As more and more damning information comes out about Trump’s illegal and dangerous theft of highly classified U.S. security information he stashed at Mar-A-Lago and who knows where else, the one glaring question no one appears willing to consider publicly is to me the most obvious.

That is, simply, given the unquestionable intent of Trump to hold onto all those documents, including the most highly secret ones — why?

The rote answer is always given as something to do with Trump’s personal agenda and his penchant for lying and/or psychosis. How about the right answer being what many were thinking in the first years of his candidacy/presidency, that he was and remains a conscious agent of a hostile foreign power? Russia.

That idea, still the soundest explanation in this writer’s view, got dropped like a hot rock by everyone when the findings of the Mueller Report were deemed uncredible. But the issues around that report were muddied by Trump himself and his GOP allies. It seems everyone, including his political enemies and in the media, felt the need to suddenly step away. I can only wonder why.

Well, this writer has not, not one bit. I go back to the columns I wrote in the months following the January 6, 2021 siege of the nation’s capital, that I compiled in a short collection entitled, “The January 6 Capitol Sacking: Putin’s Role.” It has sold well, but without a single boost from any commentator or reviewer, and also, notably, without a single denier.

My largely eye-witness reporting was in the context of my first hand recollections of the highly-charged American political fringes of the 1970s and since and the obvious ways in which Soviet/Russian methods were used then to gain a solid foothold into American political functioning. If anything, the revelations about Trump’s latest treasonous activities only more solidly underscore my previous observations and conclusions.

I write this hardly to sell more of these books, but to help awaken the public to the true, insidious nature of the ongoing Russian threat to our democracy.

Some, I presume, choose not to acknowledge my thoughts and experiences on grounds that I am not part of the D.C. media elite since I have come at these matters not from an Ivy League school but from the school of hard knocks, as it were. Since I was a part of the political counterculture of the 1970s, some perhaps expect that I somehow am still there. That, of course, is patently ridiculous, though admittedly in the frozen minds of some, a hard notion to dispel, regardless of my meritorious societal contributions of the last three dozen years.

For the record, in my heart I am not a leftist or a rightist or anyone’s agent. I aligned the way I did in the 1970s for a complex set of reasons at the time that involved my perception of joining up with a soft, humanitarian left. It turned out to evolve into an evil political weapon of Moscow.

By contrast, I consider myself best profiled primarily as a spiritual person, though I hardly wear that on my sleeve. I sought to bring the best of my graduate theological education (I graduated with honors from the United Church of Christ-affiliated Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. in 1969) to apply to issues of my “coming out” as gay in that early 1970s. Only later did I fall gradually into the nasty cultist climate of that unfortunate decade, becoming for a time a sad tool of the late cult leader, the pro-Moscow Lyndon LaRouche.

But I left that organization with extreme prejudice long ago, careful to elude the great howls of protest that some who broke free elicited from the leadership. In my case, I think that my departure was not more fully resisted if only because I am gay and the organization had turned strongly against that.

Still, the stigma of my involvement with that cult is hard to move beyond. Just in the last year, a local poll worker slandered my newspaper as being affiliated with LaRouche, though it has been totally independent since its founding over 30 years ago.

(To be continued).