*Published with the generous permission of Teri Kanefield. Read all of her writing here.
By Teri Kanefield
In June of 2020, Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant, dropped a “bombshell.” His revelation: The owner of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, paid $5 million each to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden as a bribe in exchange for Biden, then Vice President, stopping an investigation into Burisma. Smirnov’s allegation became the basis for the Republican’s Biden impeachment inquiry.
The impeachment inquiry blew up this week when the DOJ charged Smirnov with lying about the entire Burisma-bribery scheme. Yup.
According to the indictment, he made the whole thing up. We then learned from the DOJ that Smirnov had ties to Russia.
Some headlines painted the Republicans as “useful idiots,” like this:
The Smirnov Affair: MAGA Republicans Are Useful Idiots for Russian Intelligence
How GOP lawmakers got caught doing Moscow’s dirty work.
And this:
Tucker Carlson joins long line of ‘useful idiot’ journalists helping tyrants
This Washington Post piece refers to Congressional Republicans as “incredulous.”
A look at the facts and history shows that the Congressional Republicans are not useful idiots. They are not being manipulated by the cunning Russians. They are Putin’s willing partners. They share Putin’s goals and political views and use the same tactics.
The Republicans hated the former Soviet Union because, in the former Soviet Union, the government owned all the nation’s resources and industries. The Republicans believe all (or almost all) resources and industries should be privatized.
When the Soviet Union broke up, the Russian Federation was established as a constitutional republic, but before democracy (and rule of law) could take hold, there was a wild rush to control (grab) the nation’s industries and resources. The people who successfully grabbed the resources and industries became billionaires. These new billionaires then hand-picked the nation’s leaders. (If you control everything, you can do that.)
The new Russian billionaires are usually called oligarchs, but basically they’re gangsters who got rich by stealing.
Now that a few wealthy people own all of Russia’s resources and pull the strings behind the scenes, lots of Republicans feel differently about Russia.
One way to understand people like Peter Thiel and Paul Ryan is that they believe a few wealthy people should control the nation’s resources and industries and they believe these billionaires should be able to pull the political strings. They offer a few theories for why this is good and sensible. One theory is the “makers and takers” theory which holds that a few clever people drive the economy with their innovation and business brilliance. These “makers” create jobs and wealth for a lower class of people called “takers,” who are generally depicted as lazy and immoral. The trickle-down theory similarly holds that if you remove regulations and let clever people do their thing without limitations, they will create wealth and jobs for everyone.
People who hold to the makers-and-takers theory have a hierarchical worldview. They think nature forms a hierarchy and some people are naturally at the top. While most of us see regulations as creating fairness so people can’t get rich from stealing, those with a hierarchical view believe that regulations take from the competent and give to the undeserving.
The way to understand Donald Trump is that he wants to be like Putin and control the oligarchs.
It’s about Grift and Greed
We can start the story of the Republican-Russian partnership with Semion Mogilevich.
Mogilevich got rich as a young man in the Soviet Union scamming his fellow countrymen who wanted to emigrate. He offered to sell their assets and send them the money, but instead, he pocketed their money. His victims had left the country so they had no legal recourse. It made no sense (and was immediately suspect) for a person in the former Soviet Union to have millions of dollars, so Mogilevich needed to launder his money. (Money laundering = hiding the origins of illegally gotten money by putting the money through a series of complex transactions.
In 1984, Mogilevich sent an operative to buy luxury condos in Trump Tower. Foreigners, by this time, discovered that money could easily be laundered through US luxury real estate. Trump (and his agents) didn’t inquire into the origins of the money. Trump sold Mogilevich 5 condos for $6 million in cash, and Trump personally attended the closing.
It’s about Grift and Greed and White Supremacy
Timelines are always helpful. I will color in red where America’s far-right wing’s political views align with Putin’s.
In about 2000, Russian oligarchs begin “beckoning” (Timothy Snyder’s word) to America’s far right-wing, presenting Russia as the savior of white majority rule.
The message got through. In February 2001, David Duke said Russia was “the key to white survival.”
Also by the early 2000s, Trump was considered uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks, and showed no inclination or capacity to repay the money. He was such a bad credit risk that no American bank would touch him.
Then the money started pouring in from Russian billionaire-gangsters.
In 2002, after Trump went belly up in Atlantic City, he was bailed out by Bayrock, a real estate development company with ties to Mogilevich. Bayrock moved into Trump Tower. Felix Sater, a convicted Russian mobster and money launderer, was senior advisor to the Trump Org. and partnered with Bayrock.
Also in 2002: the Russian Imperial Movement, an ultranationalist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist far-right organization was founded in Russia. The idea, embraced by Putin, was to return Russia to its former glory as a great imperialist nation by “returning and reinforcing ancestral Russian lands. “ (Putin wanted to Make Russia Great Again.)
In 2004, Paul Manafort, a long-time Republican operator and later Trump’s 2016 campaign manager began strategizing on behalf of the Russian-backed Ukrainian President Yanukovych. Russia installed Yanukovych as a puppet leader in Ukraine. In 2014, the Ukrainians didn’t like having a Russian-installed president and expelled him.
Somewhere along the way, Manafort acquired $66 million. Manafort’s daughter called it “blood money.” Trump appointed him as campaign manager in his 2016 election. Manafort was later indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering, was found guilty of 8 counts, and was then pardoned by Trump.
Between 2002 – 2016, Russians invested one hundred million in Trump’s properties. Trump needed money and the Russian bandits had money they needed to launder. It was a match made in heaven. ❣️
2008: Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a house from Trump for many millions more than the property was worth. (Trump didn’t want anyone to know that the buyer was Russian.)
February 2013, Trump Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” (Gee what do you know, the Russians just keep giving us money 🤷♂️ how lucky of us!)
In this blog post, “The Perennial Problem of Demagogues,” I wrote that Trump’s pseudo biography that fueled his rise in American politics was that he was a “successful businessman.” Without Russian money propping him up, he would not have been able to pull off that deception.
It’s also about Christian Nationalism
2013: Russia enacted anti-homosexual legislation. Putin presented himself as the opponent of Western immorality and debauchery and a defender of Christian values.
2013-2014: Putin calls his “anti-gay” campaign “a return to traditional values.”
2014: Here is how Pat Buchanan responded:
Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
Putin is plugging into some of the modern world’s most powerful currents. Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated. He is also tapping into the revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.
In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelicism Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a “culture of death.”
What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?
The West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide . . .
The way to end the “West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution” is to ban abortions and birth control, which will return us to a patriarchy where women are kept barefoot and pregnant. Another way to say the same thing: these guys are frustrated that they can no longer simply grab women:
