Here are a couple of articles by people with strong backgrounds in intelligence, describing what they see when they examine what's known about the meeting involving Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...2d00a47778f_story.html?utm_term=.8008b4bf23fc
"But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election."
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/7/14/15971498/donald-trump-jr-russia-collusion-cia-kgb
Sean Illing
I assume the Russians would not feel so confident about these measures if they didn’t have considerable leverage over the Trump family. Is that fair?
Glenn Carle
Absolutely. Of course they have leverage. We know that the Trump family has taken on numerous debts from Russian creditors and banks and who knows what other sorts of leverage they might have over Trump. Hell, we have Trump Jr. on record in 2008 saying that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." It’s quite obvious that there are deep financial ties lurking beneath all of this.
Sean Illing
When you pile up all the evidence, even before this week’s revelations about Trump Jr., it seems impossible to deny that something is afoot here.
Glenn Carle
To me, it's clear that Russian intelligence has been involved with Donald Trump for years. I also believe it's clear, though it's harder to establish, that Donald Trump actively sought that involvement and has consented to it at some point.
It also seems certain that Trump is uncontrollable and would not ever consider himself a spy, but many spies don't consider themselves spies and often don't even know that they're spies. And intelligence services couldn’t care less about that.
What matters to them is exploiting people, and that is what is happening here.
