I don’t want to make a false equivalency argument here,” he said, “because the vast preponderance of them are on the right.”Like the intelligence community, Mr. Warner’s panel could face its own jurisdictional challenges as a handful of other House and Senate groups jockey to play a role in studying the aftermath of the Capitol assault and congressional leaders contemplate setting up an independent commission.For the past four years, the committee has done extensive work on disinformation efforts. Mr. Warner said that experience could guide the panel as it looks at how extremists groups spread propaganda and how foreign powers amplify it.Unlike most corners of Capitol Hill, and unlike the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Warner’s panel has managed to operate, for the most part, with bipartisan agreement. All but one senator on the committee backed its five-volume report on Russian interference. Completed last year, the Senate investigation was perhaps the definitive word on Moscow’s interference efforts and found that Russia had disrupted the 2016 election to help Donald J. Trump become president.Mr. Warner said on Wednesday that the bipartisan record of the committee was important for him to preserve, and that he intended to begin work with closed-door meetings to make the case to other committee members about the threat the groups represent and how they could be exploited by outside powers.Democrats and Republicans on the committee have expressed interest in examining antigovernment extremist groups, Mr. Warner said. But he acknowledged the political sensitivities after the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s support among far-right factions of those groups. Making the case that antigovernment groups are a problem not only in the United States but also in Europe is one way to build consensus on the issue. The committee, Mr. Warner said, will begin its discussions in private sessions so lawmakers can have a candid and less political conversation.Beyond an investigation of antigovernment extremism and foreign efforts to promote it, Mr. Warner said the committee would work on pushing for new protections for whistle-blowers and making it more difficult to dismiss inspectors general, government officials charged with finding waste, fraud and abuse..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Mr. Trump last year fired Michael K. Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community. It was Mr. Atkinson who investigated the whistle-blower complaint about Mr. Trump’s call with his Ukrainian counterpart in 2019 and ultimately delivered that report to Congress.At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, Mr. Warner began his questioning by describing how his own views on the Chinese government had changed, thoughts he repeated in his interview. He said he was wrong to have believed that China would democratize the more it was brought into the world order.“I will astonish you and acknowledge that directionally, Trump was right,” Mr. Warner said on Wednesday.Mr. Warner said he disagreed with John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s final director of national intelligence, who had argued that China was trying to interfere with the election. But Mr. Warner said he believed China had “a very, very sophisticated effort to influence American policy.”The Senate committee will also look at Chinese technological investments, building on the work members of Congress have done on Beijing’s dominance of 5G, the next generation of mobile phone networks, Mr. Warner said. He said the United States needed to carefully assess its technology compared with China’s on artificial intelligence, facial recognition and quantum computing.Having a government role in bringing some manufacturing back to the United States from China was an area of bipartisan agreement, Mr. Warner said, mentioning Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and a member of the Intelligence Committee.“There is a coalition of the willing to take on the challenge of China,” Mr. Warner said. “China has taken the best lessons of British imperialism and American imperialism, and we find them in a kind of authoritarian capitalism model.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in US Politics

      Blinken criticizes Russia's 'violent crackdown' on protesters and weighs North Korea sanctions

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      The Biden administration will consider new sanctions against North Korea as well as other possible actions against Russia said Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, in a television interview on Monday, as the administration continued its foreign policy review.Blinken told NBC News tools aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula include additional sanctions in coordination with US allies, as well as diplomatic incentives he did not specify.Blinken said he was “deeply disturbed by the violent crackdown” on Russian protesters and arrests of people across the country demanding the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.“The Russian government makes a big mistake if it believes that this is about us,” he said. “It’s about them. It’s about the government. It’s about the frustration that the Russian people have with corruption, with autocracy, and I think they need to look inward, not outward.”In the interview, taped on Sunday, Blinken did not commit to specific sanctions against Moscow. He said he was reviewing a response to the actions against Navalny, as well as Russian election interference in 2020, the Solar Wind Hack and alleged bounties for US soldiers in Afghanistan.“The president could not have been clearer in his conversation with President [Vladimir] Putin,” Blinken said of Joe Biden’s call last week with the Russian leader. More

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      ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

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      Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into the politics.The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.” More

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      Biden presses Putin on election interference and Navalny arrest in first call

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      The US and Russia have agreed to extend an arms control treaty limiting their deployed nuclear warheads after Joe Biden’s first phone call as president with Vladimir Putin.At the same time, Biden took a firm position on Russian actions that Donald Trump largely ignored, raising concerns about the poisoning and arrest of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, warning Putin that the US supported Ukraine against Russian “aggression”, complaining about Russian interference in last year’s US presidential election, and the “Solar Winds” cyber-attack on US government agencies last year.Biden challenged Putin on US intelligence reports that Russia had offered bounties to the Taliban and other extremist groups in Afghanistan for the killing of US soldiers.The White House account of the call said: “President Biden made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies.”The White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said that Biden had also expressed opposition to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, as being a “bad deal” for Europe, one example of continuity with the Trump and Obama administrations.The Biden team is seeking to take a tougher line on Russia’s violations of human rights and international law while seeking to make progress on arms control with Moscow, which crumbled under the Trump administration.The two leaders formally exchanged notes extending the 2010 New Start agreement by five years, assuring the survival of the last remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia in the wake of the Trump era.The extension was agreed just 10 days before New Start was due to expire. It keeps in place a limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on either side, imposes limits on delivery systems, and enforces verification and transparency measures, helping ensure the two biggest nuclear weapons powers do not take each other by surprise.According to the White House the two leaders also talked about re-establishing a regular “strategic stability dialogue” between senior officials, at which frictions in the relationship, and possible new arms control agreements, could be discussed.The Kremlin’s readout of the conversation said that “the presidents expressed their satisfaction with the exchange of notes of extension of the New Start, which happened today”.“In the coming days the parties will complete all the necessary procedures to ensure that this important international legal mechanism for the mutual limitation of nuclear missile arsenals functions in the future,” the Kremlin account said.The Kremlin’s account described the conversation as “frank and businesslike” – a turn of phrase often used to describe tense discussions.It added that the two leaders had also discussed the Open Skies treaty, another arms control agreement allowing transparency through mutual aerial surveillance, which Trump also withdrew from, and from which Moscow has said it was also preparing to leave.Biden and Putin discussed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump left but Biden has said he is willing to rejoin, and the conflict in Ukraine between the government there and Russian-backed separatists. Putin, now dealing with his fifth US president, restated his proposal for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN security council.Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Centre, tweeted that: “[The] Putin-Biden phone conversation today promises no reset, but suggests a degree of predictability to the badly strained relationship. Confrontation needs to be managed safely.”The change in course in US foreign policy is likely to accelerate after the Senate confirmed the appointment of Antony Blinken as secretary of state on Tuesday, one of his first actions was to co-sign a statement with other G7 foreign ministers condemning the poisoning and arrest of Navalny and the mass detention of protesters and journalists.The statement said the G7 ministers “call upon Russia to adhere to its national and international obligations and release those detained arbitrarily for exercising their right of peaceful assembly”.At the UN, the acting US ambassador announced another sharp break with Trump-era policy, the restoration of diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees as part of its support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Trump, a close ally of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had broken US ties with the Palestinians.The Biden team has said its first foreign policy goal would be to repair relations with allies and global institutions ruptured by Trump. The state department said on Tuesday it would “thoroughly review” sanctions the Trump administration imposed on the prosecutors office of the international criminal court (ICC), over investigations it launched into war crimes committed by all parties in Afghanistan, and by Israeli and Palestinian forces in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.“The United States shares the goals of the ICC in promoting accountability for the worst crimes known to humanity. At the same time, the United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the UN security council,” a state department spokesperson said.“Much as we disagree with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Israeli/Palestinian situations, the sanctions will be thoroughly reviewed as we determine our next steps.” More

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      Russia: the spectre that loomed over Trump's presidency

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      When historians look back at Donald Trump’s presidency they are likely to pick out two defining themes. One is the coronavirus pandemic. It dominated his last year in office, and saw the president become the virus’s most celebrated victim cum White House super-spreader.The other is Russia, a subject that consumed American public life for four long years. The question first came up when Trump was a long-shot candidate for president. In a Republican party that had once regarded Vladimir Putin as a cold-eyed KGB killer, why was Trump’s behaviour towards Russia’s leader so ingratiating?There were Trump’s flattering public statements about Putin on the campaign trail. And his blatant appeal in July 2016 for Moscow to locate emails that he claimed Hillary Clinton had deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he told a press conference in Florida.As it turned out Russia was indeed listening. That evening a group of hackers working for GRU military intelligence returned after-hours to their office in central Moscow. They tried to break into the accounts of senior Clinton aides, unsuccessfully. A rival spy agency once headed by Putin, the FSB, launched its own electronic attacks.Across 2016 the Russians ran an aggressive and multifaceted operation to help Donald Trump win. In spring the GRU stole tens of thousands of Democratic party emails, including from Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. These were fed to WikiLeaks and given to reporters via a GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.Meanwhile trolls working out of St Petersburg launched an unprecedented anti-Clinton social media operation. The Russians – employed by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin – impersonated Americans, organised pro-Trump rallies, and even hired an actor to dress up as Clinton and sit in a cage.Moscow rumoursDuring the 2016 campaign there were swirling rumours concerning Trump and Moscow. No media outlet could quite stand them up, but the topic burst into the public domain in January 2017 when BuzzFeed published a dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by the Democratic party. It would torment Trump for the rest of his presidency.The dossier alleged the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for five years at least. It claimed Putin’s spies had collected kompromat, secretly filming Trump and two sex workers inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.Trump vehemently denied the seedy allegations. He and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill and within the Justice Department sought to discredit its British author and to out his sources. Steele was a “failed spy” and “lowlife”, and collusion allegations a “witch-hunt” and a “hoax”, Trump insisted.‘Russia thing’Hoax or not, Trump’s efforts to make the “Russia thing” go away backfired. In May 2017 he sacked James Comey as FBI director. This resulted in the appointment of the former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special prosecutor. Mueller’s brief was to investigate whether Trump and his inner circle had conspired with Moscow during the election. To answer yes, a criminal standard of proof was necessary.For almost two years the workings of Mueller’s team stayed secret. The prosecutor was both Washington’s most present personality – endlessly discussed – and a ghost. From time to time his office issued indictments. These were against 26 Russians including GRU hackers. And against Americans: Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn, attorney Michael Cohen, and others.When it arrived in spring 2019, Mueller’s report was a disappointment to liberal Americans who hoped it might sweep Trump from power. It identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign but did not find a criminal-level conspiracy. Nor did it rule on whether the president had obstructed justice. Mueller said he had not considered collusion, which was not a “legal term”.Trump, we learned, had been secretly negotiating in 2015-16 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow while simultaneously praising Putin. Cohen had even written an email asking Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov for help and spoke to Peskov’s assistant. When asked about this by Congress, Cohen lied. The cover-up led to a feud with Trump – and, for Cohen, to federal jail.Back-channelsThe most significant back-channel to Moscow involved Manafort and his one-time Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of clandestine meetings Manafort gave Kilimnik internal polling data, including from the rustbelt states that proved crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men used burner phones, encrypted chats, and a secret email account, with messages shared in drafts.Mueller identified Kiliminik as a career Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimink did with the information he got from Manafort is unknown. He refused to cooperate with the FBI and fled to Moscow.Critics said the Mueller investigation was hobbled by an excess of legal caution and a failure to meet face to face with Trump. Its biggest shortcoming, arguably, was a lack of Russian witnesses.Much of the Trump-Russia story is still unknown. For example, does the Trump Organization have financial ties with Moscow? After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s Trump was only able to borrow cash from one lender: Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which gave him lavish credit. At the same time its Moscow division was facilitating a $10bn money-laundering scam for the benefit of Kremlin VIPs.The US public never found out when Putin ordered the DNC hacking operation and why. Nor did it discover what the Russian and American presidents discussed in their private meetings, including during a notorious 2018 encounter in Helsinki. A good guess is that Putin flattered rather than threatened Trump. He fed Trump’s ego and stoked his resentment of the US “deep state” and other “enemies”.‘Grave counter-intelligence threat’In August 2020 the Senate intelligence committee published its own Trump-Russia report. It said Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential material to Kilimnik was a “grave counter-intelligence threat”. And it gave some credence to Steele’s Moscow allegations, noting that an FSB officer was stationed inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Putin’s spy had a live video feed from guests’ bedrooms, the report said.In the end Russia did not interfere in the 2020 election in the same sweeping and systematic way. But Moscow was busy in other ways. Beginning in spring it carried out a massive cyber-raid against US federal government institutions. Russian state hackers inserted malicious code into a software update made by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds. At least six US government departments were affected, as well as the Department of Defence’s sprawling communications network, and the body that manages the US nuclear weapons stockpile. The hackers worked for Russian SVR foreign intelligence, and possibly the FSB. It was the same Cozy Bear outfit that previously hacked the DNC and the US state department.Did Trump condemn Moscow? Nope. He blamed China, in one of his final tweet’s before Twitter kicked him off its platform after the 6 January Capitol attack. The cyber-raid was a reminder of Putin viewing the US as an eternal adversary in a never-ending quasi-war. The National Security Agency has spent billions on cyber-defence and yet on Trump’s watch it was unable to deter intruders from Moscow.Russia would have preferred it if Trump had won the election. Despite Joe Biden’s clearcut victory, though, the Russian leader has much to celebrate. Over four polarising years Trump accomplished many of the KGB’s longstanding goals. These included estranging the US from its western allies and Nato; deepening domestic strife; and waging a Putin-style disinformation campaign against the 2020 result.Manchurian candidate or not, Trump did more than any previous president to discredit US democracy and suck up to the Kremlin. Back in the 1980s the Soviet government invited Trump to Moscow. Seemingly it identified him early as a person without scruples, one perhaps capable given time and opportunity of bringing down the republic.The invasion of the Capitol was the culmination of this cold war fantasy; a perfect series finale.Luke Harding’s latest book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West is available from the Guardian Bookshop More

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      in Elections

      How Biden era could kickstart coordinated approach to Russia

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      Joe Biden’s accession to the US presidency has spawned a huge body of literature about his intentions towards China, but in his four years out of office Biden has in fact made Russia his primary focus in combatting authoritarianism. Now, just days from coming into office, the arrest of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has suddenly presented him with a test case, which may also lead to friction with two of his closest allies: Germany and the UK.Germany under Angela Merkel has always resisted a full confrontation with Russia, and has fought hard to keep the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany going, saying it is a commercial not a political issue.But Merkel has met Navalny, who was nursed back to health in the German capital after his poisoning and has been described as “the Berlin patient” by Vladimir Putin, and her government may now feel a personal obligation, beyond rhetoric, to help him. The Putin entourage is already heavily sanctioned by the EU as a result if their repression in Belarus as well as Navalny’s poisoning, so her options for showing disapproval through further individual sanctions is limited. And the Nord Stream 2 project will not be far from Merkel’s thoughts.In the case of the UK, British prime ministers have been rhetorically strong about Russia, but are open to the charge that the rhetoric does not extend to clamping down on the lawyers, accountants and army of estate agents that enable the Russian kleptocracy to invest their corruptly-obtained wealth in London. Chatham House, the sober minded thinktank, is, for instance, hosting an event on Tuesday promoted as follows: “The most startling findings of the ‘Russia’ report from parliament’s intelligence and security committee were not about the extent of Moscow’s malign influence in the UK, but about how unwilling the British government had been to take steps to detect and counter it.“The report identified gaping holes in both awareness of the problem, and legislation to deal with it. A formulaic response from the government promised that at least some of these holes have been plugged”. Six months on, how many holes in measures such as ”unexplained wealth orders”, have been filled?But perhaps by coincidence matters are coming to a head. Since 2019, the threat of US sanctions has left the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline about 94% complete. If finished, the 764-mile (1,230km) pipeline will terminate in Lubmin, a coastal village in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and more than double Germany’s imports of Russian natural gas.On Friday, Germany’s federal maritime authority approved extending the project’s operational time frame because of “unforeseen delays outside German waters”.Since US sanctions would target private companies involved in the project, the state government of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has gone to the lengths of establishing a public foundation that could take over the potentially sanctionable activity. Germany believes the US would not have the nerve to sanction a public body, even though this foundation is largely Russian funded.Nicholas Burns the former US assistant secretary of state suggested to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt this week that if Germany suspended construction of the pipeline the US could lift sanctions.Equally, the UK as host of the G7 summit in June looks as if it is going to revive the anti-corruption drive David Cameron started the last time Britain held the event.The west has been hampered in the past four years by the fatal ambiguity of US policy towards Russia. The State Department had been willing to confront Russia, but Donald Trump remained inexplicably averse to doing anything but indulge Putin.Biden has appointed an experienced team with a deep knowledge of Russia including: William Burns, director of the CIA; Victoria Nuland, deputy secretary of state for political affairs; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior director for Russia and Central Asia in the future NSC; Kathleen Hicks, first female deputy head of the Pentagon; and Shanthi Kalathil, coordinator for human rights and democracy. Collectively they will try to give Germany clearer signals on US policy to Russia, and both how to combat democratic backsliding in Europe and Russian meddling. The huge cyber-attack on Washington institutions, attributed to Russia’s foreign intelligence, lies heavily on the minds of Congress.Biden has promised that he will make the promotion of democracy his guiding foreign policy principle, including a summit to attack the weapons of the authoritarians. Many have questioned the wisdom of the US presenting itself as the standard bearer of liberal values given its state of crisis.But the attack on the Capitol in Washington has only made his allies more convinced of this agenda, and its relevance to America. So the frontline of the “battlefield” where the new US administration and Russia will confront each other is likely to be extended to the post-Soviet space and will include at least Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. For all the talk of the rise of China and the implications of the “Asian century” on America, it is the threat posed by the old cold war enemy that for now at least may most exercise the transatlantic alliance. More