Earlier today, lecorbeauriant posted a diary which posits that Melania’s first chance meeting with Donald Trump may not at all have been by chance. What The Laughing Crow neglected to mention is that he is not speaking as a layman. As a matter of fact, he can legitimately claim expertise in the matter. He worked for the NSA, not as a file clerk or keypunch operator (it was in the seventies) but as an analyst, monitoring Soviet Russia. I happen to know that because he is also my husband. His expertise in the matter enables him to assess the likelihood that intelligence is plausible even if unverifiable. It puzzles me that so many people are unwilling to consider the possibity.
If you consider Trump’s narrative at the time, this possibility is indeed plausible. I’m borrowing heavily, if shamelessly from Kossack SwedishJewfish, who in an excellent diary did exhausting research on Trump’s activities during the nineties, and for which I am exceedingly grateful. This information is relevant even if her focus differs from mine.
In the years leading up to the time Trump met Melania, he had suffered numerous financial setbacks, due to poor judgment and incompetence. From the beginning, he sought the approval and acceptance of elite Manhattan society. To this end, posing as his own publicist, and under the alias John Barron, he would frequently call Liz Smith and others and regale them with absurd tales of his conquests with a dazzling list of celebrities and socialites, which they would later deny had taken place. However, despite his constant, over-the-top efforts at self promotion, he seemed to have established a reputation within Manhattan society as a failure, both in business and in romance. From SwedishJewfish’s Diary:
1989-1995 just so happens to be the same time period in which Donald Trumps world and empire was falling apart at the seams. In the beginning of the decade he was facing the end of his first marriage and a looming court battle. Despite his purportedly active dating life, by many accounts Trump was being rejected by many, if not most, of the women he pursued-including Carla Bruni and Jill Hearth. Marla Maples, after years of being the secret mistress and repeated rounds of being dumped and publicly humiliated by Trump, was starting to lose her patience. And the big gamble he took in Atlantic City was, by all accounts, failing miserably-a direct result of his jaw droppingly awful business practices and general incompetence. In 1991, his Taj Mahal Casino filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1992, he again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, this time on his Trump Plaza Hotel (also in Atlantic City), at the time owing $550 million dollars. Recall that he would report an almost 1 billion dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns, according to the copies obtained by the New York Times. Indeed, the early 90’s were not a very good era for Donald Trump.
Also, according to the Daily Beast’s Michael Gross:
In 1999, he told me that in 1995 he’d been worth about negative $900 million. I didn’t have the chops to think to ask for his tax returns.
The Gross article I linked to is interesting all by itself. He interviewed two people who had first-hand knowledge about parties Trump hosted where he offered his guests cocaine and “very young models.”
Also at this time, Trump had a lousy reputation with women. From SwedishJewfish’s diary:
“In all honesty, Donald is completely awkward with women,” a Trump insider told the New York Daily News in a July 2016 interview. “He never developed small talk. He’s not very social. He doesn’t have any friends. Plus, he’s completely paranoid about venereal disease and AIDS.”
All of this was undoubtedly very useful information for the Russians. If they were looking for someone to blackmail with kompromat, Trump would be low hanging fruit. But should they decide to make use of him, they would need a way to keep even closer tabs on him. Enter Melania.
According to Wikki, Melania met Trump at a party in 1998. By this time he had separated from Marla in 1997, but the divorce wasn’t final until 1999. He had brought Celina Midelfart with him to the party, but owing to her status as a businesswoman and cosmetics heiress and not a golddigger, she was most likely there to network for her business rather than as his companion. Otherwise, his flirting with Melania and asking for her phone number might have spelled trouble. Melania refused to give him her phone number however, and instead asked him for his. He was so eager to contact her he gave her all of them. According to the NY Daily News:
"The office, Mar-a-Lago, home in New York, everything," she told the magazine.
For a guy who wanted people to believe he had to beat Madonna and Carla Bruni off of him with a stick, he sound’s kind of desperate, doesn’t he?
Bear in mind, according to Wikki, Melania speaks 6 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and of course, her native Slovene. Why? And even more telling, why doesn’t she also admit to speaking Russian? My favorite spook assures me that anyone raised in an Eastern Bloc country at that time would almost certainly speak Russian. That’s like believing that Putin needed an English interpreter despite having served in the First Directorate of the KGB, and later as Director of the FSB. He doesn’t speak English? Doubtful, indeed.
Also, she had to redirect her personal website to Trump’s when it was discovered she had falsely claimed to have a degree in architecture and design from the University of Ljubljana. Her 2016 bio for the Republican National Convention made the same false claim. Why would she publicly make a claim that was so easily de-bunked once she was in the limelight? Had she forgotten that it was what she’d been using as a cover to conceal her actual occupation?
So, knowing all this about Trump, and knowing how easily he might suit their purposes, it would be quite simple for the FSB to place Melania in close proximity to Trump and see if he would take the bait. Which he did. Hook line and sinker. And once she had him, so did they.