Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.
By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.
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The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.
There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.
The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.
“impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”
Certainly not news after the fiasco at Helsinki in 2018. Leak the kompromat, Vlad ... :smirk: — 180 Proof
"I feel you are going to lose the election. I feel you are actually losing touch with your own base. The only reason you won last time, Mr. President, is because of the 'grab them by the pussy' comment. It actually scared you enough to listen to Kellyanne [Conway]. And for the last several weeks you behaved yourself and won by a hair. This time it's different. You cannot wait until the end. I think that if you wanted to you could walk into a second term, COVID and all. You could go down in history as an amazing president and it's yours for the taking. But it's about you, and you're turning off enough people to lose this election." — Bill Barr (fmr AG tr45h admin, RESIGNED), Spring 2020, excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It, by Carol Leonnig & Philip Rucker
The Georgia runoffs later confirmed the election results, though.I don’t think we can say with certainty who won. I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory. The only remedy is a new election. — Cleta Mitchell
A clock that never hits midnight is broken. — NOS4A2
A draft report of the Republican-backed review of 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest county — which critics derided as a shambolic stunt aimed to further vote-rigging conspiracies peddled by former President Donald Trump — has in fact confirmed the winners, the county said.
The much-delayed report from Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm whose owner had spread pro-Trump conspiracies, had been repeatedly hyped up by Trump himself.
But the draft “confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” Maricopa County’s official account tweeted Thursday night. — Maricopa County recount confirms Biden's election win
...for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election.
Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials. — NYT
It’s a kind of racket. If our predictions don’t come to fruition we can say our predictions altered the course of events. Rinse, repeat. Bush acolyte David Frum did the same in his book “Trumpocracy”, which warned about Trump’s push towards illiberalism. He never warned that the push towards illiberalism would come from him and people like him in the form of covid fascism. — NOS4A2
Certainly not news after the fiasco at Helsinki in 2018. Leak the kompromat, Vlad ... :smirk: — 180 Proof
What do people think about Trump being the Republican candidate in 2024? — ssu
No one cares what this deranged imbecile has to say anymore. — Xtrix
So Biden won. But it wasn't in the ballpark of Reagan winning over Mondale in '84 or Roosevelt winning over Landon in '36. — ssu
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