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In the years that followed, as I reported in The New Republic, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs owned, lived in, and even ran criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.

In addition, according to a Buzzfeed investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold "in secretive all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities." Anonymity and all-cash transactions are the two essential predicates for money laundering. The total value of the condos sold was around $1.5 billion, but that figure did not even include many other Trump-branded properties in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where similar transactions may have been taking place.

Meanwhile, in 1986, Trump met with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin and his daughter Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjöld Library, in a job that was widely known to be a cover for KGB operatives. Dubinina and her father told Trump how much they loved Trump Tower and would love to have him develop a Trump Tower Moscow.

In early 1987, KGB Major Yuri Shvets, based in Washington, returned to Yasenevo, the headquarters for the KGB's (now SVR) foreign intelligence operations, to engage a new recruit from the United States in "active measures," including propaganda and disinformation campaigns against the West. At the time, according to Shvets, in addition to its ongoing war against NATO, the KGB was disseminating active measures designed to disrupt America's alliance with Japan.

In July 1987, a few months later, the KGB orchestrated Trump's first trip to the Soviet Union. According to Shvets, the letter inviting Trump was written at the behest of Ivan Gromakov, a KGB general in the First Chief Directorate's rezidentura in Washington. In late summer 1987, just weeks after returning from the Soviet Union, Trump began an abortive campaign to win the 1988 Republican nomination and set up appearances in New Hampshire for the primary season.

A few days later, Shvets received a cable there instructing KGB agents "to show us examples of craftsmanship in recruitment, in analytical work, examples to follow." This cable pointed to a successful active-measure operation by which full-page ads voicing KGB talking points were printed in the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times under the headline, "There's Nothing Wrong With America's Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can't Cure."

The ads put forth a foreign policy that, for all practical purposes, called for the dismantling of the postwar Western alliance and the end of NATO. They took the form of an open letter to the American people "on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves."

The ad said: "The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help. It's time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours."

The ads were signed by none other than Donald Trump, as part of his abortive presidential campaign. "The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations of that time," Shvets told me in 2020, when I interviewed him for American Kompromat. "It was a big thing--to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trump had one business failure after another in airlines, football, and other sectors as he overexpanded into Atlantic City casinos and accumulated enormous debt. In 1996, Trump visited Russia again, hoping to revive dreams of Trump Tower Moscow.

In 2002, the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm staffed by émigrés from Russia and the former Soviet Union, began to bail Trump out with lucrative schemes that paid huge sums to license his name for luxury condos. The developments were financed by Bayrock and its associates who had ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence and, allegedly, the mob. Among its projects, Bayrock planned to develop the Trump SoHo in New York and other Trump-branded luxury high-rises in Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, and elsewhere. [...]

In April 2016, after Trump had won a series of primaries, he staged his first event presenting his foreign policy at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, hosted by Dmitri Simes, a Russian who worked in U.S. think tanks. Yuri Shvets told me that when he was still in the KGB, he crossed paths with Simes at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow and wanted to recruit him on the spot. "I saw Simes, and he was always lonely," said Shvets. "Americans didn't talk to him. Soviets didn't talk to him."

Shvets discussed the matter with his superior, who wanted to check it out with headquarters. "And the next day, he calls me saying, 'Stand down. He's being taken care of,'" Shvets told me. Translation: There was no need to recruit Simes because he was already a contact of the KGB. Simes currently hosts a political show on Channel One Russia, a state-controlled channel.

Before long, the Trump-Russia alliance went full steam ahead. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with several Russian operatives, including Emin Agalarov and Natalia Veselnitskaya, in Trump Tower in hopes of getting dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That July, at the GOP convention in Cleveland, Team Trump famously weakened the Ukraine plank of the Republican platform, removing language that called for "providing lethal defensive weapons" and replacing it with the phrase "appropriate assistance." On July 27, 2016, Trump asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. He added, "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

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