This is essentially the theory put forth by Luke Harding in the book Collusion that came out last year, which I'm surprised isn't referenced here. The $100,000 newspaper ad is one of the key pieces of evidence in this line of reasoning. The other side may be that Trump is so stupid and easily manipulated that he was just parroting what he heard in the USSR to sound politically astute. Maybe it's my hate speaking, but I think the evidence points more to the former than the latter, because there's only one way to connect all the disparate dots we've seen in the last couple years. I would highly recommend everyone to listen to Preet Bharara's recent interview with Bill Browder to get some insight into Putin's MO. (Bill Browder is the hedge fund manager who hired Sergei Magnitsky to represent him. Magnitsky was tortured to death in a series of Russian prisons for the sin of trying to expose some officials who stole $250,000,000 from the Russian treasury, and for whom the Magnitsky act, which was the subject of the Trump Tower meeting and which Trump has tried to get Congress to repeal, is named.)
Something the article doesn't discuss is that Trump may not know he's a Russian asset, not the way Manafort probably does. He's a vain and shallow man for whom self-image is tantamount and the idea that he is in some way subservient to a greater power likely never crosses his mind. Any decent handler would work within the confines of the problem and get precisely the behavior they want. Soviet construction was a big deal in '87. That's about when the whole American Embassy thing came to a head. The KGB's interest in Trump may have been limited to "this guy builds commercial real estate in New York, let's see if he ever comes in handy as a patsy for properties around the UN building where we can get KGB work crews on board." Meanwhile, Trump in a hotel room doing pervy shit deliberately walked in on by a maid and then reassured by a "It's a good thing this happened in Russia, where you have friends" from a handler would give Trump to the Soviet intelligence apparatus for a decade or more. It's also worth pointing out that Putin was plucked out of relative obscurity to be an attache and confident of Boris Yeltsin, the one guy who could have handed Russia over to democracy. Putin befriended him and became the "who the hell is this guy" Prime Minister - odds are good that the KGB surrounded Yeltsin with a bunch of reliable operatives and Putin was the one Yeltsin bonded with. If you want to see how the FSB runs Trump, you need only watch to see how the FSB ran Yeltsin.
I agree that this particular article is a bit too conspiratorial, but I'm at a loss to understand why Trump continues to make demands like having a completely private meeting with Putin, despite undoubtedly understanding that almost half of the country thinks that the Steele dossier could be quite factual. Best case scenario is that he wants to bitch about not having as strong of a chokehold on America as Putin has with Russia, I guess? Or Trump saying that Russia should rejoin the G7 while shittalking Trudeau and Merkel and starting trade wars with them. Or Trump telling Putin that his own aides... the best people... are "stupid" for trying to stop him from calling Putin to congratulate him on his election victory. Or for contradicting Nikki Haley and reneging on further sanctions against Russia via the UN. That's just a few things recently. Everything points to a single person in the White House contradicting all advice given to him by everyone around him and continually making policy decisions that benefit Russia. Why? Because he has a hard-on for authoritarian dictators? This is weird to say, but I hope that's all it is.
That's the thing I've never heard addressed by the Trump people. At what point do you take the preponderance of evidence and run a simple basyesian analysis? One thing thing is weird, two things are a coincidence, three things are eyebrow raising. 15 things? The odds of it being innocent quickly get incalculably small.This is weird to say, but I hope that's all it is.