Feb 5, 2021
Claudia Cragg @KGNU speaks here with Craig Unger about his new book, American Kompromat.
What IS Donald Trump's relationship with Russia? "Just how compromised was [/is] he?
American Kompromat is situated in the ongoing context of the #TrumpRussia scandal and the new era of hybrid warfare, kleptocrats, and authoritarian right-wing populism it helped accelerate.
To answer these questions and more, Craig Unger reports, is to understand 'kompromat'--operations that amassed compromising information on the richest and most powerful men on earth, and that leveraged power by appealing to what is for some the most prized possession of all: their vanity.
This important work is based on extensive, exclusive interviews
with dozens of high-level sources--Soviets who resigned from the
KGB and moved to the United States, former officers in the CIA, FBI
counterintelligence agents, lawyers at white-shoe Washington
firms--and analysis of thousands of pages of FBI investigations,
police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and
Ukrainian, American Kompromat shows that something
much more sinister and important has been taking place than the
public could ever imagine: namely, that from Donald Trump to
Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat operations documented
the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and
transformed them into potent weapons.