Report: Donald Trump Is the Most Powerful Russian Puppet in America

As pretty much everyone but the president-elect accepts at this point, the Russian government orchestrated sophisticated hacks of the U.S. presidential election in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign and propel Donald Trump to victory. One of the more puzzling aspects of this horrifying episode in American political history, though, stemmed from reports that Russia had gathered extensive intelligence on both presidential candidates, but released only the documents related to Clinton. This raised the question—what in the world could Russia have on Donald Trump?

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed News took a stab at providing some answers, publishing documents authored by a former British intelligence official hired by Trump's political opponents—anti-Trump Republicans at first, and Democrats after that—to conduct opposition research in the months leading up to Election Day. If you're holding breakable objects right now, consider setting them down before reading further.

TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

Later:

Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer) asserted that TRUMP’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.

This bears repeating: Credible sources report that the Russian government, thanks to video it possesses of the future president of the United States paying for a vengeance-motivated sex show in a fancy Moscow hotel, feels confident that it can blackmail the president-elect going forward.

The golden-shower details are the most salacious, but they are not the most alarming. That said, it's hard to decide what is. The pages and pages of yellow-highlighted passages detail a deep, well-developed relationship spanning eight years between Kremlin officials and Trump representatives, describing in startlingly matter-of-fact language the exploits of various "advisers"—people like Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn—conducting secret meetings with Kremlin officials to discuss and exchange sensitive information. If true, this dizzying array of lurid allegations that occasionally reads like bad Jason Bourne fanfiction indicates that for some time, Donald Trump has been cooperating with Russia, or getting manipulated by Russia, or both. 2017 is off to a hell of a start.

These documents have been circulating in political and intelligence circles for some time—Mother Jones wrote about them a week before the election. They are not official U.S. intelligence reports, and BuzzFeed is careful to note that they contain at least some factual errors. However, CNN reported today that U.S. officials have deemed the author's body of work credible enough to present a synopsis of these documents to the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, to President Obama, and to Trump himself. The president-elect's recent change of tune on this subject suddenly makes a bit more sense.

At this point, it's impossible to guess how much of these still-unverified reports will eventually prove true. But really, just about any detail contained therein would be sufficient, by itself, to paint a grim picture of our president-elect's character, the legitimacy of his election, and, most terrifyingly, his capacity to act independently and put the interests of the United States above his own for the next four years.