is it impeachable to ask ukraine to investigate political adversaries?

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by scottw

I'm pretty sure trump is a KGB agent, it's where he and putin met...they were classmates

Not quite, but you’re not that far off.

Trump’s first visit to Moscow was in 1987. The visit was arranged by KGB’s top arm, General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov. In the mid eighties, the General realized the world was changing. Russia would be left far behind, if they couldn’t gather intelligence.
In January 1984, Kryuchkov discussed the problem at a review in Moscow, and then again, six months later, at a conference. The demand was crystal clear, the KGB needed to improve their agent recruitment. Once upon a time, Moscow recruited Western individuals who sympathized with Russian ideology. In the mid-eighties, such individuals were hard to find, if not nonexistent. During these conferences, Kryuchkov suggested using money and flattery to lure recruits.
Hmmm……can you think of any prominent Western figures who’d be lured by money and flattery?

Trump had been a target with the KGB for a long time. According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies had been secretly observing Donald Trump and his newlywed Ivana. At the time, Ivana Zelnickova was a 28 year old model from Czechoslovakia, a communist country.
According to the declassified files, the Czech spies would read the letters Ivana sent back home.
The fact that the KGB was interested in recruiting Donald Trump to be a spy is fact. Whether or not Trump replied favorably to their offers of cash and flattery is questionable, but once upon a time, Donald Trump was almost certainly recruited by the KGB.
To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction. — Politico

The bottom line is that Trump had been a recruitment target of the KGB for decades.
The recruitment process started when Trump was introduced to Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin in 1986.
Dubinin’s daughter said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
Six months later, Trump is at an Este Lauder luncheon, and just happens to find himself sitting next to Yuri Durbinin. It just seemed too weird that this ambassador, the one who wound up sending Trump to Moscow for the first time, was magically everywhere that Trump was.

Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father — he died in 2013 — was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval. — Politico
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes.
It seems that Russia kept flaunting the greatest pieces of real estate in front of Trump’s face. Thirty years ago, Trump was so close to making a deal, that still hasn’t occurred. Perhaps Russia was using these properties as bait, to lure Trump along.

Trump’s first visit to Moscow was relatively unproductive. Trump was shown all these beautiful and lucrative real estate properties. He stayed in a hotel room that Lenin stayed in, most likely it was bugged. And then he went home. But Trump did endure one significant change, when he came back from his first Russian trip. As soon as he got back to America, Trump began tossing around the idea of running for president.
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[scottw]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Not quite, but you’re not that far off.


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probably what happened was that trump was abducted when he visited russia and the russians replaced him with an imposter who is now doing the bidding of the russians or perhaps an alien race...run with that

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by scottw

probably what happened was that trump was abducted when he visited russia and the russians replaced him with an imposter who is now doing the bidding of the russians or perhaps an alien race...run with that

Not quite that complicated, they just waited till Trump went bankrupt and bailed him out.

President Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from allegations of collusion by asserting that he has no business interests in Russia. That’s not for lack of trying: Trump’s efforts to establish a hotel in Moscow go back at least to 1987, when, according to his book The Art of the Deal, he discussed the possibility with the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. But the questions regarding the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russian government go beyond whether Trump has business dealings with Russia. It is just as important, if not more, to understand the many ways that Russia has business with Donald Trump.

That Kremlin-linked entities invested significantly in Trump’s properties over the years is not inherently nefarious. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, wealthy Russians have invested heavily in real estate in the West, while Americans were in turn encouraged to invest in Russia. However, in the context of a president under several investigations for his connections to the Kremlin, Russia’s outsize role in Trump’s reemergence from financial tribulations that nearly destroyed his real estate empire merit additional attention. What emerges is the story of a man indebted to Russia through the oligarchs that President Vladimir Putin helped create and now controls.

Upon taking office, Trump superficially distanced himself from the Trump Organization, ceding day-to-day control to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. However, he still owns and profits from the company, which gives him an ongoing stake in maintaining the relationships that make his company profitable, and leaked internal emails suggest he retains more control over the Trump Organization’s operations than he publicly acknowledges. Moreover, the relationships and transactions described below occurred long before his political career, at a time when both internal and external sources have described him as exerting almost unilateral control over the organization.

Individually and collectively, these relationships form the underpinning of the Russia scandal. The Kremlin has a long history of using compromising information, or kompromat, to exert leverage over businesspeople and politicians, both in Russia and abroad. As a result, the question of whether Trump is financially compromised goes beyond the simple question of whether he or his company is directly in debt to Russian banks—something the president denies but has yet to demonstrate by releasing his tax returns. The president’s myriad financial entanglements with individuals from Russia and the former Soviet Union may provide Russia with such kompromat, especially given the substantial evidence that Trump and the Trump Organization have engaged in questionably legal practices, many of which are outlined below. (The Trump Organization has repeatedly denied, both in specific cases and in general, that it has acted illegally or unethically in its business practices.)

This does not intend to suggest that all of Trump’s clients and partners from Russia and the former Soviet Union are individually connected to the Kremlin, nor that each deal is individually corrupt or connected to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Instead, the goal is to highlight how dependent Trump’s company has been on Russian money, a fact he has repeatedly denied, and to explicate how those connections appear to have laid the foundation for what occurred in 2016. As such, this explainer explores the totality of those business dealings, ranging from projects whose financing comes from sources directly linked to the Kremlin to potentially corrupt dealings in Azerbaijan and Georgia to the allegations that some of Trump’s Russian and Soviet buyers and business partners have used his properties as vehicles for money laundering, all of which could have generated the type of compromising material the Russian government is known to exploit.
Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have survived the period without the financial support of his father, Fred Trump, who not only loaned his son millions of dollars to keep his struggling businesses afloat but also helped orchestrate massive, likely illegal tax fraud schemes to hide those transactions from authorities. Unfortunately for Trump, that safety net disappeared in the late 1990s, first when Trump and his siblings officially took over the family company in 1997 and later when his father died in 1999. But Trump’s financial struggles continued: his flagship companies declared bankruptcy in both 2004 and 2009, with Trump resigning from his position as head of the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009.

Compounding Trump’s financial problems was the Wall Street stigma his business failures attracted. The Guardian has reported that, in the 1990s, “Wall Street banks, which had previously extended him credit, turned off the tap.” According to The New York Times, bankers went so far as to coin the phrase “the Donald risk” to describe the widespread aversion to lending to Trump. In 2013, one banker told The Atlantic, “If a major institution in New York—whether it was a Chase or a Goldman or a law firm or something—wanted to have a building built . . . I can give you almost 100 percent assurance that Donald would not be on the list.”
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