Summer 2019
There may be those who read the many intertwining narratives in this book and wonder whether a man with as much wealth as Donald Trump would sacrifice America’s foreign policy, our rule of law, our democratic processes, and our standing in the world on the altar of some additional real estate business in, or investments from, Moscow, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Doha, and the former Soviet republics—even if this prospective new business could, by the end of the 2020s, bring in tens of billions of dollars to the Trump Organization’s coffers. Surely the price of a man’s integrity and a nation’s safety and security is higher than an eleven-figure sum? Surely no man who is a father, a husband, a longtime public presence in American life—and, in the bargain, a billionaire—would risk nuclear war in the Middle East just to earn a little more coin?
Consider, in answer to this question, the following anecdote. In 1990, a “hip, satirical, bomb-throwing magazine,” Spy, concocted a prank to lure fabulously wealthy celebrities into publicly revealing their greed.1 The plan: send a “refund” check for a “miniscule” amount of money, under the cover of a shell corporation, to a small group of extremely rich individuals, and see if they cash it; if they do, send them a check for half that amount and again wait to see if they cash it; and then proceed from there until the ruse discloses which already-rich person in America or beyond our shores is so venal that they would cash even a virtually worthless check.2 Spy learned that twenty-six of its fifty-eight targets would cash a check for $1.11; that thirteen of those people would cash checks for half that amount, 64 cents; and that two billionaires in the world would actually go so far as to cash a check for just thirteen cents. The first of those two people was a billionaire Saudi arms dealer and international “fixer” who had been implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal and lived a life of such “infamy,” “influence peddling,” and “spectacular scandals” that he was ultimately on the receiving end of an indictment for racketeering.3 Imagine, if you can, someone so hedonistic that the band Queen felt it had to write a song about him; that’s the first man Spy caught in its trap.4
The other was Donald Trump.
So what would a man like that do for $50 billion and the chance to rule autocratically over one of human history’s richest and most esteemed nations?
Just as Trump’s self-admitted greed has become legendary, so too has his deceitfulness. A representative anecdote: Trump is a onetime real estate developer who always took great pride in his prowess as a builder, but who also repeatedly added nonexistent stories to his buildings whenever he talked about them. He didn’t merely add one or two floors, either; in Vancouver, Trump added six imaginary stories to a sixty-three-story tower so that it could better be marketed as one of the tallest in that Canadian city.5 In his hometown, New York City, Trump outdid himself, adding a full ten stories to Trump Tower in order to claim that a fifty-eight-story building was actually sixty-eight stories.6 This is a man who, in 1989, used the death of a good friend of his in a helicopter crash as a way of getting good press for himself, lying to the media and saying he’d been planning to be on the ill-fated helicopter on the day it went down. It was a lie, of course, but as he said to the roomful of people, several of them friends of the deceased, who watched him during the call with the media that set up the hoax, “You’re going to hate me for this, but I just can’t resist. I can get some publicity out of this.”7
Donald Trump couldn’t resist thirteen cents. He couldn’t resist despoiling the memory of a friend who died tragically. He couldn’t resist “cheat[ing] on [Melania] throughout their relationship, including when she was pregnant and soon after Barron’s birth,” according to Business Insider. He couldn’t resist leaking classified intelligence to Kremlin agents in the Oval Office in May 2017, a violation of his sworn duty as president so grave that, in June 2019, the New York Times reveals that “Pentagon and intelligence officials [have] described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about [cyber] operations against Russia for concern over his reaction—and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials.” Trump couldn’t resist the prospect of illegally receiving stolen Clinton emails from Kremlin hackers during the 2016 election, nor, apparently, would he be able to resist committing the federal crime of illegal solicitation of foreign campaign donations even today: the New York Times, recounting an interview with Trump by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, reports that Trump still proudly believes “there would be nothing wrong with accepting incriminating information about an election opponent from Russia or other foreign governments” and would see “no reason to call the F.B.I. if it were to happen again.”8 And more broadly, Trump couldn’t resist telling 10,000 lies in his first 825 days as president of the United States, an average of twelve lies a day—and those are just the ones the Washington Post happened to catch.9 The Post has more recently conducted a major investigative report revealing Trump’s decades-long career of wildly inflating his assets and his wealth.10 The New York Times has likewise uncovered evidence that Trump’s business successes in the 1980s and 1990s were a mirage: he wasn’t just losing money throughout much of those two decades, the Times found, but was losing more money than anyone in America.11 He lied about that, too; he probably just couldn’t resist.
The question, of course, has never been about what Donald Trump can or cannot resist. Rather, it has always been about what a society that values the rule of law is willing to tolerate. And more recently—since November 8, 2016—the question has been an even more dire one: What happens to a nation when it not only tolerates the worst excesses and degradations of the human condition but celebrates them? What happens when a once-great nation makes of its very worst instincts and proclivities a shudderingly grotesque political and cultural idol? The question is rhetorical, of course, as the answer is what lies before America every day of every week: not just what cable and network news reveal, or what digital and print newspapers disclose, but the story of what is happening that is plainly visible if we merely look for it. This book has sought for it in existing major-media reporting, not just from the scores of reliable outlets in America but from those of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Israel, Qatar, Turkey, Canada, and many other nations. Told in these pages are not just news stories revealed in the past few days or months or years but even some that date back decades. The archive of information on Trump and his allies around the world is broad and deep and still too little known.
What we find when we train this sort of lens on a man like Donald Trump is that his desire to rule has always been co-extensive with his desire to accumulate. Indeed, the fact that, as president, Trump now wants to combine diplomacy with business—even if it threatens America’s national security—is clear. In March 2019, Trump actually complained, according to the New York Times, “that his generals and intelligence agencies don’t consider business and economics in their intelligence analyses.”12 This same perverse attitude was even more vigorously in evidence pre-election, though it took until 2018 for Trump himself to ably summarize it, as he did in telling a press gaggle in November of that year that his ethos as a presidential candidate was this: to make as much money as he could while running, because, as he explained, “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won [the election], in which case I would have gotten back into the [real estate] business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”13 This was a man, remember, who had run for president in part on the idea that he loved America so much he was willing to forgo new wealth to serve it. Like so much else he said, that turned out to be untrue.
Now in the Oval Office, with overwhelming support from a political party he has shattered and rebuilt in his own image, the world Trump and his allies at home and abroad seek to create is a crueler, more dangerous, and more autocratic world than most Americans had ever thought to see a U.S. president endorse. In mid-April 2019, the Egyptian parliament amended Egypt’s constitution to allow its strongman president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to stay in power until 2030—plunging Egypt into autocratic rule for years to come—and Trump lauded el-Sisi, indeed everything from his “97 percent” election victory to his designer shoes.14 More than this, Trump now seeks to declare el-Sisi’s enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, a move the United States has long resisted because it will wrongly classify even nonmilitants as dangerous radicals.15 As the New York Times has explained, in describing the turmoil surrounding Trump’s policy reversal, “The Pentagon, career national security staff, government lawyers and diplomatic officials have voiced legal and policy objections, and have been scrambling to find a more limited step that would satisfy the White House. As a matter of law, officials have argued that the criteria for designating a terrorist organization are not a good fit for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is less a coherent body than a loose-knit movement with chapters in different countries.… Several political parties in places like Tunisia and Jordan consider themselves Muslim Brotherhood or have ties to it, but eschew violent extremism.”16 The result of Trump’s ill-conceived classification decision is that thousands of peaceful Muslims may now be wrongly characterized as violent killers and hence be subject to drone strikes—though we should, by now, expect nothing less from a president who celebrates his “bromance” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator who obliterates the bodies of his enemies (while they are still alive) with flamethrowers, wild dogs, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns.17
Just a few days after the Egyptian parliament gave el-Sisi a clear path to stay in power through 2030, Trump issued the second veto of his presidency, blocking Congress’s attempt to end U.S. support for the devastating Saudi-led war in Yemen. The result of Trump’s veto is that America will continue to provide assistance to a war effort that has indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians.18 More recently, Trump has invoked his “emergency powers” to send new missiles and other heavy military equipment to Saudi Arabia—though he knows, as we all do, that these weapons will shortly be carelessly used in areas with large civilian populations, especially now that King Salman, MBS’s father, has publicly absolved his entire army of war crimes with a preemptive royal decree.19
Now reports come from Palestine that the Saudis are trying to bribe Mahmoud Abbas into accepting Trump and Kushner’s cobbled-together “peace deal” by paying the Palestinian president $10 billion—a gambit that underscores how little Trump’s new Sunni allies are committed to justice for the Palestinian people, whom they have long professed to care for.20 According to the Jerusalem Post, King Salman asked Abbas before making his offer, “What is the annual budget of your entourage?” to which Abbas replied, “I’m not a prince to have my own entourage.”21 King Salman’s insulting query underscores not just the slick venality behind what now passes for a peace process in Israel and the Occupied Territories, but a way of seeing fellow humans that stands as Trump’s clearest kinship with the world’s despots. Trump is, after all, a man who withheld billions in disaster relief from storm-torn Puerto Rico because he felt the Americans on that island had shown him insufficient gratitude.22
In Libya—originally intended as a Red Sea Conspiracy nation, until it became clear that MBS could determine the course of its future without much input from its people—Trump, according to the New York Times, in 2019 “abruptly reversed American policy” by “issuing a statement endors[ing] a militia leader [Khalifa Hifter] who [was] battling to control Tripoli and depose the United Nations–backed government.”23 In addition to putting American rhetoric on the opposite side of the United Nations in a key geopolitical and military conflict, Trump’s about-face once again saw him “publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman” whose “regional sponsors” were, unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.24 The Washington Post notes that the conflict in Libya is “yet another civil war” fueled by “Saudi Arabia’s reckless prince,” adding, in reference to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, that “these Arab governments and Russia have deliberately sabotaged an international effort that had the support of the European Union, the African Union and the United States.” The Post attaches Hifter’s recent resurgence to a visit to Saudi Arabia, “where he was promised [by MBS and King Salman] millions of dollars in aid to pay for the [new military] operation” he was then planning.25 Hifter, like MBS, has been credibly accused of war crimes by American and international media.26
In Iran, Trump continues his march toward war by ending the U.S. policy of offering sanctions waivers to countries that import Iranian oil—a decision sure to increase tensions in the Middle East and render an already economically devastated Iran even more isolated, desperate, and dangerous; more recently, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was heard telling members of Congress that “the 2001 AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] might authorize [a] war on Iran.”27 Trump’s decision on the sanctions waivers, like his ultimate decision on whether or not to go to war with Iran, stands to greatly enrich his allies MBS and MBZ—a fact Trump even alluded to in his announcement of the administration’s decision on the waivers.28
Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia faces the prospect of a gradual decline in oil revenues in the coming decades, Trump is aiding its turn to nuclear energy instead of the more obvious solution: solar power. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists observes, “For sun-baked Saudi Arabia, the economical and obvious switch [from oil] is to solar energy, which also doesn’t result in carbon emissions and can be used to reduce domestic consumption of oil and gas. The limited efforts in installing solar power capacity on the part of the Saudi government suggest that climate action and economics may not be the driving motivations for its extensive nuclear energy plan. Indeed, members of the Saudi regime have, on other occasions, made it clear that their interests in nuclear energy derive from the idea that it would help them acquire the capability to make nuclear weapons and match Iran, whose regional status is seen to have risen as a result of its uranium enrichment program.”29
Trump’s coddling of Saudi Arabia’s foolish nuclear enterprise exponentially increases the odds of a cataclysmic nuclear war in the Middle East, as events in the late spring of 2019 have confirmed. In May, Iran declared it would pull out of parts of the nuclear deal it signed with the Obama administration in 2015—a deal the Trump administration had pulled out of in May 2018—including its uranium-enrichment restrictions, unless Europe moved quickly to counteract the devastating effects of Trump’s newly imposed sanctions.30 Days later, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia issued public allegations of Iranian sabotage of Saudi oil tankers; the allegations made reference to holes in tanker hulls, but there were no reports of casualties, no photographs of any damage, no details on the alleged weapon used to produce the holes, no claims of any oil spillage, and no claims of responsibility from Iran or a proxy authorized to speak for Iran.31 The Saudis’ and Emiratis’ report of Iranian sabotage came just days after the two nations had communicated to U.S. intelligence that an Iranian attack might be imminent, an allegation that led Trump’s administration to credulously move bombers and a heavily armed carrier group into a forward position in the Persian Gulf; meanwhile, the British deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Syria was announcing that he had seen “no increased threat” from Iranian-backed forces in either country. For its part, Iran quickly denied any ill intent in the Gulf, and asserted that the Saudi and Emirati allegations were part of a “conspiracy” to provoke the United States into a war with Tehran.32 These events led “national security experts [to] warn [that] the two countries [the United States and Iran] may be headed toward a military confrontation.”33
While the Iranians have often not been good-faith actors in the Middle East, and have rarely given their Sunni neighbors or the United States much reason to trust their medium-term geopolitical designs, that President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal at a time when Iran was in compliance with it—and that he did so at the behest of men like MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, and Netanyahu, who have proven themselves to be as faithless to rule of law as they are dangerous—doubly damages America’s credibility as a good-faith broker in the many conflicts of the Middle East. As already noted, Trump’s chief Israeli ally, Netanyahu, has implied publicly that he, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other allies (with many reasonably presuming he means allies in the White House) want a “war” with Iran.34 It is difficult, therefore, to see in the events of early 2019 anything but a Trump administration–encouraged escalation of regional tensions that would have remained quelled had the United States not unilaterally backed out of its commitment to the Iranian nuclear deal.35 This sense of a commitment dishonored and a hard-won reputation for honest brokerage sullied was only reinforced when, on May 13, 2019, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was “review[ing] military plans against Iran,” thus echoing Netanyahu and further raising the prospect of hostilities between the United States and Tehran breaking out prior to the 2020 presidential election.36
At home, Trump has installed a new attorney general, William Barr, whose recent holding that a president cannot obstruct justice was in early May disputed by more than one thousand former federal prosecutors of both political parties, who collectively declared that the evidence from the Mueller Report that Barr said did not rise to the level of obstruction of justice in fact provably did so.37 Even the famously taciturn and retiring special counsel, Robert Mueller, could not help but angrily conclude, in a letter he must have been certain would become public, that Barr had done a disservice to the work of the special counsel’s office through the DOJ’s misrepresentations of its substance and context.38 The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has gone so far as to call Barr’s April 2019 testimony before Congress on the subject of the Mueller Report a perjury in violation of the federal criminal code.39 Many Americans—including many Americans who are attorneys—would agree with her. That Trump has now given Barr unprecedented oversight over the U.S. intelligence community, with the ability to declassify classified documents at will, can therefore cause nothing but concern to Americans who believe in the rule of law.40 Slate has called Trump’s move to give Barr broad new powers a “threat to national security,” and doubtless many Americans—including many Americans who are national security experts—would agree with that assessment as well.41
Meanwhile, the increasingly unpredictable and idiosyncratically empowered Barr is seeing his conflicts of interest mount, with his son-in-law currently working in the White House counsel’s office advising the president on the very investigations his father-in-law is overseeing, and his daughter working at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the very agency that increasingly is at the center of what Vanity Fair calls “Russian intrigues” involving the Trump administration—including the pre-election referrals to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve that Trump adviser Dimitri Simes made on behalf of Kremlin agents Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina.42 According to Newsweek, Barr even has conflicts of interest involving the Russians, with the magazine noting that “Barr’s previous employers are connected to key subjects in the [special counsel’s] probe … [and] his financial ties to companies linked to aspects of the Russia investigation raise questions about whether he should—like his predecessor, Jeff Sessions—recuse himself.”43 The media outlet references, in particular, a “public financial disclosure report [in which Barr] admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.… [Vector’s] president, Howard Lorber, brought Trump to Moscow in the 1990s to seek investment projects there. The trip is widely seen as the first of many attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.”44 In the midst of his conversations with Emin Agalarov about Kremlin agents coming to Trump Tower to offer incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the man Donald Trump Jr. called wasn’t his father or his sister, but Howard Lorber.45
These conflicts now sit atop other, more personal reasons one might imagine William Barr voluntarily accepting recusal from not just the Russia investigation but the counterintelligence probes and fourteen pending federal investigations that grew out of the work now formally completed by the special counsel’s office. As Vanity Fair notes in February 2019, “Last June, [Barr] sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to the Justice Department calling the inquiry into potential obstruction of justice by Trump ‘fatally misconceived’ and Mueller’s actions ‘grossly irresponsible,’ and insisting ‘Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.’”46 It is clear, given how Trump has selected his appointees in the past—former acting attorney general Matt Whitaker being one example—that Barr’s memo served as a job application of sorts for the new AG, and ultimately was critical to netting him Trump’s nomination for the job; the likely collateral effect of writing such a memo to this president could not have been lost on as seasoned a D.C. operative as Barr. Nor could Barr have failed to appreciate the concern another recent move of his would cause ethicists the nation over: his receipt of an ethics waiver to oversee yet another scandal that could threaten the political future of the man who nominated him as attorney general, the 1MDB case involving allegations of potential criminal misconduct against Jho Low—allegations that could, in time, draw into their web Trump associates Barrack, Lorber, and Broidy.47
William Barr’s evident hostility to conventional legal judgments and processes is of course mirrored by similar traits in appointees and advisers found throughout the Trump administration, which in spring 2019 began opposing all House subpoenas intended to further Democrats’ investigative oversight, regardless of their purpose, scope, or target.48 It is mirrored, too, in revelations about former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who despite overseeing a federal investigation that found substantial evidence that the president of the United States had run afoul of the law nevertheless secretly assured the president that he was “on his team” and that he could “land the plane” for Trump with respect to the special counsel’s Russia investigation.49 Indeed, Rosenstein was privately assuring Trump that he was not a “target” of the Mueller investigation even when he knew the president was exactly that with respect to at least the question of obstruction; Rosenstein’s were a clandestine set of promises to Trump that seemed to presage his idiosyncratic and ahistorical conclusion, shared with and aided and abetted by Barr, that obstruction cannot be charged without an underlying crime. And yet, just days after the Mueller Report’s publication, the DOJ did precisely what both Barr and Rosenstein had publicly claimed it could not do with Trump: in an unrelated investigation, it charged an American citizen with obstruction without identifying any underlying crime.50 That in Trump’s case the underlying crimes obscured by Trump’s obstruction had in fact already been identified by the special counsel, the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.—cases involving Russian hacking, Russian disinformation, Trump’s own campaign finance crimes, the financial and obstructive crimes of Trump’s campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, and the crimes of two Trump national security advisers—was of no moment to Barr or Rosenstein.
In the face of such unusual legal and administrative wrangling, even Mueller eventually felt compelled to speak out, giving a ten-minute statement to the press on May 29, 2019, in which he underscored that the chief reason the special counsel’s office did not reach a final conclusion on obstruction with respect to President Trump was that “under longstanding Department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office … [e]ven if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from the public.… Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.” On the other hand, Mueller noted, the DOJ opinion precluding the indictment of a sitting president “explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available … [and] says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”51 That the special counsel was referring to impeachment was lost on no one.
Perhaps it is little surprise, then, with this degradation of moral reasoning at the highest levels of American government, that Trump’s current and former inner circle has begun to make its own controversial views and ambitions, many of an international scale, better known. According to The Intercept, Erik Prince and Steve Bannon are now business partners, selling arms directly to the Emiratis—this time an updated version of Prince’s original idea for a militarized crop duster, with “Israeli-made avionics and surveillance software for geo-locating targets on the ground.”52 It is unclear whether Prince will face consequences for Congress’s recent perjury referral to the DOJ; The Intercept opines that, “given his wealth and political ties, it may be that the Department of Justice will never have the political fortitude to thoroughly investigate Prince for defense brokering and trafficking violations, or to challenge his questionable ties to China’s intelligence service … [but] the FBI is currently probing Prince’s work at Frontier Services Group, with a team assigned from the Washington field office. It is unclear whether the investigation is a continuation of the 2016 probe or stems from the Mueller investigation.”53 Certainly, Prince’s current relationship with Bannon casts doubt on the possibility, raised implicitly by the Mueller Report, that Bannon had betrayed Prince, or vice versa, with the contradictory testimonies they gave to the special counsel’s office. The evidence suggests that, more probably, the two men have worked in tandem on U.S. foreign policy issues even as they have, in their federal interrogatories, implied that their actions on the campaign and during the transition were not coordinated.
At a Time 100 gala in April 2019, Jared Kushner minimized the massive disinformation campaign the Kremlin deployed during the 2016 general election, describing a coordinated assault on America’s information architecture that infected as many as 135 million U.S. voters as nothing more than “a couple Facebook ads”; he made no mention of the fact, revealed in the Independent, that the Trump administration has been running through the State Department a taxpayer-funded anti-Iran troll factory nearly identical to the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency—with the difference that Trump’s trolls also “target[] American citizens critical of the administration’s hardline Iran policy and accuse[] [U.S.] critics of being loyal to the Tehran regime.”54 Kushner’s recalcitrance in recognizing the awesome influence of Russian (or American) psy-ops in this decade, and the continued danger these operations pose in 2020 and beyond, may be connected to the fact that, increasingly, Americans are also being subjected to psy-ops coordinated by Kushner’s autocratic friend, MBS. Indeed, after the release of the Mueller Report, thousands upon thousands of Twitter bots descended upon unsuspecting Americans with the message that the report revealed a massive deep-state “hoax”—Twitter bots that were ultimately traced to pro-MBS forces within Saudi Arabia.55 That the Saudis increasingly have the hacking capabilities they do because of dangerous Israeli technology sold to them by private Israeli companies with the blessing of Netanyahu’s government (expressly because that government wants the Saudis as allies in future campaigns, political and otherwise, against Iran) only underscores how complicated America’s foreign policy debates will become in the years ahead.
As America engages with these new and increasingly fraught assessments of our geopolitical position, MBS is in Riyadh beheading his own citizens by the dozens—including, recently, an incoming freshman at Western Michigan University—and torturing others before executing them, including a young man who was ultimately beheaded for sending WhatsApp messages about an anti-MBS protest when he was sixteen.56 Yet MBS is the sort of scoundrel beside whom America’s foreign policy now sleeps.
In exchange for all of the above concessions of our national dignity and foundational values, America has gotten nothing more than a “peace plan devised by Jared Kushner that wholly depends upon—of all things—the creation of new ‘desalination plants’ in Gaza.”57 According to investigative journalist Vicky Ward, author of Kushner Inc., under Kushner’s grand plan the Saudis and Emiratis would “provide economic assistance to the Palestinians … [and build] an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Gaza, where refineries and a shipping terminal” would then be built, along with the new desalination plants to spur employment.58 New York Magazine calls the “alleged” plan “preposterous,” noting that it asks Jordan to “give territory to the Palestinian authority,” and in return, per Ward’s book, “Jordan would get land from Saudi Arabia, and that country would get back two Red Sea islands it gave Egypt to administer in 1950.”59 All told, New York Magazine concludes, the plan “would involve no less than five countries (plus Palestine) coordinating to give aid or renegotiate boundaries in the most politically convoluted region on the planet … [while] not requir[ing] the Netanyahu government—a close ally of Kushner’s—to make any significant concessions.”60 In the balance, the magazine observes, the plan would create “inefficient” desalination plants that produce “1.5 times more unusable brine than potable water.”61 Has America thrown over its principles and its foreign policy—not to mention the decades-long hope of a two-state solution in Israel and the Occupied Territories—for a few strategically ludicrous and likely purposeless desalination plants in Gaza?
Even as America’s newly amateurish foreign policy descends into meltdown, the matter of whether Trump or anyone tied to him poses a national security threat to the U.S. by a preponderance of the evidence due to their communications with Kremlin agents or other foreign nationals remains unresolved. It is unclear, indeed, whether America even understands the dangers that such a widespread compromising of our nation’s governmental apparatuses would pose. In a 2019 filing in the Maria Butina case, the Department of Justice opined about “Russia’s broader scheme to acquire information and establish relationships and communication channels that can be exploited to the Russian Federation’s benefit.… Acquiring information valuable to a foreign power does not necessarily involve collecting classified documents or engaging in cloak-and-dagger activities. Something as basic as the identification of people who have the ability to influence policy in a foreign power’s favor is extremely attractive to those powers. The identification could form the basis of other forms of intelligence operations, or targeting, in the future.”62 According to the DOJ, “Such channels bypass open channels of diplomacy and can be used to win concessions or influence positions that contradict declared official policies articulated by governments.… [These channels and identifications are] of substantial intelligence value to the Russian government, and Russian intelligence services will be able to use this information for years to come in their efforts to spot and assess Americans who may be susceptible to recruitment as foreign intelligence assets.”63
By this metric, the third Russian election-interference operation—one that American media never identifies as such—was a coordinated effort to infiltrate the Republicans’ 2016 presidential campaign in the hope of future Kremlin-friendly policy victories. That that effort was wildly successful during both the pre-election, transition, and post-election periods is now clear. And indeed, this particular threat continues, as the Trump administration periodically drops sanctions on new Russian individuals and companies and promotes within its ranks men and women whose ties to Russian interests either have never been explored or have been ignored. As of May 2019, the Trump administration was considering making Monica Crowley the spokeswoman for Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, even though Crowley has in the past lobbied on behalf of Victor Pinchuk, a Soviet-born Ukrainian businessman whom Mother Jones describes as a man “whose large payments … to prominent Americans, including Donald Trump, and apparent promotion of pro-Russian interests drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller.”64 Crowley has also worked with Pinchuk on a “peace deal” for the Ukraine—with “peace deal” a euphemism for, as we have learned from the many covert Kremlin operations described in the Mueller Report, Putin’s duplicitous efforts to achieve his primary policy goal: sanctions relief.65
Trump has also brought potential witnesses against him in future criminal or congressional proceedings into his fold. For instance, despite claims by former Trump communications adviser Michael Caputo that Richard Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox and Trump were at loggerheads about Trump’s political future in 2013 and 2014—when the evidence suggests that in fact Cox, who is closely connected to both Dimitri Simes’s CNI and Carter Page, ultimately facilitated Trump’s run—in May 2019 Trump will effectively confirm Cox’s importance to his political operation by bringing him aboard his reelection campaign via the Trump Victory Committee.66 As the Hill reports, “The role with Trump’s reelection effort provides a soft landing spot for Cox.”67 Indeed, the Trump Victory Committee has a history of welcoming individuals whose testimony could be damaging to Trump, including, most notably, Elliott Broidy, the committee’s longtime director.68 On a broader scale, Trump has sought to reward those with whom his team colluded by, per Politico and congressional Democrats, “violating a law requiring a report on human rights abuses in Russia”; specifically, Trump’s administration is now five months late in delivering a report required by the Magnitsky Act and other Russian sanctions regimes and, moreover, is “misleading Congress about the reason for the delay.”69
Despite all of these conflagrations at home and abroad, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has still not received a comprehensive briefing on the ongoing counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, transition, and administration.70 The result is a 2020 American electorate not fully informed on who it can trust to advance America’s interests rather than those of our enemies.
Trump’s venality, penchant for deception, and disregard for American values and the nation’s security interests in dealings abroad can persist for only so long without severely destabilizing America’s rule of law, its democratic principles, and, finally, its abiding self-identity. Already we are seeing historic erosion in the American spirit—one that can be traced to a leader whose first principles are fundamentally not in line with those of the nation he leads. Most troubling—not just in Trump himself and his inner circle but also in his enablers in Washington—is a celebration of willful ignorance incompatible with American greatness. Sen. Angus King summarizes Trump’s attitude toward receiving intelligence from American intelligence agencies, which are among the world’s best, in this way: “Don’t tell me information I don’t want to hear.”71 Just so, Trump’s most ardent supporters inside and outside the Beltway can now regularly be found on social media and elsewhere referring to the backbone of American journalism as “fake news” worthy of little more than a sneer. Encompassed in this preposterous moniker are such television outlets as CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks; in print, the New York Times and the Washington Post; and online, the digital editions of both these outlets and Pulitzer Prize–winning newcomers such as BuzzFeed News. Once-valued standards of conduct are everywhere being diminished; for instance, it was recently revealed that the Trump administration hid from Congress emoluments-clause-violative leases to foreign governments at Trump-branded properties, including a luxury apartment now occupied by Saudi government officials.72 A Trump appointee to the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced publicly—on social media, no less—that she “honestly doesn’t care” about abiding by the federal Hatch Act preventing political activity by government employees. It’s not clear why she would, either, given that it is hardly ever enforced or even gesturally attended to: not when the White House press secretary is repeatedly accused of violating it; not when top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway repeatedly violates it, taunting her critics with lines like, “Let me know when the jail sentence starts”; and not when members of the New York field office of the FBI routinely leaked intimate details of the ongoing Clinton email investigation to conservative media in October 2016.73 Even the universal conclusion of America’s highly regarded intelligence agencies that the Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election is a subject for public mockery by the president and his allies. During an early May 2019 phone call with Putin, Trump and the Russian president commiserated about Mueller’s Russia investigation being predicated on a “hoax”—a shared assessment that Trump immediately thereafter merrily outlined to American media.74 In view of this dangerous accord between two men whose mutual admiration has never been sufficiently explained or investigated, it is increasingly difficult to retain our faith in those deeply held American values that once distinguished us so readily from the world’s autocracies.
In view of all the foregoing, it appears that former FBI director James Comey was right when he wrote in the New York Times that “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.”75 He neglected to add that the same can be said of the very soul of our nation, and that while the spirit of a dynamic and historically progressive people can be replenished, it is not, finally, inexhaustible. At some point America crosses a proverbial point of no return, beyond which a great nation risks being consumed by animuses, false equivalencies, and perversions of revered institutions that are incompatible with the complex fabric of our history and culture. I fear that a time is approaching when, as Americans and as America, we will be rendered permanently unrecognizable to ourselves and to anyone else in the world.
At the end of December 2018, the United States for the first time in its history became one of the five most dangerous nations in the world for journalists.76 We cross this dark threshold at a time when the nation’s journalistic ecosystem simultaneously produces too much quality investigative reporting for even the nation’s best analysts to synthesize; too little accountability for corporate journalism that places profits above ethics; too many stories where commitment to evenhandedness masks an unwillingness to render conventional journalistic and even moral judgments about truth and falsehood, integrity and moral degradation; and too little attention for innovations in the journalistic enterprise that might allow the profession to survive, even if generatively transformed, amid the bewildering transfigurations of a digitized and increasingly virtual (if too rarely virtuous) world.
Recently, one of Trump’s attorneys and closest campaign advisers, Rudy Giuliani, announced on national television that receiving stolen material from a hostile foreign power during a presidential election is hereafter, as his view was summarized by NBC News, “fair game”—a new doctrine of political corruption that former acting attorney general Sally Yates told NBC is “shocking” and a “devolution” of American patriotism.77 The FBI has begun sounding the alarm about a 2020 Russian election-interference operation it calls a “significant counterintelligence threat,” though there is little evidence the Trump administration takes this threat seriously.78 The chance that Americans will have little faith in the integrity of our future national elections is now higher than it has ever been—not merely because of cyberintrusions and social media disinformation, but also because of the rise of doctored multimedia “supercuts” and “deep fakes”—all of which promise disastrous consequences for both the spirit and the level of engagement of America’s electorate. The New Yorker quotes Tamir Pardo, the director of Israel’s chief spy agency Mossad from 2011 to 2016, as saying of the Russian election-interference operation in 2016—which appears to have received significant assists from Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati entities—“It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart.”79 Yet U.S. media still spends more time dissecting Trump’s tweets than seeking to curate the hundreds of major-media investigative reports from around the world that confirm that it is Trump who is, piece by piece, dissecting our nation’s foreign policy and domestic institutions.
Trump’s influence on the national psyche is so powerful that the violence of his language and his psychology has transformed into actual violence in the spaces to which he sends his words and ideations. Indeed, U.S. counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the ensuing twelve months.80 It’s no wonder, writes Tamir Pardo, that when Russia considered its anti-Western geopolitical ambitions, it “took a look at the political map in Washington, ‘and thought, which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals? And they chose him [Trump]. From that moment, they deployed a system [of bots] for the length of the elections, and ran him for president.’”81 It makes sense that Putin’s Kremlin would reach this conclusion—and that MBS would, and MBZ, and Benjamin Netanyahu—not merely because the evidence tells us they did but because Trump shares with these men a certain sort of contempt for legal process and conventional civics, and an avarice for ever-greater authority over others. In time, a man of such a mind-set decides these goals can best be achieved by doing violence to humankind’s most prized values.
There are signs that a change is coming, however.
According to the Atlantic, “dozens” of federal whistleblowers—“a small army” of them—have now contacted Congress about malfeasance in the Trump administration.82 With Julian Assange now in custody in the United Kingdom for bail-jumping, there remains a possibility that he can be extradited to the United States and questioned, under the threat of pending indictments in the Eastern District of Virginia—including one under the Espionage Act—about his contacts with the Trump campaign, the Kremlin, or cutouts acting as agents for either.83 Assange has extradition-related hearings scheduled in London for May 30 and June 12, but the presiding magistrate in his case says the extradition issue will likely not be resolved for “many months.”84 George Nader has signed a cooperation agreement with the FBI that is so favorable to him, the New Yorker reports, that a Nader representative told the magazine, “Someone who has this kind of immunity has no incentive to lie”; this offers some hope that Nader, especially after his recent arrest on new child pornography charges, will be fully transparent with U.S. intelligence agents about what he did, and for whom, from 2014 onward.85 Andrew Miller, a longtime Roger Stone associate who fought a special counsel’s office grand jury subpoena for months, has now agreed to testify, raising the prospects of a successful prosecution of Stone this fall—and the possibility of a Stone cooperation agreement that will see the GOP political operative finally giving the lie to certain of Trump’s statements about what he knew about WikiLeaks and when, and from whom.86 Cindy Yang, the now-infamous Florida massage parlor owner, has conceded in a legal filing that she was selling Chinese nationals access to Trump’s home in Florida, suggesting the possibility of future revelations about Trump-Chinese collusion involving Trump not just selling access but possibly cutting deals to ensure favorable treatment for his and his family’s brands abroad. Indeed, the Chinese government approved sixteen Ivanka Trump trademarks just forty-eight hours before Election Day in 2016.87
Meanwhile, at least fourteen ongoing federal criminal investigations involving evidence uncovered by the special counsel’s office—and witnesses in federal cooperation agreements in a position to reveal new counterintelligence threats resulting from Trump campaign collusion and possible criminal conduct—offer hope that the full story of the Trump campaign, transition, and administration can eventually be brought to light. For instance, as reported by the Daily Beast, “Rick Gates, the former campaign aide to Donald Trump, is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into whether individuals from the Middle East worked with the Trump campaign to influence the election, according to two individuals with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.”88 The digital media outlet adds that the repeated delays in Gates’s federal sentencing hearing are due to ongoing investigations with which Gates is involved, and that “one of the ongoing investigations is into possible Middle Eastern election influence.”89 New evidence suggests that it may have been George Birnbaum, Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime adviser, who acted as the Trump campaign’s most consequential intermediary to Zamel’s Psy-Group, rather than Rick Gates, a possibility that would even more powerfully expand the Trump-Russia scandal to include the Israeli government as well as Saudi and Emirati agents; meanwhile, Politico reports that Senate investigators have found a witness—a British security consultant named Walter Soriano—who may be able to establish significant links between Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Wikistrat, and Psy-Group.90 Specifically, Soriano may be able to more closely tie Joel Zamel to his former employer Deripaska.91
On the document-production front, Congress has had recent successes in its efforts to get Trump financial documents from Deutsche Bank and Trump’s accountant, Mazars.92 And the doggedness of American journalists is likely to, in time, rescue forgotten stories from the domestic and international news archive and reconnect them with today’s latest news developments. For instance, in March 2018 a Business Insider article revealed that Trump was offered a $2 billion deal by an old Emirati business partner days before his 2017 inauguration—and that while he “rejected” the offer, the Trump Organization’s concurrent dealings abroad raise questions about why Trump found this offer particularly politically dangerous. It is stories like these that deserve new life as America turns its attention to pre-election and transition-period Trump-Saudi and Trump-Emirati collusion, especially as it intersects with Trump-Russia collusion and Benjamin Netanyahu’s evident support for Trump’s presidential candidacy.93
And yet, particularly in the absence of any Republican appetite for holding Trump accountable for his actions—other than the presently isolated support for impeachment from Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI)—it may be too late for America to conclusively shift back toward equal justice for all and honorable bipartisan governance in Washington.94 So much described in this book has already progressed to what appears, at first blush, to be points of no return. In April 2019, Bloomberg published a satellite photo of Saudi Arabia’s nearly completed first-ever nuclear reactor (at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh), a construction that marks the beginning of the Saudi-Iranian arms race and its attendant “risk[] of the [Saudi] kingdom using [nuclear] technology without signing up to the international rules governing the industry.” In Egypt, el-Sisi’s power is now unchallenged and absolute. The Emiratis have developed a complex ecosystem of assassination squads operating across the Middle East. Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection in Israel (notwithstanding that he was thereafter unable to form a coalition government, and will have to stand for reelection again in September 2019). And Trump is planning to send 10,000 more troops to the Middle East, in what could presage U.S. preparations for a military conflict with Iran.95 There are also other indications that things are worse behind the scenes than Americans realize, and perhaps more such things than U.S. journalism can readily uncover in the short term. In late April 2019, for instance, Americans discovered that former secretary of defense Jim Mattis had to routinely ignore directives from the White House—an astounding, perhaps even unprecedented recourse for a respected lifelong soldier atop the country’s military infrastructure—in order to save the world from further bloodshed in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.96 This is news that should send a chill down the spine of the world.
That America will eventually learn the full story of what was done in 2015 and 2016, in locations around the world, to secure the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president is certain. Whether that discovery will come in a year, a decade, or a century remains unclear. Fortunately, there is evidence that, before formally ending his investigation, Mueller was looking with great intensity at the “grand bargain” this book describes—and clearly, from his report, he was willing to contribute his findings to other federal investigations and to counterintelligence probes that remain ongoing and will, presumably, report their results to someone eventually. Alongside these efforts, there is every indication that the president’s legal strategy, which comprises simply ignoring congressional subpoenas and urging all the administration’s allies to do the same, will not hold water before either the lower courts of the nation or the Supreme Court. The combination of business-record revelations and counterintelligence findings these separate developments could portend may well make all that this book has disclosed merely the opening chapter of the sorriest story of corruption and treachery this country has ever known. If this account has done anything to signpost that glimmer of light somewhere down the road—to remind us that America’s story remains one of inquisitiveness, courage, and renewal—then it has done all it can.