found on Fark.com:
For the “no collusion” crowd, here’s the master list so far:
1) In 1986 Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow.
2) In July 1987 Trump visited Moscow and stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite (which certainly would have been bugged). He mentions this in The Art of the Deal, that the Soviets were eager for him to build a hotel there.
3) Trump came back from that 1987 trip to Moscow and spent $100,000 on full-page ads in three major US newspapers urging America to abandon its allies in Europe and Asia which was a long-standing goal of Soviet (now Russian) foreign policy.
4) Trump then went to New Hampshire a month later and did a campaign rally to see if there was enough support for him to run for President.
5) US intelligence officers reported that the 1987 ad campaign for president led to a champagne-laced celebration in Moscow, with Russian intelligence calling it one of their most successful infiltration/influence campaigns in decades.
6) In 1988 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited NYC to meet with the UN and Presidents Reagan and Bush, with a special stop at Trump Tower for a private meal just with the Trumps.
7) In 1989 Trump publicly floated an interest in buying American Airlines. He was never taken seriously, mostly because he refused to reveal his secret (Russian) lender in the deal.
8) In-wordussian gangster Vyacheslav Ivankov was arrested. Ivankov had a luxury condo in Trump Tower and a personal phone book containing a working number for the Trump Organization’s Trump Tower Residence, and a Trump Organization office fax machine.
9) Due to many bankruptcies and failures in the 90s the Trump Org could no longer borrow from American banks, so in the wake of the 08 crash Trump’s sons admitted that they got most of their funding from Russia. Between 2007-2016 buyers tied to Russia made 86 cash purchases at Trump properties.
10) In July 2008 Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million — well over twice its appraised value. The home was never occupied and was demolished in 2016.
(Later during the 2016 Presidential campaign, for reasons no one can sufficiently explain, Trump’s plane was shadowed by Rybolovlev’s plane at nearly every stop on the campaign trail, touching down within hours of each other at every airport. Yet both men denied ever meeting each other, and insisted that the synchronized flight patterns was just a huge coincidence.)
11) In 2013 Preet Bharara, US Attorney for SDNY, announced charges against a massive Russian organized crime ring operating out of Trump tower.
12) Later in the year Trump arranged and hosted the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Some of the details of this event were later documented in the Steele Dossier. One of the fugitives from the Bharara indictment, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, was a guest of honor.
13) In 2014 Trump inked a secret deal with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to build Trump Tower Moscow and kept it concealed from the American public throughout his Presidential campaign. This building was never even started much less never completed, and it seems more than likely that Putin never had any intention of building it and was just using the revenue potential as a carrot to dangle in front of Trump.
14) Trump announced his candidacy for President on June 16, 2015. Almost immediately European intelligence agencies began picking up evidence of communications between the Russian government and people in Trump’s orbit.
15) In October that year The CIA received intelligence from one of the Baltic states that intercepted audio recordings of Russians discussing funneling money to the Trump campaign.
16) Trump hired Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Felix Sater, Alex van der Zwaan, and Roger Stone to run various aspects of his campaign. All of them were Russian assets or had Russian connections. Manafort, Papadopoloulos, Gates, Flynn, and Stone were all indicted and convicted of crimes relating to the Russian investigation. Cohen was also convicted but for unrelated reasons.
17) Carter Page was already under surveillance by the FBI who opened a FISA warrant on him in 2014 for being an unregistered Russian agent. This FISA would lead to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation when he was hired by the Trump campaign as foreign policy advisor on March 21 2016.
18) Paul Manafort was hired as Trump’s campaign manager, a guy who:
– Took 66 million from Russian intelligence services via Putin-friendly oligarchs.
– Helped Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska install puppet Viktor Yanukovich as the leader of Ukraine in 2010.
– Was paid $1 million a year to help the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) solidify his relationship with Moscow.
– Forced the Republicans to remove references in their platform to defending Ukrainian democracy.
– Gave Russian intelligence agent Konstantin Kilimnik top-secret insider campaign information about voters in 6 swing states so they could run a micro-targeted Facebook campaign to help Trump.
– Offered to run the campaign for free because he’d been well-compensated by Russian intelligence services.
– Was arrested, tried, and convicted of tax evasion. He was later pardoned by Trump.
19) On April 27 2016 Trump made his “America First” speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC, detailing a foreign policy plan that was very friendly to Russia. The event was sponsored by the pro-Russian think tank “Center for National Interest” and in attendance was Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He would later meet with Trump, Jared Kushner, and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in a private meeting.
(During his confirmation hearing for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions lied to Congress that he had not met with any Russian officials during the campaign. Because of this he recused himself from the Russian investigations, a move that angered Trump leading to his firing).
20) Trump kept insisting during the campaign that we should “get along with Russia”. That it would be a great thing for America. He still says this today. He never specifies why.
21) June 9 2016: The infamous Trump Tower meeting between Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnetskaya and Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Don Jr.
(Trump denied any knowledge of this meeting despite it occurring in his own residence and involving the three most important people in his campaign, two of them family relations)
22) A month later cybersecurity services detected a pattern of online traffic between two computer servers belonging to Alfa Bank in Moscow and the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, corresponding with major campaign events and always during office hours in either city, suggesting human communication rather than bots. After news of this broke, the server in Trump Tower immediately shut down.
23) In Aug 2016 Belarussian escort Anastashia Yashukevich recorded Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on his yacht describing a plot to interfere in the 2016 election. There is a video of this that Moscow fought to have removed from YouTube. Yashukevich wrote a letter to American authorities claiming she had 16 hours worth of audio recording. Unfortunately she was in a Thai jail cell at the time — arrested for prostitution — and was eventually released back into Russian custody, where after a few days of silence she resurfaced, recanted all her claims in a press conference, and then disappeared.
24) Russian hacking collective Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC, obtaining sensitive voter profile data, and then ran a Facebook operation targeting 26 million Americans in 6 swing states, helping Trump win those states and the Electoral College by a collective 77,000 votes.
25) Back in March 2016 Russia had successfully hacked the emails of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary’s 2016 campaign, on behalf of Trump. They sat on these emails for months and then suddenly publicized them through Wikileaks on October 7, mere hours after the infamous Access Hollywood tape broke, as an October Surprise counter-narrative.
26) The Russians have, publicly and loudly and proudly, claimed the 2016 election of Donald Trump as their greatest foreign policy success in decades. They still celebrate this stunning achievement today.
27) After failing several security clearances due to close connections with adversaries of the United States, Jared Kushner was rammed through by Trump into becoming Senior Advisor to the President under the extreme objections of every department in the Pentagon. Kushner then tried to set up a secret back channel with Russia that would evade detection from US intelligence agencies.
28) When that didn’t work, Erik Prince — the founder of the private military company Blackwater and brother of Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — traveled to the Seychelles in Dec 2016 and met with Russian officials to attempt to establish another back channel.
29) Trump appointed unregistered Russian agent Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor. It sparked a nigh-universal revolt among the intelligence community and after 22 days of media turmoil Trump was forced to ask Flynn to resign.
30) Trump also appointed former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Back in 2013 Tillerson had won a “Russian Order of Friendship” award for his cooperation with Russia in the oil business. Trump’s initial nominee was Mitt Romney. Tillerson was Moscow’s handpicked choice.
31) In early 2017 Congress passed sanctions with vetoproof supermajorities to retaliate against Russia’s election attack. Trump lobbied to remove or weaken them, then stalled for four days before being forced to sign the bill when he knew he couldn’t block it. After it passed, Trump refused to enforce the sanctions as directed.
32) Six weeks after inauguration Trump fired Preet Bharara for investigating the Russian crime ring operating out of Trump Tower. Two months later on May 9 Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.
33) A day later Trump invited Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to a covert meeting in the Oval Office. After bragging to them that he had fired Comey, Trump then gave them top-secret information on a spy Russia asked about. That spy was then burned.
34) In Mar 2018 Putin won re-election, Trump was the first to call and congratulate him despite being handed a card before the call that said: “Do not congratulate.”
35) Trump spent the rest of the midterm attempting to set up a meeting with Putin at the White House. This meeting never actualized though not because of Congress or the media or any other obstruction. Putin is a paranoid dictator who doesn’t fly and rarely leaves his home country, and if so only to friendly neighboring countries.
36) Trump instead met with Putin at the Russia-USA summit in Helsinki in July 2018. At the summit he openly praised and deferred to Putin while trash talking American intelligence services. He also floated the idea of a friendly exchange/extradition of people that were of interest to each other’s intelligence agencies. Trump called it an “incredible offer”. The Senate voted 98-0 on a resolution condemning the idea.
37) A month later on Aug 8 Senator Rand Paul made a private trip to Russia to hand-deliver a “letter” (ie: possibly stolen sealed documents) to Putin’s intelligence services.
38) Over the course of his term Trump had nearly 20 secret telephone conversations with Putin for which the records no longer exist. But it was easy to tell when he had one of these calls because afterward he would immediately and inexplicably try to gather support for, talk a lot about, or push a seemingly random pro-Russia plank on social media, like allowing Russia back into the G7, or telling France or other European countries to leave the EU, or lifting sanctions on individual oligarchs or Russia itself, or exit and/or break apart NATO, or remove all US troops from Germany and other NATO countries, or blocking military aid to Ukraine. All these policies benefit only Russia and no other country.
39) In Jan 2019 Trump lifted sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska — another move that benefited Putin and Russia and no one else. Deripaska was a mobster who worked with Russian intelligence (and Paul Manafort) to flip and/or install pro-Russian puppets in other countries, including Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine and FBI counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal (who was arrested in 2023 for conspiracy and money laundering).
40) Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was contracted to investigate all this, the incomplete results of which (before William Barr was hired as AG and ordered by Trump to shut it down) were:
– Russian interference in the 2016 election was sweeping and systemic.
– Indictments against 37 individuals including six Trump advisers and 26 Russian nationals, including seven guilty pleas or convictions, and compelling evidence that Trump himself had stonewalled or lied to investigators and obstructed justice on multiple occasions.
– 14 criminal referrals to the Justice Department, where William Barr — who’d helped President George HW Bush cover up the Iran/Contra Scandal — ignored them and let them lapse.
– Five specific examples of Trump criminally obstructing justice in ways that could be easily prosecuted.
41) In May 2019 Rudy Giuliani hired Russian ex-pats Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman to help shake down Ukraine in a not-well-thought-out scheme involving corrupt Russian oligarch Dmytro Firtash that would frame Democrat candidate Joe Biden while also politically destabilize Ukraine in preparation for the forthcoming Russian invasion. When these efforts were thwarted by US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Trump fired her.
42) Two months later Trump made his infamous quid pro quo phone call to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, attempting to blackmail him into framing Joe Biden in exchange for military aid. Zelensky — who ran his own Presidential campaign on a non-corruption platform and was familiar with Russian-style coercion and corruption tactics — did not acquiesce to Trump’s chicanery. This led to Trump’s first impeachment.
43) It should be noted that before these activities the Trump Administration had practically zero interest in Ukraine or its politics. The only other major power that had a high interest in Ukraine was Russia. Trump therefore developed an interest in Ukraine because Putin had an interest in Ukraine. America’s foreign policy toward Ukraine during the Trump Administration was identical to Russia’s foreign policy toward Ukraine (and before Ukraine it was Montenegro, a country that Trump couldn’t find on a map but nevertheless had some harsh opinions about that were word-for-word Russian narratives).
44) During the 2020 election campaign Russia again came to Trump’s aid by hacking Biden’s family members, planting suggestive information that they were corrupt (this disinfo campaign continues to this day as the Republicans find it a useful election narrative). This is a carbon copy of Russia’s smear campaign against Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine in 2010, who lost to pro-Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovich due to vague allegations of corruption.
45) Russian intelligence officers used social media to amplify Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, culminating in the Jan 6 insurrection by Trump supporters who sought the assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The coup failed and Trump was impeached for the second time.
46) On his way out the door Trump pardoned his campaign cronies Manafort, Flynn, Stone, and van der Zwaan, who were all in prison for crimes stemming from Mueller’s Russia investigation.
47) Trump also pardoned lobbyists John Tate and Jesse Benton who were originally convicted of bribery during the 2012 Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. Less than a year later Benton was additionally convicted of laundering Russian money into Trump’s 2016 campaign. Tate was later hired by Trump for his 2024 campaign.
48) Trump also pardoned Paul Erickson for unrelated white collar crimes although Erickson had been associating with Russian honeypot spy Maria Butina at the time.
49) A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went suddenly missing two days before Trump left office. The missing binder has no relation to the classified documents Trump stole and hid at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
50) When Bill Barr and John Durham took multiple taxpayer-funded luxury trips to Italy to interrogate that country’s government about possible FBI wrongdoing in the Hurricane Crossfire investigation of Trump and Russia, they instead discovered evidence of specific “financial crimes” committed by Trump himself that were so serious they aborted the trip and Barr quietly closed the matter.
51) In November 2023 Ukrainian authorities arrested politicians Oleksandr Dubinsky and Andrii Derkach along with former prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk for treason, for colluding with Russian intelligence agencies to aid Rudy Giuliani in framing Joe Biden and his son back in 2019.
