I've been saying for months that the Russian Trump interference goes much further than the 2016 election...that was just the culmination. Everybody sees the admiration that Trump has had for Putin, everybody knows Trump's relationships and business deals on that side of the iron curtain goes back decades and we all can see from Eric Trump's comments that money has been flowing in from Russia. Nobody is surprised by any of this anymore but what hasn't been made clear is how Trump used the Russians or better yet how the Russians used Trump.
You can't tell me that you honestly believe Trump is a genius businessman, most of his ideas are tacky disasters. Take a Trump air or Trump Steaks or Trump University, they are all lame and genuinely bad ideas. The kinds of ideas that your idiot cousin would invest in if he ever hit the lottery. The one thing he has made his money on is developments but why for a guy who was so bad at so many other things, was he good at that? I think it comes down to Trump getting a little help.
Basically the Russians were using Trump as a cash mule to launder money through off-shore companies who needs to park their found money into assets, ones that could appreciate.
Nobody knows how to value real-estate, especially high end real estate, so it's a perfect way to funnel money and Trump had it set up to basically collecting a vig. Oligarchs were buying and selling apartments they never planned to live in, just leaving their money parked -and their apartments empty- until the next oligarch could come in and give them some cash relief. Values could easily go up or down depending on the market, we aren't talking about a cookie cutter tenement apartment here.
And this is how hey will get him eventually, through a complex money laundering scheme.
They used Trump's name and allowed him bus space and then, one day, they saw an opportunity and thought they'd take this big time at which time Trump descended that escalator and we were all screwed