Today, the world stands speechless and with mouths agape at the latest news of the veritable demise, or next stage of “slow killing,” as U.S. Rep. Don Beyer put it, of one of America’s great institutions, The Washington Post.

It happens at the same time that Virginia U.S. Senator Mark Warner is going all over the media to sound the alarm, as the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that this year’s midterm elections are in grave peril.

 In Warner’s case, his concerns are taken from news coverage of Trump’s brazen call to “nationalize” elections under Republican control and his deployment of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to Fulton County, Georgia to oversee the FBI’s illegal confiscation of voter records from the 2020 presidential campaign.

Warner is as concerned with the role of Gabbard as anything else in this week’s bizarre set of developments. There is news of a whistle blower report on Gabbard that is being held away from the public as extremely “classified” because of its sensitive nature.

But we recall that during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton ran against Trump and lost, that Clinton warned then that Gabbard, who was considering running for president herself at the time, was a Russian asset.

Now, everything that Clinton said about Trump’s ties to Russia, and what was included in the Mueller Report at the time about those ties, has turned out to be true, even if Trump and his allies have succeeded in burying them under mounds of obfuscation, denial and pressures against the media.

Still, the story won’t go away about Trump’s visit to Moscow in 1987 and the reports that he was recruited then to be an asset of Moscow. Journalist Luke Hardin reported in his 2017 book, Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House, that the (then) Soviet Union, specifically the KGB, began cultivating and identifying Trump as a potential asset as early as 1987. Craig Unger, in his book American Kompromat, makes the same claim, and at the time, the Executive Intelligence Review, a U.S. magazine with a Moscow tilt, first reported it in 1987. 

According to Hardin, in 1987, the KGB-controlled travel agency Intourist arranged Trump’s visit to Moscow, where Soviet officials wined and dined Trump to explore hotel deals, a typical tactic used by the KGB to “work” foreign targets.

Harding noted that the KGB’s recruitment strategy under Vladimir Kryuchkov sought Americans with traits such as vanity, narcissism, and a lack of scruples. He then noted that immediately following the trip, Trump took out full-page newspaper advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe criticizing U.S. foreign policy and NATO, talking points that aligned with Soviet interests.

Former KGB sources such as Yuri Shvets and Alnur Mussayev, have further alleged that Trump was formally recruited in 1987 under the codename “Krasnov.”