It’s time to revisit our favorite horror movie, Kremlingate. The sequel is even scarier than the original.

Speaker Pelosi once said of the Kaiser of Chaos, “With him, all roads lead to Putin.”

I’d like to amend that remark, “With him, all roads lead to Russia.”

Pennywise was a Russian asset long before Putin became a 21st Century Tsar.

There’s a new book out by veteran investigative reporter Craig Unger, American Kompromat. Former KGB agent Yuri Shvets is one of his primary sources. Shvets spoke on the phone with the Guardian’s David Smith. Here’s the extended money quote:

… in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into the politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

It appears that a bit of flattery was enough to kick start Trump’s love affair with Russian intelligence. It was even more damaging than his love affair with the diminutive North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. What a maroon.

Nothing in the Guardian story should come as a surprise to anyone with a pulse. Trump spent four years in the Oval Office doing Putin’s bidding. Everything about it screamed kompromat, but the MSM remains in denial. The so-called tough guy is a pussy. He should grab himself.

Russia policy is one area in which the party of Trump is not an extension of the Reagan GOP. Reagan was an ardent Cold Warrior who would have been appalled by Pennywise’s appeasement of Putin whose main policy goal is to revive what he regards as the glory days of the Soviet Union. Aided and abetted by the Impeached Insult Comedian.

The readout of Joe Biden’s first phone call with Putin was a breath of fresh air. He mentioned the recent anti-Putin protests and the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Putin’s fingerprints are all over the attack on Navalny: the KGB was big on poisoning enemies of the state.

Putin was a former KGB colonel when Boris Yeltsin elevated him from obscurity. Yeltsin must have been really drunk when he did that. It was a betrayal of everything he stood for as the destroyer of the Soviet Union. Spasiba, Boris.

The scariest thing about Shvets and Unger’s account of the relationship between Trump and Russian intelligence is that it’s unclear that the Russians had to blackmail the Impeached Insult Comedian. Fulsome flattery may have been enough to turn Trump’s head. As Unger said to the Guardian:

“He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

He forgot two of Pennywise’s most notable qualities: ignorance and stupidity.

Oy just oy.