The Hartmann Report

11/14/2025

We now know — from the emails released this week — that Epstein wrote that Sergei Lavrov could “get insight” from him and that Russian Ambassador Churkin “understood Trump” after their talks.

And the Russians, as the world knows, never, ever let such juicy material go to waste. Former KGB senior intelligence officer Vladimir Putin is a man trained to find the soft spot in any opponent and apply the exact right pressure to make them bend to his will, and it’s looking more every day like that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Trump was “best friends” with Epstein for more than a decade. They lived near each other in both New York and Palm Beach, and partied publicly together. They traveled on Epstein’s jet repeatedly. They allegedly shared women.

These don’t prove blackmail, but the possibility that Epstein passed along compromising details to Lavrov or even Putin is staggering.

Imagine Putin, alone with Trump in Helsinki way back in 2018, quietly signaling that he knew more about Epstein, Trump, and underage girls than Trump could survive being exposed.

A soft whisper. Perhaps simply sliding a note card to Trump with the words “Epstein, girls” on it.

And then Trump goes out to meet the press after their meeting, shoulders down looking beaten, and lavishes Putin with praise while trash-talking his own intelligence and military officials. What the hell?

Even former Harvard President Larry Summers was horrified, writing to his friend Jeffrey Epstein on July 16, 2018, moments after the Helsinki meeting:

“Do the Russians have stuff on Trump? Today was appalling even by his standards.”

Epstein replied to Summers the next day:

“My email is full with similar comments. wow. Im sure his view is that it went super well. he thinks he has charmed his adversary.. Admittedly he has no idea of the symbolism. He has no idea of most things.”

The idea that Putin threatened Trump in that first private meeting is only a hypothesis, of course. But the secrecy Trump immediately imposed — and his repeatedly whipped-dog-like servile behavior to this murderous dictator in the years since — makes such a moment impossible to rule out.

If something like that did occur, if Putin delivered even the hint of a threat and Trump immediately bent over and bowed down and has ever since, it would explain Trump’s world-changing behavior and why he’s so seriously damaged the interests of America while abandoning our European allies.

Is there anything else that could possibly explain why Trump has spent years refusing to confront Putin for anything, no matter how shocking or monstrous the Russian dictator’s behavior?

It would also explain his silence in the face of Russian assassinations, Putin’s bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, and now the horrific nightly devastation of Ukraine and Putin‘s kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.