Just when you thought the left couldn’t get any more desperate, they go and try to resurrect the Russiagate narrative that plagued news coverage of former President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
A former KGB spy told The Guardian that the former president was “cultivated as a Russian asset” for over four decades and that Russia’s government was supposedly thrilled when he became president because he engaged in “anti-western propaganda” before entering politics.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin.
The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s.
He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship.
He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Shvets claims Trump was “fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics,” according to the report. The Kremlin believed Trump was “extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.”
The former Russian spy told Unger that Trump first came to the Kremlin’s attention after marrying Ivana Zelnickova. The KGB allegedly cooperated with Czechoslovakia’s intelligence agencies to spy on the former president.
During a 1987 visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg, the KGB supposedly gave him their talking points and encouraged him to go into politics. Trump later took out an ad in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe in which he criticized U.S. involvement in NATO and discussed “why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
Shvets also criticized special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations that Trump colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. He referred to the probe as “a big disappointment” because it was only “an investigation of just crime-related issues” and did not focus on “counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
The article does not provide any concrete evidence backing up the authors’ claims.
During and after the 2016 election season, Democrats and members of the press continued floating unfounded claims that Trump was essentially a Russian asset in the White House in an effort to undermine his presidency. Mueller’s investigation found no such connection between the former president and the Kremlin.
To put it simply, the entire narrative fell apart like a house of cards in a blizzard. In light of this, it is amazing that the left is even trying to give the Russiagate narrative the Lazarus treatment. But, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures, right?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member