An agent in Czechoslovakia’s StB, a secret police agency, files a report claiming that Ivana Trump recently told her father that Donald is being pressured to run for president, and any misstep in her visits to the country could have “incalculable consequences for her husband’s position.”
According to the report, Trump was pushed to run for the highest office in the nation last year but decided against it, fearing that his young age would make it difficult to win. He plans to run again in 1996 as a third-party candidate, according to an intelligence assessment dated October 22, 1988. Whenever he does launch a serious campaign, the report says, …
D. TRUMP is confident he will succeed.
In 1987, someone close to Trump told Newsweek that he would only be serious about running for president “if he were appointed.” Over a decade later, in 1999, Trump tells the New York Times that he’ll only run for president when he’s sure he can win.
Trump teased a campaign last year and even spoke at a Republican fundraiser. By then, he’d decided not to run. Trump gives running for president a second chance in 2000, for a few months. He says he plans to run as a third-party candidate with the Reform Party, and the party supports him, but Trump backs out.
His “one foot in the door” attitude shows itself again in the 2012 presidential election, and, of course, he officially enters the 2016 race.
Background
Documents obtained through an information request and released by Germany newspaper BILD following the 2016 election revealed previously secret kompromat (compromising material) on Donald Trump. Czech agents kept spied on Ivana Trump’s father, Milos Zelnicek, and even wiretapped his phone.
The BILD report sparked other outlets to go digging for outdated intelligence from the CSSR’s StB. This is also how the public finds out about Donald Trump’s 30-year tax exemption. The Czech Ministry of State Security was monitoring the Trumps in the 1970s and ’80s.
“The State Security was constantly watching (Czechoslovak citizens living abroad),” said Libor Svoboda, a historian from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. “They were coming here, so they used agents to follow them. They wanted to know who they were meeting, what they talked about. It was a sort of paranoia.”
Associated Press
External Sources
Business Insider (Archived)
The Guardian (Archived)
Photo: Jeffrey Asher / Getty
