Codename ORANGE ROOSTER

Threatening to lock up his rivals has been a feature, not bug, of Donald J. Trump’s sloganeering ever since he dramatically entered the presidential race a decade ago, thereby upending American politics. Chants of “Lock her up!” by candidate Trump and his surrogates, threatening Hillary Clinton with prison for myriad alleged crimes, were commonplace through 2016.

Trump then proceeded to do nothing. Neither Clinton nor any other Democrats were arrested, much less prosecuted, during Trump’s first term in the Oval Office. Before long, Trump was telling everyone that Hillary was just fine, after all.

Keep this in mind as we embark on a new constitutional crisis caused by threats this week from the White House to throw former President Barack Obama in prison. That won’t happen, we know Trump’s strong preference for easy talk over challenging action, but it’s nevertheless jarring to witness Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announce that she’s referring the former president’s alleged “treasonous conspiracy” to misuse intelligence to the Department of Justice for prosecution. For what exactly is unclear, while Gabbard’s announcement filled MAGA’s online minions with glee amid claims that “traitor” Obama will be frog-walked by Feds imminently.

They will be disappointed, notwithstanding Attorney General Pam Bondi’s creation of a DoJ “strike force” to investigate what Gabbard piquantly termed Team Obama’s “years long coup” against Trump. Since nobody can point out exactly what alleged crimes were committed here, beyond gauzy claims of “treason” (the only crime that’s explicitly defined in our Constitution), don’t expect Obama or any of his officials to see the inside of a courtroom anytime soon.

There’s a lot of recent history, nasty, partisan, and dumb, at play here and this newsletter won’t seek to explain it all, yet again. But the short version goes something like this. In shock and revulsion over Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, the outgoing Obama administration had a collective nervous breakdown over the president-elect’s apparent ties to Moscow. Before long, this became the Democrat mantra that Russian President Vladimir Putin had rigged the election to favor Trump, indeed many liberals professed that the Kremlin “installed” Trump, making him an illegitimate president. If you watched MSNBC regularly during Trump’s bumpy first term, you heard versions of this fable several hundred times.

An angry Team Trump nurtured their own counter-fable, that the “Russia hoax” was a cynical Democrat political game, devoid of facts, to smear the new administration with false intimations of Kremlin interference in our election. If you consistently watch Fox News, you’ve heard this version of 2016 many hundreds of times. MAGA has embraced this line of argument with renewed vigor in Trump’s second term, as demonstrated by DNI Gabbard’s pugnacious accusations this week of grave crimes against Obama and his retinue.

The problem with these competing partisan myths is that they’re both false. They make Trump’s lovers and haters happy, in opposite directions, yet they omit vast elements of what actually happened in order to sustain pleasing narratives. Of course, neither myth is wholly wrong. Democrats did get far ahead of their skis after Trump’s 2016 election, embracing wild accusations of Putin’s puppetry in Washington, DC, that had no factual basis. Similarly, many Republicans were quick to dismiss prodigious evidence that Russia’s intelligence services interfered in our 2016 election, to Hillary Clinton’s detriment.

Our nation’s capital expended enormous time and energy over the last nine years attempting to make sense of all this, without success or tranquility. Trump’s tumultuous first term featured the inquiry headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, which lasted nearly two years, culminating in a final report that left nobody content. For reasons known only to himself, Mueller punted on counterintelligence issues almost altogether, even though these constituted the cornerstone of the 2016 election story, thus coming to remarkably few firm conclusions of any variety.

Its counterpoint was the inquiry led by veteran DoJ prosecutor John Durham into the FBI’s election-related counterintelligence activities in 2016, what the Bureau termed Operation CROSSFIRE HURRICANE. While Durham established that the FBI’s efforts to ferret out possible Russian involvement with the Trump campaign were inept and fumbling, he failed to unmask any criminality (aside from a legal wrist-slap pertaining to a wiretap application). Durham’s investigation lasted even longer than Mueller’s, with the final report not appearing until 2023, but like Mueller, he managed to disappoint partisans of most stripes.

Gabbard’s shocking accusations against the Obama White House this week, which portray a rather mundane interagency dispute over intelligence sources and methods as a treasonous criminal conspiracy, imply that Mueller and even Durham, who was appointed by President Trump, missed the real story. There’s no reason to think that. Gabbard either doesn’t understand the complex intelligence issues involved in this touchy topic – which is highly possible since she had zero intelligence experience of any kind when Trump selected her as DNI – or she’s knowingly lying.

The best account of Russian clandestine interference in our 2016 election is the comprehensive report issued at the tail end of Trump’s first term by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence following three years of rigorous bipartisan investigation. The committee chair who led the inquiry was then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who’s currently Trump’s top diplomat and cabinet member at-large. The publicly available SSCI report is vast, running to nearly a thousand pages, and it dives deep in important places (with some redactions for classification), addressing key counterintelligence questions that Mueller punted on.

Importantly, the SSCI assessment demolishes the notion of the “Russia hoax,” establishing that between hacking, propaganda, and disinformation, the Kremlin’s spy agencies indeed attempted to interfere in our 2016 election in a systematic fashion, hoping to harm Hillary Clinton, thereby posing a “grave” counterintelligence threat. However, the report concluded that Russian spy-games, despite their malign intent, didn’t sway the election’s outcome in noteworthy ways. Democrat claims that “Trump was installed by Putin” were therefore incorrect. Since the SSCI’s take was fair, principled, and bipartisan, it made nobody in Washington, DC, particularly happy and was largely forgotten.

What really did happen with Putin’s spy services, Donald Trump, and our 2016 election? The thumbnail counterintelligence assessment, which I’ve shared for years, is that Putin hated Hillary Clinton, whom he blamed for protests in Moscow against his regime between 2011 and 2013, which he deemed an effort at a “color revolution” in Russia. Putin therefore unleashed his intelligence agencies, hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee, then fencing them through their cut-out WikiLeaks to embarrass Hillary and her party. As they did. Putin’s plan was to render the new Clinton administration as weak and divided as possible.

Electing Trump was never the Kremlin’s intent. The Putin regime certainly favored Trump over Clinton, mainly because the candidate’s offers to “be friends with Russia” sounded like the “reset” which the Obama administration, led by Hillary personally, offered him in 2009 but then reneged on, in Putin’s view. Still, President Trump wasn’t deemed politically possible by Moscow. Neither did Trump’s own campaign think he’d win in 2016. Top Trump cronies were telling friends as late as October that there was no plan to win, this was really all a public relations exercise by the reality TV star. On election night, Nov. 8, 2016, the president-elect had no victory speech ready, implying that Trump was more interested in getting a more lucrative contract with NBC for additional seasons of The Apprentice than being commander-in-chief.

Nevertheless, win Trump did. What, if any, was his secret relationship with Russia? This vexing question defies a complete answer without access to Kremlin archives, yet those who are well acquainted with Russia’s intelligence services and their longstanding modus operandi can deduce some tentative conclusions. This newsletter did just that in 2021, offering what remains the only unclassified professional counterintelligence assessment of Trump’s connections to Moscow. Unlike more than 99 percent of pundits pontificating on Trump and Russia, I’ve worked in counterespionage for more than one U.S. intelligence agency, including against Russia.

That assessment concluded it’s likely that the late Soviet KGB was cultivating Trump in the mid-1980s as what they term an “agent of influence” (агент влияния), which isn’t a “spy” in the James Bond sense, rather a foreigner, often a well-connected VIP, whom Moscow secretly employs for purposes of propaganda and policy influence. High-ranking KGB sources I trust have told me that Trump was indeed a candidate for such recruitment – that’s what his famously flashy 1987 trip to the USSR was about – but whether it actually happened is another question. Although Soviet Bloc spy services had eyes on Trump as far back as the late 1970s, as a rising New York businessman with a Czech wife, evidence that the KGB or any of its allied agencies officially had Trump “on the books,” as spies put it, remains elusive.

Claims of Trump’s witting recruitment by Soviet intelligence pop up from time to time, lacking evidence or even plausibility, but the most likely scenario is that, just when Trump might have become useful to the Kremlin, in the late 1980s, the Soviet system was imploding, leading to the demise of the KGB itself in 1991. This was also the moment when Trump went totally bankrupt, due to cascading bad business choices, which made him less useful to Moscow anyway. Trump therefore seems to have been “put on ice” as Russian spies say, but the KGB’s successors never forgot about Trump, whom they deemed a “confidential contact” (доверительный контакт), that is, someone who they were talking with. This is a casual relationship, well short of espionage in any normal understanding. Indeed, the contact may not be witting or even aware that s/he is talking with a Russian intelligence officer.

There’s been speculation about Trump’s affiliations in the 1990s with shady characters from the former Soviet Union, including people with ties to organized crime and Russian intelligence, but this arena offers vexing questions with few answers. This was the “Red Mafiya” invasion era in New York City and Trump was in the middle of it, but to be fair, so were many other American businesspeople. How exactly Trump managed to bankrupt a casino that was caught up in significant money-laundering has never been explained.

Nevertheless, Moscow found itself in 2016 in the interesting situation that Donald Trump, who professed to be a friend of their country, was running for president. The Kremlin and its spy agencies didn’t deem Trump to be reliable, his erratic personality made him a poor fit for any clandestine work, but he could be employed to attack the hated Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign’s efforts during 2016 to curry Moscow’s favor, plus get dirt on Team Clinton, were amateurish and imply that Trump’s relationship with Russian spies was less substantial than Democrats imagine. Indeed, the brake on that relationship came from Moscow’s side, not Trump’s.

Therefore, Russian spy agencies in 2016 boosted Trump and attacked Clinton, while still anticipating the latter’s election win. Moscow sent unsubtle messages like the notorious Steele Dossier, which was noted as an obvious disinformation scam at the time by bona fide experts, yet it bolstered partisan rancor in America, as intended, while reminding Trump about his Russian secrets.

That dossier’s salacious claims about Trump’s alleged personal and sexual antics, which took up so much media attention, were fictional, or mostly so. However, Moscow enjoyed muddying waters, as usual. During the 2016 campaign, more than one Western intelligence service received videos of purported sexual kompromat involving Donald Trump, claiming to be from sources inside the Federal Security Service, Putin’s powerful FSB. The authenticity of those videos was never established. Were they wholly or only partly fake? Nobody knew. When dealing with Russia’s spies, you should expect regular forays into the wilderness of mirrors.

The Kremlin’s opinion of Donald Trump was never especially high. To hard-edged lifer spies like Putin, who proudly call themselves Chekists after the revolutionary Soviet secret police, Trump simply wasn’t a serious person. He might be useful to Russia, but Trump was mostly a figure of fun inside the Kremlin in 2016. Moscow viewed Trump as “ours” (наш) in a vague way, based on his nebulous past with the KGB, but his utility was inherently limited by his personality.

It’s been reliably reported that Kremlin potentates, people close to Putin, among themselves referred to Trump as a “rooster” (петух), which sounds innocent, but isn’t. In colloquial Russian, this isn’t a nice word. Literally it means “rooster” but in the underworld argot which thrives in Russia, being favored by mobsters and spies alike, it means the recipient in man-on-man sex, in a very pejorative sense. Its closest English equivalent would be “prison bitch.”

I can add more. I’ve had discussions with old friends in Western intelligence circles for over a decade about Trump and Moscow. Senior Kremlin officials, including top officers of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, have been overheard by more than one Western intelligence agency referring to Trump as ORANGE ROOSTER (Оранжевый петух). This isn’t a formal covername, that is, an official KGB or SVR secret term for a recruited agent. It’s an in-joke codename among Kremlin elites, referring to the current American president as ORANGE PRISON BITCH.

The bad news for Democrats is that Trump isn’t a Russian spy, you got that wrong, in fact Moscow views him with bemused contempt. The worse news for Republicans is that Trump is viewed with bemused contempt, indeed as worse than a mere weakling, by our enemy who has several thousand nuclear weapons. I explained yesterday that the threat of Putin’s retaliation against the United States, particularly with his spy agencies, is rising now that President Trump has finally found some backbone in the Russo-Ukraine War. Putin and his regime have always viewed Trump as a lightweight, indeed a pushover. Now you know why.

What can be stated confidently at this moment is that the Trump’s administration’s desperate efforts to change the topic off the Epstein scandal, which threatens the whole MAGA movement with the president’s inexplicable flip-flop, will not work. Polls indicate the public isn’t buying it. Trump and the deceased pedophile intersected in important ways. Anything But Epstein reeks of panic. Significant elements of Trump’s base are enraged, with cause, since as this newsletter exclusively elaborated last week, the sordid Epstein sexpionage network raises highly disturbing questions about our elites and who really controls them – questions which Trump promised to answer, yet he now pretends aren’t legitimate questions at all. The Trump administration runs the risk, with its frantic ABE maneuvers, of bringing our 2016 election back into focus in a manner that may prove most damaging to the White House.

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