Young column: How Putin’s corruptible pawn was cultivated

To mortified Americans everywhere — you who still cannot expel the hurt from your minds:

This president has done many horrible things: conspiring to undermine a U.S. election; inciting a bloody insurrection; breaking the law and skating past felony indictments.
As aghast as you’ve been at all that and about every stunning action since November, you never imagined it would come to the televised mugging of a western hero.
The victim: A man who every day fights to preserve the very democratic ideals for which generations of Americans have fought and died.
The mugger: One who ambushed and demeaned Ukraine’s president to abet the geopolitical lustings of a murderous dictator.
Where did this start?
Was it when Ukraine’s president risked retribution and crucial military aid by not telling lies about Joe Biden?
Was it in 2016 when Russia decided the best use of its diminishing might was to boost the election of the most destabilizing American candidate?
Neither. Too recent.
A good candidate for the nexus for this is way back 1986, when the then-Soviet Union thought a young, easily corrupted Manhattan developer might be up for a little — heh, heh – kompromat.
What a good choice the Soviets made.
Though several publications have written about it, no deep digging is necessary. The target of the Soviets’ affections wrote about it in his “The Art of the Deal.”
As reported by Politico, it began with a meeting, spontaneous or otherwise, with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin. It yielded a trip to Moscow where the man who would be Putin’s boy toy started to visualize a high-rise tower near Red Square.
In “The Art of the Deal” he remarked on “the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal.”
Who knows how much courting followed from there? Certainly, it appeared in play when Vladimir Putin sent the kindest of regards and accommodations when the Man from Manhattan was in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe contest.
Though the latter would say negotiations for a hotel in Moscow ceased before he ran for president, that was a lie, said former fixer Michael Cohen, who was doing some of the negotiating.
What about collusion with the Russians in 2016? Robert Mueller couldn’t pin a crime on the recipient of that “from-Russia” love. Mueller did say the obstruction of the probe was criminal, and that Russian interference in the election was real and egregious.
From firing the FBI director for not playing ball, to yucking up with the Russian ambassador about it, it was all a magnificent and intricate game of cover-up.
As with all the investigations that brought Manhattan Man to the brink of jail over the last four years: If he was without fault, all he had to do was cooperate. Testify truthfully; set things straight.
Instead, he stonewalled. Then he ran to his hand-populated Supreme Court to invent an immunity defense for him.
With so many bits of evidence about all this, for my money a dead giveaway happened the other day, though it barely got attention amid all the destruction wrought by this president.
It happened when FBI officials who had been assigned to monitor foreign interference in U.S. elections were forced out or re-assigned.
The White House shut it down. Nothing to see there.
Several publications recently have reported assertions by a former Russian intelligence agent, Alnur Mussanayev, that in 1987 the American striver angling to see his name on a Moscow tower was enlisted for his services by the KGB.
For one who has exhibited allegiance to none but himself, assuming the price was right – and you know it would be — a transactional relationship with the Kremlin wouldn’t have been a stretch at all.
It hardly matters now, for as demonstrated in his horrendous treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, it doesn’t matter if he’s picking up a check from for it or not. He’s doing what Putin would have hired him to do.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.