Russian President Vladimir Putin personally authorized an operation by his country’s spy agency to support Donald Trump’s bid for the U.S. presidency in 2016, the Guardian reported, citing leaked Kremlin documents.
The document states that Putin, his spy chiefs, and top ministers agreed that a victory for a “mentally unstable” Trump would permanently weaken the United States and help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US.
Following the 2016 meeting, Putin reportedly issued a decree ordering the country’s three spy agencies to “find practical ways” to back Trump, who by that time had been well on his way to securing the Republican Party nomination for president.
According to the Guardian, the documents also contained a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
The document also reportedly states that the Kremlin had “kompromat, or potentially compromising material” on Trump.
It cryptically refers to “certain events” that happened during “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”
As a businessman, Trump visited Russia numerous times before he was elected as president in 2016. It was on one of these trips for the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant that he allegedly invited a “number of prostitutes to perform ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB [Russian intelligence] control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to,” according to the Steele dossier.
The Guardian noted that this Kremlin leak is “serious and highly unusual.” The outlet did not definitively prove the documents to be authentic, but they showed the leaked documents to experts on Russian spy agencies and Kremlin diplomacy who say they appear to be real. The “overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking,” the outlet reported.
The Kremlin dismissed the report, with Putin’s press secretary Dmitri Peskov calling the idea the Russian leader met and agreed to support Trump in the 2016 election “a great pulp fiction.”
