The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount and has led Michael Morrell, the former Acting Central Intelligence Director, to call Trump an “unwitting agent” of Russia and the Kremlin.
As the Senate Majority Leader, Reid was a member of the so-called Gang of Eight -- the Congressional leaders who were supposed to receive special briefings about Intelligence issues.
Morell served as the Acting CIA Director during two periods:
1) July 1, 2011 to September 6, 2011
2) November 9, 2012 to March 8, 2013
It's most likely that Morrell briefed Reid about Trump during the 2012-2013 period, when Trump initially raised a stink about President Barack Obama's birth certificate.
..., Trump "became a virtual spokesperson for the 'birther' movement. The strategy worked: when Trump flirted with running for president in 2011, his popularity was concentrated among the sizable share of Republicans who thought that President Obama was foreign born or a Muslim or both."
In 2010, at the urging of Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential campaign, and with Cohen's involvement, the tabloid began questioning Obama's birthplace and citizenship.
In March 2011, during an interview on Good Morning America, Donald Trump said he was seriously considering running for president, that he was a "little" skeptical of Obama's citizenship, and that someone who shares this view should not be so quickly dismissed as an "idiot" (as Trump considers the term "birther" to be "derogatory"). ....
Later [in late March 2011], Trump appeared on The View repeating several times that "I want him [Obama] to show his birth certificate." He speculated that "there [was] something on that birth certificate that [Obama] doesn't like" ....
In an NBC TV interview broadcast on April 7, 2011, Trump said he would not let go of the issue, because he was not satisfied that Obama had proved his citizenship.
After Obama released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, Trump said "I am really honored and I am really proud, that I was able to do something that nobody else could do."
On October 24, 2012, Trump offered to donate five million dollars to the charity of Obama's choice in return for the publication of his college and passport applications before October 31, 2012.
When Morrell became the Acting CIA Director in July 2011, the birth-certificate issue already had died down, because Obama had released the long-form certificate a couple months earlier, in April 2011.
When Morell became the Acting CIA Director again in early November 2012, the birth-certificate issue had come back to life recently, in late October 2012, when Trump had offered the $5 million. Therefore, I will assume that Morrell briefed Reid about Trump during November 2012.
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So, during November 2012, Morrell officially told Reid that the CIA assessed Trump to be "an 'unwitting agent' of Russia and the Kremlin" (according to Reid's letter in August 2016).
What was the CIA's basis for such an assessment? I doubt that the basis was merely some FBI assessment that the CIA had been told about. Morrell would not brief Reid about an FBI assessment.
I think that, rather, Morrell's briefing of Reid about Trump was based largely on a CIA source -- Oleg Smolenkov, an assistant to Yuri Ushakov, who in November 2012 was the Deputy Chief of the Government Staff of the Russian Federation.
In this situation, it's likely that the CIA had asked Smolenkov about Trump in 2011 or 2012 and that Smolenkov subsequently had reported to the CIA that Trump was an "unwitting agent of Russia and the Kremlin". Then that information was included in Morrell's briefing of Reid in November 2012.
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In November 2012, the FBI Director was Robert Mueller. At that time, Comey was not even in the US Government; he was working for Bridgewater Associates, an investment-management firm. Comey did not become the FBI Director until September 2013.
Therefore, when Reid wrote his public letter to Comey in August 2016, he well might have refrained from mentioning whatever Mueller might have briefed him about Trump in November 2012. Perhaps Mueller had briefed Reid about Trump, or perhaps he had not done so.
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The FBI had its own source about Trump -- former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who had immigrated to the USA and then had begun to brief FBI Counterintelligence in 1994. At some unknown point in time, Shvets began to report that the KGB had initiated a program to "compromise" Trump in about 1987.
If the KGB indeed did initiate such a program, then Shvets himself was not involved in it. Shvets collected intelligence about Washington DC, whereas Trump lived in New York City. However, it is possible that Shvets did learn about a KGB program to compromise Trump.
If so, then Shvets probably would not have included such hearsay information about Trump during his initial FBI debriefings. Rather, it's much more likely that Shvets's memories about the Trump program were brought to the surface during 2011-2012, when Trump raised a stink about Obama's birth certificate. Only then did Shvets begin to tell FBI Counterintelligence his sketchy memories about a KGB program to compromise Trump. Of course, I am just speculating about this particular sequence of events.
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By late 2012, both the CIA and FBI suspected that Trump was at least an "unwitting agent" of Russian Intelligence.
I myself do not agree with any such suspicion that Russian Intelligence had any program to compromise Trump or that he ever was compromised -- or that he ever colluded with Russian Intelligence.
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