Your Turn gives Beast Inside members a chance to weigh in with questions and perspectives about what’s happening in the news. Thank you to member Bill Ratner for this week’s question on who might have incriminating dirt on President Trump.
Adam Davidson at the New Yorker published an article detailing the possibilities of who may have kompromat on Donald Trump. His article was the first time I’ve seen a detailed and sensible breakdown of how kompromat works on a global scale ... and how logic would dictate that there most probably is serious kompromat on Trump Sr., and Jr., along with other Trump Org. collaborators ... [So] who may have serious kompromat on Trump & other individuals at Trump Org.?
Ever since a former British spy dropped allegations of an infamous “pee tape” held by Russian intelligence, the world has been dying to know who, if anyone, has the goods on Trump.
ADVERTISEMENT
First off, what’s kompromat? It’s a Russian word meaning compromising information of the kind that’s usually included in blackmail. Russia’s intelligence services are notorious for using kompromat either to publicly discredit a target of their ire or privately coerce them into doing their bidding.
On the public side, you can see an example of it at work in the sex tape, conveniently broadcast on national TV, showing a political rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin having an affair with a younger woman in a Moscow apartment. On the private side, former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin detailed how the Soviet Union would use similar techniques to turn Western diplomats into spies for the Kremlin. The KGB would hire women to lure Western diplomats into an affair, have the woman feign a pregnancy, and then enlist the diplomat’s help in arranging a fake, illegal abortion.
So who might have kompromat on Trump? Before we assume the premise of the question, it’s important to point out that thus far there’s no concrete evidence that such material exists—only allegations. We know that Trump is quite fond of Putin. We know that members of his campaign had eyebrow-raising interactions with members of Russian intelligence and were open, at least in principle, to receiving help from the Russian government.
The most direct allegations concerning Trump kompromat came from the infamous Steele dossier, compiled by a former British spy at the behest of an opposition research firm. Christopher Steele, who had worked in Russia for MI6 and handled former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, canvassed “several knowledgeable sources” from his old line of work who allegedly told him Trump had been filmed carrying out “perverted sexual acts,” in a hotel room during a 2013 trip to Moscow, he wrote in his dossier. Specifically, Steele says multiple sources told him Trump hired a number of prostitutes to “perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him” in the room where his hated rival, Barack Obama, had stayed during a previous Russian trip. Trump has called Steele a “lowlife” and dismissed the allegations in the dossier as “phony & discredited.”
The FSB or Federal Security Service is the Russian intelligence agency alleged to have secretly recorded the incident at the Moscow hotel. Russia has a number of intelligence agencies, including the civilian SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), which carries out espionage abroad under diplomatic and non-official cover, and the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate), which performs a similar function for the military.
That the FSB might possess some secret Trump kompromat is at least consistent with its portfolio for domestic security and intelligence operations—it’s sort of like Russia’s FBI. The lines of responsibility between the various intelligence agencies aren’t always clear and they often compete against each other. But the FSB is by far Russia’s most politically powerful spy shop because its portfolio offers the opportunity to influence domestic politics —just ask its former director, Vladimir Putin—and it is often entrusted with some of Russia’s most sensitive operations.
There’s also the question of whether the Kremlin’s covert outreach to the Trump campaign in 2016 could, in and of itself, offer Russia blackmail leverage over Trump and his associates. The Steele dossier and Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling have yielded several examples of outreach from alleged Russian government operatives to the Trump campaign: Natalia Veselnitskaya’s offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton as a gift of the Kremlin; the mysterious tip-off from Professor Joseph Mifsud to a Trump staffer that Russia had Hillary Clinton’s emails; and the SVR’s courtship of Carter Page. We know some of what transpired in those relationships but the parties on Russia’s end of those transactions likely know a lot more.
Other have theorized that, in addition to his personal life and political campaign, Trump’s business dealings in Russia could’ve been a target for Russian spies seeking blackmail material. Mueller’s investigators appear to be thinking along similar lines and have reportedly asked about Trump’s efforts to brand a Trump Tower skyscraper in Moscow in 2015 and 2016. The effort to brand a Russian Trump Tower, detailed in a lengthy Buzzfeed investigation, included outreach by Trump fixers Michael Cohen and Felix Sater to Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, since-sanctioned Russian banks, and a mysterious unnamed former GRU spy. Trump Tower Moscow never became a reality, though, leaving those many shady relationships and whatever material they might yield mostly still hidden.
When it comes to theorizing about Russian blackmail, it’s important to remember two things.
First, while many of the other, less salacious allegations contained in the Steele dossier have been verified by U.S. intelligence, so far there’s no corroborating evidence of the alleged Trump sexual indiscretions in Moscow. We know that Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant at the time of the allegations but there are no witnesses or leaks from U.S. intelligence indicating the infamous “pee tape” is real.
Second, kompromat is in the eye of the beholder. You can’t be blackmailed for things you’re not ashamed of—and when it comes to Donald Trump, his capacity for shame appears to be severely limited. Trump has already been revealed boasting about sexual assault in the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Two of his alleged former mistresses, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, have already come forward to offer lengthy accounts of the affairs. Stormy, in particular, has gone into excruciating and punitive detail about Trump’s sex life.
None of that discounts the prospect that Russia may have succeeded in obtaining embarrassing material on Trump, but the fact that none of the many revelations about Trump have succeeded in derailing his presidency so far suggests that any dirt Moscow may have might not give it as much leverage as it might think.
