Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.
The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.
Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.
Why is it unlikely that he’s a Russian agent?
This started in the 90s when Trump lost all of his inherited money, had half a billion dollars in debt and stayed afloat with Russian money.
Russia has, demonstrably, influenced the 2016 elections in his favor. If he wasn’t indebted until 2016, he sure was after.
His „business“ ties to Russia are so numerous, there’s a separate Wikipedia page just on that topic.
It’s possible he would have been recruited. It’s possible that in 2016 he was elected as president as a Russian asset because maybe the agencies didn’t have time to fully investigate him.
While Trump was president, Robert Mueller did a fairly thorough investigation. I’m sure there was a lot of interference by Trump. But, while his investigation found a lot of contact between Russians and Trump, and a lot of money flowing from Russia to Trump, it didn’t find any evidence that he was an asset, or that he was being blackmailed. IMO that’s a key difference. The amount of cooperation you can expect from a bribe is vastly different from what you can expect from blackmail.
Biden had 4 years with the CIA and FBI under him. Surely, finding out for sure whether or not Trump was actually a Russian asset was one of the most important things for him and those agencies. Even ignoring the political advantage it would gain Biden’s party to expose Trump, even the most GOP-friendly conservative people in the CIA and FBI wouldn’t want to have their boss be a Russian asset. Just in pure professional pride, I don’t think they’d have let that slide. How embarrassing would it be if you were a counter-intelligence officer and your boss was the agent of a foreign government?
I have to believe that getting to the bottom of it was a critical thing that the FBI and CIA were working on during Biden’s presidency. It would obviously be kept quiet because they didn’t want it to seem like they were just digging for dirt on a political opponent. But, is it believable that they just completely dropped the investigation?
So, the fact that after 4 years there were no revelations, no leaks, nothing to indicate anything more than was in the Mueller report suggests that the Mueller report was pretty thorough. Sure, he’d broken the law countless times. Sure, they were funnelling relatively small amounts of money to him, but he wasn’t an out-and-out asset being kept in line via blackmail.
So he’s just an outright Traitor then?