The volume and scope of Trump’s deceit, along with his indefensible domestic and foreign policies, could well produce, in short order, the crashing of the American economy, multiple costly military adventures abroad, and a continued degradation of American cultural and political discourse that will take many years to heal. Ironically, the chances that Trump will cause dramatic harm to the very party that elevated him to the presidency are far higher than many suppose; we cannot expect that Trump will go quietly into the good night while he retains his hold on power or at any time thereafter. He will pursue vengeance against anyone he perceives as having been an instrument of his accountability, whether those in his sights are Democrats or, as he might see it, disloyal Republicans.
What Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—have learned in the Trump era is what nations around the globe learned long ago: autocrats are poisonous to any nation in which they take root. Many civil societies collapse under the weight of their autocrats’ corruption and moral turpitude. That said, in America we have the benefit and shield of a democracy most of us believe in and would fight to protect, a rule of law that is long-standing and broadly just, and a history of surviving tragedy and periods of shame with our optimism and our moral ambitions mostly intact. America will survive this period; to do so, however, it will have to finally accept the unthinkable: it elected a man capable of corporate crime, astonishing greed, and personal cruelty. What ties together the dizzying number of lies, misdirections, and degradations endemic to this era is quite simply that this presidency is not an American presidency but a Trump presidency: a course of ill governance that is for Trump, about Trump, and inextricably tethered to the interests of Trump.
The penchant for dubious associations Trump has historically pursued is, if not matched, at least dwarfed in size and scope by the collective perfidy of the more than a dozen Trump family members, aides, allies, and associates who in some cases for years have enabled his behavior in business and now in politics. Never has a presidential campaign birthed so many lies from so many different mouths: lies of indifference, lies of carelessness, lies of callousness, lies of pique, lies of strategic advantage, lies of ignorance, lies of malicious intent, lies of ulterior motive. The rogues’ gallery produced by the Trump campaign, then Trump transition, now Trump administration will encompass a number of men and women—including many who had little inkling of Trump’s quid pro quo with the Kremlin. These ancillary figures will be accounted in history as mere adjuncts to Trump’s deceit; they flew too close to a dark sun.
But this is only one version of the future. It is equally probable that history will deem even minor Team Trump figures—spokesmen and -women, high-level administrative assistants, and second-tier family members—willing accomplices in Trump’s monstrous accomplishment: perverting American government and culture. They may be blamed, too, for having left America, in their wake, unable to recognize truth from fiction, benign intent from malice, courage from cowardice, patriotism from self-interest.
It will take many years, perhaps even more than a decade, for America to fully recover from the Trump presidency.
If America’s rule of law remains fully intact, and if there are still men and women of abiding conscience on both sides of the political aisle, Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives in 2019 and convicted of impeachable offenses by the U.S. Senate in 2019 or 2020. To avoid the embarrassment—an offense to his vanity, not his dignity—of being the first president to be removed from office, it is equally possible Trump will resign in 2019 shortly before he is impeached or shortly before he is convicted. This rather obvious plan of escape is complicated by the fact that the moment Trump is no longer president he can be indicted by his former Department of Justice.
The menu of federal offenses from which the roster of indictments against Trump and his closest associates may be drawn includes the following (as well as conspiracy to commit any or all of these offenses): various campaign finance violations, election fraud, wire fraud, bribery, bank fraud, computer crimes, extortion, identity theft, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, perjury, making false statements to Congress, making false statements to law enforcement, failure to register as a foreign agent, money laundering, tax evasion, and RICO charges. No one Trump administration official, Trump included, would ever face more than a handful of these, but several are likely to tick a number of the boxes here. If Robert Mueller is a typical prosecutor, he will propose as many charges and as serious a set of charges against each defendant (provided he or she is not cooperating with the government) that he reasonably can, assuming—as prosecutors do—that negotiations will occur down the line to limit the number and severity of any given defendant’s charges and exposure to prison time.
Special Counsel Mueller has thus far exhibited an extraordinary willingness to under-charge those who can assist him in establishing that the president of the United States is compromised. That Michael Flynn, an evident bad actor in the events described in this book, should face only a single charge is either a testament to Mueller’s uncommon mercy, Flynn’s value to the investigation of the president, or Mueller’s choice to focus on other targets he considers more culpable than even the disgraced former National Security Advisor. These other targets could include, in addition to the president, Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Sam Clovis, Roger Stone, Joseph Schmitz, J. D. Gordon, Carter Page, a number of Russian nationals (whose prosecutions would be difficult to pursue because of the unlikelihood of their being extradited to the United States), and, because lawyers tend to take misconduct by other lawyers particularly seriously, Jeff Sessions. Naive dupes and cutouts like George Papadopoulos who cooperate will face minimal jail or prison time. Mueller could also decide to view the conspiracy question through a narrow lens, concluding that while many people assisted Trump with his plans and particularly with the cover-up of his misdeeds, few beneath Trump and his family in the campaign and administration hierarchies stood to directly benefit from the graft above their heads and therefore had little reason to fully appreciate its scope. One imagines that in the Trump-Russia investigation, as in many conspiracy investigations, a core group of bad actors is surrounded by a large number of men and women responsible for after-the-fact offenses like obstruction of justice, perjury, witness tampering, making false statements, or participation in a conspiracy whose ambitions they knew were criminal but whose breadth they did not understand.
Those who predict widespread violence should Trump be impeached and convicted or resign are being reactionary. Americans are as a national community more noble than that, and most have much more instinctive faith in our legal and political institutions than our often poisonous discourse would suggest. Violence is for those who have given up on America completely. While it is true that the tens of millions of Americans who voted for this president are not yet prepared to give up the way he makes them feel and the self-respect they had in the moment they cast a ballot in his name, they did not support him because they’d given up on America. Rather, in a particular way that can be difficult for the rest of America to appreciate, they voted for him because they love America.
Perhaps a more pressing question is the fate of the Republican Party should Trump maintain his cultish appeal and position himself as a martyr after his impending fall from grace. Were he not likely to face imprisonment—an eventuality only a “grand bargain” involving his voluntary resignation could avoid—one would expect him to found a television network the way he’d planned to do if he lost the 2016 election. One would further expect that the television network would promote a new slate of right-wing populists whose Trump-inspired “grab-bag” of policy positions would eventually sever the GOP in two. The odds that the Republican Party exists in its current state ten years after Trump leaves the White House are longer than many believe. Should Trump feel the GOP has betrayed him, he will stop at nothing to destroy it in whatever years he has left. The hardened core of “strong” Trump supp
orters within the party, comprising about 30 percent or so of voting-age Republicans, will follow Trump wherever he leads. If he bolts the party following whatever happens in 2019, he will lead these voters into political irrelevance, and the splintered Republican Party will guarantee an America in which the Democratic Party is the long-term majority in all branches of federal government. That prospect alone should convince Trump and his followers to try to remake rather than unmake the Republican Party.
Oddly, for all Trump’s railing against federal law enforcement and the American intelligence community, the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and other now-maligned government agencies are likely to emerge from the Trump presidency unscathed. The Republican Party has too much to gain by continuing to steer debate over the criminal justice system with “law-and-order” rhetoric to remain the would-be executioners of that system for long.
A greater question is how we will all live with one another going forward—that is to say, love one another. It is hard to imagine many proud Trump voters feeling any goodwill toward those who helped engineer his political downfall in the years ahead. How one stood on the question of Donald J. Trump at this moment in American history will be the defining feature of many Americans’ self-identity as citizens for years to come.
There is, of course, one remaining possibility that could alter the equation as laid out here: America may be invited to witness the complete, utter, monstrously loud self-disassembly of Donald J. Trump in the public square. Should Trump attempt to effectively suspend the rule of law in America by firing Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and/or Robert Mueller; should he seek to pardon any person believed by half or more of the country to be one of his coconspirators at the time he pardons them; or should he so dissociate from the reality of America as a democracy that his increasingly mercurial Twitter feed and undignified public presence become unsustainably obscene, then a spectacular self-implosion like this could so embarrass his allies and a sizable percentage of his backers that support for his administration craters in a way modern polling has never seen. In that case, America might yet awake from this presidency as from a bad dream. This future becomes increasingly likely with each Trump tweet baselessly calling the Mueller investigation “rigged” or ominously signing off “stay tuned!” after declaring that any investigation of his actions before his presidency or while he is in office is “illegal.” Having represented more than two thousand accused criminals and seeing, in several of the worst of them, many of the same traits evident in this president, I cannot help but anticipate at least one illegal firing and at least one illegal pardon—obstruction in the guise of leniency—before the curtain falls on the Trump era. Any such action would of course be accompanied by a legion of pundits and politically minded attorneys assuring Trump and his supporters that a president can execute any of his constitutional functions for an illegal purpose. But he cannot.
If the Democrats do take the House of Representatives in the fall of 2018, it will happen in part because Trump cannot help himself from committing political and cultural atrocities on a near-daily basis. In that, and in his inability to tell the truth or value any cause or person more than he values himself, he is apparently pathological. He will not, one would expect, ever agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller; he will fight any subpoena issued to him in court, and he will lose if his case reaches the Supreme Court. By the same token, Trump’s allies in Congress may continue to obstruct the investigations into his administration, even mounting a doomed campaign to impeach Rod Rosenstein or terminate the special counsel’s authority. But I predict cooler heads among the Republican leadership—with a longer vision, if not necessarily a more expansive understanding of civic duty—will prevail.
If Rod Rosenstein is still the acting attorney general for the Trump-Russia investigation when Mueller issues his final report sometime in 2019 or 2020, he will release the report to the public over the objections of fellow Republicans in Congress. If they somehow temporarily block him from making the report public, it will leak; it will be longer, more comprehensive, and more damning than any public consideration of Trump’s misdeeds could have anticipated. Mueller’s access to Trump’s financial records, for a start, will have opened for the special counsel an entire landscape of graft Americans can’t now contemplate. Unfortunately, far-right media—in many cases, personalities on the right who simultaneously advise Trump as they analyze his presidency—have done so much to inure a subsection of Trump supporters to a sober, professional, rational analysis of the hard and circumstantial evidence in the Trump-Russia investigation that a notable bloc of voting Americans will reject whatever Mueller writes in his report simply because he was the one to write it.
Whatever happens, America—which has been spiritually, psychologically, and politically paralyzed by Trump’s toxic insinuation into its culture—will continue in a state of paralysis that won’t be broken until Trump’s exit from American life. And when that happens, America is likely to find that the president’s unprincipled and narcissistic reality could not be sustained at home or under the gaze of the entire world. That gaze will reveal, even more than is already evident, that the world Donald J. Trump inhabits isn’t the one most of the rest of us do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The list of people without whom this book would have been impossible is nearly as long as the list of people whose names appear in its index.
I am, first and before all, fortunate beyond deserving for the love and support of my wife, whose wisdom, temperament, and perspective was a compass in this endeavor as it has been in so many others.
This book draws together the research of hundreds of investigative journalists from around the world, whose articles and employers are cited in the book’s endnotes and whose names and other contributions to journalism could readily fill a book several times this size. In networking and synthesizing the knowledge and hard work of a large number of these professionals as a curatorial journalist, I was always in awe of their fearlessness, ambition, perspicacity, and candor. The information matrix we call the Trump-Russia investigation is impassable without the work, work ethic, and nodes of data these journalists have provided.
I’d like to particularly thank Natasha Bertrand, Paul Wood, David Corn, Michael Isikoff, Luke Harding, Craig Unger, Julia Ioffe, Bill Moyers, Virginia Heffernan, Caroline Orr, Ryan Goodman, Asha Rangappa, Jeffrey Toobin, Carl Bernstein, Jim Sciutto, Steve Schmidt, Laurence Tribe, Isaac Arnsdorf, Matt Apuzzo, Carol Cadwalladr, Sharon LaFraniere, Kenneth Vogel, Carol Leonnig, Rosalind Helderman, Tom Hamburger, Mark Mazzetti, Annette Schatzle, Jos Van Dongen, Manon Blaas, Marianna Kakaounaki, Alex Papchelas, Katie Benner, Adam Goldman, and the members of the Channel 4 News (UK) investigative team for their excellent reporting and analysis. The employers of these journalists and all those whose work appears in Proof of Collusion also deserve thanks for sponsoring the sort of journalism that daily acts as a guiding star in times of confusion and anxiety.
Closer to home, the team that worked on this book—including Jonathan Karp, Priscilla Painton, Megan Hogan, Jonathan Evans, Ed Klaris, Alexia Bedat, Keith Schneider, Kristina Rebelo, Julie Tate, Elise Ringo, Marie Florio, Felice Javit, Kristen Lemire, Tom Spain, and Jeff Wilson—improved a project whose scope could easily have become unwieldy. The commitment of the whole team to telling this story was inspiring.
Throughout each stage of the process, my agent Jeff Silberman has been far more than that: he has been an advisor, mentor, and erudite discussion partner whose contributions run throughout the book and are no less valuable for being seamlessly interwoven into the text. I feel incredibly lucky to have had him as a partner on this journey.
Finally, I want to acknowledge perhaps the largest and most diverse class of participants in this project: the family members, friends, co-workers, social media acquaintances, Twitter readers, rescue hounds, peer curatorial journalists, and passionately engaged fellow citizens whose enthusiasm, advice, and encouragement helped sustain me throughout. Their efforts reminded me
, at a time I definitely needed the reminder, that there is no storm that cannot be weathered when those of courage, integrity, and kindness stand together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
©UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
SETH ABRAMSON is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is the author of eight books and editor of five anthologies. Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the PhD program in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two one-year-old rescue hounds, Quinn and Scout.
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NOTES
INTRODUCTION: A THEORY OF THE CASE
1. Emma Loop and Jason Leopold, “Senate Intel Wants to Follow the Money in the Russia Probe,” BuzzFeed News, August 14, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmaloop/senate-intel-wants-to-follow-the-money-in-the-russia-probe.
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