President Donald Trump excessively appeases Vladimir Putin out of fear because he knows the Russian dictator likely has serious dirt on him, the author Luke Harding has alleged.
Appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, Harding told host Joanna Coles that Trump, 80, is “afraid” of the Russian president, 73, because of the Kremlin’s sweeping surveillance operations.
The Betrayal: Trump, Putin and The New Age of Conquest author said that while working as a correspondent in Moscow in 2007, he experienced firsthand the frightening extent to which the Russian government monitored him and his family.
Harding described how the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) broke into his family’s apartment and planted bugs, which they used to keep eyes on them even during their most intimate moments.
“They made it clear that they were watching us because on one occasion, we came back from a family holiday in Berlin and they’d left a sex manual in Russian by the side of the marital bed,” Harding said. “And I had to say to my wife, you know, ‘Darling, this really isn’t mine. The KGB have introduced this.’”
“And that was them basically saying, ‘We’re watching—we’re watching you,’” he added.
The Guardian correspondent shut down any notion that the “clues” they left in his apartment were friendly, even recounting one occasion when they found the window next to his six-year-old son’s bed busted open, leaving a 10-story drop to the ground below.
“The reason I tell you this is that the... FSB, KGB, are adept at surveillance,” Harding said. “They break in and watch everybody. And of course, that means there’ll be... tapes of Donald Trump.”
The journalist said that “any high-profile American visitor will be bugged, followed, intercepted,” adding that the Kremlin likely had tapes of former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as well as Trump.
“There’ll be an attempt to kind of compromise their electronic devices. That’s just, you know, standard operating procedure,” he explained. “So there will be tapes of Trump in Moscow. And really, you just have to ask yourself, what did Trump do there?”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The author noted that the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, then chaired by Marco Rubio, confirmed in a report that “the FSB had surveillance cameras in guest bedrooms in the hotel where Trump stayed.”
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