The Manchurian Billionaire: How Trump’s Rise Mirrors Every Classic Intelligence Takeover

This well-sourced article by Thom Hartmann begins by catching up on this Daily Mail piece linking Epstein to Putin. And continues to to draw a picture of Trump being a Russian asset as well as of a general Russian intelligence take-over of the US.

A little background on the author from wikipedia:

"Thomas Carl Hartmann (born May 7, 1951) is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator."

Debt, ego, sexual compromise, and fear: why Trump’s behavior makes sense only when you realize he’s been in Putin's pocket for years…

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

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So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

— Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?— Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?— Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?— Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?— Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?— Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?— Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?— Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?— Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?— Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?— Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

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Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”