![](\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/resizer\/PnZpNNFQ5XZDwul7knHBspZEx0s=\/200x200\/s3.amazonaws.com\/arc-authors\/washpost\/6974e11f-72a4-4106-923c-e135283be881.png\")
<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/a> <\/div>\n Max Boot<\/a> <\/p>\n Columnist covering national security<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n On Friday, the New York Times reported<\/a> that \u201cin the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president\u2019s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.\u201d That investigation may well be continuing under the auspices of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. We don\u2019t know what Mueller has learned. But we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.<\/p>\n Here is some of the evidence suggesting \u201cIndividual 1<\/a>\u201d could be a Russian \u201casset<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article<\/a>: \u201cFrom 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases \u2014 a red flag of potential money laundering \u2014 of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. \u2018Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,\u2019 said Donald Jr. in 2008. \u2018We don\u2019t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,\u2019 boasted Eric Trump in 2014.\u201d According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen\u2019s guilty plea<\/a> of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide. These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.<\/p>\n \u2014 The Russians interfered<\/a> in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails on July 27, 2016 (\u201cRussia, if you\u2019re listening\u201d), on the very day<\/a> that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton\u2019s personal and campaign servers.<\/p>\n \u2014 There were, according to<\/a> the Moscow Project, \u201c101 contacts between Trump\u2019s team and Russia linked operatives,\u201d and \u201cthe Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.\u201d The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting<\/a> at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and a Kremlin emissary promising dirt on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.\u2019s reaction<\/a> to the offer of Russian assistance? \u201cIf it\u2019s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.<\/p>\n \u2014 Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch<\/a>, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data<\/a> that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance<\/a> that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta\u2019s emails. (Stone has denied it<\/a> .)<\/p>\n \u2014 Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the \u201cRussia thing<\/a>\u201d \u2014 and then bragged<\/a> about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. As Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes argues<\/a>, \u201cthe obstruction was <\/i>the collusion\u201d \u2014 Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted <\/a>Putin\u2019s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the \u201chigh confidence\u201d assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.<\/p>\n \u2014 Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (\u201ca cancer in our country<\/a>\u201d) \u2014 two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.<\/p>\n \u2014 Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO \u2014 he has suggested<\/a> that France should leave the E.U. and that the United States should leave<\/a> NATO, reportedly saying<\/a>, \u201cNATO is as bad as NAFTA.\u201d The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban<\/a> in Hungary and Marine Le Pen<\/a> in France, just as the Russians do.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump has praised Putin<\/a> (\u201ca strong leader\u201d) while trashing just about everyone<\/a> else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations. Trump even praised<\/a> Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats and, notwithstanding instruction<\/a> from his aides (\u201cDO NOT CONGRATULATE\u201d), congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article<\/a> on Saturday, Trump \u201chas gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with .\u2009.\u2009. Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials .\u2009.\u2009. Several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president\u2019s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump defends<\/a> the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria<\/a>, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack<\/a> on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.<\/p>\n \u2014 Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and \u201cacting\u201d appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.<\/p>\n Now that we\u2019ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let\u2019s look at the exculpatory evidence.\u2009.\u2009.<\/p>\n [This page intentionally left blank]<\/p>\n I can\u2019t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.<\/p>\n In his own defense, Trump claims<\/a> he has been tougher on Russia \u201cthan any other President,\u201d but literally in the next sentence he says, \u201cgetting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.\u201d When the United States actually has taken steps to get tough with Russia in the past two years, it has usually been the work of Congress (the 2017 Russia sanctions bill<\/a>) or Trump aides (expelling<\/a> 60 Russian diplomats). The Post reports that Trump was \u201cfurious<\/a>\u201d when his administration was portrayed as being tough on Russia, and NBC News reports that he instructed<\/a> subordinates never to publicly discuss plans to sell weapons to Ukraine.<\/p>\n This is hardly a \u201cbeyond a reasonable doubt\u201d case that Trump is a Russian agent \u2014 certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen<\/a> or Aldrich Ames<\/a> were. But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden warned during the 2016 campaign, \u201can unwitting agent of the Russian federation\u201d (Morell<\/a>) or a \u201cuseful fool\u201d who is \u201cmanipulated by Moscow\u201d (Hayden<\/a>). If Trump isn\u2019t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n