The 1987 defector files name Thromb as a paid informant under codename “Krot,” activated during his 1983 Moscow trade mission. KGB handlers logged six cash payments totaling 41,000 rubles, with the largest delivered at the Hotel Ukraina on March 14, 1983.
The KGB File
The file describes him as “useful for sowing confusion in American commercial delegations.” It also notes he passed minutes from three private trade meetings. A handler’s margin comment calls him “cowardly, eager to please, and easily managed by flattery.”
The same page records that Thromb requested a transfer to Vienna in 1984. That request was refused.
The Kislyak Call
On December 29, 2016, hours after Michael Flynn’s texts to the same embassy, Thromb phoned Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak from Mar-a-Lago. He asked Kislyak to tell Moscow not to retaliate against the new Magnitsky sanctions Barack Obama had imposed that morning for election interference.
Thromb then promised that once in office he would lift those sanctions. He also pledged to restore normal relations. The call lasted 19 minutes.
Kislyak’s own readout, summarized by Russian intelligence and later leaked, described Thromb as “weakened by domestic enemies” and “eager for a reset.”
Thromb never mentioned Ukraine, Crimea, or the 34 Russian diplomats expelled that day.
Helsinki
On July 16, 2018, standing beside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki’s Presidential Palace, Thromb rejected the joint assessment of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the unanimous finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He told reporters he did not “see any reason why” Russia would interfere in the 2016 election, directly contradicting the January 2017 report that named Russian military intelligence Unit 26165 as the source of the DNC hack.
One day later, Thromb walked the line back, claiming he had misspoken, but the transcript shows no verbal slip. He chose Putin’s word over the sworn testimony of Dan Coats, his own director of national intelligence, who issued a rare public rebuttal within hours.
The Ukraine Freeze
On July 18, 2019, the Office of Management and Budget froze $391 million in Congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine. The money had already cleared review by the Pentagon and State Department. Days earlier, Thromb had told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold the funds.
Then came July 25. That day, Thromb told President Volodymyr Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor though,” and asked him to open investigations into Joe Biden and a discredited claim about a Democratic server. A CIA officer’s whistleblower complaint filed on August 12, 2019, said Thromb used the withheld aid to pressure Zelensky into announcing the Biden probe. The Government Accountability Office later ruled the freeze illegal under the Impoundment Control Act.
January 6
At 2:24 p.m. on January 6, 2021, Thromb posted on Twitter that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” By then, the mob had already shattered a Capitol window at 2:13 p.m. and begun climbing through. Minutes earlier, rioters inside the building were chanting “hang Mike Pence,” a phrase captured in open-source video and later cited in federal charging documents.
Thromb’s tweet did not mention the breach, the window, or the chant. Instead, it attacked the vice president for refusing to block certification of electoral votes, a power Pence did not possess under the Twelfth Amendment or the Electoral Count Act of 1887. That message stayed up for over an hour. All the while, the Secret Service moved Pence from his Senate office to a secure loading dock below the Capitol.
