The Swamp is written by David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice.
It’s a Beast of a time in Washington. Donald Trump’s D.C. reality show is full of new characters, plot twists, and cliffhangers, and the Daily Beast will navigate you through it. The 47th president won’t need to drain The Swamp. It’s all leaking here…
Before “Little” Marco Rubio sold his soul to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Everything, he may have inadvertently outed his boss’s wandering eye and/or spread misinformation for the Russians, depending on your point of view.
This was back in the days of innocence, four years ago, when federal agencies still employed people and the Senate Intelligence Committee was able to pull together a 1,000-page report proving there was no collusion between Trump and Russia to meddle in the 2016 election.
Deep in the weeds of the “bipartisan” report ( p.650), there is an unsubstantiated report that Trump, then married to Marla Maples, “may have begun a brief relationship with a Russian woman.” The mystery woman’s name has been redacted. However, the report suggests she may have been a former Miss Moscow. It’s unconfirmed but The Spectator magazine suggested it was Masha Kalinina, her country’s first ever beauty queen in 1988, who, incidentally, denied having a fling with Mikhail Gorbachev when she was 19 and the Soviet leader was 60. It was labeled the “Mish-Mash Affair” in a Russian tabloid. Trump was said to have met her during a party at “The Library” at the Baltschug Kempinski Hotel in Moscow in November 1996 during a trip he made with investors to explore real estate opportunities.
Trump was pictured with the mysterious Miss Moscow in Rubio’s report when it was released in April 2020. Senate Intelligence Committee report, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities.
If Rubio’s report is to be believed, the one-time beauty queen made quite an impact on the one-time Miss Universe chief. A Russian media report from 1998 quoted Trump as allegedly saying that she wasn’t “overshadowed” by even supermodel Claudia Schiffer or the late pop icon Tina Turner.
Masha Kalinina, the possible Miss Moscow in the Rubio report, was a regular on the red carpet and the subject of intrigue about her relationship with Gorbachev too. Ron Galella Collection via Getty
The claims were included in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities. Trump was still steaming to the media on Tuesday over the so-called “Steele Dossier,” written by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, that he insists was a pack of lies compiled for the Democratic Party about the then-real estate developer’s visits to Russia. Perhaps Trump should ask his top diplomat why he included such a salacious claim in a congressional report. He could even fire Rubio from one of his jobs.
The Swamp is written by David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice.