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“No matter how it unfolds, this will be the next chapter in a story I first addressed more than five years ago in American Kompromat, where I investigated Epstein not as a rogue predator operating in isolation, but as a node in a decades-long Russian intelligence effort — working hand in glove with Trump — to cultivate compromising material on American elites. I also addressed his ties to Israeli intelligence.”—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous
Hello Bette members!
Thank you to all new and renewing subscribers. Hope you join our community events — a membership perk!
Paying members are invited to register for our latest Bette’s Book Club event with New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger as he discusses the findings in his second book on Trump-Russia, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (Penguin Random House, 2022).
This event is scheduled for Sunday, 1 November, at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Registration can be found by scrolling all the way to the end of this post, below the paywall.
We just had a fantastic meeting with Craig on his first Trump-Russia book from 2018, House of Trump/House of Putin, and I invited him back for a refresher on American Kompromat, his follow up, which also exposed Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and delved into the criminal underground tied to Robert Maxwell. As with all his work, he is years ahead of the mainstream and only now are people seeing that everything he has reported for a decade about Donald Trump and Russia was bang on.
I asked Craig for an update on how his American Kompromat book ties into this moment in time and he responded:
The release on Monday by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, of a 52-page document citing five women — Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe — who directly accuse Trump of sexual assault is the most promising sign yet that an incoming Democratic Congress will hold Trump accountable in the near future.
No matter how it unfolds, this will be the next chapter in a story I first addressed more than five years ago in American Kompromat, where I investigated Epstein not as a rogue predator operating in isolation, but as a node in a decades-long Russian intelligence effort — working hand in glove with Trump — to cultivate compromising material on American elites. I also addressed his ties to Israeli intelligence.
Every subsequent Epstein document release and DOJ file dump has done the same thing: forced the public to confront that his network reached further into finance, politics, banking, and intelligence circles than almost anyone wanted to admit in 2021. The book essentially pre-identified the shape of a story that is still being excavated piece by piece, years later, by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators only now catching up to the structural argument it made at the outset.
So far, the Republican Congress and Trump’s highly politicized DOJ — aided by massive corruption in the banking, legal, and political sectors — have managed to cover up both the breadth and depth of the scandal. My hope is that when a new Democratic Congress takes office in January, all of America will finally see women testifying on camera about both Trump’s criminal assaults on them and his role in Jeffrey Epstein’s larger sex trafficking enterprise.—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous
Mic drop.
More about American Kompromat from the publisher:
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Kompromat n.—Russian for “compromising information”
This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the world—including Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB; thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations; and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine. Among them, the book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, and it supports that conclusion with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first “spotted” Trump as a potential asset, how they cultivated him as an asset, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points that were published in three of America’s most prestigious newspapers.
Among its many revelations, American Kompromat reports for the first time that:• According to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Trump first did business over forty years ago with a Manhattan electronics store co-owned by a Soviet émigré who Shvets believes was working with the KGB. Trump’s decision to do business there triggered protocols through which the Soviet spy agency began efforts to cultivate Trump as an asset, thus launching a decades-long “relationship” of mutual benefit to Russia and Trump, from real estate to real power.
• Trump’s invitation to Moscow in 1987 was billed as a preliminary scouting trip for a hotel, but according to Shvets, was actually initiated by a high-level KGB official, General Ivan Gromakov. These sorts of trips were usually arranged for “deep development,” recruitment, or for a meeting with the KGB handlers, even if the potential asset was unaware of it.
• Before Trump’s first trip to Moscow, he met with Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the United Nations library in a vital position usually reserved as a cover for KGB operatives.
• In 1987, according to Shvets, the KGB circulated an internal cable hailing the successful execution of an active measure by a newly cultivated American asset who took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe promoting policies promoted by the KGB. The ads had been taken out by Donald Trump, who, Shvets said, would become a “special unofficial contact” for the KGB, that is, an intelligence asset whose role has been compared to that of the late industrialist, Armand Hammer.
A number of America’s highest national security officials have said they believe Trump is a Russian asset, but neither the Mueller Report nor the numerous congressional investigations throughout Trump’s presidency pursued that vital question. American Kompromat does.
In addition to exploring Trump’s ties to the KGB, American Kompromat also shows that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, Russian kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed those secrets into potent weapons. It also reveals:
• How Jeffrey Epstein and Trump jostled for influence and financial supremacy for years. A college dropout let go from his prep school teaching job, Epstein became a millionaire in part with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who allegedly served as a Soviet and Israeli spy and likely gave Epstein a sum estimated between $10 and $20 million before his death in 1991.
• How the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking operation provided a source and marketplace for sexual kompromat–dirty secrets of the richest and most powerful men in the world. While Epstein had a rule when it came to selecting women, namely, “the younger, the better,” he also knew that a multimillionaire–or future leader–caught committing adultery is nothing compared to getting caught on video in the act with a minor.
• How the Epstein-Maxwell ring helped enable young women with possible ties to Russian intelligence to gain access to the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the worlds of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the internet. This, at a time when Vladimir Putin has asserted, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.”
• How Epstein had ties to Russia through sex-trafficking. Epstein partnered with Jean-Luc Brunel, head of MC2 modeling agency and a major sex trafficker, who, in turn, had worked with Peter Listerman, the celebrated procurer, or “matchmaker” as he prefers, for Russian oligarchs.
• How John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach County, says he acquired 478 videos confiscated from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, fled to Moscow, became only the fourth American to win asylum in Russia, and immediately gained access to Putin’s inner circle, showing the ongoing power that comes from kompromat and how its value is highest before it is “used.”
More about Craig Unger’s body of work here:
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, American Kompromat, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.
You can check out his collection of investigative reporting on Trump-Russia and the Republican party’s war on democracy here by ordering his books here:
In addition, learn more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s own substack here:
And please read and share this Q&A from one of my long-form interviews with him:
That interview was cited in the new book, “American Overthrow,” by Keir Giles, who was our first Bette’s Book Club guest and who will be coming back on 15 November for a Q&A session.
Thank you to everyone who has been showing up to meet our authors in our new book series: so far, we have enjoyed visits from French historian and disinformation analyst David Colon; Giles and Unger; and intellectual historian Marci Shore, who offered us an amazing talk on Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Those who attended learned about the Yale Milgrim experiment, and as a follow up, Marci sent me these pages so you can learn more about this landmark psychological study.
Thank you Marci!
Please keep scrolling below the paywall for the registration link for our Craig Unger event. It’s not too late to become a member!
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