by D. W. Buffa
“Mr. Antonelli, are you ready with your next witness?”
“Yes, your Honor. The defense calls Jenny Ann Carruthers.”
She had been sworn in before. I did not have to ask her to state her full name for the record, but she did not know that, and I wanted to remind the jury that there was something essentially false even in the way she identified herself.
“Jennifer Anastasia Carruthers,” she replied when I asked.
“When you testified before, you were asked why you had not accompanied the president on his trip to California. You replied, ‘There wasn’t really any reason for me to come. The speech had been written, all the arrangements made.’ Do you remember saying that?”
She was surprised that I thought it so important that I would quote back to her the reasons she had given; even more surprised that I had done it from memory.
“Yes, I believe that is what I said.”
“Is that still your testimony? Is that still what you want this jury to believe?”
“That was the reason I didn’t come.”
“Those same reasons would have applied to any trip the president made. This was the only trip you did not make. What was different this time?”
She seemed suddenly nervous and uncertain. I was standing behind my empty chair. I moved to the corner of the counsel table. Fitzgerald was sitting below me on my left.
“It can’t be because you hadn’t been involved in what was going to happen after the president arrived. You testified—I remember it quite well—that the trip was ‘partly my idea.’ You testified—I remember it quite well—that you thought the president should make the trip, out here, to California, ‘to take the fight to the senator’s home ground. He had left us no choice.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
“Something like that, I think.”
“Something like that. You also told us—admitted—that according to your own polling, Senator Fitzgerald would have defeated Walter Bridges in the next presidential election fifty-six to thirty-two, an astonishing margin. Isn’t that what you said? Didn’t you say ‘something like that’?”
Anger shot to her eyes. She gripped the arms of the chair.
“I also said that if the president had lived, if he had not been murdered, he would have turned that around. He would have been re-elected.”
“The trip was your idea, you wanted to take the fight to Senator Fitzgerald on his home ground, because with that kind of margin to overcome, there really wasn’t any choice. Is that what you were trying to say?”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”
“But despite that, this was the only trip you missed. Was it because, as you also testified, you had to stay in Washington ‘to work out our communications strategy’?”
Added to the other reasons she had given, it seemed a reasonable excuse.
“Yes, that was important, and as I said, I—”
“Whose communication strategy? The president’s, or the one you and Michael Donahue knew you would need?”
Her face went rigid, her eyes went cold.
“What are you talking about? What communications strategy would Michael Donahue and I—”
“The one you used, the whole series of press briefings, press releases, interviews, after Walter Bridges was murdered!”
The life came back in her eyes, and she seemed suddenly triumphant. I was a fool, and she could prove it.
“How could anyone have done that before it happened?”
The next question was out of my mouth almost before she had finished.
“Did you know you were under surveillance, that the meetings you had with Michael Donahue, the late-night telephone calls, were all recorded?”
I opened the thin black finder in which I had placed the intelligence reports Reynaud had given me.
“Here, for example, let me read what you said the night before that trip you decided you could miss. The call was made from your cell phone at ten seventeen eastern time. It reads as follows: ‘Carruthers,’” I began. Then I changed my mind. “No, I think I’ll wait. But let me ask you, Ms. Carruthers, and I would remind you not only that you are under oath, but that this will be your one and only chance to tell the truth about what happened, and why it did.”
She sat there, ashen faced and almost immobile, staring at me as if I were the devil incarnate.
“Did you, or did you not, discuss with Michael Donahue the great danger the Bridges presidency was in? Did you, or did you not, agree that what Senator Fitzgerald had learned would almost certainly lead to the president’s impeachment?”
Her mouth was too dry to speak. She asked for a glass of water.
“Do you want me to repeat the question?”
“No. The answer is yes, but not the way you seem to think. We knew, and not just Donahue and me, but nearly everyone in the White House, what the polls were saying. We knew—as I testified—that the Russian investigation was making things difficult, that—”
“Did you discuss with Michael Donahue that what Senator Fitzgerald had discovered would likely lead to impeachment?”
“There was that possibility,” she conceded, finally.
“Senator Fitzgerald did you quite a favor, didn’t he?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean. He killed—”
“Killed Walter Bridges, is that what you’re going to say? And if he is found guilty of it, you have a new president, and you’re rid of the one candidate that even he can’t beat.”
I looked long and hard at her, smiling with the secret she still was not sure I knew.
“I have no more questions of this witness, your Honor.” And then, before she had taken two steps, I announced, “The defense calls Michael Donahue.”
They passed each other, and after seeing the look on her face, he must have known he was in trouble. He could not possibly have known how much. He had just taken the witness stand when Raymond St. John said he had a matter for the court that had best be discussed in chambers.
“If the defense has evidence - transcripts of recorded conversation - the prosecution has the right to know it.” He turned to me, sitting next to him in front of Silverman’s spartan desk. “Unless you were just bluffing, trying to make Carruthers think you knew something that you really did not.”
“I wasn’t bluffing,” I replied with a reluctance that caught his, and the judge’s, attention. “In some ways, I wish I were.”
I reached inside my briefcase for the thin black binder I had used in court, and then I reached inside again.
“These are copies, one for the court, one for the prosecution. If there is any doubt concerning their authenticity, if you want me to offer proof that they are what they appear to be—transcripts of conversations between Michael Donahue and, amongst others, Jenny Ann Carruthers—there is someone in the courtroom, a representative of the French government, willing, if necessary, to provide it. I would ask that it be done on camera. I don’t have any objection if Mr. St. John is included in the court’s interview, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to be gained by making the source and methods of this information more public than is necessary.”
For the next few minutes, Leonard Silverman and Raymond St. John read through the intelligence reports I had been given by Jean-Francois Reynaud.
“My God!” muttered Silverman in astonishment after he had finished the first few pages. “What do we do now?” he asked an equally astonished Raymond St. John.
“I think we get to watch Joseph Antonelli.”
I did not know what the jury was thinking, or what the witness imagined, when the three of us came back into court, looking more serious, and more determined, than when we left. Silverman placed his right arm on the bench and with an air of great anticipation, looked down on Donahue. St. John rested his elbows on the counsel table, folded his hands together, and peered at the witness with narrow-eyed intensity. I stood at the end of the jury box, my right hand gripping the railing. I began with what seemed an u
tterly routine question about what he had testified before.
“You testified that when you had dinner with General Rostov, you did not know he was a Russian general and you did not know he was in charge of Russia’s cyber warfare program. Is that still your testimony?”
He was nothing if not brazen. He said it was.
“You’re aware that last week Senator Fitzgerald testified that not only did you know it was Rostov, you had met him before, that you had, in fact, spent the better part of the day with him at the Russian embassy in Washington?”
“I’m aware of what he said.”
“Then you’re also aware that in addition to his own sworn testimony, evidence was introduced, including the transcripts of what was said in that meeting you had at the Russian embassy?”
“I’m aware that documents were introduced; I’m not aware that they were authentic, that they have been verified as being true.”
“You deny, then, that they’re true?”
“I deny I’ve ever done anything that wasn’t done to protect this country.”
“Protect this country! Yes, I understand. That was the reason you came up with this plan to use the threat of Russian interference in the next election as a way to cancel it, to postpone as long as you had to even the possibility that Walter Bridges would have to leave office, wasn’t it?”
“No, I never—”
“Yes! Along with Jenny Ann Carruthers, and who knows how many others, you had it all worked out. It was the reason for the meeting—the meeting that never took place—with people who could penetrate the computer systems used in our elections and make it look like another country—Russia—was behind it!”
“No, that isn’t true! It was the other way around. We were trying to stop them from doing anything like that again.”
“The reason why you were going to meet with those cyber security people isn’t really important, is it?”
It stopped him. Thoroughly confused, he threw up his hands. The question did not make sense.
“The reason for the meeting did not matter, because the meeting was never going to happen. On the flight, the last flight Walter Bridges would ever make, you argued with him. You had been opposed to any meeting with Senator Fitzgerald, and yet, now, suddenly, you were all for it. You knew Fitzgerald would be there, didn’t you?” I asked, shifting ground so fast he could not keep track.
“Yes, he was going to be there. It was the normal—”
“In fact, the day before the flight you called his office to make sure. You did that because you had to be sure. He had to be there. Everything depended on it.”
“Everything depended…?”
I stared at him, daring him to deny it, daring him to tell me I was wrong.
“He had to be there, because without him, your plan would never work. You had already decided your first plan would not work,” I said, as if I were reminding him of a well-established fact. “You couldn’t use a phony cyber attack to delay, much less cancel, a presidential election. Walter Bridges might think he could get away with something like that, but you—and Carruthers, and anyone else in the White House who was halfway sane—had to know that the House, the Senate, whoever had a majority, would never go along with anything that unprecedented, that extreme, especially with Kevin Fitzgerald going after everything he could find. It wasn’t going to work. There was going to be an election, and you, and everything you wanted, all the great changes you wanted to make, the new American revolution you intended to lead, the one you wanted to use Bridges to accomplish, was going to be defeated in an electoral landslide. It was over. Bridges was a disaster. Something had to be done. You studied history. What did history teach you? When something becomes necessary, necessary to save the country, you do what you have to do. Isn’t that what you were doing: following, like Kevin Fitzgerald, the same law of necessity? Isn’t that why you did what you did? Isn’t that the reason why you, not Kevin Fitzgerald, murdered Walter Bridges?”
It felt like an earthquake, the one everyone had been expecting, the one that would level San Francisco and send a tidal wave to the shore. The courtroom shook from side to side, the floor began to roll beneath my feet. The noise was so loud no one heard the gavel with which Judge Silverman tried to stop it. I kept staring at Donahue, and he kept staring back.
“That’s ridiculous! Insane! He confessed. He testified under oath!” he cried, stabbing his finger at Fitzgerald, who sat, thunderstruck, in his chair.
“The law of necessity, Mr. Donahue! Kevin Fitzgerald walked into the president’s cabin to confront him with what he had discovered, what, as you know, would destroy his presidency, and found Walter Bridges lying dead on the floor. You were there, Mr. Donahue, remember? Richard Ellison had left, gone outside the cabin to wait for Senator Fitzgerald. He thought you had left as well, gone out the other entrance, the one that leads to the president’s bedroom. But you didn’t leave, you stayed and, alone with the president, you went up to him as if there were some last things you wanted to tell him. That’s when you stabbed him in the throat, severed the artery, causing almost instant death. You thought that when Fitzgerald came in he would be caught, the only one in the room, and charged with murder. It never occurred to you that Fitzgerald would confess and try to argue that he had killed the president to save the country.”
I picked up the transcript and handed it to Donahue.
“Read it out loud, the first page will be enough.”
He would not do it. I ripped it out of his hands and read it out loud myself.
“‘Carruthers: Did you do it? Did it work?’
‘Donahue: Better than we could have hoped. Fitzgerald has been taken away. They found him with the knife in his hand.’
‘Carruthers: It was the only thing we could do. He wouldn’t have had a chance against Fitzgerald. Now we have Spencer. What could be better than that?’”
I tossed the transcript onto the table.
“Everyone who testified in this trial, every witness—with one exception, Milo Todorovich, who would have taken a bullet for the president, and was willing to take one for the truth—lied. Every one. And they all did it for the same reason: they thought, they believed, that what they thought necessary—for themselves, for their country—was more important than the truth. The truth for them was whatever they wanted it to be. You lied, Mr. Donahue, not just to cover up your crime; you lied for the same reason you committed that crime: this bizarre belief that history is on your side, that you somehow understand what history requires. In this respect, you and the defendant are not really that much different. You think history has a meaning, and that you know what it is. Kevin Fitzgerald thought that history provided, not very often, perhaps only once in a lifetime, or even once in a century, a chance to make history. The difference is that he confessed to a crime he did not commit so that he might have that chance, while you lied about a crime you did commit so that you might have the chance to change the country into something it never wanted to be.”
There was dead silence. I did not even bother to tell the court I was finished with the witness. St. John did not get up to ask to cross-examine. Judge Silverman turned away from Donahue and stared, without seeing, at the courtroom crowd. I did not know how long it lasted, but finally, Leonard Silverman brought us back to the safety of settled procedure.
“Mr. Antonelli, does the defense have a motion it wishes to make at this time?”
The habit was so ingrained, I knew without thinking the useless motion made routinely when the last witness has testified and the case is about to go to the jury.
“Yes, your Honor. The defense moves for a judgment of acquittal on the grounds that based on the evidence in this case no reasonable jury could return any other verdict.”
“Mr. St. John, does the prosecution wish to oppose the motion?”
The consummate professional, and a thoroughly decent man, Raymond St. John stated that the prosecution did not.
“The motion is therefore granted,”
announced Silverman. “An order of acquittal will be entered on the record. The defendant is free to go.”
Free to go, but where? He was not the savior of his country as he had wanted everyone to believe. He was worse than a joke, a man who had lied about a murder, confessed to a crime he had not committed, undergone, quite willingly, torture as part of this unconscionable ruse, and all for the purpose of claiming an exaggerated importance that would make his name live through the centuries. He turned to me to offer an explanation, to excuse what he had done. He had saved the country, he insisted, imploring me to believe him. If he had not done what he did, discovered what they were planning, if he had not decided to make that confession, there would not have been a trial, and without a trial, Donahue and the others would have gotten away with it. He had saved the country, he repeated. And he was glad that he had.
“You’ve been acquitted,” I reminded him. “It’s up to you what you do next.”
And with that, I turned and walked away. Sitting in the front row, right behind him, where she always sat, his wife, Tricia Fitzgerald, looked like a bride left at the altar. She did not know what to do or what to think.
The crowd outside, all the reporters, all the cameras, all the others who had come to see what finally would happen when the trial reached its conclusion, melted away. There had been no victories, only defeats; defeat for Michael Donahue and who knew how many others who wanted what Walter Bridges wanted more than they wanted Walter Bridges, defeat and either execution or life in prison without the possibility of parole. And defeat for Kevin Fitzgerald. Not a single reporter wanted anything to do with him. He had become an embarrassment, and no one in public life ever recovered from that.