TIME article from 2018. "How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team"

[Budi]

How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team
https://time.com/5401645/putins-oligarchs/
Snip
"Reviews of legal records and interviews with oligarchs and their associates in Russia and the West show just how far they have gone. They also show how deeply they penetrated the 2016 U.S. presidential contest, and the campaign of Donald Trump.

SNIP
The network of relationships cultivated by the oligarchs over the past two decades covered almost every sphere of influence at home and abroad, and it was partly by chance that Trump got caught in it. Trump’s desire to do business in Russia began well before Putin and the oligarchs rose to power. During his first visit to Moscow, arranged in 1987 by the USSR’s ambassador to Washington, Trump visited sites for a new hotel, including one near Red Square"

TRUMP
SNIP
"In the fall of 2013, Agalarov collaborated with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. They spent a couple of days together while hosting the event, attending parties and dinners with the Russian elite.
The result was a plan to build a $3 billion complex of hotels, shopping malls and office space in Moscow, including a tower that was to bear Trump’s name.
The state’s largest lender, Sberbank, even agreed to finance around 70% of the project, which would have been the biggest commercial real estate loan in its history at the time.
But Trump’s political ambitions apparently wound up getting in the way. “If he hadn’t run for President, we would probably be in the construction phase today,” Agalarov’s son Emin told Forbes last year.

PUTIN MEETS THE OLIGARCHS
Snip
"Hidden among thick forests on the western outskirts of the city, the estate in Kuntsevo was the home of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for two decades before his death in 1953. It was also the place where Stalin drew up lists of enemies among Russia’s political and economic elites, who were sent to their deaths in Siberia and elsewhere by the untold thousands in what became known as the Great Purge. The tyrant’s old office, right down to his desk and the couch where he used to take naps, was still preserved at Kuntsevo when the oligarchs pulled up to the gates for their meeting with Putin.
In the presence of these memento mori, no one challenged the young President with any difficult questions, says Pugachev. “It’s enough that he let us leave,” he recalls one of the guests saying afterward.

Not all of them were so easily intimidated. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil mogul with political ambitions of his own, understood the new rules that Putin was trying to enforce. “He wanted us to understand that we, as big businessmen, may have some power,” he tells TIME. “But it is nothing compared to his power as the head of state.” Khodorkovsky did not take that message to heart. After publicly clashing with Putin and his loyalists, he was arrested on charges of tax evasion in 2003 and subjected to a trial criticized by human-rights activists as a settling of scores. He wound up serving 10 years in prison.
********

Excellent backstudy in the money, players, & years of cultivating Oligarchy to do Putin's bidding.

Here's a 2019 Thread on Vladimer Putin & Robert Mercer and the influence they manipulated. For gain or for mere sport.
Robert Mercer and Vladimir Putin.

Link to tweet

[Irish_Dem]

1. So Putin was a driving force behind the Hillary smear campaign.

He bribed the GOP to implement this campaign.

It was easy to corrupt them since it served their purposes as well.

Basically Putin gave the GOP talking points that forwarded Putin's agenda, and it helped the GOP get elected at the same time.

Sociopaths banding together for mutual benefit.

[Budi]

2. Yup. From Stalin's preserved home in the Russian forest to Trump, Silicon Valley & all...

...at the behest of two men playing a high dollar political board game with the US election.
Winnner take all.
Its just sport for the the wealthiest powerful men.

[Irish_Dem]

3. For Putin it was not a game. Everything was prelude to what we are seeing now.

His desire for Russian superpower status, shifting global power to him.

[Budi]

5. Certainly. Like a mere board game only with real life stakes.

Putin's meeting with the wealthy Oligarchs as he began his presidency was the beginning, & his tatics remain exactly the same today.
Absolute loyalty to Putin to achieve his one purpose.
And those wealthy who aquired such spoils by loyalty to Putin are today seeing it disappear via Sanctions.. Though they may fall, Putin remains still untouched.
Such rubes they were.

[gratuitous]

4. It's a good thing that's all cleaned up now

Right? Hanh? Still heavily involved with Republican bankrollers? Huh. Maybe someone should do some follow up?

[smirkymonkey]

6. You know what just occurred to me about all the Hillary hate?

Men do not like women who see them clearly. Who can see them for what they are. And that is why Hillary threatened so many powerful men. And so many average men. And even women who did not want other women to be threatening to men.

All these posts I have seen in the last few years about how Hillary was right about EVERYTHING, makes me realize that she is one of those rare people who knows what is going on and what everybody's game is at all times. She is nobody's fool and a lot of men despise women that they can't charm or manipulate. That is why they hate her so much.

I still think she should be president, but she will never win because of this.