The Anatomy of a Taboo

Ten years ago, the highest intelligence officials in the land said that Donald Trump was an asset of Russian intelligence. Why won't the mainstream press say it out loud?

When I was in Finland last month, I gave a talk at the Centrum Balticum to a couple of hundred intelligence officers, diplomats, and cabinet officials from Finland, Estonia, and other countries in the Baltics. “I’m going to say something that may be obvious to many of you but is still taboo in the United States,” I told them. “Donald Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence.”

When it was over, I was delighted with the way my talk was received. But one thing was striking: there was no pushback whatsoever to the shocking premise of my talk.

Donald Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence?

Of course.

Ho hum.

Nothing surprising there.

In the United States, however, such an assertion is still taboo. I’ve written two books — House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat — laying out the facts: how, over four decades, operatives tied to Russian intelligence and the Russian mafia cultivated Donald Trump as an asset.

I’ve already made the case ad nauseam, so this essay is not about the particulars. (You can read how it started in my Trump-Russia Timeline.) It’s about a different question: Why won’t the mainstream press say it out loud?

Of course, I’m not the only one who’s raised the issue of Trump’s ties to Russian intelligence. In one form or another, the same charge has been made repeatedly by the highest intelligence officials in the land. On August 5, 2016, The New York Times published Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, writing an op-ed piece that endorsed Hillary Clinton, and declaring: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” A few days later, on ABC’s This Week, Morell doubled down, saying he had no doubt Putin viewed Trump as “an unwitting agent.”

Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed just before the 2016 election, Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, reached for a Soviet-era term: polezni durak, the “useful fool,” a phrase, more commonly rendered as “useful idiot,” and often attributed to that Vladimir Lenin(probably apocryphally) describing naïve Westerners who can easily be manipulated by Russian intelligence. Trump, Hayden wrote, was a naïf “manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

And after the Helsinki summit in July 2018, former CIA director John Brennan declared that Trump’s conduct was “nothing short of treasonous” and that he was “wholly in the pocket of Putin” — treason being, at its core, the betrayal of one’s trust to aid an adversary.

There was one more finding the press let slip beneath the surface — the most authoritative of all. In August 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the fifth and final volume of its investigation into Russian interference: nearly a thousand pages, built on more than three years of work, two hundred interviews, and over a million documents.

This was no partisan exercise. The committee was Republican-led, with Marco Rubio as its acting chairman. Yet it went much further than Special Counsel Robert Mueller had—largely because this was a counterintelligence investigation, as it should have been, and Mueller’s report and charging decisions had wrongly been framed around criminal matters rather than counterintelligence issues.

That was then: In 2020, as acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Rubio released a report saying the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia represented “a grave counterintelligence threat.” credit: AP/Alex Brandon

Significantly, Rubio’s report identified Konstantin Kilimnik, the man to whom Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort fed internal polling data, not as some ambiguous Russian contact but, in its own words, as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It concluded that Manafort’s access and his willingness to share information with people tied to Russian intelligence represented an ongoing threat. And in a passage so sensitive it was largely blacked out, it reported information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the very operation that hacked and leaked the Democrats’ emails.

Mueller had been confined to a criminal question — was there a prosecutable conspiracy? — and found too little to charge one. But the Senate took up the more serious counterintelligence question: not “is it a crime?” but “is it a threat?” And the bipartisan, Republican-led committee answered yes, the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia are a threat and that threat is grave and ongoing.

Here, surely, was an explosive story: not a cable host’s monologue, not a partisan’s accusation, but the considered judgment of the Senate’s own intelligence committee, led by none other than Marco Rubio. But there was no indictment to follow, no trial to cover, no docket to supply the narrative spine — only a report. And a report, however damning, that the press didn’t know how to keep alive.

When I started out in journalism, reports of the My Lai Massacre, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate startled the American people, hijacked the national conversation—and changed the course of history. Just one series of stories by one or two reporters could set off an explosion that would destroy the preferred narratives of the powers that be.

But today — not so much. The assessments of Morell, Hayden, and Brennan were reported as the remarks of the day, and then… nothing. Not a single major media outlet took the extraordinary claim these men had handed them and built a sustained investigation around it. Did you see it pursued on CBS Sixty Minutes — even before its recent immolation? As for The Washington Post and The New York Times, they reported the contacts, and even won prizes for it — but never pursued the asset question as the through-line.

It is not that the claim cannot be spoken at all; it circulates freely enough in independent media and online. But in the institutional press, it remains taboo. The bigger the platform, the more unsayable it becomes. Rachel Maddow, the cable anchor for MSNBC/MSNOW who pursued Trump-Russia more relentlessly than any other, was branded a conspiracy theorist for it — and even she stopped short of saying it in her own editorial voice, routing it through conditionals and the findings of others.

As a result, instead of getting to the bottom of the issue, the American public heard Donald Trump himself proclaiming, ad nauseam, that it was all a “Russia hoax.”

When I grew up, my favorite movie was The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 political thriller in which Communists penetrated the highest reaches of American power. It was the apotheosis of Cold War paranoia.

How is it possible that these extraordinary allegations are not taken seriously enough to become part of the national conversation? Why can little old Finland and Estonia accept a reality that America won’t dare acknowledge?

One reason may be a definitional sleight of hand. I’m not asserting that Trump is a Russian agent — someone knowingly tasked by Putin, with a secret back channel. Rather, I’m asserting that Trump is an asset: a trusted contact whose interests are aligned with Putin’s and who has been cultivated by Russia for forty years. He doesn’t need to be told what to do, because he already wants what they want.

So let’s get it straight: Donald Trump is not an agent of Russian intelligence. He’s an asset.

But the press won’t report even that.

Consider the one time the case against Trump truly seized the national conversation. In the summer of 2022, the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack — chaired by Bennie Thompson, with Liz Cheney as vice chair and Jamie Raskin among its members — staged a series of televised hearings that were, by design, riveting. The committee brought in James Goldston, a former president of ABC News, to produce them, and the result was narrative television in the old network mold: live witnesses, surfacing evidence, a clean arc from the January 6 rally to the riot to the refusal to call it off. It was a genuine spectacle, and, for a few weeks, the country watched, captivated, and the illicit conduct of a corrupt president who led a violent insurrection to overturn the legitimate election of Joe Biden was, at last, the story.

And then it ended. The committee made its criminal referrals, issued its report, and dissolved when the House changed hands. The prosecutions that followed gave the story a second life — indictment, arraignment, the machinery of a trial the press knew how to cover — until that machinery, too, was shut down, this time by an election.

Once the prosecution stopped, so did the coverage — not because the facts had changed, but because the proceedings had ended. And suddenly, it became taboo again.

The Trump-Russia story had run a similar course years earlier. The Mueller investigation supplied the procedural engine — subpoenas, guilty pleas, indictments, a report the country awaited for nearly two years — and the coverage ran exactly as long as the machinery did. When the report finally landed, no charge against the president followed; Attorney General William Barr got out ahead of it with a four-page letter clearing him, and the story collapsed before the full document was even public.

The lesson is the same in both cases. The American press can carry a grave story about a president only so long as it is tied to a legal procedure — an investigation, an indictment, a hearing, a trial — that supplies the narrative spine and the daily news peg. Give reporters a docket and they will follow it to the verdict. Take the docket away — especially when it is taken away for political reasons — and the story is not reexamined on its merits. It simply goes quiet.

Another reason major news outlets don’t pursue the story is that they rely heavily on first-person contact with the president, and to name Donald Trump as an asset of a hostile foreign power would likely forfeit that contact permanently. That’s the problem with access journalism. It’s not a conspiracy of silence among editors. Rather, it’s an institutional disincentive that makes the most important story one that is too costly to finish. The truth is held hostage to the big “get.”

Lest we forget: Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer and Paul Manafort’s sidekick, was given internal data from the 2016 Trump campaign.

To be sure, reporters should always try to get both sides of the story. But more often not, I believe, journalists can get closer to the truth by not getting that exclusive interview with the president. If one party says two and two is four and the other says it’s a hundred and twenty-seven, the truth is not somewhere in between. To report it as such is to abdicate journalism’s real responsibility — finding the truth.

And there is one more reason the press has nothing to hold onto, the strangest of all. Even if a reporter proved the case tomorrow, there is no law against being an intelligence asset. American journalism is trained to anchor its gravest accusations to legal process — the indictment, the verdict, the named statute — and here there is none to be found.

Which brings me back to the question I left hanging in that room in Turku. Why could an audience of Finns and Estonians take as self-evident what 340 million Americans will not say out loud? Part of the answer is everything I’ve just described — access journalism, both-sidesism, a media and consumers divided into countless impenetrable silos, a crime with no name in the statute books.

But part of it is simpler, and I felt it as I stood at the podium. The Finns and the Estonians have lived next door to Russia their entire lives. They have watched the cultivation, the kompromat, the bought officials and the hollowed-out institutions operate up close, for generations. They do not need the model explained to them; they can see it.

Americans, insulated by an ocean and seventy years of global dominance, have the luxury of disbelief. The Baltics never did.

And the stakes are not abstract. What hangs in the balance is NATO, Ukraine, and the survival of democratic institutions at home.

Finally, there is a bitter symmetry I keep returning to. In September 1987, just two months after he returned from his first trip to Moscow, Trump took out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe attacking the very alliances the Kremlin wanted weakened. At the time, Yuri Shvets, a source for my book American Kompromat, who, in the 1980s, was a major in the KGB, was at the KGB’s foreign intelligence headquarters when a cable came across his desk.

According to Shvets, the KGB’s Active Measures Directorate saw Trump’s ad as a great success in helping the Soviets drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. It was a big deal, Yuri told me—cause for a real celebration. They had succeeded in getting an intelligence asset to plant KGB talking points in three major American newspapers!

But nearly forty years later, those same newspapers cannot bring themselves to print the story of what that asset became. The Kremlin well understood the value of the American press.

Maybe we should, too.

Source Notes

1. Michael J. Morell, “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” The New York Times, August 5, 2016.

2. Michael Morell, interview on ABC’s This Week, August 7, 2016.

3. Michael V. Hayden, “Former CIA chief: Trump is Russia’s useful fool,” The Washington Post, November 3, 2016. (Hayden described the term as Soviet-era; the popular attribution of “useful idiot” to Lenin is itself undocumented.)

4. John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan), post on Twitter/X, July 16, 2018, following the Trump–Putin press conference in Helsinki.

5. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities, released August 18, 2020 — 966 pages, the product of more than three years of work, 200-plus witness interviews, and over a million pages of documents; acting chairman Marco Rubio, vice chairman Mark Warner.

6. Ibid. The committee identified Konstantin Kilimnik as a “Russian intelligence officer” and concluded that Paul Manafort’s willingness to share campaign information with figures tied to Russian intelligence “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” In a largely redacted passage, it reported information suggesting Kilimnik “may have been connected” to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation; it could not determine what Kilimnik did with the polling data.

7. The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, 1962.

8. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair; Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair; Rep. Jamie Raskin, member). Former ABC News president James Goldston was engaged to produce the June–July 2022 televised hearings.

9. Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (2019); Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page letter on the report’s “principal conclusions,” March 24, 2019.

10. Todd Blanche has served as acting U.S. Attorney General since April 2, 2026 (following the firing of Pam Bondi) while remaining the confirmed Deputy Attorney General; President Trump formally nominated him for the permanent post on June 8, 2026, with Senate confirmation pending.

11. Donald J. Trump, full-page open letter on U.S. foreign and defense policy, published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, September 2, 1987 (cost: $94,801). Trump’s first trip to Moscow was in July 1987.