As early as August 2016, three months before the election, he had convinced a former acting director of the CIA that “Mr. Putin has recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” After a year in office, only the “unwitting” part seemed questionable. By then, Trump had convinced a number of leading American intelligence specialists that he was a Russian asset. As one of them put it: “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”
