And it was most definitely being collected on Secretary, former First Lady and Senator Clinton as well.”
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Here is Hill: “I think that there’s a good chance that was the case and that, you know - and, again, compromising material was being collected on a whole range of individuals. 14 congressional testimony specifically points to Putin’s role in exclusively “targeting” American businessmen in the late 1970s, not “for decades.” In an adjacent quote, in fact, Hill argues that everyone was targeted by Russians for decades - not that Trump was “cultivated,” as Harwood asserts - and that it was a mistake to focus only on meddling in relation to the president rather than on meddling in a broader perspective. The quote Harwood highlights from Hill’s Oct. Recently CNBC’s John Harwood resuscitated this conspiracy, claiming that while “conservative media dismissed as ridiculous the idea that Russia might have cultivated Trump for decades, Fiona Hill, a leading US govt Russia expert, now makes clear it’s not ridiculous in the slightest.” Cobbling together every interaction the real estate developer ever had with Russians, Chait posits that Trump might have become a Kremlin asset in 1987 when visited Moscow. In a sprawling July 2018 New York piece headlined, “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart - Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion,” Jonathan Chait offered a fully realized rendering of Trump’s potential sedition. Putin, who is apparently blessed with seer-like abilities, knew in the late 1970s that Trump, whose political positions would wildly fluctuate over 40 years, was presidential material, and that now, after decades of patiently waiting, the duo’s nefarious plan to cut taxes and place originalists onto the federal bench has finally come to fruition.
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In every version, he is an asset of a hostile government.
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In some iterations of the tale, Trump is willingly serving his Kremlin comrades in others, he is merely the victim of kompromat. One of the most durable conspiracy theories of our times finds Vladimir Putin recruiting a billionaire media personality named Donald Trump to the U.S.