Trump the Soviet spy, and the mysterious disappearing news articles that never were

A look at the Russian claim that surfaced this week that Donald Trump was recruited as a spy in 1987 — and the allegedly disappearing news articles reporting it.

So the big news this past week is that former Soviet spy Alnur Mussayev posted to his Facebook page — a claim that he had recruited a 40-yr-old Donald Trump to spy for the Soviet Union in 1987:

This was a repost of a post he made in 2018, in which he said (in part):

Donald Trump is on the hook of the FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] and swallowing the bait deeper and deeper. This is evidenced by numerous indirect facts published in the media. There is such a concept as object credibility. Based on my experience of operational work at the KGB-KNB, I can say for sure that Trump belongs to the category of perfectly recruited people. I have no doubt that Russia has a compromise on the President of the United States, that for many years the Kremlin promoted Trump to the position of President of the main world power.

The story spread like wildfire, but just as fast came claims that it was being taken down by all the news sites. Sure enough, when I first Googled “Trump Krasnov” some of the results I clicked on took me to a 404 page or something like “This article is no longer available.” Most notably, it was Daily Beast that first broke the story, and it was gone within hours. As of this writing, I find no explanation on the Daily Beast site.

Conspiracy theorists were quick to speculate that Trump was ordering the story removed. Here’s why I don’t think that’s very likely:

• It’s still up on some American websites, like Daily Kos and Radar Online.

• The only place I have confirmed anyone discovering it being removed was Daily Beast.

• It never appeared at all, so far as I can find, on major news websites, anywhere in the world. It’s only on “less reputable” websites.

Most likely Daily Beast made an editorial decision to remove it when they learned the only source was this guy’s Facebook post, and major publishers never pick it up for the same reason.

So I’m calling bullshit on the claim that all the news websites are mysteriously taking the story down.

It’s kind of a pointless claim anyway. It’s well known that former KGB major Yuri Shvets has stated that both Russia and the former Soviet Union had had their eye on Trump as a potential asset for some 40 years. But it wasn’t as a spy or an agent; it was, as The Conversation put it, as a useful idiot. Shvets said in Craig Unger’s book American Kompramat:

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.

He was simply someone they felt would do favors for them, all for the price of flattery. And that’s exactly what happened. Trump has been laundering money for the Russians for decades:

• Trump would sell properties, including Trump-branded condos and even his own Palm Beach home, to Russians for grossly inflated prices — in one case for more than $50 million over market value.

• At least $109 million of these purchases were in all cash straight through Deutsche Bank, which is a big red flag for money laundering.

• Many of the sales were through shell companies with untraceable Russian owners.

• Some of the Trump properties were deliberately overpriced, such as the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, specifically to attract Russians needing to launder money (and for which Trump failed to pay Panamanian taxes).

• Trump has famously owned casinos, but not because they are cash cows, because they are classic money laundering instruments. His Trump Taj Mahal Casino, a favorite hangout for Russian mobsters in Brooklyn, had 106 violations of federal rules against money laundering. Most of these violations were failing to report gamblers who cashed out over $10,000 in a single day.

Anyway, it just goes on and on. For the real dirt on the depth of his corruption, check out the NPR podcast series Trump Inc., a joint project of WNYC Studios and ProPublica.

Regardless of what this clown Mussayev posted on Facebook, Trump has long been one of Russia’s greatest “assets” in the truest sense of the word.