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U.S. President Donald Trump is under the control of Russia's Vladimir Putin, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein helped create this situation by operating a "honeytrap" scheme that gives Putin leverage, to use as he sees fit, over wealthy and powerful men. One such man apparently is Trump, who twice has taken an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," but long has been under the sway of our country's most notorious adversary -- and Trump's status as a Putin toady remains to this day, according to reports from the UK Daily Mail (published Feb. 1, 2026) and U.S. political commentator Thom Hartmann. This is sobering journalism, but Hartmann is doing his darnedest to help ensure that Americans, or at least as many as possible, understand the gravity of the moment.
Hartmann begins with the Daily Mail article and uses it to explain how America got into its current precarious position, and what might be ahead in our future. As an author, businessman, radio host, former nightly TV host, daily newsletter publisher, and one of our country's leading progressive voices, Hartmann is the right guy to provide context on such a weighty issue. After all, considering the threats currently posed to American democracy -- which, to a great extent, undergirds worldwide stability -- one could argue this is the most important story of our times, at least dating to the end of World War II.
We will focus on a perspective from the Feb. 2 issue of The Hartmann Report, under the headline
"The Manchurian Billionaire: How Trump's Rise Mirrors Every Classic Intelligence Takeover: Debt, ego, sexual compromise, and fear: Why Trump's behavior makes sense only when you realize he's been in Putin's pocket for years . . . "
The article also can be read at Raw Story, under the headline"Staggering evidence trove shows who put Trump in the White House -- and controls him still." At both sites, Hartmann writes:
The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).
It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Putin has basically owned Trump for years, even before he ran for president in 2016.
They note of last week’s partial (about 50%) Epstein document release:
"The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution."
Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.
That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:
“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running the world's largest 'honeytrap' operation on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”
Was this a quid pro quo, a "something for something" deal between Epstein and Putin? Yes, it was, Hartmann reports:
In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.
Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian-organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.
Speaking of the Mafia, it's been widely reported that Trump has been mobbed up for years. Isn't it ironic then that "Mr. Real Estate" found himself stuck in a web of dirty money from foreign sources. And that leads to this question: How much of that foreign money made its way into Trump's campaign coffers? Were his runs for the White House in 2016 and 2024 fueled largely by ill-gotten cash? Let's hope those questions will be among many that a competent tribunal will investigate someday.
Here's another irony: Trump has made a living from attacking the "deep state," using Elon Musk and DOGE to weaken America's government-oversight environment. If we'd had a stronger "deep state" of regulatory agencies, it might have kept Trump from getting caught in a thicket of corruption that Putin and Epstein helped create. Translation: Trump's undoing might be driven by his own inability to understand what comprises good government. Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump believes government regulators are the enemy; in fact, they can be his friend (if he were inclined to understand and support them effectively), but they certainly can be friends to everyday Americans-- the ones who tend to determine the outcomes of national elections. Hartmann describes a regulatory failing that Trump only has made worse:
America has the most lax and largely useless real-estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real-estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).
And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.
As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:
"In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate share of our assets."
Junior's younger brother makes clear that such thinking runs in the family. Listen to Eric Trump:
"'Well, we don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah.' We've got some guys that really love golf, and they are very interested in our programs. We just go there all the time."
Words of the Trump brothers apparently have not escaped the attention of U.S. lawmakers, Hartmann reports:
This is one of the reasons Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.
That alone is worth a call to your two US senators. (Unless, of course, you live in Alabama. A call to Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville, two devout Trumpers, would be a waste of time.)
Information that has surfaced since the document dump of Jan. 30 indicates manipulating Trump is almost as easy as winning a political argument over one of his MAGA devotees. Hartmann writes:
The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:
Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give valuable insight into Mr. Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. . . .
"In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the U.N., understood Trump after our conversations. . . ."
"Earlier that month, Epstein also had messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr. Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and then was staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris."
Epstein did not live to see how his skulduggery would play out on the world stage, but Hartmann provides a guide of how the Epstein-Putin tag team might have affected Trump:
So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?
— Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?
— Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?
— Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?
— Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?
— Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of US intelligence?
___ Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin's side?
— Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?
— Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?
— Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?
— Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?
— Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?
One of the most damaging news reports of Trump's first term involved his tendency to stay in contact with Putin, in a peculiarly personal way. One can almost imagine the "Leader of the Free World," talking breathlessly with his friend "Vlad" like a 13-year-old girl on a princess telephone. Hartmann writes:
In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.
Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when
With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.
Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.
If you are thinking, "How did Manafort get away with what sounds like treason?" I am thinking the same thing. And the best answer legal reason I can find is this: Treason is narrowly defined in the U.S. Constitution, and thus, is rarely brought as a criminal charge. Here is a specific explanation regarding the Manafort case, per AI Overview:
Under Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution, treason is narrowly defined as "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
In a legal context, an "enemy" refers to a foreign power with which the United States is in a declared war. Although Russia engaged in interference in the 2016 election, the U.S. was not at war with Russia, meaning the legal threshold for "adhering to enemies" was not met.
While the investigation highlighted that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate linked to Russian intelligence and collaborated on initiatives that provided cover for Russian operations, legal experts noted this did not equate to waging war against the United States.
In short, Manafort tippy-toed right up to the line marking treason, but apparently did not cross it.
That Manafort committed such treachery against the United States, but was rewarded with a presidential pardon and a hefty bank account . . . well, that's what amounts to "justice" in an age when Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court-- and our federal courts are littered with GOP appointees of dubious judicial pedigree, who treat the rule of law like a plaything. (By the way, I know from personal experience that some dreadful Democrat appointees are on the federal bench. One is M. Douglas Harpool in the Western District of Missouri. My wife, "Carol" (we know her here as "Mrs. Schnauzer") had a sheriff deputy attack her from behind during an unlawful eviction from our duplex apartment. The guy slammed her to the ground, and yanked on her arm so violently and awkwardly that it shattered her left elbow in the form of a "comminuted fracture," one that required eight hours and $80,000 worth of surgery for repair. I witnessed the attack on Carol while sitting in our car about 15 feet away, and it looked like the videos we see these days of ICE agents beating up peaceful protesters or attacking those who dare capture their unlawful actions on camera. I've run X-rays of Carol's injured arm here on the blog, and those images make me want to cry. I've read notes from her surgery -- they make it clear that "elevated pressures" from such an intricate procedure put her life at risk. It also seems clear, based on my research, that Carol now has kidney issues due to the necessity of having such a lengthy surgery. We filed a civil-rights lawsuit, alleging police brutality (among other claims), and you might expect we got at least a decent amount of compensation in court -- especially considering that members of Carol's care team told us she might regain 75 percent use of her arm, losing 25 percent. In other words, her arm will never be the same -- not even real close. She will live the rest of our days, with all kinds of metal plates and screws in her arm. With Harpool at the controls of our court case, we got nothing, not one penny. And he had to violate black-letter law at least 8-10 times to reach a bogus dismissal of our case. (Ironically, I went to junior high school with Harpool, and I went to high school with his wife, the former Cindy McCord -- although I don't think we had any classes together, and I don't recall meeting her.) I once thought Doug Harpool was a gem dandy guy -- we played junior-high basketball together, and we played on the same Kiwanis League baseball team. Our team was Dave's Angels, and I had a team picture for years until it was stolen or lost -- possibly in our eviction. Putting aside memories of my "glory days" in youth baseball, it's sad to know that one of my old teammates has grown up to be a warped and soulless guy. I find it hard to conceive how that happened. For example, I understand Cindy McCord Harpool is the mother of six children, so I feel certain her health and well being matter to her judge-husband. Carol and I don't have six kids, but Carol has been a wonderful companion to her journalist-husband and a great mother to the four "fur babies" we've had over the years. Needless to say, Carol's health and well being matter a lot to me, even though a federal judge apparently sees our lives as having zero worth. Federal judges hold lifetime appointments, but they aren't above the law and they aren't beyond accountability. I intend to publicly unmask Doug Harpool for the fraud he has become, violating his judicial oath and using taxpayer dollars to cheat litigants who come before him. If he winds up losing his bar card, it's going to be kind of hard to perform his judicial duties. And if he is forced off the bench, I will have performed a public service -- so I'm fine if that comes to pass. I also intend to see that the persons responsible for Carol's injuries are held accountable under the law.)
My apologies for that side trip down "My Personal Woes Highway"; it's a much longer and treacherous road than Carol and I sometimes care to remember. But let's return to Thom Hartmann's take on perhaps the defining story of our days -- the Trump-Epstein-Putin axis of evil.
Hartmann does not seem thrilled with the Manafort outcome either. He writes:
As The New York Times noted in 2020:
Investigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created 'a grave counterintelligence threat' by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
— There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity -- and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.
Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?
However you choose to answer those questions -- and I don't see how any non-MAGA American can ignore the obvious -- evidence points to this conclusion: Trump has been compromised and appears to still be compromised, with Putin and Epstein playing key roles in that state of affairs. Hartmann writes:
Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.
"Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel," The Post noted, "following him to hotel rooms around the world -- including countries considered foreign adversaries. When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.
The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
It adds, detailing Trump's specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:
"These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General's recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contact with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony."
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.
And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.
The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).
That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin. . . .
The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.
The Helsinki submit one year later long has been consider an example of Trump's peculiar behavior around Putin. Hartmann writes:
Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:
"There was this gasp at the CIA's Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode as they watched it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.
Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul played an odd role as a sort of courier and defender for Trump and Putin, Hartmann reports:
Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Senator Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Again, this behavior likely comes close to what many layman would consider treason, whether it meets the strict legal definition or not. Vital U.S. interests seem to have been put at risk. Here is more from Hartmann:
Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.
In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.
As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:
"Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of 'urgent concern' a legal threshold that requires notification of Congressional oversight committees."
On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.
The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.
The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants. . . .
In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.
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What is the American public to make of this. As Hartmann notes, there is no known precedent to Trump's behavior by any president in American history. With nothing to compare it to, how can the public come to grips with Trump's conduct in office?
It starts with collectively being made of strong stuff. Trump is a bad person who has surrounded himself with bad people -- and they probably feed off each other. They seem to have no respect for the rule of law, they don't know what the law says, they likely think they have done nothing wrong anyway. People like this have narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies, and that is a tough combination to deal with. One expert says people with such personality traits are "victimizers." In other words, they search for victims, can promptly size them up, and have no problem abusing them. Hartmann challenges Americans to take the Trump threat seriously, to speak out, protest, and be prepared to take bold action:
These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.
If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.
If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.
This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.
We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.
Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.
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