by Craig Unger
In the immediate aftermath of the episode, more than 1,250 former attorneys for the US Justice Department, Republicans and Democrats, called for Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz to investigate what role Barr had played in overseeing the aggressive tactics used at Lafayette Square.
Similarly, General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had accompanied Trump and Barr in walking across Lafayette Square, expressed regret for his presence at the event. “I should not have been there,” he said in a prerecorded video commencement address to the National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
Other high-ranking members of the military joined in. Secretary of Defense Esper asserted that the Insurrection Act should be invoked only in the “most urgent and dire of situations,” adding that “we are not in one of those situations now.”37
Retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey tweeted, “America is not a battleground. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy.” Michael Mullen, who held the same post under President George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in The Atlantic that he was “sickened” by the use of troops to accommodate the president because “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”38 And General James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, said he was angry and appalled at seeing troops ordered “to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizen.”39
For his part, Trump was said to be furious with Milley and Esper. But this was merely the beginning of what was clearly going to be a long summer of discontent. The game wasn’t over yet.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AMERICAN CARNAGE
The explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement didn’t take place in a vacuum. It materialized in the midst of the greatest health crisis of the century—the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the United States, the pandemic was being handled with all the proficiency that one might expect to find in a corrupt and dysfunctional regime led by a superstitious, science-defying authoritarian leader of a banana republic who had decided to let the people fend for themselves—and die accordingly.
Notices about COVID-19 had appeared in the president’s daily briefings (PDB) as early as January 2020, but, as was usually the case with PDBs, Trump didn’t bother to read them. He had long since disregarded the entire intelligence apparatus as “deep state,” and was preparing to do to it exactly what he had done with the Justice Department by installing a loyal lieutenant who would put forth exactly the kind of self-serving intelligence he wanted.
And when it came to the pandemic, despite repeated warnings from various officials, Trump exempted the federal government from overseeing the fight against it and instead delegated it to the fifty states and hundreds of municipalities. The resulting patchwork quilt of wildly varying strategies allowed the virus to bounce back and forth from one state to another as it spread throughout the country for month after month after month.
Trump was consistent in this approach to the pandemic. He did everything within his powers to pump up the economy—or at least the stock market (which is not the same thing)—but he did next to nothing when it came to stopping the spread of the virus. When a reporter asked about the administration’s failure to test Americans for the virus as it first spread throughout the country, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
And so, the nation that put the first man on the moon, that created mass consumer culture with automobiles, telephones, televisions, and iPhones, and that led the world in so many sectors of science and technology, cast science aside for Trump’s cultlike magical thinking. Maybe we could save ourselves by somehow putting ultraviolet lights “inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”
It was a death cult. Trump suggested injecting bleach as a cure. He asserted that the virus would disappear “magically.” He taunted those who wore protective masks as being “politically correct.” Trump campaign workers removed social-distancing stickers at his rally in Tulsa. Rarely wearing a mask himself, Trump demonized protective measures as an unnecessary capitulation to cultural elites. He urged governors to open up their states even if they were not operating within the guidelines set forth by the Centers for Disease Control.
In other words, America was in crisis and there was no coordinated national health policy. And worse, like a slow-motion Reichstag fire, the disease itself was being weaponized and politicized by Trump and his followers. Much like the 1933 arson attack that allowed Germany’s newly elected chancellor Adolf Hitler to consolidate power, the pandemic provided cover for Trump and Barr to do likewise. In rapid succession, they fired no fewer than five inspectors general, cut back on sharing intelligence between Congress and the director of National Intelligence, appointed a Trump megadonor as head of the U.S. Postal Service, who issued orders to destroy equipment, removed mail drop boxes, and slowed down mail delivery (especially of mail-in ballots), and more—all to help Trump’s reelection chances.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 2020, depending on one’s location, Americans were either in lockdown or partying at bars and restaurants, dying en masse in nursing homes or taking spring break in Fort Lauderdale—all with little to no federal guidance and haphazard regulations varying from state to state, municipality to municipality.
As a result, by August, the United States had more casualties than any country in the world. More than 6.3 million Americans had been confirmed infected, 189,000 people had died, and infections were still accelerating at a rate that was worse than the European Union’s by a factor of ten. At one point, Florida, with 21 million people, had nearly twice as many new cases per day—about 10,000—as the entire European Union, with its 446 million people.
Tens of millions of people were newly unemployed. Economic repercussions were certain to be dire and long-lasting, the “rocket ship” economic recovery promised by Trump having been scrubbed at liftoff.
The United States was a nation in free fall. The George Floyd murder, in conjunction with the killings of Ahmaud Aubrey, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and many other African Americans, ignited more than 450 major demonstrations led by Black Lives Matter all across the United States and three continents in what appeared to be a historic rebirth of the civil rights movement, with as many as 26 million Americans participating. According to the New York Times, that may have made it the biggest movement in American history, bigger even than the antiwar movement and turbulent counterculture wars of the sixties.1
Injuries had been minor at Lafayette Square, to be sure, but Trump’s intentionally tone-deaf nonresponse suggested a reckoning was at hand. Attorney General Barr had set a precedent for more to come: Federal troops were being used against American citizens. Biden moved ahead in the polls. But Trump was considering other ways of holding on to power.
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Meanwhile, with the entire nation consumed by the fight against a massive deadly pandemic and systemic racism, there was still the question of Trump’s relationship to Russia. We may never be privy to all the conversations Trump and his surrogates had with Putin and influential Russian contacts, but it would be an understatement to say that those interactions appear to have had their desired effect.
A case in point dated back to October 2016, just before Trump’s election, when, as you may recall, Donald Trump Jr. gave his speech in Paris before the Kremlin-linked Center of Political and Foreign Affairs. Immediately afterward, Randa Kassis, a Syrian whose husband had sponsored the event and who is herself the leader of a Syrian group endorsed by the Kremlin, had flown off to Moscow to brief Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which then issued press statements about Trump Jr.’s speech.
Almost immediately after he was installed in the Oval Office, Donald Trump showed
he clearly had gotten Russia’s message. In March 2017, just two months after his inauguration, Trump reversed Barack Obama’s policy that had made the departure of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad a key American goal.2 Then, in July 2017, Trump terminated a CIA program arming anti-Assad rebels.3 And in December 2018, Trump announced the departure of all remaining American troops from Syria—even though it meant abandoning America’s Kurdish allies and strengthening the Assad regime.
The move effectively ceded control of the area to the Syrian government and Russia.4 “Putin likely can’t believe his luck,” a Western military official who served in Syria told Business Insider.5 “A third of Syria was more or less free of ISIS, and its security was good without any involvement of the regime or Russia, and now because of the Turkish invasion and American pullout, this area is wide open to return to government control.”
Once again, Trump had given Putin everything he wanted.
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And why was Trump doing that?
The answer, I believe, is that John Brennan, Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper were right when they said that Donald Trump was a Russian asset; that, as Yuri Shvets explained, when Trump bought hundreds of TV sets from Semyon Kislin for the Grand Hyatt more than forty years ago, he had been identified as a potential asset by the KGB, and that evolved into a series of intelligence operations that paid off far, far more handsomely than anyone in the KGB could have imagined.
As the relationship continued over the years, Trump had been rescued from multiple bankruptcies when boatloads of Russian cash were laundered through Trump real estate in the eighties and nineties. In the 2000s, he became wealthy again, thanks to his partnership with Bayrock, which brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian money to finance and develop buildings franchised under Trump’s name. And now that he was president, it was Trump’s time to pay the piper—knowing, of course, that the Soviet Union could document any or all of his ties to them if they so choose.
But when it came to giving Putin what he wanted, Syria was just the beginning of his wish list. “The Russian objective is to separate the United States from NATO,” says Glenn Carle, “to undermine NATO, to expand Russia’s sphere of influence, at least regionally, and to remove the United States as an immediate rival. Those are the strategic objectives.”
Putin, after all, had famously characterized the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest catastrophe in world history and would do anything to re-create his new Russian empire in its image. To that end, whether it was czarist Russia or the Soviet Union, Moscow’s imperial ambitions had always begun and ended with Ukraine. Ukraine was essential if Russia was to be an empire.
In that regard, Trump answered more of Putin’s prayers than the Russian leader could possibly have imagined, inflicting more damage on NATO during the first three years of his administration than all its foes during its entire seventy-year history.
It began even before Trump took office, at the 2016 GOP convention, the Washington Post reported, when Team Trump famously weakened the Ukraine plank of the Republican platform, removing language that called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replacing it with the phrase “appropriate assistance.”6
“Since then, it’s been very obvious that on many occasions he’s been acting in the Kremlin’s interests, even when it’s not in America’s interests, and that is extremely troubling regardless of the relationship between Donald Trump and the Kremlin prior to 2016,” Biden adviser Mike Carpenter told me.
“There’s just a litany of things you can tick off the list, from calling Putin a terrific guy, to maligning our closest democratic allies—Europe, like Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron—withdrawing troops from Germany, saying that Putin offered a strong denial of his interference in the US election when clearly there was absolutely not a shadow of doubt amongst all the disparate US intelligence agencies that he had done so.”
NATO, of course, had been the foundation of the Atlantic Alliance, the most powerful deterrent to Russia and, before that, the Soviet Union for seventy years. As result, weakening NATO—or even better, destroying it—was answering Vladimir Putin’s prayers.
“It’s not hard to figure out how the Russians would have approached him,” says Carle. “Let’s assume that Trump is actually a controlled asset. They couldn’t say, you know, here are your tasks today and here are your tasks tomorrow. Instead they would say, ‘We’re interested in establishing security in Europe, and we don’t really want to have a clash. We just want to have good relations. And we can help you with your real estate development, and so forth, but it would be good if you were to focus on, uh, you know, the fact that Europe is really screwing the United States over and they aren’t paying their fair share of NATO.’”
Not long after Trump became president, some twenty-four years after he had taken out those full-page ads saying NATO was taking advantage of the United States, he picked up the theme again—the same one, according to Shvets, that he had been taught by the KGB—and repeatedly criticized NATO members for not paying enough in dues.
Before long, Trump made it clear that the United States, which had long been the most powerful component of NATO, was no longer a reliable partner.7 In July 2018, after a private two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki, where he strongly suggested he believed Putin’s denials about the 2016 election, Trump was interviewed by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who questioned one of the most basic tenets of NATO, Article 5, which requires member states to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all members and to response appropriately. “So, let’s say Montenegro, which joined [NATO] last year, is attacked. Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that?” Carlson asked Trump.
“I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people,” Trump replied. “They have very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you are in World War III.”
By rejecting Article 5, Trump was thereby practically inviting Putin to invade the tiny Balkan country. Without American support, Europe would likely refrain from coming to Montenegro’s aid, a scenario that would render NATO toothless.8
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Trump repeatedly told administration officials that he wanted to withdraw from NATO.9 And he continued to distance himself from the alliance. In October 2019, after Trump announced the planned withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria, French president Emmanuel Macron told The Economist, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” because the United States is “turning its back on us.”10
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Worst of all, in terms of Trump’s stunning deference to Putin, on June 26, 2020, the New York Times published reports that Russia was offering lucrative bounties to the Taliban to target remaining American troops in Afghanistan. According to the Times, intelligence officials say the program was run by an arm of Russian military intelligence (GRU) known as Unit 29155, with money going directly to middlemen who apparently had large sums of money sitting around the house.11
Russian aid to the Taliban had been a concern of the Pentagon since 2017, when then secretary of defense James Mattis raised concerns. But Trump never said a word, so the Russians continued and upped the ante by ordering the assassinations of Americans.
It was not immediately clear whether American soldiers had been killed by the program. What was clear, however, according to the New York Times, was that intelligence assessments of the program had been included in the President’s Daily Brief by no later than February 2020—and he had done exactly nothing.
When Republicans and Democrats alike expressed alarm at both the news and the president’s lack of response, the White House, at various times, said that the president had not read the briefing—as if that explained it.
Regardless, according to The
Economist, in March, the report was taken seriously enough that it had been discussed at a National Security Council meeting, and potential plans for reprisals were discussed. But the matter was never discussed in the Oval Office.12 And why would they? After all, Trump, according to CNN, had made it clear that he did not want to hear any more bad things about Russia.
Moreover, his antipathy toward the military was crystal clear. As the Atlantic reported, he had bridled at being forced to go to an American military cemetery near Paris. Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Separately, he had referred to 1,800 marines who died in battle as “suckers.”13
Meanwhile, according to a report by Ryan Goodman of Just Security, Trump went even further to win Putin’s favor by directing the CIA to share intelligence on counterterrorism with Russia. “There was a consistent push for CT [counterterrorism] cooperation with Moscow, coming from the White House, despite near universal belief with the IC [intelligence community] that this effort would be one sided and end up being a waste of time,” Marc Polymeropoulos, who had worked for the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, told Goodman. “I cannot think of anything of value that the Russians provided us.”14
He added that the “myth that Russians could be a good CT partner—which former National Security Advisor [Michael] Flynn first perpetuated and then became the cornerstone of for this farcical engagement strategy—was by 2019 met with near total derision and eye-rolling in the IC.”
As part of his assault on NATO, Trump had essentially seized control of US intelligence and had, in effect, muted counterintelligence reporting on his ties to Russia. He fired FBI director James Comey, attacked and humiliated FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok as “dirty cops” and “lovers,” and fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe—the latter just two days before he was eligible to collect a full early pension from the FBI, thereby sending a loud and clear message to all FBI agents who might be investigating the president.15