No one should be surprised that the FBI never fully got to the bottom of Donald Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin. This is not because there is nothing to see. Indeed, there has always been so much to see that following the trail felt like drinking from a firehose. Russian buyers, post-Soviet intermediaries, mob-adjacent money, Moscow real-estate promises, Deutsche Bank loans, Russian beauty pageants, oligarchs, backchannels, and inexplicable policy alignments. The threads to pull are endless.
The problem was never the absence of smoke. It was the number of powerful people whose careers, reputations, clients and paychecks depended on treating the smoke as fog, so that it would be impossible for anyone to make out what was behind it.
Now, as Trump once again positions himself to dictate Ukraine’s future through his own circle of envoys, that old failure looks less like a mystery than an indictment. Russia has said that it expects Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to resume Ukraine-related contacts soon, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praising their “constructive” approach. That is, of course, the giveaway. Vladimir Putin wants Trump’s people in the room because he knows exactly whom he is dealing with.
Trump’s fascination with Moscow did not begin in 2016, when Russia did everything it could to throw the election his way. In 1986, Trump met Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin, when the Soviets appear to have identified him as a potential witting or unwitting asset to cultivate. In January 1987, Dubinin sent Trump a letter relaying Moscow’s interest in a joint hotel venture. Later that year, Trump and his first wife, Ivana, traveled to Moscow to explore the project. Nothing came out of it — much like nothing has ever come out of any Trump real estate project in Moscow.
The Russians have been dangling prizes in front of Trump ever since: real estate, status, flattery, access, and the promise that he might finally be allowed into the strongman club, seated at the table with the men he has spent his life trying to impress. Moscow is Trump’s kind of town: gold-filigreed, glitzy, transactional, soaked in conspicuous consumption and populated by the kind of beautiful Slavic women he has always fetishized. Putin, a former KGB officer, understands this better than most, though it hardly takes an intelligence dossier to see what makes Trump tick. Trump wants money, spectacle, submission, and membership in the world of men who do not ask for permission before they do whatever moves them. But for all his hunger, he has never quite broken in — at least in Moscow. And that is precisely what has always made him so easy to play for the Russians.
That trip forty years ago marked the beginning of Trump’s long, visible hunger for Moscow’s approval — a hunger that became more consequential as post-Soviet money poured into the luxury real estate world where Trump made his name. Over the years, Trump and his children traveled to Russia repeatedly. They dealt in an ecosystem populated by Russian mobsters, influence peddlers, Kremlin cronies, and oligarchs. In turn, people from that world bought and sold real estate in Trump’s orbit, moving money through the same luxury property channels that stretched from Trump Tower to South Florida.
The FBI, of all institutions, should have understood this world. It spent decades studying Soviet intelligence, Russian organized crime, money laundering, oligarch networks, and Kremlin influence operations. It knew Moscow did not always cultivate people by handing them envelopes in parking garages. Sometimes it cultivated vanity. Sometimes it used debt and business opportunities. Sometimes it used access, flattery, kompromat, greed, and mutually useful corruption.
And yet when Trump emerged as a national political figure with decades of Russia-adjacent business questions behind him, the system somehow treated the matter with less attention that it has paid to low-level political figures in New Jersey. From the moment he descended the golden escalator in 2016, it was obvious that Russia was deeply interested in helping him get to the White House. Indeed, it had already put mechanisms in place to cultivate the Republican Party, the NRA, evangelicals and other members of what would become his base years earlier. But the FBI largely stood back and did nothing even as this extraordinary counterintelligence operation played out.
During Trump’s first term, former FBI Director Robert Mueller investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election but report did not establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — a conclusion then-Attorney General William Barr immediately weaponized to flatten the public narrative into “no collusion.” Still, Mueller’s report also documented Russian election interference and contacts between Trump-world figures and Russian-linked actors. It did not exonerate Trump on obstruction.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee went further. Its report concluded that the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence-linked figures posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” and detailed how Trump associates had regular contacts with Russians and expected to benefit from the Kremlin’s help.
“Grave counterintelligence threat” should have been the beginning of a national reckoning. Instead, Trump turned “no collusion” into a slogan and the deeper question was never answered in a way the public could see: what leverage, dependency, affinity, financial exposure or psychological attachment tied Trump so consistently to Moscow?
It is time to talk about why we still do not have that answer. The very law enforcement world that should have pursued the Trump-Russia connection most aggressively may have had its own reasons to tread lightly.