It’s an old axiom. “You make a deal with the devil, don’t be home when he comes to collect”. Trump obviously never heard this simple rule when he was growing up, which is too damn bad since the devil is now knocking at the door. But the funny thing is that in this case, instead of holding a fiery pitchfork, this devil holds an expensive briefcase. And instead of wearing a red cape, this devil dresses in a well cut suit. And Robert Mueller is perfectly comfortable in the role of Donald Trump’s personal dybbuk.
But there’s another person around who obviously didn’t get that memo either, and that person goes under the moniker of Vlad the Imp. Putin’s devil doesn’t have a pair of horns, he sports the worlds worst day glo combover. And he doesn’t clomp around on cloven hooves, he stumbles around in $1,200 Gucci golf spikes. Donald Trump never wanted to be Vladimir Putin’s personal devil, exactly the opposite, he wanted to be his fairy godfather.
But that’s the spot Putin finds himself in. As it becomes clearer and clearer that with or without the collusion and enthusiastic acceptance of the Trump campaign, interfere with our election the Russians did. And as more and more information about their clever games with American social media, including the possibility of spot targeting, the possibility grows that Russian interference may have had a tipping influence on the result.
Why go to all of this trouble in the first place? Look at it this way. In the worst case scenario, no collusion with the Trump campaign, it was still a winning proposal for Putin. If Der Gropinfuror simply kept his word on pulling the U.S. into an isolationist stance, there would be no further pushback on the invasion and annexation of Crimea, and would make it possible for Russia to cobble up border disputes to allow it to eat into the Ukraine even more. It would also place the entire Baltic region at risk of renewed Russian aggression against them. And if Trump blew the NATO pop stand, then the entire alliance would be crippled almost to the point of no longer of being of consequence to Russia.
And in the best case scenario? Not only does Putin get all of the above, but his “useful idiot” is calling the shots. Putin can get his massive reset, normalizing the relationship to pre Crimea levels, without recrimination for his invasion. Maybe he gets his joint task force on cyber threats, and gets to poke around in our closest held secrets, or at least learns more of our internal weaknesses for future exploitation. And he gets all of those cumbersome sanctions lifted, so he can start collecting on that half a trillion dollars of oil exploitation with Exxon and Rexxon.
But all of that is now a far away light, and getting dimmer by the day. Putin was so arrogant in his tactics in interfering, and Trump was so clumsy, that not only haven’t the sanctions been lifted, it’s exactly the opposite, congress got so pissed off that they voted on new sanctions, and made it almost impossible for His Lowness to unilaterally remove any sanctions. And after initially refusing to pledge allegiance to article 5 of the NATO charter, he was forced to reverse course and pledge future support, even to a country that isn’t an active member of NATO, just a “friend”. Worst of all, Putin’s blatantly obvious interference highlighted his shenanigans, quite possibly damaging his attempts to get far right Marine Le Pen elected in France, when they caught him at the same tricks just before French balloting began. Putin’s carefully laid plan has fallen apart like one of Trump’s casino deals.
The big question is, what does Putin do about this now? Forget about the direct consequences of Putin’s sticking his grubby little fingers into our election. The media blowback couldn’t matter less to Putin, unlike his “useful idiot”, Putin does require constant public gratification to feed his ego. This consequence has largely gone unnoticed by the media, but is in fact more critical to Putin and his friends than getting caught with electoral cookie crumbs on their chins. And this consequence affects not only Putin, it affects the only people in the world who can bring Putin down.
As Mueller started to expand his investigation into the Trump-Russia connection to “follow the money”, he ventured into the one area that would affect the people Putin made into billionaires, and the ones with enough fingers in enough pies to be a threat to Putin’s continued existence in power in Russia, the oligarchs. Sniffing for lucre has uncovered more than one money laundering operation for Russian oligarchs trying to find creative ways to spend their ill gotten rubles. This is critical. The last round of congressional sanctions added some previously unnamed oligarchs to the list of people forbidden to blow cash in the US. What good is having several billion dollars if you can only spend it in shitty government shops in Moscow, or have a materialistic trophy wife take you to the cleaners in divorce court?
Right now, these greedy bastards are persona non grata in the US. If they are spending money under the table in the US, they are violating federal sanctions and laws. If Sessions tried to have his Justice Department sweep this under the carpet, he would risk the real threat of congressional oversight, hearings followed by the appointment of another special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute. And. that doesn’t even include the possibility of state Attorneys General launching their own investigations and prosecutions. If you watch Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell regularly, then you are already aware of how deep investigators have already gotten into this tangled web, and how much closer they are coming to completing the links. Remember, Deutsche Bank didn’t get taken out behind the woodshed for short sheeting the interest rates on their savings accounts. And Felix Sator got caught up in a Russian-Mafia scam to con the stock market. To quote the motto from “The X-Files”, “The truth is out there”.
Like Trump, Putin has a persona. But where Trump deals with failure by copping a scoot in bankruptcy court, Putin deals with failure by sending men carrying Glock .9 mm pistols. And like Trump, Putin has a long memory, and never forgets a slight. It is highly unlikely that, considering the facts that he couldn’t even cover his tracks in a lousy election hack, that Putin can find a way to get radioactive poison into Trump’s double bacon cheeseburger. But he doesn’t have to. He can get his revenge on Trump in the only way that Trump would feel was worse than his own death. Putin can kill Trump’s reputation. Trump would rather die himself than live without his ego, and to hear the word “loser” attached to his name.
During the election, Trump thought that Wikileaks was right up there with Breitbart and the Drudge Report as the best investigative journalism on the planet. How would he feel to wake up one morning and find that Wikileaks had done a dump of Russian files that validated some of the critical accusations of the infamous Steele dossier, maybe even a couple of gif’s of Trump with a fishbowl over his head? Or how about a copy of Trump’s signed and dated letter of intent to go ahead with the Trump Moscow project while he was denying having any interests in Russia? Maybe some time and date stamped internal memo’s and e-mails on the Russian side leading up to the June 9th Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnetskiya, confirming Trump Jr’s knowledge of, and thirst for dirt on Hillary, with a precis of what they should offer him?
I said it at the top of the diary, “don’t be home when he comes to collect”. But if he shows up at the door of your hideout suite, dressed in a waiters uniform and holding a 12 pack of Coke and a bag of cheddar cheese chips, you’re screwed.