President Vladimir Putin's Election Gambit

There is no evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a master at the board game called "chess", but he is a grand master at a real life version of the game.

In 2016. he began an operation to discredit the American system of elections.   He took advantage of the basic stupidity of many American politicians and journalists to create the delusion that he had colluded with Donald Trump to affect the presidential election.

Putin was a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, the highly effective Soviet Secret Police.  If  the Russians had been trying to elect Trump, any Russian contact with the Trump campaign would have been done in secret to avoid detection.  Putin is intelligent enough to know that some Americans would vote against a candidate favored by Russia.

Putin had Russians meet with Trump campaigners to set Trump up for a collusion charge in the event Trump won.  I became suspicious of the real purpose of  one meeting because a tv news story sounded like someone might have coordinated the meeting with the Department of Justice.  The discovery of the meeting seemed too  easy.  I'm not a fan of Putin, but I respect his intelligence.  He would not have used people so unprofessional that they would be caught while engaged in what  should have been a secret operation.

Putting people in apparently compromising situations  is an old KGB tactic that the KGB used to blackmail  people into cooperating with the KGB such as by providing access to information.    The Russian contact with Trump campaigners is a variation on this tactic with the goal simply being to frame people in Trump's campaign.

I doubt that Putin wanted either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to be President  of  the United States.   In 2016 Putin  likely thought the best outcome would be a discredited American election especially if the winner would be forced out of office.  .  Putin had been criticized for his  conduction of presidential    elections.   Creating a scandal about an Amercan presidential election might prevent unfavorable comparison of Russian elections to American elections particularly if Putin could claim the "American Secret Police" rejected the candidate voters wanted. 

Putin is certainly aware of how much the Soviet Union had benefited  from the Watergate controversy.  The fall of Richard Nixon  was followed by the fall of U.S. backed governments in Vietnam and Iran.  The  Soviet Union was able to take advantage of the weakened American presidency to invade Afghanistan.   

If Putin has any derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, he will probably keep it secret unless she is elected president.

This farce has gone on long enough.   Congress and President Trump  need to concentrate on the real problems our nation faces.