“Or…my dupe was an innocent dope,” Fanny Brice (Barbara Streisand) followed in that Funny Girl exchange with reporters about her husband’s arrest.
The unfunny Melania Trump is not commenting yet on this story from The Guardian. Nor has Trump himself:
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.
Western intelligence agencies have been aware of the documents for months, the product of “a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.” Independent experts The Guardian consulted deem them authentic.
“A great pulp fiction,” responds Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
More:
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”.
That was obvious to anyone looking closely, and from a lot closer than the Moscow.
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 Kremlin hoped to use Trump’s election to exploit a “deepening political gulf between left and right” as well as the pre-existing anti-establishment mood that grew under Barack Obama. Putin got his wish.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies and author of The Red Web, said the leaked material “reflects reality”. “It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the security council,” he said. “Decisions are always made like that, with advisers providing information to the president and a chain of command.”
He added: “The Kremlin micromanages most of these operations. Putin has made it clear to his spies since at least 2015 that nothing can be done independently from him. There is no room for independent action.” Putin decided to release stolen DNC emails following a security council meeting in April 2016, Soldatov said, citing his own sources.
Former UK ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood, offers that Putin is a more competent version of Trump and also believes himself incapable of mistakes.
Trump is one of the biggest mistakes American voters ever made. At least some of them recognized that by November 2020.