The post from “Rockaway Primetime Reporting via Ron

Ron sends the following report which appears to be fake news: URGENT BREAKING: New unmasked evidence proves who put Trump in the White House Rock away The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with an extensive researched investigative report. It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release: “The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.” Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it: “Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.” In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US. Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate.

It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too. America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country). And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia. As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference: “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it: “‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs.

We just go there all the time.’” This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking. That alone is worth a call to your two US senators. The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it.

They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump: “Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ … “Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.”

[ Emphasis added] Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide: “Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.” So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior? In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election. The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf. Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when. With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump. Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison.

He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump. As The New York Times noted in 2020: “[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.” There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations. Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to? Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified. “Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.” When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia. As the Mueller Report noted: “The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes: “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.” There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen. And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016.

They were quickly paid off in a big way. In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy. The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited). That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin. As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later): “The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.” The CIA concluded that the risk

Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017. Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met. The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post: “There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley,

Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.” Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under.

Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”: “The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it: “[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election. In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar. In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies. As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”: “Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car… But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.” Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents,

The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants: “Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.” In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve. If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years. This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it. We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself. Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121

Bucky’s Response:

The post from “Rockaway Primetime Reporting” (a Facebook page that describes itself as providing “objective & rational” news, though it appears to lean progressive/anti-Trump based on its content) is largely misleading and not accurate as presented, qualifying as fake news or heavily distorted misinformation in key ways.The core claim is that a “shocking” Daily Mail investigative report provides “new unmasked evidence” proving Vladimir Putin “owned” Donald Trump for years via Jeffrey Epstein’s operations, including kompromat (blackmail material) from underage sex encounters, laundered Russian money to Trump, and implications that this explains Trump’s behavior toward Russia/Putin.While a recent Daily Mail article (and related pieces from early February 2026) does discuss Epstein’s alleged ties to Russia/Putin based on newly released Epstein documents (from a large DOJ/FOIA-style release of millions of pages), the post wildly exaggerates, selectively quotes, and fabricates connections to Trump that the Daily Mail itself does not make in those reports.What the Daily Mail actually reported (based on the recent Epstein file releases)

• Intelligence sources (anonymous) believe Epstein may have run “the world’s largest honeytrap operation” on behalf of the KGB (or Russian intelligence), procuring women (including Russian ones) to gather kompromat on powerful figures.
• The files mention Putin over 1,000 times (around 1,056 documents) and Moscow extensively (around 9,629 references).
• Epstein appears to have sought/arranged meetings or had communications involving Putin (e.g., emails referencing “appointment with Putin,” discussions with Russian officials like those close to Lavrov, and mentions of FSB friends).
• Epstein had ties to Russian organized crime elements (possibly dating back decades, per claims from ex-MI6 figure Christopher Steele and others).
• Speculation ties this to broader kompromat efforts, potentially linked to figures like Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine’s father, alleged spy ties).

These are sensational claims, largely based on anonymous “intelligence sources,” email snippets, and document counts — not hard proof of direct Kremlin control or operations. The Kremlin dismissed such ideas as ridiculous/joke-worthy. Other outlets (e.g., The Moscow Times, Washington Post) covered the Russia mentions but emphasized Epstein’s efforts to court contacts rather than confirmed spy ops or blackmail success.Where the post crosses into fake news/distortion

• No direct link to Trump in the Daily Mail pieces on this: The articles mention Trump as one of many high-profile names in Epstein’s orbit (alongside Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, etc.), but they do not claim new evidence from these files shows Putin/Epstein “owned” Trump, had kompromat videos of him with underage girls, or used it to install him in the White House. The post invents/implies this as the “shocking implication” and “unmasked evidence.”
• Old, recycled claims presented as new: Elements like Trump family quotes on Russian money in real estate (Don Jr. 2008 conference, Eric Trump anecdote), Manafort’s ties/feed to Russians, Mueller Report obstruction findings, secret Trump-Putin calls, Helsinki meeting concerns, burned spies, etc., are from 2016–2020 reporting (Mueller, Senate Intel reports, media leaks). They are not from the recent Epstein file release or Daily Mail’s 2026 stories on Putin/Epstein links.
• Conspiratorial leaps: The post stitches these old Russia/Trump stories to the new Epstein-Russia speculation, suggesting Epstein gave Putin Trump kompromat, explaining everything from pardons to document handling to Ukraine policy. This is unsubstantiated speculation — no evidence in the files or Daily Mail ties Epstein’s alleged Russian ops directly to controlling Trump.
• Misrepresentation of Epstein docs: The files do reference Putin/Moscow heavily, but mostly in Epstein’s own emails/correspondence seeking access/networking, not proof of successful KGB ops or Trump blackmail.

In summary: The Daily Mail did publish eye-opening (if speculative/sourced-anonymously) reporting on Epstein-Putin/Russia connections from the new files, but nothing in it “proves who put Trump in the White House” or newly unmasks Putin owning Trump via Epstein honeytraps. The post repurposes real reporting on Epstein-Russia ties, inflates it with unrelated/old Trump-Russia allegations, and adds unproven causal links to create a dramatic conspiracy narrative. This makes it fake news — not entirely fabricated, but deliberately misleading and hyperbolic in its conclusions. Always cross-check primary sources like the actual Daily Mail articles rather than social media summaries.

32 web pages