I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

Apr 2, 2025, 7:59 AM

I also think it may not matter anymore.

Anybody who doesn't think Russia did not have Donald by the short hairs is, sorry, either a slavish partisan or someone who hasn't done the math. Donald went bankrupt four times in the '90's and Western banks would no longer lend to him, so he travelled to Russia, and almost instantly was able to secure a $300+ million loan from Deutsche Bank's private side, which was astounding because he'd defaulted on a $45 million loan from their public side just a few years earlier...and then sued the bank. Clearly Donald had significant backers in Russia, which means "oligarchs" because in 1990's Russia (and even today, actually) they were the ones with the money. These guys had won the knife fights for carving up the various public institutions in post-Soviet Russia like Gazprom and Aeroflot, and were now looking to stash their ill-gotten gains in Western banks...usually illegally. Laundering Russian assets was an immense multi-billion-dollar cottage industry at the time and it came out in 2018 Deutsche Bank's private side had a huge hand in the so-called "Global Laundromat", and even Don Junior told a reporter in 2014 that Donald now had access to "infinite funds" from Russia. And Donald's once-struggling and wildly overpriced properties, which native New Yorkers increasingly wouldn't touch with a fork, began to fill up with Russian oligarchs, international arms dealers, and Saudi oil sheiks...even though a shocking number of these (more than a third, apparently) were never occupied by their owners. Then again, flip properties often aren't intended to be used as homes...but as assets.

A reporter from the (conservative-leaning despite its name) Tallahassee Democrat told me around then that it was pretty much an open secret in Florida's journalism world that Donald was almost certainly money laundering for the Russians using all the old classic standbys, namely "flips" for overpriced real estate and all-cash businesses like casinos, hotels, and golf courses. (Anybody who ever watched Ozark can tell you how that game works...and Donald's easily "launderable" business interests were of a scale that Marty never even aspired to.)

Putin was also old-school KGB. Specifically, he was First Directorate - their foreign intelligence division - and operated out of Dresden, Germany, working with the Stasi - East Germany's secret police, who were savage even by secret police standards - recruiting insurgents for violent far-left organizations in Europe like the Red Army Faction (which spun off into Antifa here in the US...yes, Putin had a hand in starting Antifa!) and the Red Brigades. Compromising people was what the KGB did...and indeed the "Kremlin Papers" leak in 2021 that appeared when verified Russian documents were published by The Guardian confirmed that Putin had indeed aided Trump's presidential run in 2016...and had "kompromat" - compromising material - on Donald. And Donald's behavior during his first term regarding Russia and Putin is now a matter of record.

But that was then, and this is now. And now that Donald has solidified his hold on both the GOP Congress and stuffed the DOJ with his own loyalists, and his MAGA base has coalesced into a cult of personality that would have made Jim Jones wince in envy, I wonder: does any leverage Putin has on Donald even matter anymore? Because 2025 again-president Donald has access to billions-plus revenue sources completely independent of his once-overwhelming loans, and Trump 47's Congress won't impeach him and his DOJ won't prosecute him for anything either, period, no matter what evidence the Kremlin might think to leak. And in this era of deepfakes even the most compromising pee tape imaginable can be denied and frankly, MAGA wouldn't care if it was real anyway. So if Putin thinks he has Donald on a leash, he may discover that Donald has now chewed through it...and Donald Trump is 100% a transactional and fickle creature loyal to no one. It may also have occurred to him just how many domestic institutions and Western and Pacific Rim powers with the means now have powerful motive to remove him by any means necessary; my own belief is, if Donald doesn't change course and quickly he'll be dead within the year. Power defends itself - always.

And while he has no love for Zelenskyy - clearly! - Putin is also now making him look bad. Not only has Putin bargained with the US in complete bad faith regarding Ukraine, Donald also thought he had a hold on civilian-infrastructure attacks arranged with Putin...which Putin then broke just three hours later.

I'm not sure how this ends. But I also don't think Putin knows either. And the only things you can reliably say about Donald Trump is, he is consistently unreliable...and he hates looking bad. And his ire towards Russia appears to be growing. And I ran across this today and found this...interesting. We have certainly never heard these kind of rumbles from Trumpworld before.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/finland-s-president-i-just-met-donald-trump-russia-is-running-out-of-time/ar-AA1C4mSY

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Mixed. It's cold as #$^%. It snowed again here last night. I lived in Wisconsin back when I was a kid, as well as the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan...and South Dakota is every bit as cold if not worse. We were also in a hurry to get moved because the company had the moving company coming in like, a week at that point, and so we never came out here; instead we did a video tour of some rental properties we were interested in including this really awesome old Victorian that was built in 1923. My wife loves old houses, and this one was very nice (and shockingly cheap, which should have been a red-flag), and within just a few blocks of downtown, including that really nice Falls Park that seems to be the only picture of Sioux Falls anyone ever takes, and which admittedly does make the one with the same name in Greenville look kind of precious.

Turned out the house was vacant because it was right across the street from one of the local halfway houses in town, and our so-helpful real estate agent seems to have forgotten to point the camera in that direction when he was doing the exterior tour. So there's something like 70 "rehabilitating" former cons living just across the street from us. Fortunately they're in lockdown after 9pm (or they're back in jail!) and I'm a Very Big Dude who still has a decent Mean Bouncer stare; I've had to use it more than a couple of times already. And we already survived Detroit and Toledo - which actually was way worse, Detroit's cleaning up these days. whereas Toledo is still 90% hood - and I've got a couple of shotties loaded with #4 Buck close to hand. If someone decides to relapse they're not going to have a good day. It definitely makes for Not Boring neighbors - there was a hunt for a stolen Harley that mysteriously appeared on our street a couple days ago - and the non-criminals around us are fairly hardcore; our next-door neighbors on one side are TSA agents and armed to the teeth themselves. No one has cared to test them either, and they've been here 16 years.

But other than a couple of bad spots in town and this giant trailer park down near the river, the town itself is really well-kept and well-run...and the traffic is, like, absolutely precious compared to Detroit. I keep looking around when I jump on the 229 that loops around the town because the road is usually so wide-open it just feels wrong, and your mind just rejects that there could be that few cars on a major highway because it's never seen it before. Downtown is great, ton of great restaurants and bars, free parking on weekends and most weeknights, a ton to do.

The downside is - except for Sioux City (which is in Iowa maybe an hour south of Sioux Falls, South Dakota...I know, confusing) there is nothing within four hours of here and I cannot emphasize enough how spectacularly boring Iowa is. I'm really eager for it to warm up, though, because I'm dying to take some road trips to the western part of the state because there's some stuff there - the Black Hills, Deadwood, Badlands National Park - that I really want to see. There's also this underground physics lab in an old gold mine that does dark matter experiments and suchlike and because I'm a tech geek I'm dying to get in there too.

I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

Re: I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

It's obvious, but to a crowd that loves dictators, they don't care.***

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LSS.....

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My Grandparents immigrated to Toledo

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Here. Read up.......

On the money laundering......

Re: I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

Another example^^ of a MAGA who can't refute the claim through argument...

Re: I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

Re: I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

Re: I absolutely think Russia has "kompromat" on Donald

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