Trump's Russia Problem (Part 1)

Although he will never admit it publicly, the Russiagate story often seems to be the foremost thing on Donald Trump's mind. And if you couldn't tell by the tweets and rants at press conferences, the bad press really bothers him. A lot. The happiest moments of his presidency so far have been the day after his joint address to congress and the week after the Syria strikes. Why? Because the national media largely left the Russia story on the shelf to praise the 45th president for "finally becoming presidential". These positive periods never last for long and he's soon back to ranting about unfair coverage and the biased media.

It has been well-documented that POTUS is an avid consumer of cable news. There is nothing wrong with this inherently, other than the fact that it seems many of his policies come directly from what he sees on television, rather than what he reads in his Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). He says that CNN and MSNBC unwatchable, but they actually seem to be the networks that he watches the most. I can only assume that the reason for this is to see what the Russia story of the day will be. As he realizes that this narrative is not going away, he is desperately trying to find ways to gain the positive coverage that he craves. People have asked me about his mental state on several occasions. I am not a psychologist, but I do not personally believe that he is crazy. He's an insecure, egotistical paradox, but not crazy. Even with all of his narcissistic tendencies, privately he appears to be one of the most self-conscious people that I've ever met. He is constantly seeking validation. He often appears to be more interested in how his actions are being received than the consequences of said actions. Aides and staffers are constantly asked things like, "what do they (the media / public) think about ----?" It's kind of sad coming from the leader of the free world.

I said in a previous post that the Russia problem was not going away. That was quickly highlighted by a CNN breaking news story that Michael Flynn lied (again) and potentially (duh) broke the law by not disclosing his Russia dealings. Let's briefly recap the extent of the Russia problem:

This is a graphic highlighting most of the known ostensible ties to Russia.

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Let's start with some of the most damning evidence first. We know that members of the congressional intelligence committees have said that when this is all said and done, "people are going to end up in jail." We know that Trump tower had an exclusive connection with Alfa bank (Russian bank with KGB ties) and Spectrum Health Group (owned by Betsy DeVos and her husband). Quoted from @TeaPainUSA in an attempt to simplify the pattern. If you want to read the whole article, you can find it here:

"A connection is made from Alfa Bank to Trump Tower, which may last anywhere from 1 minute to 15 minutes or more, following by a longer "sleep" period. When averaged over months, these events charted an average time between connections to be 3660 seconds, or 1 hour and 1 minute. Whatever was running, it would hook up, transfer data for a few minutes, then go to sleep for an hour. This was the clue that led Tea Pain to formulate a much clearer working model to explain what we were all seeing: SQL Server Database Replication between multiple sites.

Database Replication is a rather simple concept.  When you have a database with millions of records representing hundreds of gigabytes of data, and you would like to keep a copy of that database housed in 2 or more locations, it makes no sense to continually copy the entire database from point A to point B every time a change is made, so you “replicate” it.
This allows only the changes made to be sent from one database to another.  This is accomplished by a process that runs on timely intervals, usually an hour, that wakes up and checks the changes made since the last hour and broadcasts those changes to the other database.  The other database, in turn, check for its changes and broadcasts them in the other direction.  Voila!  Both databases are identical!"

Trump Tower functioned as a center-point in a data-sharing triangle between Alfa Bank (read: Russian Intelligence) and Spectrum Health (reminder: owned by Betsy DeVos... whose brother, Erik Prince - yes, the same one that founded Blackwater - also happened to orchestrate a backchannel between Russian Intelligence and the Trump campaign in the Seychelles islands. More on that later.) As Tea Pain asked, "What do Trump Tower, the Devos Family and the Russians all have in common? A desire for Donald Trump to be President of the United States."

So, we know that all three sites had synched data, but what was the purpose? To keep a long sub-point as short as possible, the working theory outlined by Tea Pain is that Russia created a voter targeting database with information from the DNC hack that was filtered through Spectrum Health, and Trump Tower, which allowed them to create a specifically targeted "hit list" complete with social media handles, addresses, names and phone numbers. This was then passed on to the 1000 Russian trolls that we know were working against Hillary Clinton in the election, who used the data to run targeted ad campaigns in key battleground states that might have just been enough to tip the vote in Mr. Trump's favor. We don't know this for sure, yet. But I can assure you that the NSA, the CIA and the FBI are all working on it.

We also know that Trump for whatever reason is absolutely refusing to release his tax returns. His treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin highlighted this again today during the White House Press Briefing. I would assume that he has a pretty good reason for breaking such a long-standing precedent, and it's certainly not that he's under audit; the IRS has already confirmed that anyone has the autonomy to release their tax returns, audit or no.

We know that at least two people associated with the Trump campaign, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani have requested immunity or  some kind of a deal, and the FBI has told them both, "no thanks". I'm not an FBI agent, but this tells me that they've probably already got enough information. I don't know the extent of the legal trouble Giuliani is in at the moment, but for context, here's a photo of him meeting with Alfa bank execs. Reminder: this is the guy that Trump wanted to use as his cyber security expert:

We also know that Paul Manafort (You know, the guy that played a 'very limited role' in the Trump campaign... as campaign manager) had an office in Moscow, worked as an advisor, helping Viktor Yanukovich (Putin backer in Ukraine) win the 2010 election in Ukraine and is going to be at least the second Trump campaign member to register as a foreign agent. He was paid millions of dollars by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate, and he is currently wanted for questioning in Ukraine regarding his role in a corruption scandal. A ledger was discovered last month in which Manafort's name was written 22 times as the recipient of payments totaling 12.7 million dollars, according to Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities.

This feels like a good place to stop part 1. Part 2 will be discussing Jeff Sessions, Roger Stone, and possibly the most interesting person of all, Michael Flynn.

I would like to clarify one point before I close out this post: I do not have any personal, non-open-source information that suggests that President Trump directly colluded with Russia or Russian Intelligence in order to win the election. There is certainly a lot of open-source information and circumstantial evidence that suggests that members of his campaign absolutely were in bed with the Russians, but it would be irresponsible at this point to declare POTUS complicit in anything. I don't typically believe in coincidences, particularly this many, but I think it's safe to say that we should let the FBI and Congressional committees finish their investigations before we start pointing fingers directly at the president.