How awful is Trump

To the Editor:
Trump was put in office by the Russian mob. The interference in our election was just a part of that scheme. There was no guarantee to the Russians that they would succeed with Trump's candidacy, but it was possible. And, catastrophically for the United States, they did succeed.
Impossible? Similar mob schemes have worked well before. The American mob blackmailed the cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1950s and were able to go unchallenged by the FBI for decades. The mob controlled the American Teamsters Union and its president, James Hoffa, for decades — until they made him disappear.
The Russian mob bailed Trump out of bankruptcy in 2009. Then they videotaped his romp with prostitutes in 2013 in Moscow. The Russians knew that Trump was a corrupt American celebrity who had stated publicly his desire to run for president as early as 2010. Trump was the perfect stooge for the task. In 2015, ex-con and mobster Alex Sater, Trump's construction partner, went to Russia with Ivanka Trump to negotiate a Trump hotel to be built in Moscow. Sater and Ivanka met with Putin. Sater sent an email back from Moscow to Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, stating, "Putin says not only will you get your hotel but he is going to make you president of the United States."
The FBI has that email from Sater. You can see a copy of it in the New York Times archives. Cohen had explained that the email was just a prank. It was no prank.
Vern Lazaroff
Port Jervis, N.Y.