Trump, the Russian Mafia, and the FBI

No, Mike Johnson, Donald Trump was NOT an FBI informant. But he had friends both in the Bureau and the Russian Mafia. And and he knew how to get something out of both of them--and emerge unscathed.

The Informant? Trump’s relationship to the FBI was not that of an informant, as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said. Instead, he was more like a “hip pocket source,” that is, someone who was not an official source for the FBI, but who nonetheless tipped off the bureau from time to time—and expected something in return. Credit: Tom Brenner/Washington Post

One explanation for President Trump’s refusal to release all the Epstein files has been Mike Johnson’s statement that Donald J. Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”

Over the weekend, the Speaker of the House modified that assertion to say he meant that Trump merely said he was “willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator.”

Exactly why any of that would prevent the president from releasing the files escapes me, but Johnson’s outlandish proclamation does raise crucial questions about Trump’s relationship to the FBI. It’s important because the Russian Mafia laundered untold millions of dollars through Trump real estate and, as I reported long ago, in The New Republic, “at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.”

Many of them used his apartments and casinos to launder millions of dollars in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower. Others helped provide Trump with lucrative branding deals so that he could franchise luxury high-rise apartment buildings for the rich.

Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing—hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars— that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics.

When you realize that the Russian Mafia works hand in glove with Russian intelligence, the fact that the president of the United States is so deeply indebted to them suggests an historic and staggering breach of national security. The inescapable but nonetheless taboo conclusion is that the president of the United States is a Russian asset.

In that context, Trump’s relationship to the FBI raises a question of historic importance. In view of the extraordinary intelligence failures that led to Trump’s ascent, what was his relationship to the FBI?

Trump’s Get Out of Jail Card: Trump was generous with James Kallstrom, the head of New York’s FBI field office, but he expected something in return.

Trump’s closest friend in the FBI was the late James K. Kallstrom, who oversaw the FBI’s New York office in the mid-nineties and took charge of successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and the Russia Mafia. He worked closely with then US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani, in the Eighties, and, going back even further, had been close with Trump since around 1973 when Kallstrom put together a parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans which was funded in part by Trump. “We just got to be friends,” said Kallstrom in a 2020 interview done for a documentary called An American Affair: Donald Trump and the FBI. “I went to a few dinners with him. We talked quite often. He was very, very supportive of the bureau. We lose an agent, or somebody gets shot up, he was always there for the food or whatever it took.”

According to The New York Times, Kallstrom had founded the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit that got an unusually generous offering of more than $1.3 million from the normally parsimonious Trump.

As I wrote in American Kompromat:

But Trump being Trump, loyalty and generosity came with strings attached. “He[Trump]cultivated FBI people,” investigative reporter SpyTalk editor Jeff Stein says in An American Affair. “And that’s well-known behavior by people who swim in dangerous waters. They want to have a get out of jail card, and that get-out-of-jail card is having friendships or being a good source for the FBI.”

Kallstrom insisted that Trump was not an FBI informant, but another agent told Stein that Trump was known within the bureau as a “hip pocket” source—that is, someone who was not official a source and therefore not in the FBI files, but who had curried enough favor to be known as a “friend.”

On the one hand, Trump had millions coming in from Russian mobsters like David Bogatin buying luxury condos to launder money. He also had at least a sporadic connection with [Semion]Kislin, who came to Trump’s aid after his massive bankruptcies in Atlantic City in the nineties by issuing mortgages for condos in Trump World Tower, the seventy-two-story luxury high-rise near the United Nations. According to an investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek, one-third of the units on the tower’s priciest floors had been snatched up by individual buyers or limited liability companies tied to Russia or the former Soviet Union.

So Kallstrom’s friendship with Trump set up a bizarre dynamic. David Bogatin, Semion Kislin, and Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal gangsters in the Russian Mafia and the owner of a Trump Tower condo in the nineties, all allegedly had ties to Trump, the Russian Mafia and/or the KGB. All of them were on the FBI’s radar screen and on Trump’s.

Trump could afford to be generous with Kallstrom, but he expected something in return. Perhaps it was as simple as having the FBI turn a blind eye to the massive amounts of money that was being laundered through Trump condos. According to a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation, more than 1,300 Trump-branded condos inthe United States were sold “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

While it may be impossible to calculate the exact amount of money Trump reaped from such transactions, given that the average price of the condos was $1.2 million, the total amount of capital being parked in Trump condos was likely more than $1.5 billion, a significant but unknown part of which came from Russians. And that involves the sale of condos only in the US and does not include Trump properties in Turkey, Canada, Panama, the Philippines, India, Azerbaijan, or elsewhere.

So when people ask what the Russians had on Trump, the answer is quite simple: They owned him.