A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower — in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
Some people saw a contradiction in Donald Trump Jr.’s 2008 statement that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” on the one hand, and on the other hand the Trumps’ repeated insistence that they have no investments in Russia. The latter may be true (though we don’t know for sure). But what is most certainly also true is that Russians have lots of investments in Trump. In fact, the amount of money that Russian oligarchs and alleged mobsters have put into Trump’s pockets over the years goes into the hundreds of millions of dollars. In some cases they invested in Trump projects. In many cases they bought condos in Trump’s buildings, as Unger documents. There’s the reporter who says Eric Trump told him that that they didn’t need loans from American banks for golf course projects, because “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Then there’s the story of the Palm Beach estate Trump bought for $41 million, then soldfour years later to Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million.
It’s entirely possible that none of Trump’s interactions with Russians over the years stepped over any legal or ethical lines. Maybe he never asked why so many Russians were showering him with money. But we have only scratched the surface of his financial entanglements with Russia. And those entanglements may end up helping explain both why Trump is so solicitous of Vladimir Putin and possibly more. Right now it seems clear his deep Russian connections and those of so many of his associates may have provided the Russians easy access to his inner circle. Believe me, if a Kremlin-connected attorney, a former Russian intelligence officer and a man once thought to be involved in money-laundering called up the Clinton campaign and said, “Hey, can we give you some info?” they wouldn’t have been quickly brought in to meet with Chelsea Clinton, Huma Abedin, and John Podesta.
But with Trump it was easy — Trump Jr. is friendly with the oligarch’s son, Manafort got $17 million from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine, and one Trump adviser after another is connected in some way to Russia, usually through their bank accounts. When some Russians want a meeting with the Trump team, they get it.
There’s one more thing we know: Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation has the resources it needs and won’t be deterred by the spin from the White House and Fox News that this is all much ado about nothing. Among other things, Mueller will probably pry from Trump what he worked so hard to conceal: Not just his tax returns as specific documents, but also the secrets and revelations contained therein, wherever they might lead. In the end, it may all turn out to be squeaky-clean. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
