Tsar Trump: Old & New Reports Suggest Russia Groomed Donald Trump to Lead US (Part I)

Decades before humans could tweet, Czechoslovakian spies tailed Donald Trump. Recently many of their documents were declassified by the Czech Republic government. In December 2016 the English-language news coverage of this document cache tended to emphasize a memo about Trump’s apparent lack of IRS obligations — but it was mention of his political strategizing in the 1980s that sent Trump Watchdogs into a frenzied dig for deeper understanding.

Here we share various “bones” we’ve discovered that might help structure a compelling body of evidence that Russia has long held influence over Donald Trump’s behavior and was his partner (perhaps a dominant partner) in shaping the course and outcome of the 2016 US presidential race.

It’s possible that not all these bones are related. After all, we discovered them along many paths. If those paths indeed cross, that’s quite a Trump weave!

But you might conclude that Trump’s woven himself a very tangled web… It wouldn’t be surprising if a spider took advantage.

1988: Czechoslovakia’s Spies, Trump and the US Presidency

A document from the former Czechoslovakia’s covert surveillance agency as shown in a report from the Czech Republic’s national news service ČT24

In December 2016 the Czech Republic’s national news service ČT24 reported that old Czechoslovakian spy documents involving Donald Trump and his first wife, the Czechoslovak-born Ivana, had recently been declassified. These documents were reportedly created in the 1970s and 1980s when Czechoslovakia was a communist state and especially wary of US influence.

(Side notes: The CSSR, or Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, was formed after a Soviet-backed coup d’état. Today the democratic Czech Republic is said to be riddled with Russian spies hoping to topple NATO.)

According to the December 2016 report on Czech TV, the former CSSR’s secret intelligence agency and Ministry of the Interior covertly monitored Donald and Ivana Trump’s many visits to Ivana’s father in Czechoslovakia; occasionally listened to long distance calls between “Ivana Trumpová” and her father; read the family’s mail; and sent a Trump-focused spy to the US. (You can see the ČT24 report here. For rudimentary translation help see translate.google.com.)

From what we understood of this document cache, of greatest interest to Trump Watchdogs was a Czechoslovak intelligence agent’s 1988 report (as translated in The Guardian) that Donald Trump “was being put under considerable pressure to run for the US presidency.” The spy added that the source of pressure was unclear, and that according to Ivana’s father, Trump seemed confident he could win the 1996 race.

“Under considerable pressure?” From whom? And why might he feel so confident?

Certainly Trump could have felt pressure from domestic sources. But on guard for signs of his partnering with Putin in the 2016 US presidential race, we first sniffed along a Russian path.