What is it he is so petrified of?
Anything sexual aint going freak anybody out
Trump Jr, Manfort, General Flynn , Carter Paige & Paponopolis meeting with the Russians. Doesnt bother the Anti American Trump fan club
We all know hes doing business in Russia
I think he has a direct business link to Putin. He never ever says anything bad about his buddy Vladimar
Originally Posted by themystic
Hey mistake, here's a great opportunity for you to demonstrate you are not just a flaky troll but you actually have some intellectual substance!
Below is a WSJ column that puts US-Russia business ties into historical perspective for you. Read and critique it (if you can). Don't be too scared to try.
What’s Behind the Putin Fantasies
Donald Trump never found much of a seat on the U.S.-Russia business express.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Feb. 28, 2017 7:22 p.m. ET
Several Trump campaign advisers had business ties to Russia, so that must be nefarious, right?
Except that
until the Crimea sanctions in 2014, it was U.S. policy to encourage American business in Russia—and had been since 1991. That a handful of advisers did business in Russia is amazing only because it’s so few. In July 2009, President Obama himself visited Moscow with a passel of U.S. execs in tow. Joe Biden was in Moscow a few months later partly for business-promotion purposes.
Go back and read the press. In 1995,
Al Gore, presiding over the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, helped enable Exxon’s Sakhalin Island venture. Sixteen years later, the
Obama White House helped enable its Russian Arctic venture. These two deals define almost the entirety of Rex Tillerson’s CV in Russia.
But wasn’t Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s sometime campaign adviser, an adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, Vladimir Putin’s favorite in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election? At the time, Mr. Yanukovych was promoting an economic tie-up with the European Union, a near-and-dear U.S. interest. Mr. Manafort may not have been working for the Obama administration’s preferred Ukrainian pol, but he was following in the footsteps of previous
U.S. political aides, including some
dispatched by Bill Clinton to save Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 (enabling Mr. Yeltsin eventually to hand power to Mr. Putin to protect his entourage’s stolen wealth).
Only later, when Mr. Putin yanked Mr. Yanukovych’s chain, did the events unfold that now have Democrats eager to discern nefarious patterns.
What about Mr. Trump’s ties to “shadowy” Russia banker
Carter Page? A hilarious and lengthy article at Politico.com finds Mr. Page an elusive wannabe who held a minor job in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office.
What about
Roger Stone, the make-believe secret shaman of American politics? Mr. Stone wants you to believe he’s connected to the KGB.
In the Trump-as-mole screeds, the biggest wonder is the non-mention of Goldman Sachs. After all,
Gary Cohn and
Steve Mnuchin both worked there when Goldman, on the eve of Russia’s 1998 default, arranged a convenient bond sale to tide the Yeltsin government over. Then again, another Goldman alum,
Robert Rubin, was running the Clinton Treasury at the time, and pitched in with an IMF bailout for Russia.
We come to the sorry truth: So much hopeful money that poured into Russia only helped fund the emergence of the Putin kleptocracy.
Over the course of three administrations, when the U.S. goal was to promote business ties with Russia, Mr. Trump was notable mainly for failing to find a seat on the train. His Russian-backed property and branding deals all came a cropper. He did manage to hold his Miss Universe contest in Moscow in 2013. Unlike Formula One, however, he hasn’t been back since. At least, like all high-end New York real-estate developers, he couldn’t fail to profit from selling overpriced condos to Russian emigres.
“Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Mr. Putin during his first years consolidating power,” writes veteran foreign correspondent Susan B. Glasser in a New York Times op-ed last week. “The similarities are striking enough that they should not be easily dismissed.”
The similarities are indeed striking. Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump both have arms and legs. When it comes to distinguishing noise from signal, however, two men could not be less alike.
Russia was a country in chaos. Its president was a drunk seeking a successor to protect his daughter and friends from corruption investigations. Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent and head of the secret police, ran one of the few, after a fashion, functioning institutions in Russia, albeit arm in arm with organized crime.
Mr. Trump’s rise couldn’t be more different. He’s a reality TV star and brand manager. To an unusual degree, he’s a president who lacks even a party. Meanwhile, the courts, the bureaucracy, the media, the political parties all continue to function as they always have.
By all means, investigate Russia’s propaganda efforts directed toward influencing the U.S. election, as long as we don’t kid ourselves unduly that something novel and unprecedented took place. As for Mr. Trump, even to a broken-down Russian intelligence he simply would not have been that interesting a person until very recently. Now, somehow, he’s got the power of the U.S. president if he can figure out how to use it (a big if).
His increased military spending plus his support for U.S. energy, ironically, would amount to harsher sanctions on Russia than any Mr. Obama imposed. In a second irony, his rise has half the U.S. political firmament, Democrats plus a smattering of Never Trump Republicans, willing to see the Putin regime for what it is. Thinking clearly about Russia might finally become a fashion in Washington. It won’t happen, though, if the only goal is to turn Mr. Putin into a partisan club against the Trump administration.