I'm reading a book at the moment by Craig Unger: American Kompromat, How the KGB cultivated Donald Trump and related tales of sex, greed, power and treachery. I can’t decide if it’s just a lot of sensationalised conspiracy theories stitched together to sell a book or if there is genuinely something to it all. That Trump is a KGB (now the FSB) asset is hardly news and as time goes on Trump himself seems determined to convince us all that he is. But Unger makes a plausible case to raise the possibility that the Russians have yet more powerful people in Washington in their pockets and the FSB tentacles are everywhere.
He makes claims about the involvement of Opus Dei, what might be called the provisional wing of the Catholic Church made famous by Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, in current American politics. Unger even links Jeffrey Epstein to the Russians and it seems possible.
Epstein left $575 million when he committed suicide in prison in DATE but where he got his wealth is shrouded in mystery. He was supposed to be an investment manager but nobody can remember him or his company engaging in any serious stock trading. During the police investigation, which started in 2005, hours and hours of video on CDs and computer hard drives showing activities in his $77 million townhouse, were discovered and said to have been secretly filmed.
We know a lot of well-known celebrities visited Epstein including of course Prince Andrew.
Epstein's house was seven stories high, with 28,000 sq ft of space including 10 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms and a two-storey reception area. It was sold in 2021 for $51 million, a big discount from the advertised $88 million price tag. Not bad for a man born to a parks department gardener and a school assistant from Coney Island.
A Palm Beach policeman, Mark Dougan, was involved in the investigation of Epstein and obtained copies of all the video evidence. He quit the force in 2009 and founded PBSOtalk.org, a website for whistle-blowers that allowed cops and other law enforcement officers to talk anonymously about alleged abuses and corruption. In 2016, the FBI seized his computer and he fled the country, becoming the 4th American citizen in history to obtain political asylum in, of all places, Russia. He still has copies of the videos and is known to be in contact with a former Kremlin official, Pavel Borodin.
You may well ask why.
There is a whole chapter on Opus Dei and how they helped cover up the activities of a Russian Spy, Robert Hannsen, who worked at the FBI in a senior role dealing with Russia, allowing him to continue spying for two decades after he confessed to them about what he was doing.
"....according to the Justice Department’s [Inspector General] report, [he] gave so much valuable information to the KGB. In all, officials say, he betrayed a total of nine double agents, and gave the Soviets “some of this nation’s most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human assets, at least three of whom were executed."
Trump's Attorney General William Barr in his first term sat on the board of directors at the Catholic Information Centre, which relocated to K Street, just two blocks from the White House in 1998 under the direction of Reverend C. John McCloskey. K Street is the favourite place for Washington lobbyists. Barr denies he was ever a member of Opus Dei but he was surrounded by them at the CIC.
"Before long, it became a lively gathering place for conservative academics, politicians, and journalists, thanks in part to a celebrity studded noon Mass that boasted converts to Opus Dei whom McCloskey had recruited and in some cases baptized, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Judge Robert H. Bork, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, and Fox News host Laura Ingraham."
William Barr remember, rubbished the 2019 Mueller Report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and claimed (wrongly) that it 'exonerated' Trump even before it was published.
There are also known links between Opus Dei and the Federalist Society, a conservative think tank, which according to the Washington Post, has provided seven current or former associate justices for the Supreme Court: Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Donald Trump’s most recent Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, who had clerked for the late associate justice Antonin Scalia, also a member of the Federalist Society.
Whether any of it amounts to Russia having control of the US government is debatable but what I think it does show is how with a few people in key positions, policy can be nudged in the direction that is helpful to Putin and The Kremlin.
