While it’s already been established that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team had multiple contacts with Russians with connections to the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has no connections to Russia whatsoever, business, personal, or otherwise.
But a recent report from former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst John Schindler exposes the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies have considered Trump a Russian agent for years.
In a column he wrote for the Observer, Schindler notes:
“The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple [intelligence] reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community.”
By the time Trump was on the verge of clinching the Republican nomination, Schindler goes on to explain, numerous foreign intelligence agencies (including the British) were reporting to their American counterparts that Trump was a compromised figure who could not be trusted. That same conclusion had then been reached by the U.S. intelligence community:
“NSA understood quite a bit about Trump’s connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016 it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate’s Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, ‘We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,’ as a senior NSA official put it to me recently.”
That’s right: Donald Trump, according to the NSA, is a Russian agent.
Intercepted communiques from Russia only served to confirm what the NSA had determined:
“‘The Kremlin talked about Trump like he was their boy, and their comments weren’t always flattering.’ The NSA official stated that those above-top-secret reports left no doubt that the Russians were subverting our democracy in 2016—and that Team Trump was a witting participant in the Kremlin’s criminal conspiracy: ‘Trump and his kids knew what they were doing, and who they were doing it with.'”
So the next time you hear Donald Trump deny he has any connections to Russia, keep in mind that he’s been in the pocket of the Russians for years, and the evidence is undeniable.