President Donald Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the beginning of a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
During an appearance last week at the Economic Club of Chicago, Donald Trump refused to say whether he had talked with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since his presidency ended almost four years ago. The issue arose because in his new book, journalist Bob Woodward, citing a single source, reported that Trump had chatted with Putin up to seven times following his departure from the White House. Asked about this revelation, Trump said he doesn’t disclose his conversations with foreign leaders—though he recently boasted he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—but he added, “If I did, it’s a smart thing.”
Then the news cycle and the world moved on. Once again, Trump escaped scrutiny of his bizarre and troubling relationship with Putin. But this remains a significant question, as does the larger issue of Trumpworld interactions with Russia, as well as Moscow’s never-ending covert interventions in US elections to benefit Trump.
The Kremlin is once again attempting to subvert an American presidential contest. Throughout this year, US intelligence officials have been warning that Moscow is clandestinely interfering in the 2024 election to help Trump. Last month, a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed reporters that Russia is using “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and disseminate false narratives through social media and sham websites, targeting swing states and using artificial intelligence to create fake content that boosts Trump.
One online Russian network, according to the Washington Post, has been “touting a parade of lies about Harris, including that she is showing signs of Alzheimer’s and that her family has secret ties to ‘Big Pharma’ and so would push puberty-blocking drugs.” One Russia-based disinformation campaign, according to Microsoft, pushed the false story that Kamala Harris had been involved in a hit-and-run accident that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed. This week, US intelligence officials disclosed that a Russian operation used a deepfake video to spread a wild and baseless claim that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz engaged in sexual misconduct. The intelligence officials also noted Moscow is weighing actions to encourage protests and perhaps violence over the election results. (Iran and China also have run operations aimed at the US election.)
Multiple reports and statements from the US intelligence community, the House and Senate intelligence committees, special counsel Robert Mueller, the Treasury Department, and private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the basic narrative of Trump’s betrayal: Through three elections, Putin has attacked American democracy to aid Trump’s bids to win the White House.
A former senior US intelligence official tells me that the consensus in the intelligence community is that the Russian efforts have become more sophisticated and tougher to uncover. In September, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that Moscow had clandestinely funneled $10 million to a group of conservative and pro-Trump influencers in the United States. That same month, the feds seized 32 internet domains used by the Russian government to spread disinformation targeting US voters. The American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation, recently published a report noting it had found what it calls a “Sleeper Agents” bot network—a decade-old, global network of nearly 1,200 likely-automated social media accounts that exist to amplify Russian propaganda and other divisive content—and that “the Kremlin is ramping up its old brute-force methods of influence in advance of the 2024 election.”
The former intelligence official makes the obvious point: With his horrific war in Ukraine, Putin has more at stake in the current American election than ever before. Trump and his running mate JD Vance have expressed skepticism, if not outright hostility, regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s support of Ukraine, at times even echoing Kremlin talking points. Their election could signal a death knell for American military aid to Ukraine, which would be a huge victory for Moscow. Last week, Trump, amplifying Putin’s propaganda, blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for helping to start the war.
With Putin waging information warfare against the United States for Trump’s benefit and with the US having spent (so far) $175 billion to back Ukraine as it battles against the Russian army, voters ought to know whether Trump is in contact with Putin and, if so, what the two are discussing.
Putin is not just any foreign leader. He’s an adversary of the United States and a war criminal looking to conquer an American ally. What might Trump be discussing with him? Is he telling Putin to cease his meddling in US politics or thanking him? Is he demanding Putin withdraw from Ukraine or is he encouraging Putin to hold tight until Trump possibly wins the White House and can lean on Ukraine to cut a deal that favors Moscow?
These are vital question. Trump’s refusal to address them should spark a campaign controversy, even within the clutter of all his outrageous remarks and actions.
But there’s history. The political-media world has never totally come to terms with the Trump-Russia scandal. For years, Trump has screamed that it’s a hoax cooked up by the “fake news.” And with his cries of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—meant to demean the investigations of the Kremlin’s attempted subversion of American elections and the ties between the Trump crowd and Moscow—Trump has largely succeeded in delegitimizing inquiries about him and Russia.
Look at what he’s gotten away with on this front.
In 2016, Russian cyber-operatives stole Democratic emails and files and used WikiLeaks to release them publicly to harm Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. The material, leaked almost daily in the last month of the campaign, did much to impede the Clinton campaign; this was a factor in her defeat. Trump and his minions aided and abetted that Russian effort by insisting throughout the race (and afterward) that there was no Russian intervention. He covered for Putin. And during the 2016 campaign, we know now, top Trump aides, including his son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and campaign chair Paul Manafort secretly met with a Russian emissary who they believed was bearing dirt on Clinton, after they were told the Kremlin was scheming to assist Trump. This meeting signaled to Moscow the Trump campaign was not opposed to Putin’s undercover efforts to sway the election toward Trump.
This was not the only direct connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released a lengthy bipartisan report that revealed that during the 2016 election Manafort regularly met with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and who “may have been connected to the [Russian] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Manafort shared internal campaign data with this Russian operative, and the committee disclosed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was tied “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Manafort, according to the committee, also explored with this Russian asset using his own access to Trump to advance a pro-Russia “peace plan” for Ukraine that would offer a “backdoor means” for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.
Despite all this—Trump’s complicity in Moscow’s attack and his campaign chairman’s conniving with a Russian agent—Trump managed to maintain his it’s-a-hoax crusade. As president, he yukked it up with senior Russian officials who visited him in the Oval Office and revealed highly classified information to them that endangered a critical source for US intelligence. At a summit meeting in Helsinki with Putin in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian tyrant—over his own intelligence agencies—when Putin insisted that Russia had not assaulted the American election.
The Kremlin’s pro-Trump skullduggery did not end in 2016. During the 2020 campaign, Rudy Giuliani, on behalf of Trump, was trying to whip up a phony scandal, claiming falsely that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, had pressured Ukrainian officials to kill an investigation of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma because his son Hunter sat on its board. Material for this smear campaign came from Russian agents, most notably a Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andriy Derkach—the son of a former KGB official. Derkach had staged press conferences in Kyiv and played secretly recorded tapes of Biden speaking by phone with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Derkach insisted the recordings backed up Giuliani’s allegations about Biden. Yet the tapes revealed no misconduct. This was a disinformation stunt. Ukrainians critical of Russia speculated that the tapes originated with Russian intelligence. Giuliani repeatedly met with Derkach and called him “very helpful.”
Derkach, it soon turned out, was a Russian agent. In August 2020, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said Derkach was assisting a clandestine Russian effort to “denigrate” Biden. The following month, Derkach was sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department, which called him “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and declared he was one of a group of “Russia-linked election interference actors” and had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
Giuliani’s endeavor to brand Biden corrupt—aided by Fox News, other right-wing media, Steve Bannon, and assorted Trump operatives—was a made-in-Russia operation. Trump again was accepting the Kremlin’s help, with his personal attorney in cahoots with a Russian agent. This time it did not work. Trump lost the election. But once more, Trump was not tarred for partnering up with Putin to smear Biden. Trump continued promoting his Russia hoax charade. (Trump was impeached in 2019 but not convicted for pressuring the new Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to concoct an investigation of Biden to bolster the Russian smear operation.)
No matter how much evidence emerges that the Kremlin has been seeking to unsettle American politics to assist Trump, he sticks to his disinformation campaign insisting all talk of Russian interference is fraudulent. When the Justice Department last month announced its indictments alleging secret payments to pro-Trump influencers in the United States, he brayed that this was part of an effort by the Justice Department “to interfere in and suppress the Election in favor of the Democrats by resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.” On Fox News this past weekend, Trump proclaimed, “The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax was all made up, and now it’s acknowledged that it was made up.”
There has been no such acknowledgement.
Multiple reports and statements from the US intelligence community, the House and Senate intelligence committees, special counsel Robert Mueller, the Treasury Department, and private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the basic narrative of Trump’s betrayal: Through three elections, Putin has attacked American democracy to aid Trump’s bids to win the White House, and Trump, who called on Russia to meddle in 2016, has insisted none of this has occurred, essentially assisting and protecting a US enemy. (In 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin, then a close Putin ally who oversaw the Russian social media operation that targeted the 2016 campaign, said, “We have interfered [in U.S. elections], we are interfering, and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do.”) According to Mueller’s report, Trump even engaged in possible obstruction of justice to thwart a full accounting of what occurred during the 2016 campaign.
There’s an undeniable pattern. In the 2016 election, Trump’s campaign chairman colluded with a Russian intelligence officer. In the 2020 election, Trump’s personal lawyer conspired with a Russian intelligence agent. The only hoax is Trump’s assertion that he’s the victim of a hoax.
Now Trump won’t say whether he is talking privately with a brutal foreign adversary who has killed, kidnapped, and injured tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and who is yet again messing with an American election.
For over a decade, Trump has been weirdly enamored with Putin. In 2013, when he announced he would hold his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow—after teaming up with a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch who would help Trump pocket millions of dollars in Russia—Trump asked in a tweet whether the repressive Putin will “become my new best friend.” And when Trump later that year visited Moscow for the event, he was obsessed with meeting Putin, repeatedly asking his aides and Russian contacts if such a confab would happen. It did not. But a bond between Trump and Putin was forged. Trump has frequently praised the dictator and basically provided alibis for his attacks on US elections.
To some, talk of Trump and Putin may seem like old news. And that’s what Trump wants people to think: This is a discredited story from years past. Thanks to the deflections, distractions, and false denials of Trump and the GOP, the peculiar and disturbing Trump-Russia ties have never fully registered in the national discourse. Trump has successfully sidestepped this scandal, even as it continues to this day with the ongoing Russian operations and with Trump refusing to disclose whether he has been in contact with Putin. The vexing connection between Trump and Russia is not a leftover issue from previous elections. With the autocratic Putin seeking to crush Ukraine and Trump looking to score an electoral victory that could lead to the implementation of authoritarian measures in the United States, this strange and alarming relationship may matter more than ever.
