Trump’s lazy preference for Fox News over the super-secret President’s Daily Brief by our Intelligence Community is well known. He is viewed with undisguised contempt for his venality and stupidity, even by his hand-picked top staff. Trump’s own National Security Council chair observed that, during briefings, the president “wasn’t absorbing a f*****g thing he said,” while his secretary of state called him “a f*****g moron,” a put-down the country’s top diplomat walked back in an unconvincing, pro forma fashion.

Someone as unmotivated and unskilled as Trump ought to have chosen top people for his administration, but he did not. By and large, the working staff of Trump’s campaign-turned-White House consists of fourth-raters deemed too unskilled or simply too dumb to get a job in any administration but Trump’s. Therefore, we have shady political hacks considered untouchably unsavory and crooked by Washington’s shady political class. There are sub-shop managers masquerading as consiglieri. There are soi-disant academics turned Fox News blowhards. There are deviants in league with foreign intelligence. There are of course wife-beaters and related criminals. While it was once fashionable to deride Nixon’s staff as inept bunglers lacking basic ethics, they loom as moral paragons and MacArthur Fellows compared to the doomed crew of room-temperature-IQ wannabes that Trump has collected around himself in Washington.

However, the greatest distinction between Watergate and Kremlingate is the underlying crime. In the case of the former, it was a politically-motivated break-in; with the latter, it appears to be collaboration with a hostile foreign power that may be tantamount to treason. Whatever Nixon’s flaws, he was a veteran and former Navy man who was impeccably loyal to the United States. Trump is a draft-dodger who tears down our national institutions, one by one, while possessing a strange unwillingness to criticize Vladimir Putin—whose nasty crimes abroad have increased since January 2017—under any circumstances, for anything.

But is Donald Trump actually a Russian agent? To the eyes of a veteran counterintelligence hand, the answer to that question is: Not exactly. Trump is far too psychologically unstable and personally compromised to be deemed a good fit for clandestine work by the KGB (or any serious spy service). However, Trump gives every appearance of being a longtime agent of influence, to use the proper Chekist term, that is a person (often a high-flyer in business or politics) to be exploited as a conduit for pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Agents of influence are frequently not on the Chekist payroll, strictly speaking, though they are often given sweetheart deals by Moscow as payment for services rendered. The classic American case was Armand Hammer, a son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa made good with an impressive business empire, Occidental Petroleum; in fact, Hammer’s start in business was arranged by Kremlin spies, and his KGB sponsorship was barely hidden during the Cold War. He was an unfailing public advocate for Moscow and, embarrassingly, his political connections in Washington, which were substantial, ran through Democratic Senators Al Gore Sr. and Jr., who took significant donations from Hammer that counterintelligence circles believe originated in Moscow. It’s best to think of Trump as a markedly less successful and less intelligent Armand Hammer.

Suspicion lingers that in the 1990s the Trump Organization, which failed as a legitimate business, reinvented itself as a money-washing machine for Eastern organized crime. There’s evidence that this is precisely what happened, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for nearly two decades. The Treasury Department’s $10 million fine levied in 2015 on the now-defunct Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City for pervasive violations of the Bank Secrecy Act gives hints that there’s a lot of unraveling being done by Team Mueller as it gets to the bottom of what the Trump Organization really is.

Nevertheless, the question lingers of what exactly the Kremlin had to do with getting Trump into the White House. It’s obvious that, using its intelligence services and fronts like WikiLeaks, Moscow clandestinely inflicted enormous damage on the Democrats and Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s not clear, however, that this was an explicit effort to boost Trump, since the Kremlin seems to have been as surprised as President-elect Trump was himself on the night of November 8, 2016, when he appeared stunned by the realization that he won the election.

What, then, can we say about Trump and the Kremlin? To anyone versed in counterintelligence, particularly involving Russians, Trump seems to have been an on-again, off-again agent of influence for Russian intelligence for at least three decades. We can assume that Kremlin spies long ago took the measure of him and realized he was an erratic figure who could be useful to Moscow, if kept at arm’s length. His desire to run for the presidency was likely deemed useful for Putin and his retinue, but they surely considered it as unlikely to succeed as everyone else did. Donald Trump’s poetic undoing will be his unplanned winning of the White House. That unanticipated victory is bringing him the deep scrutiny by federal authorities that Trump and his flimflam business empire long needed, but never got. Moscow, too, will likely rue the day that they secretly helped get their man in the Oval Office.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3960708&forum_id=2#35926175)