Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that angry truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Postreported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Timesran 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. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.