One doesn't like to say it
but there is a Russian asset
in the White House.
That man, who certainly isn't pulling
any punches,
is journalist
and author Craig Unger.
He's worked for Vanity Fair
and Esquire but most recently
he's written a book called 'House of Trump,
House of Putin'.
I got the chance to sit down
with Craig to discuss the book where he lays
out Trump's connection to Russian organized
crime via money laundering rackets,
the origins of the strategy
Russia used to attack the U.S.,
and what the ordinary citizen like you
and me can do to fight this.
You call the cultivation of Donald Trump one of
the greatest intelligence operations in history.
You also see that he could maybe unwittingly
be a Russian agent.
Can you explain what that distinction is.
Right. Well this appears to be an operation
that stretched over many decades.
More than 35 years
and I think it began organically nearly
as money laundering
and evolved into something else.
And in 1984 Donald Trump
met with a man named David Bogatin who was
tied to the Russian mafia
and Bogatin and came in
with six million dollars,
that's equivalent of about 15 million today,
and said, "I'll five condos".
That according to the state
attorney general's office of New York
was laundering money.
It was a transaction that was all
cash and bought through anonymous
shell companies. That Kind of
transaction happened again
and again. And if it had only happened two
or three times I think you could make a strong
case that we don't know what's going through his mind.
But there has been investigations
that found at least 13 hundred
similar transactions,
all cash transactions,
in which anonymous shell companies
are buying Trump real estate.
That is probably billions
of dollars.
And you know the legal concept known
as willful ignorance
or deliberate ignorance
and I think a good case can be made
that there's a real pattern here
and that Trump was pretty much
aware of going on on some level
because it was so highly profitable.
Can you explain just a basic level what
money laundering is?
Money laundering is essentially taking
dirty money often from organized crime
or flight capital, and Russia has
had roughly a trillion dollars
in foreign capital since Vladimir
Putin has been president, and
entering into the western world making
it legitimate.
Washing through banks.
So real estate is a terrific way
to launder lots of money
and the Russians figured that out.
And so did Donald Trump.
So why is real estate in particular so fantastic
for this?
Well the regulations are incredibly
lax. That is it is illegal
to buy a condo here in Manhattan
all cash through a shell company
and no one will know that you own it.
So you lay out the case that.
Donald Trump's ties to Russians started long
before 2016.
Right. And this is in the Russian mafia
and I think an incredibly important thing to understand
is that the Russian mafia is very
different from the Italian American Mafia we're
more familiar with here in the United States.
And the big difference is the Russian mafia
are state actors they are part
of Russian intelligence.
I interviewed General Oleg Kalugin
who'd been head of counterintelligence for the KGB
and when I asked him about the Russian mafia
he said, "Oh that's just another branch of the KGB.
So when you unpack what really
was going on.
That you had Russian mobsters buying
into Trump Tower 35
years ago.
That they continued to have a presence
on and off laundering vast
amounts of money through Trump real estate living
in Trump Tower. The FBI searching
and finding that Russian mobsters
lived there and all the way up to 2013.
And you have a huge bust
of a gambling ring
with Russian mobsters in Trump Tower.
And when you understand that these
people are tied to Russian intelligence
they have a line straight into the Kremlin
and they are living in the home of the
president of the United States that
is a massive security problem.
So how much of this do you think is actual
long term strategy coming from
Vladimir Putin himself?
And how much of it is
this has been an ongoing operation of Russian
intelligence to try to destabilize the
United States?
Well by 2013 you see
things really start to kick in.
And at that time that was sort of interesting
the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the
Russian military general Gerasimov
put out a paper that sometimes known as the
Gerasimov doctrine.
And he proposed a policy of hybrid
warfare.
At the time he was saying that the Russian military
is absolutely no match for
the American military.
And that's completely true
but he was saying it really didn't matter
because massive land invasions
and old-fashioned wars generally
don't yield very significant results.
Look at what the United States ended up
with Vietnam.
Nothing. So he proposed a strategy
of hybrid warfare that included
cyberwarfare media manipulation.
You see this massive assault
on the truth and it is right out
of the Kremlin playbook.
The kind of lies Trump tells
again and again
and again you know you feel you
have to respond to them
but when you do it you're playing his game.
You're being distracted by him.
You're not going after your own agenda.
Trump is wealthy. He was born wealthy,
he inherited wealth.
Why would somebody like that risk
all of this to get involved in my
laundering?
Well he's a very odd personality.
But you see ties to organized crime
going way way back in the Trump family.
His father, who was
a real estate developer in Queens
and Brooklyn, had ties to the Russian mafia.
When Trump himself started out
he also had ties to the Mafia
and his lawyer was Roy Cohn
who was famous dark prince
of the McCarthy era.
And Roy Cohn was also a lawyer
for the Italian American Mafia
which was just about to start partnering
with the newly arrived Russian mafia.
So I think in a way this is where
the thing started off
with Trump getting involved
with that and that's been the source
of his whole fortune.
They own him.
He was four billion dollars
in debt after his Atlantic City
when he overexpanded there
and they came to his aid
with a completely different business plan for
him.
Now one of the other criticisms of
the Mullar investigation comes from people who
say, "Oh it's a McCarthyite
type thing that's happening in America right
now and there is Russophobia
occurring". But I think that you make
a clear case that we're talking about Russian
mafia actors
and state actors.
It's not just the Russians in general
as the problem.
This is about an assault
on American sovereignty.
You know I even find the word meddling
trivializes everything meddling is
what your in-laws do
with your marriage.
This was an assault on America's sovereignty
by tampering
with our electoral system.
Part of the challenge of this whole scandal
is it is it breaks so many taboos.
I mean one doesn't like to say
it but there is a Russian asset
in the White House.
The Russians were able to install
their man in the White House without
firing a single shot.
In many ways I think this is a global conflict
and it is important to see it that way.
We see Russia doing the same kind of
techniques all over Europe
and they fostered this wave
of right wing anti immigrant populism
as a way of undermining European
and Western unity.
Putin wants to destroy the Western alliance.
And he has done a pretty good job of it
so far.
I think it calls for a complete overhauling
of our election rules
like the Citizens United rule
the way Super PACs are run.
I think these investigations will be going on
for several years.
What can the average person who is angry
about this do about it? Vote.
Everyone has to vote.
And the voter participation has been terrible.
And it got much better for the midterms
but it was crucial. If the Democrats
lost the midterms I think we would have faced
another two years of Trump without
the Democrats having any weapon whatsoever
to fight back with.
Until the Democrats come back
Trump has effectively neutralized
checks and balances
and what I look forward to is the Democrats getting back
in power
and fighting back. Because this
is not the kind of democracy
I grew up in.
That's it for this week's Russia desk.
Thank you so much for watching.
Be sure to share this video
with you liked it.
Do you have a story about Russia that you want us to
cover? Let us know in the comments
and we'll maybe make it into an episode.
Thanks for watching guys,
see you soon!