The Asset

The scandal of Russian interference became Topic # 1 in the first six months of 2017. In a whirlwind of bombshell stories and breaking developments, Trump’s Russia ties went from a fringe topic, ignored by the national media, to a national media obsession.

During the 2016 election, candidate Trump’s laudatory comments about Russia were, frankly, weird. For 70 years, the Republican Party had defined itself by being hawkish o...

Donald Trump’s businesses failed; a lot. He bankrupted hotels, casinos, an airline and—even an entire football league. And when they failed Trump needed someone to bail him out. And up until the late 1990s that person was his dad.

Yet despite Trump’s businesses failures, he came to personify the image of American wealth and success in the 1980s. It was an era of a roaring stock market and Wall Street extravagance and n...

To understand the Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is essential to understand Vladimir Putin. And to understand Putin, you need to understand his KGB past, his rise to power, his fight for control of Russia, and the system--The Sistema--he created.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set off a mad violent scramble to take control over its vast state-held industrial sector. Organized crime flourished and The Oliga...

Russian Money was pouring out of Russia into the US real estate market and Donald Trump was all about it. We follow the Russian money flowing into the Trump Organization, highlighting the shady cast of characters that surround Donald Trump and his businesses from the suspicious deals in the former Soviet Union, to “little Moscow” where Trump concentrated his properties in Florida, to the story...

The fight over Ukraine’s future is key to the Trump-Russia story. It is central to understanding why, in 2016, Russia undertook such a brazen and risky assault on American democracy.

 Russia’s attempt to reassert itself as a great power and exert control over Ukraine led to a collapse in U.S.-Russia relations. Color revolutions in former Soviet states, including two major uprisings in Ukraine, aggravated Putin’s suspic...

Join us as we go through the murky world of Russian intelligence. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the old-style KGB tactics didn’t go away. Instead, the Russian intelligence apparatus has been empowered. This episode goes through the story of the Russian “illegals” spy ring operating in the U.S., examining the back story of these deep cover Russian agents who would later become the inspiration for the hit television series “Th...

We break down the beginnings of the two campaigns to elect Donald Trump: one run out of Trump Tower, and the other run out of the Kremlin. 

From the moment Trump announced he was running for president, he was unabashedly pro-Russia. It made no sense. Until we learned that throughout the campaign, the Trump Organization was actively seeking to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow.

 In this episode of The Asset, hos...

Friday, July 22, 2016 was the day it became clear that the 2016 presidential election would be like no other ever experienced in the United States. On that day, the Russian cut-out WikiLeaks released a massive trove of hacked emails from the DNC. And Russia had just shown that it was all-in in support of Donald Trump.

We break down Trump’s collusion with Russia into five easy steps: Hack. Inform. Collude. Release. Cam...

October 7th, 2016, was one of the most important days in American political history. At 4:03 pm that day, the Access Hollywood tape was released. Just 29 minutes later, WikiLeaks – at 4:32pm on a Friday –began releasing emails hacked by Russian military officers from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account. The timing of this dump made no sense for WikiLeaks. But it made a lot of sense for Donald Trump.

Last ...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is the most damning document ever published about a sitting president. But as much as it told us, the Mueller report said it found “insufficient evidence” to establish that there was a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Not that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, just not enough to prove it in c...

After the election, Russia sought to cash in for its efforts during the election. Collusion didn’t end with the 2016 election, as the Trump transition team and the Kremlin continued working together to plot ways the incoming Trump administration could deliver for Russia.

This week on The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress, analyzes ...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report documents not only collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to win the 2016 election but also Trump’s frantic efforts to cover up collusion with Russia. In this week’s episode, host Max Bergmann, the director of the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, breaks down those efforts, from pressuring witnesses not to cooperate to pushin...

As an FBI Special Agent, Asha Rangappa specialized in counter intelligence investigations, pursuing threats to our nation's security. In that role, Rangappa tracked down assets of foreign governments and neutralized those threats. She also flipped foreign nationals into becoming assets of the United States government. In this trailer to our Patreon post of the full 45-minute interview with Rangappa, the former ag...

Donald Trump's deep and complicated relationship with Russia goes back to the 1980's with his trip to the Soviet Union. In this excerpt of our exclusive interview with journalist and author Luke Harding, who was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief from 2007 to 2011, we dive into the stories swirling around Donald Trump of assassinations, sketchy real-estate deals, money laundering, hacking and Russian espionage......

On July 25, Trump had a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the recently-elected president of Ukraine. According to notes on the conversation released by the White House, Trump asked Zelensky to do him a “favor” by investigating two conspiracy theories, one claiming that Ukrainian government officials conspired with the Clinton campaign in 2016 and the other alleging that former Vice President (and Democratic presidential ...

In order to fully understand the impeachment inquiry, the United States' relationship with Ukraine, and how "All roads lead to Putin," you must first understand the recent turbulent history of the region.

Max sits down with Franklin Foer, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine and a longtime journalist covering Trump and Russia. In this exclusive interview with The Asset, Foer delves into Ukrainian politics and the ov...

In 2016, Donald Trump conspired with a foreign government to become President of the United States.

 On July 25, 2019, with the 2020 election around the corner, he decided to do it again.

The first time around, it was collusion, aiding and abetting Russia’s attack on American democracy. This time, it was extortion, demanding the Ukrainian government manufacture dirt on Trump’s political opponents in exchange for help th...

Donald Trump’s efforts to extort the Ukrainian government for his own political gain are now at the center of the ongoing impeachment proceedings. But how did we get here? To understand that, we’ll need to go back to the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and explore his efforts to get closer to the Trump administration. 

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann, the director of The Moscow Proje...

On October 9, 2019, two Soviet-born Florida businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. It would soon turn out that these two men had been involved for months in Rudy Giuliani’s quest to find dirt on the Biden family.

In this episode of The Asset, host Max Bergmann outlines the origins of Trump’s conspiracy theories surrounding Ukraine and Biden and expl...