Trump’s Russia Ties Are an Enduring Mystery

With Donald Trump threatening to retake the U.S. presidency next week in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine, it’s time to take stock of a deeply unsettling fact. After years of investigations by U.S. government bodies from the Justice Department to the FBI to Congress, the American public has no idea if Russian President Vladimir Putin has “something” on Trump—in other words, some compromising information about the would-be 47th president’s past, or what the Russians call kompromat.

Eight years after the FBI first began probing Trump’s Russia connections in mid-2016, national security officials are still puzzled by the former U.S. president’s unrelenting deference to Putin, as well as the enduring mystery of Trump’s decades-old relationship with Russian and former Soviet investors and financiers, some of whom helped save his failing businesses years ago.

So we’re asking the same questions we were asking eight years ago. Is Trump some sort of Manchurian candidate—or in this case, perhaps a Muscovian candidate—controlled by or beholden to Moscow in ways that we don’t know and likely will never know? Or is Trump’s persistently fawning treatment of Putin mainly just a manifestation of his often-expressed admiration of autocrats around the world, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and ​​Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban?

Trump himself has long denied that there is any collusion between him and the Kremlin. But among key U.S. officials who were involved in these earlier investigations, there is no small amount of frustration over this disturbing question.

What has emerged from interviews in recent weeks is an idea of just how ugly and unresolved the disputes remain among the investigators, some of whom are kicking themselves for not going deeper in their probes back then. In many cases, former senior officials at the FBI and Justice Department are still blaming each other for falling short—especially when it comes to the investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller of Russian election interference and ties between Trump officials and the Kremlin during the Trump administration.

“Here we are in 2024, and over the years since the special counsel started their work in 2017, all we have gotten is more questions, more evidence, more situations that point toward very serious questions about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia and specifically with Vladimir Putin,” said Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who first pushed for the Mueller probe, in a phone interview with Foreign Policy. “And none of those questions have ever been answered,” he added. “Likely because there’s never been a thorough and legitimate investigation of them.”

And that’s unlikely to change if Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025.

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Russian interference in the November U.S. election—all apparently in support of Trump—is already more widespread and intense than in 2016, U.S. officials say. Deploying new methods such as deep fakes and paid-for news sources, Russia’s activities “are more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in September.

According to the Washington Post, the official cited the use of artificial intelligence as well as “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and spread socially divisive narratives through major social media and fake websites posing as legitimate U.S. media organizations. Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states “to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump,” the newspaper said.

Perhaps the most crucial swing state that could decide the election is Pennsylvania, and on Oct. 25, U.S. officials announced that “Russian actors” were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in a critical county of that state—in an apparent effort to justify Trump’s regular rants about election fraud.

In late September, the U.S. Justice Department accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to a company that media outlets later identified as Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that has hosted right-wing pro-Trump commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms. The Biden administration also announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns called “Doppelganger.”

According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, “Putin’s inner circle, including [First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office] Sergei Kiriyenko, directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to … secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

“In some respects, this payment of media sources to put out stories is even more brazen than some of the activities we investigated,” said Andrew Goldstein, a former senior Justice Department lawyer and the co-author of a new book titled Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation.

“Americans should be concerned about the fact that Russia interfered in a very substantial way in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and they’re doing it again by every measure we’ve been able to see publicly,” Goldstein added. “People should be continuing to try to get the bottom of that.”

The most urgent issue, these former officials say, is what might happen if Trump gets elected and follows through on his promise to resolve the Ukraine war quickly. Trump has hinted that he will give Putin at least some of what the Russian president wants—in particular, the parts of Ukraine that he has conquered as well as a pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO.

“On a foreign-policy level, that is clearly the biggest concern,” McCabe said. “His promise to end it [the war in Ukraine] in one day can only possibly end it one way, and that will be an absolute travesty that could spell the end of NATO, and on and on. There’s a million other things, though. He’s the only president to ever have repeated one-on-one unmonitored, unwitnessed interactions with Vladimir Putin who then gets up in front of the world and tells them he believes Putin over his own intelligence agency.”

Those conversations with Putin continued after Trump left the presidency, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, titled War. Woodward reported that Trump spoke to Putin as many as seven times after he left the presidency and that at one point, in 2024, Trump told a senior aide to leave the room at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call” with the Russian leader.

According to Goldstein, “given the difference in the candidates’ views of the war in Ukraine, there is an even greater incentive now for Russia to intervene, wanting Trump to win and not wanting [Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala] Harris to win.”

Trump himself, asked to confirm the Woodward account of his alleged conversations with Putin since he left the White House during an interview with Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait in mid-October, responded: “I don’t comment on that. … But I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”

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So what do we actually know about Trump’s ties to Russia? A great deal. But while there is a great deal of smoke, it’s still difficult to find any fire—that is, any kind of hard evidence of a tit-for-tat relationship that would cause Trump to side with Putin. The investigations simply didn’t go far enough to know if there is one.

What’s clear is that some three decades ago, when Trump’s businesses were buckling under failure after failure and repeatedly declaring bankruptcy—causing him to be toxic to U.S. banks—foreign money played a significant role in reviving his fortunes.

In particular, Trump benefited from investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics, some of them oligarchs linked to Putin. The overseas money came initially in the form of new real-estate partnerships and the purchase of numerous Trump condos—but Trump also benefited from help from the Bayrock Group, run by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on unknown sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a massive stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Some of the overseas banks and investment groups that Trump used also had alleged ties to the Kremlin and Russian money launderers linked to Putin, according to U.S. officials.

Trump’s own family has acknowledged his dependence on Russian money, without ever saying where in Russia it came from. In September 2008, at the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in New York, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. … We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump’s former longtime architect, the late Alan Lapidus, confirmed this in a 2018 interview with me, saying that in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles, “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

In the view of U.S. investigators, these historical connections to Russia looked suspicious and helped to explain why during the 2016 presidential campaign, some of the people in Trump’s orbit—including Trump’s son, daughter, and son-in-law—were contacted by at least 14 Russians at a time when it was clear that the Kremlin was interfering in the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. Parts of this relationship were hyped as open collusion by the so-called Steele dossier produced by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, which was later mostly debunked.

All those suspicions in turn led to the FBI probe and then the Mueller investigation, along with a massive bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that identified a close associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort—Konstantin Kilimnik—as a Russian intelligence officer.

“Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of [Russian oligarch] Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” read the 2020 Senate report. The report also delved into Trump’s relationships with women in Moscow during his trips there starting in the mid-1990s.