IN YOUR FACE TRUMP IS A 'MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE' FOR RUSSIA
Former President Donald Trump is a "Manchurian candidate" for Russia.
FBI pondered whether Trump was ‘a Manchurian candidate elected,’ former agent alleges in new book
Then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok testifies before Congress in 2018.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok alleges in a new book that investigators came to believe it was “conceivable, if unlikely” that Russia was secretly controlling President Trump after he took office — a full-fledged “Manchurian candidate” installed as America’s commander in chief.
In the book, “Compromised,” Strzok describes how the FBI had to consider “whether the man about to be inaugurated was willing to place his or Russia’s interests above those of American citizens,” and if and how agents could investigate that. Strzok opened the FBI’s 2016 investigation into whether Trump’s campaign had coordinated with the Kremlin to help his election and later was involved in investigating Trump personally. He was ultimately removed from the case over private text messages disparaging of the president.
“We certainly had evidence that this was the case: that Trump, while gleefully wreaking havoc on America’s political institutions and norms, was pulling his punches when it came to our historic adversary, Russia,” Strzok writes. “Given what we knew or had cause to suspect about Trump’s compromising behavior in the weeks, months, and years leading up to the election, moreover, it also seemed conceivable, if unlikely, that Moscow had indeed pulled off the most stunning intelligence achievement in human history: secretly controlling the president of the United States — a Manchurian candidate elected.”
“I don’t think that Trump, when he meets with Putin, receives a task list for the next quarter,” Strzok said, referencing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “But I do think the president is compromised, that he is unable to put the interests of our nation first, that he acts from hidden motives, because there is leverage over him, held specifically by the Russians but potentially others as well.”
Strzok’s book is the latest by former FBI officials — including former director James B. Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe — to disclose new insights into the bureau’s investigation of Trump, while lambasting the president for his conduct.
The FBI’s investigation was taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who could not substantiate a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Mueller did, however, conclude that the Trump campaign was willing to accept Russian assistance to help win the election, and that Russia was willing to give it; his report outlined ways Trump might have obstructed the special counsel’s inquiry.
Mueller’s final report, released last year, reached no determination on whether that conduct was criminal, and Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed the matter and determined it was not.
Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence investigator, tries to bring his experience in that area to the discussion of Trump, alleging repeatedly that the president seemed to be compromising himself as he lied publicly about his business dealings in Russia, or his interactions with that country’s officials. That, Strzok writes, essentially gave Russia leverage over the president.
“Trump’s apparent lies — public, sustained, refutable, and damaging if exposed — are an intelligence officer’s dream,” Strzok writes. “For that very reason, they are also a counterintelligence officer’s nightmare.”
Strzok was also a key figure in the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information by using a private email server while she was secretary of state during the Obama administration. His book seeks to pull back the curtain on that case as well, contrasting it with the investigation into Trump.
Strzok writes that he now believes it was the wrong decision for Comey to announce publicly in July 2016, just months ahead of the election, that he was recommending Clinton not be charged while criticizing her conduct. He talks, too, of institutional bias against the former Democratic presidential candidate, claiming a retired executive — whom he did not name in the book — said at lunch one day, “Pete, you’ve got to get that b----.”
Strzok’s view, though, is that the investigation into Clinton was a far less serious matter than the inquiry into Trump.
Even as he says Clinton’s use of a private server is what fueled investigators’ interest, Strzok allows that had her email been housed on the State Department system, “it would have been less secure and probably much more vulnerable to hacking.” He also concedes that Comey’s decision in October 2016 to reveal to Congress that the investigation had resumed — less than two weeks before voters were to go to the polls — probably altered the results of the election in Trump’s favor.
“Reflecting back on 2016 reveals another hard truth: small margins matter in an election in which the total number of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan voters needed to swing the Electoral College would fit in one football stadium,” Strzok writes. “Pundits who argue that it’s hard to substantively change public opinion miss the point: when you’re dealing with razor-thin margins, it doesn’t take much to move the needle. And as much as it pains me to admit it, the Russians weren’t the only ones who pushed the needle toward Trump. The Bureau did too.”
But Strzok also jabs at Clinton advisers for, at times, not being fully cooperative, and says some of Clinton’s answers in her interview with the FBI were “aggravating” for how carefully she chose her words. He cryptically hints that Russians did not release more material they had procured about her, possibly saving it for if she had been elected.
“We also knew through classified channels that the Russians had material with the potential to be greatly disruptive, yet they had chosen not to release it,” Strzok writes. “Were they waiting for Election Day? Were they holding it in reserve to discredit Clinton?” He writes that the substance of the material is still classified.
As McCabe and Comey did, Strzok discusses at some length the behind-the-scenes talks about investigating Trump, including in the early days of Mueller’s investigation. Strzok, who was briefly the lead FBI agent on Mueller’s team, writes that he and Mueller composed a team “representing a cross-section of criminal and counterintelligence expertise,” because he was concerned with some of the noncriminal aspects of Trump’s behavior.
“The broader counterintelligence concerns about the president — which included the ways in which his suspected obstruction of the Russia probe might have been coerced by or intended to aid Russia — were investigated by multiple teams,” Strzok writes.
Strzok was removed from the Mueller team in August 2017, after the Justice Department inspector general found he had exchanged anti-Trump texts with FBI lawyer Lisa Page. He was ultimately fired from the bureau over the missives. In his book, Strzok defends the messages as private expressions of his political views, and writes that he vehemently disputes the inspector general’s insinuation in a report that they indicated a willingness to use his position to hurt Trump.
Strzok rebukes current FBI and Justice Department leaders for succumbing to Trump’s repeated attacks on law enforcement. He alleges that they helped foster a culture where those involved in the Clinton and Trump investigations were “shunned and disavowed,” and that Trump had effectively turned the investigation of his own conduct into a “third rail.”
FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich ordered Strzok’s firing, overriding the decision of a lower level official who proposed lesser discipline. Strzok is also critical of FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, in particular, for his concession at a congressional hearing that he had not read all of Mueller’s report.
“However indefensible, the short-term message was clear: DOJ and the FBI’s new leaders were disclaiming responsibility for any investigation relating to Midyear or Crossfire,” Strzok writes, using the code names for the Clinton and Trump investigations. “The long-term message was far worse: it was just too perilous to investigate matters relating to Trump.”"If Trump wins, he will enter the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, as a much more dangerous president than he was in 2017,". "He will be bitter and seek to take his revenge on the so-called deep state that he claims stole the election from him in 2020."
Trump is compared to a character from the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.S. President Donald Trump are pictured together during a G20 summit in Osaka, Japan on June 28, 2019.
A hypothetical scenario if Trump if elected in November and starts his second term by granting a series of favors to this "friend" Putin, including ending American military aid to Ukraine, before announcing the formation of U.S.-Russia strategic pack.
Trump would "appear on television screens throughout the world to inform us that he is heading to Moscow on the invitation of "his friend Vladimir" days after beginning his term, with Trump insisting to concerned countries that "you're going to love it."
Trump and Putin would sign an agreement that stipulates NATO is "no longer up to the task of maintaining security and stability in Europe" and ordains U.S. and Russian control over the continent, while forcing Ukraine to cede much of its territory to Moscow in exchange for "peace."
"Candidate Trump promises almost every day that he will stop the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of assuming the presidency, which is code for putting an end to US arms shipments," Piontkovsky wrote.
Trump has "the same list of enemies" as his "long-time partner Vladimir Putin"—
“Donald Trump: A Modern Manchurian Candidate?”
These bold words were printed on page A31 on the New York Times atop a column questioning the president-elect’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the column, Max Boot wrote, “At the same time that Mr. Trump continues to exhibit paranoia about American intelligence agencies, he displays a trust verging on gullibility in the mendacious and murderous government of Mr. Putin.”
It’s not the first time Trump has been called a “Manchurian candidate.”
The comparison has been brought up from outlets as wide-ranging as the Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, the Hill, Daily Kos, Salon and the New York Daily News.
Most of these columns, including Thursday’s NYT opinion piece, don’t mention what that means. Like many phrases introduced by pop culture (think: Catch-22, gaslighting), it’s become shorthand for something — namely, a president controlled by a foreign (these days, most likely Russian) power — even though at this point wide swaths of the American public likely haven’t consumed the media that bore it.
The phrase first came into existence thanks to Richard Condon, who in 1959 wrote a novel by that title — “The Manchurian Candidate” — in which a platoon of decorated soldiers return from the Korean War, after being brainwashed to believe in communism. One of them has unwittingly become a sleeper agent, controlled by the communist Chinese and Soviet governments to perform a particular assassination, which will allow them to install a communist puppet dictator as U.S. president. (The comparison to Trump is derived from the thought that he might be a puppet of the Russian government.)
(Though it was published in 1959, some of it might have been written a bit earlier. Allegations have been levied against Condon, who died in 1996, claiming the author plagiarized passages from the 1934 novel “I, Claudius,” a book set during the Roman Empire. His agent denied these accusations.)
At the time of its release, the book — written by a man who chose his profession because “the only thing I knew how to do was spell” — received decidedly mixed reviews, notably appearing on Time’s 10 best bad novels list while being dubbed “a wild and exhilarating satire” by the New Yorker.
Regardless the novel was a hit, likely because it made campy pulp out of the era’s political climate. As Louis Menand — who called the book “a man in a tartan tuxedo, chicken à la king with shaved truffles, a signed LeRoy Neiman . . . Mickey Spillane with an M.F.A.” — wrote in the New Yorker:
Fear of Communist brainwashing seems an example of Cold War hysteria, but in the nineteen-fifties the fear was not without basis. United Nations ground forces began military action in Korea on July 5, 1950. On July 9th, an American soldier who had been captured just two days earlier delivered a radio speech consisting of North Korean propaganda. Similar broadcasts by captured soldiers continued throughout the war. At the end of the war, the Army estimated that one out of every seven American prisoners of war had collaborated with the enemy. (The final, generally accepted estimate is one out of ten.) Twenty-one Americans refused to return to the United States; forty announced that they had become Communists; and fourteen were court-martialed, and eleven of those were convicted.
Added Menand, “Condon’s book played on the fear that brainwashing could be permanent, that minds could be altered forever.”
If that sounds a bit cinematic for a novel plot, that’s because it was. Fittingly, while film historian David Thomson called it “a book written so that an idiot could film it,” director John Frankenheimer referred to it as “one of the best books I’ve ever read.”
Frankenheimer directed the 1962 film adaptation of the book, bearing the same name and starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey. Film historian Howard Hampton wrote that one “could hardly have devised a more perfect union of formalistic effects, ideological paradox, and existential instability.”
Even so the movie was a complete flop. Perhaps it struck the wrong chord in the midst of the Cold War. Perhaps it was just too hard to follow.
Regardless of its success in the United States, it certainly created waves worldwide. As Rob Nixon wrote for TMC:
“The Manchurian Candidate”‘s story was considered so politically controversial it was either censored or prohibited from theatrical release in many Eastern European countries then under Communist governments and even in neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden. The theatrical premiere for most of those countries was held after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993.
Most concerning for Americans at the time, the film included an assassination scene, which reportedly caused United Artists fear that it might prompt someone to perform such an action off-screen. A year after its release, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy. This story is even more startling considering that Kennedy allegedly “interceded with United Artists to get the film greenlighted,” according to Hampton.
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(It grows even creepier when one realizes, as Hampton wrote, that “in a stranger-than-fiction twist, Frankenheimer was with Robert F. Kennedy on the night of his murder.”)
A theory exists that Oswald was influenced by the film, which he likely saw, according to John Loken, who explored this very question in his book, “Oswald’s Trigger Films: The Manchurian Candidate, We Were Strangers, Suddenly?”
And, in fact, days after the assassination, a newspaper reporter asked Condon if he felt at all responsible for the president’s death. (He did not.)
The film was pulled after its original run (some claim at Sinatra’s insistence due to the death of his friend Kennedy but according to Menand this didn’t happen until later. He wrote, “In 1972, Sinatra bought the rights and, in 1975, removed it from circulation entirely.”).
The movie, though, lived on as a television staple some years later.
