Vladimir Putin’s big mistake, and why his Donald Trump – Russia conspiracy is unraveling

| 6:51 pm EST February 21, 2017
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With each passing day, the name of yet another alleged conspirator surfaces in Vladimir Putin’s far reaching plot to install Donald Trump into the White House and control him as a Russian puppet. Michael Flynn. Felix Sater. Paul Manafort. Sergei Ryabkov. Carter Page. Andriy Artemenko. Roger Stone. Sergey Kislyak. Michael Cohen. The massive and multipronged conspiracy put together by Putin is now unraveling as we speak. And one thing has become clear: Putin’s strategic mistake.

If you listen to a baseless conspiracy theorist like Donald Trump, he’ll tell you that forty buses full of people went to New Hampshire on the same day so they could all rig the primary voting there. Accordingly, Trump’s fringe base will tell you that the millions of anti-Trump protesters in the streets of America have all been paid in cash by George Soros. But no rational person believes that these kinds of conspiracies, involving that many people, could be real — because one of the numerous participants would end up bragging about it or getting caught. If these conspiracies had taken place, the law of large numbers says we’d all know about it by now.

Back in the real world, smart conspiracies involve as few people as humanly possible. It’s just basic arithmetic that a conspiracy involving ten people is five times more likely to get exposed than a conspiracy involving two people, and so on. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, surely knows how these things work. And yet he was never content to limit himself to using one conspirator within Donald Trump’s realm, or even one conspirator at a time.

At the time Paul Manafort was installed as Trump’s second campaign manager, Michael Flynn had already been installed as Trump’s foreign policy advisor. Carter Page was also installed in the campaign as yet another Trump foreign policy advisor. Flynn was the only one of the three to make it into the Trump administration, so perhaps tripling down paid off for Putin in the short term.

But even then, Putin’s plan to use Flynn to twist the arm of “President Trump” apparently expanded to involve Cohen, Sater, and Artemenko – the latter of whom is a Ukrainian citizen who’s now facing treason charges back home for his role in the conspiracy. And it’s unlikely Putin knew about Sater’s past as an FBI informant, or he wouldn’t have used him. The more participants who get added to a conspiracy, the greater the odds that one of them brings the whole thing down.

Whether because he got greedy, or because he felt he needed as many handlers in place as possible to try to control the erratic Donald Trump’s behavior, Vladimir Putin ended up involving far too many people in his conspiracy. It worked, in as much as it put Trump into the White House. But secret conspiracies involving this many people never remain secret for long. And now it’s merely a matter of which of the alleged conspirators will be the first to give up the others to save himself. Contribute to Palmer Report