Dirty Rubles Read online

  DIRTY RUBLES

  An Introduction to Trump/Russia

  By Greg Olear

  Softback (print paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-64184-926-5

  Ebook

  ISBN: 978-1-64184-927-2

  Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

  PREFACE

  TRUMP/RUSSIA IS THE GREATEST POLITICAL SCANDAL in American history. It’s also the most complicated. This book, as its subtitle suggests, is an introduction to the subject. It is not intended to be comprehensive. There is so much complexity to the story, so many names to learn, so many relationships to understand, that it will take a much longer volume than this one to cover it all in detail. My purpose here is not to get lost in the weeds, but to present the larger narrative as succinctly as possible and get the reader up to speed.

  Because Trump/Russia is an ongoing crisis, no extant book can possibly cover it from start to finish. Indeed, the full story may not be known for years, perhaps decades. Critical details are sure to emerge after publication. More indictments will come, more collaborators will flip. Our understanding of what happened will evolve. However, the key events that shape how we viewed Trump/Russia—and how we were encouraged to view it—are more or less fixed. Dirty Rubles focuses primarily on this formative period, from 2016 through mid-2018.

  This book is drawn from posts I’ve written at The Weeklings beginning 18 months ago (Is that all? It feels much longer!). Because it was written quickly, and published independently, and because my own memory is fallible, it is impossible to properly acknowledge where I obtained every piece of knowledge I obtained. For this failing, I apologize up front. Let me instead acknowledge here, in a general way, the main sources of my understanding of Trump/Russia: Louise Mensch and Seth Abramson, first and foremost, and also John Schindler, Eric Garland, Dena Grayson, AliasVaughn, Counterchekist, Tea Pain, Natasha Bertrand, David Corn, Luke Harding, Tracie McElroy, Claude Taylor, Louise Neufy, Garry Kasparov, Asha Rangrappa, Rick Wilson, Pete Evans, Alison Greene, Caroline Orr, Kyle Griffin, Judd Legum, Steven Bertoni, Jay McKenzie, Sarah Kenzior, Molly McKew, Richard Painter, Laurence Tribe, Norm Eisen, Walter Shaub, Andrew Laufer, Elizabeth de la Vega, Benjamin Wittes, Cheri Jacobus, Grant Stern, Paul Wood, Molly Jong-Fast, Kelly Lieberman, Polly Sigh, Sara Danner Dukic, Spicy Files, Lincoln’s Bible, and everyone else on Twitter who has helped me gather knowledge. I am indebted to all of them for their insight, their courage, and their tireless dedication to truth, justice, and the American way. Special thanks to Jana Martin and Tracie McElroy for proofing the draft, and for everyone gracious enough to give me a blurb.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, my kids, my parents, and to true patriots.

  I.

  INTRODUCTION:

  The Emperor Has No Clothes

  ON 8 NOVEMBER 2016, DONALD J. TRUMP was elected President of the United States. To say this was a surprise is putting it mildly. The odds were vanishingly, almost impossibly long. No one expected this result—not even Trump himself. His victory seemed nothing less than miraculous.

  He won despite losing the popular vote by some 2.8 million.

  He won despite virtually every pollster and pundit predicting victory for Hillary Clinton.

  He won despite the late-October release of the Access Hollywood tape, which showed him bragging about being able to “grab [women] by the pussy” and get away with it because of his celebrity.

  He won despite two successive campaign managers leaving the campaign for dubious reasons.

  He won despite bucking his promise to release his tax returns.

  He won despite not receiving the endorsement of a single daily newspaper in the United States.

  He won despite a number of prominent “establishment” Republicans—some contributing anti-Trump diatribes in a full issue of the conservative National Review—vehemently opposing him.

  He won despite appropriating a slogan—“Make America Great Again”—from the American Nazi Party of the 1930s.

  He won despite a chequered past that included habitual non-payment of debts, multiple bankruptcies, lack of demonstrable charitable work, and involvement with organized crime.

  He won despite being twice divorced, and having five children with three different women.

  He won despite building a campaign upon insults, divisiveness, and lies.

  He won by the slimmest of margins—some 77,000 votes in three swing states—but he won just the same.

  Donald Trump—reality TV star, failed businessman, insult comic—was going to succeed his nemesis Barack Obama as President of the United States.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, the election post-mortems came in: Hillary was a bad candidate. She should have visited Michigan and Wisconsin. She put too much faith in wooing celebrities and failed to connect with “regular” Americans. Who would want to have a beer with Hillary Clinton? She was fake. She was school-marmy. She was too strident. She was too prepared in the debates. She had too much baggage. No one wants a Clinton Dynasty. She should have picked Bernie as her running mate. Heck, if the DNC didn’t rig the process, Bernie Sanders would have been the nominee, and Bernie would have won.

  And her emails! Her emails!

  HER FUCKING EMAILS!

  Those reasons are all, at best, lazy. Hillary won more votes than any previous white candidate in American history—hers was the second-highest total of all time, behind only Obama’s showing in 2008; how does that make her a bad candidate? Bill Clinton hurt her more than he helped her, without question, but two exceptional individuals who happen to be married does not a dynasty make. Even without the superdelegates, she would have soundly defeated Bernie—who is not a Democrat, by the way, and whose refusal to go quietly once it became clear he could not win the nomination certainly damaged Hillary’s campaign. There is no telling if Bernie would have won, because he was never properly vetted, his past is not exactly pristine, and his poor performance among black women suggests that victory would hardly be assured. And her emails were only an issue because the press made them into one.

  In actuality, there were three primary reasons for Trump’s David-and-Goliath-level upset:

  First, the so-called Comey letter, which re-focused the media’s attention on Hillary’s emails a week before Election Day—for no good reason, as it turned out. This reinforced the narrative of Hillary as crooked, secretive, untrustworthy, up to no good.

  Second, the historically terrible article that ran in the New York Times on 31 October 2016: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Here was the purported paper of record, just nine days before Election Day, proclaiming that Trump/Russia was bunk. Most major media outlets dropped the Russia story like a proverbial hot potato and did not pick it up again for months. Saturday Night Live gave more airtime to the red-flag Putin/Trump bromance than the news shows did.

  Finally, but most importantly: Trump had help from Moscow.

  All three of these reasons—the Comey letter, the Times article, and the covert Russian aid—are related to each other, and to Trump’s shady business dealings, and to the machinations of his deplorable associates, especially Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and Jared Kushner. And the result could not have been more ominous: the nuclear launch codes were in the hands of the wrong person…in every sense of the word.

  Donald Trump is nothing less than a threat to the American way of life. His term in office comprises an existential threat
to the republic, the gravest since the Civil War. Not since 1860 has the future of the Union itself been in such doubt. Other presidents might have lacked good judgment, but we never questioned where their true loyalties lay. George W. Bush loved America, Richard Nixon loved America, Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding loved America. Trump loves only himself, cares only about himself, is loyal only to himself. And Vladimir Putin has exploited this weakness, to the detriment of not just every American, but every freedom-loving human being on earth.

  The threat posed by Trump transcends politics. Although I am a liberal and was an avid supporter of Hillary Clinton, my politics are irrelevant. It is my belief that Trump’s policies, such as they are, are odious and will cause real harm to millions of people, but policies can be defeated politically. As Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker just before inauguration: “In such a moment of continued emergency, the most important task may be to distinguish as rigorously as possible between new policies and programs that, however awful, are a reflection of the moral oscillation of power, natural in a mature democracy, and those that are not.” Once a democracy falls, once a dictator is installed, the damage is irreversible. This is not a donkey vs. elephant issue. Many of the most prominent and stalwart anti-Trump leaders are conservatives, current or former members of the GOP: David Frum, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, Evan McMullin, Cheri Jacobus, Bill Kristol. I stand with them.

  As I write this, a third of the country rightly recognizes Trump as a clear and present danger. A third will defend him no matter what he does, as a matter of blind faith. Whether the middle third is able to call out the naked emperor standing before us may well determine whether the United States survives this unprecedented crisis.

  There are powerful forces working to silence these cries of “The Emperor has no clothes.” The talking heads at Fox News and InfoWars, the editorial writers at Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal, and an army of bots on Facebook and Twitter are adamant that Trump is wearing only the finest threads. Mainstream media outlets insist on giving equal time to the “Trump’s new clothes are fabulous” crowd, despite his indisputable nakedness. To too many evangelicals, to denounce Trump as a naked emperor is to renounce Jesus Christ Himself.

  Furthermore, the story, the real story, strains credulity. Are we really to believe that a Russian dictator helped install his compromised asset in the White House, and is now exerting influence over said asset’s key decisions? That is the stuff of bad spy movies, surely; not the AP wire!

  And yet here we are.

  BEGINNING WITH MY FIRST ESSAY on 1 November 2016, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words on Trump/Russia, consuming as many news articles and threaded tweets as I could find, in the service of calling attention to the most consequential story of my lifetime. To be clear: I am a novelist, not a journalist. I have no sources of my own. My role, as I see it, is to take all of the stray pieces of information, separating the good reporting from the disinformation, and give them shape and structure, to make the narrative easier for my growing readership to understand. My experience writing novels is the ideal background for this self-imposed assignment, because novelists must be able to tell long, complicated stories in a way that readers can easily process. It’s no coincidence that Louise Mensch (née Bagshawe), one of the first Trump/Russia reporters and certainly the most controversial, is the author of several novels. A novelist is trained to connect disparate storylines and weave them together into a coherent narrative. I know Mensch is derided in certain circles as a conspiracy theorist, of which more later; but on 6 November 2016, she published an exclusive on the existence of FISA warrants that was only confirmed by the mainstream media four months later, and the working theory she laid out in “Dear Mr. Putin, Let’s Play Chess,” written on 17 January 2017, has proved remarkably prescient. Another journalist may have gotten the FISA scoop, but it took a novelist to write the “Chess” piece.

  For, like a Tolstoy novel, the unabridged story of Trump/Russia is long and complicated. The dramatis personae alone runs to half a dozen pages. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of threads that seem at first blush not to be related, a lot of different players with different agendas, involved for different reasons, and many of them have unpronounceable Slavic surnames. This makes it hard to wrap your head around, and harder still to explain.

  Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the support of his voters. I beg to differ. If he did that, there would be irrefutable evidence of a terrible crime, a literal smoking gun, and that would (I like to think) sway the minds of even the most obdurate #MAGA apologists.

  Trump/Russia, however, is not bang-bang. There is no single smoking gun. Instead, there are thousands of them, firing simultaneously, and the result is a noxious fog that hangs over everything, clouding our view.

  This book is an attempt to see through the fog.

  II.

  THE RUSSIA LIE:

  “You’re the Puppet!”

  LET’S BEGIN WITH THE LIES—or, rather, with one lie, the same lie that was repeated time and time again. The Big Lie, the große Lüge. The Russia lie.

  Throughout the campaign, during the transition period, and after inauguration, Donald Trump and his surrogates vehemently denied meeting with Russians of any stripe, for any purpose. Every time they were asked about a connection between the campaign and the Kremlin, they shot it down. And they were indignant about it. The response was always something along the lines of, “Russia? Us? How dare you accuse us of such a thing!”

  Here are some examples:

  24 July 2016, Paul Manafort, Trump campaign chair:

  “…pure obfuscation…..That’s absurd. And, you know, there’s no basis to it.”

  24 July 2016, Donald Trump, Jr:

  “I can’t think of bigger lies. But that exactly goes to show you what the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and what the Clinton camp will do. They will lie and do anything to win…..These lies and the perpetuating of that kind of nonsense to gain some political capital is just outrageous.”

  27 July 2016, Donald Trump:

  “I can tell you, I think if I came up with that, they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a conspiracy theory, it’s ridiculous.’ I mean I have nothing to do with Russia. I don’t have any jobs in Russia. I’m all over the world, but we’re not involved in Russia.”

  25 September 2016, Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager:

  “If [Carter Page is] doing that [meeting with Russians], he’s certainly not doing it with the permission or knowledge of the campaign, the activities that you described. He is certainly not authorized to do that.”

  24 October 2016, Trump:

  “I have nothing to do with Russia, folks, I’ll give you a written statement.”

  11 November 2016, Hope Hicks, campaign communications director:

  “It never happened. There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”

  18 December 2017, Conway:

  “Those conversations never happened. I hear people saying it like it’s a fact on television. That is just not only inaccurate and false, but it’s dangerous.”

  11 January 2017, Trump (tweet):

  “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

  15 January 2017, Mike Pence, Vice President-elect:

  “Well of course not. I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

  7 February 2017, Trump (tweet):

  “I don’t know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy…”

  16 February 2017, Trump:

  “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.”

  19 February 2017, Reince Priebus, White House chief of staff:

  “I can assure you and I have been approved to say this: that the top levels of th
e intelligence community have assured me that that is not only inaccurate, but it’s grossly overstated and it was wrong. And there’s nothing to it.”

  20 February 2017, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy White House press secretary:

  Trump/Russia is “a non-story because to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place, so it’s hard to make a comment on something that never happened.”

  24 February 2017, Sean Spicer, White House press secretary:

  “Well, again, there are no connections to find out about. That’s the problem. I think, a), he [Trump] has answered it forcefully. You can’t disprove something that doesn’t exist. He’s talked about the fact how many times he’s talked to Putin. He has no interests in Russia….There’s only so many times he can deny something that doesn’t exist.”

  26 February 2017, Trump (tweet):

  “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”

  11 May 2017, Trump:

  “I have had dealings over the years where I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian many years ago. I had the Miss Universe pageant—which I owned for quite a while—I had it in Moscow a long time ago. But other than that, I have nothing to do with Russia.”

  18 May 2017, Trump:

  “…the entire thing has been a witch hunt. There is no collusion—certainly myself and my campaign—but I can always speak for myself and the Russians—zero.”

  These were all lies—the same big lie, repeated over and over. This repetition of the “Big Lie,” it should be noted, is a propaganda technique developed by the Nazis. Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kompf, one of very few books Trump is believed to have read. Either way, Trump has employed the Big Lie technique for years—lying regularly about his wealth (he lied his way onto the Forbes wealthiest Americans list), his fitness (he coerced his physician to lie about how healthy he was), his sexual prowess (a tabloid headline allegedly from ex-wife Marla Maples, saying Trump was the best sex she’d ever had), and so forth.