John R. Schindler

Strange espionage events with a Chinese flavour are piling up at Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s home-away-from-home. Awkward questions are now being raised about what’s really going on, including: are the White House’s real spy problems with Beijing rather than Moscow? In Goldfinger, the British spy-turned-spy-novelist Ian Fleming gave the world the classic line, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’ Veteran counterspies generally suspect enemy action well before the third incident, however, and President Trump’s odd Chinese espionage incidents are getting too numerous to ignore.

Trump’s latest wet kiss to his pal Bibi is supposed to help the beleaguered Israeli prime minister, but really it will benefit Putin – and Xi. The unintended consequences of dumb diplomacy may prove severe here. It happened with a tweet. Because that’s how Donald J. Trump rolls. Yesterday, the president informed the world of a significant change in US foreign policy with this tweet: ‘After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!’ https://twitter.

No diplomats anywhere enjoy dealing with North Korea. Pyongyang is difficult, indeed obstreperous at the best of times, while the Kim dynasty and its emissaries are notorious worldwide for their aggressive and undiplomatic trash-talking when they are displeased. Which they frequently are. Donald Trump’s quixotic effort to make nice with the world’s strangest regime was therefore always a long shot, while his desire to denuclearize North Korea in exchange for diplomatic normalization and economic development was based in what can be kindly called fantasy thinking. That has just been made painfully evident in Hanoi, where the much-ballyhooed second summit between President Trump and the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un fell apart with no deal of any kind.

If only President Richard Nixon could go to China, per the hoary Beltway cliché, perhaps only yours truly could write this column. Longer than just about anybody, I’ve warned the public about the threat to Western democracy posed by Vladimir Putin’s aggressive spies and weaponized lies. As a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, I was combating Russian propaganda, what they call Active Measures, two decades ago. When the NSA contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in June 2013, I called him out as the Kremlin agent he is — as the Kremlin subsequently admitted — which won me few friends among the great and the good.

Judging from the weekend’s ‘modern presidential’ tweets – always a decent metric of Donald Trump’s mood swings – the Special Counsel investigation into his Russian links is weighing heavily on our 45th president. And no wonder. New reports indicate that Donald J. Trump may be in a lot hotter water than his MAGA legions want to believe. According to the New York Times, the FBI in the opening months of Trump’s administration opened a counterintelligence investigation into the new president to assess whether he is a pawn of the Kremlin, wittingly or otherwise.

Yesterday, Michael Cohen, the president’s disgraced consigliere, accepted his fate. Although Cohen has assisted the Department of Justice in its inquiry into Donald J. Trump’s Kremlin connections, he nevertheless was sentenced to three years in Federal prison for myriad crimes, including hush-payoffs to two Trump mistresses, as well as lying to Congress. The old Cohen, brimming with bravado about taking a bullet for his only client, taunting TV talking heads in Trump’s defense, is long gone. The new Cohen sounds contrite about his crimes, which he admitted. In the Federal court in Manhattan, he explained that his ‘blind loyalty’ to the president and Trump’s ‘dirty deeds’ constituted his downfall.

The central fact of Donald Trump’s presidency is that it was never supposed to happen. Running for the White House was a publicity stunt, The Donald’s biggest yet, a bold effort to pump up his brand several notches and get more money for his myriad gigs. It was never a serious run for office. Yet, somehow, it worked. Anecdotal evidence abounds. There was the stunning lack of a bona fide victory speech on the night of November 8, 2016. What Trump delivered in response to his unexpected victory was incoherently ad hoc even for him. Winning was never part of the Trumpian plan. As Howard Stern, who has known our 45th president for decades, explained, ‘Believe me, nobody wanted Hillary to win more than Donald Trump.