If the Russians were genuinely interested in recruiting Donald Trump or any member of his family to be an agent to spy clandestinely, long-term, for its foreign and military intelligence services, the FSV RF and the GRU, would they (meaning Putin) send a Russian national lawyer (Natalia Veselnitskaya) with direct ties to the Russian government into overt meetings with potential targets for recruitment in the Trump Tower?
If the government of the People’s Republic of China were genuinely interested in spying on President Donald Trump or anything going on at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Florida, would the PRC’s intelligence service, the MSS, have sent a readily-recognizable Chinese national woman (Yujing Zhang) with poor English language skills and an array of technical equipment, covert communications, and malware to try and talk her way through staff and Secret Service checkpoints with poorly prepared and very shaky multiple cover stories?
The answer to both these questions is a resounding “No!”
And yet, the Fools on the Hill (members of Congress) and their go-to stooge, Robert Mueller III, have just spent the last 2-1/2 years and tens of millions of dollars trying to show that President Donald J. Trump and his presidency have been fatally contaminated by exactly these kinds of foreign influence operations.
If the very few honest and competent Senators and Representatives among the Fools on the Hill Club dig deeper, what they are likely to find is that both the Russians and the ChiComs have been running what is often referred to as “discoverable influence operations” (or discoverable intelligence operations) in the US. I’m quite certain this possibility occurred to or was explained to them long before now, though judging from their actions, you might reasonably ask if they were listening to the explanation. The key word is “discoverable.”
Most covert or clandestine intel operations run in other countries are intended to remain hidden from the counterintelligence services of the host country and the target country. Learning that your successfully recruited spy has been discovered is the next-to-last thing either a case officer or the espionage agent want. (Only more disturbing to the case officer or spy would be having the spy discovered by counterintelligence and the CO or spy does not know about it!)
For example, Robert Philip Hanssen is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. The KGB (later the FSV) and Hanssen used proper tradecraft to keep his identity and espionage activities secret from the FBI and others in the US counterintel community for as long as they could. Hanssen and the FSV hoped he would never be discovered. Once he was discovered, Hanssen was of no further use to the FSV. He became a throwaway and will die in prison.
In contrast with “normal” human intelligence operations like Hanssen, discoverable influence/intelligence operations are expected to be discovered by host country counterintelligence. In fact, they’re designed to be discovered. Their discovery is part of the aggressor intelligence service’s operation strategy.
The host and target countries’ counterintelligence discovery of the operation, the methods used to discover or failure to discover it, and the amount of time it took for the countries to discover and correctly assess it provides the aggressor’s intelligence services with useful information about the skills, capabilities, and limitations of opposing counterintelligence services.
How we have responded and continue to respond to the absurd charges of “Russian collusion” against candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump has provided foreign intelligence services with valuable information about the United States intelligence and counterintelligence services’ own capabilities and limitations. It has also further revealed more of our own social, political, and economic vulnerabilities.