Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

352 Pages·2018·0.49 MB·english

by  Michael Isikoff

Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor.
Jacket photographs: Trump © Anadolu Agency/Contributor, Kushner © AFP
Contributor/Contributor, Manafort © Matt Rourke/Associated Press, putin ©
Mikhail Svetlov/Contributor
Author photographs (on back flap): isikoff © Evan McGrath, Corn © Mary
Noble Ours
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2875-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-2874-1 (ebook), 978-1-
5387-1473-7 (international)
E3-20180222-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: “It’s a shakedown.”
1. “Mr. Putin would like to meet Mr. Trump.”
2. “We did not recognize the degree it would tick Putin off.”
3. “Are we here because Clinton texted us?”
4. “You don’t know me, but I’m working on a troll farm.”
5. “This is the new version of Watergate.”
6. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it.”
7. “He’s been a Russian stooge for fifteen years.”
8. “How the fuck did he get on the list?”
9. “If it’s what you say I love it.”
10. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”
11. “I have to report this to headquarters.”
12. “As for the Ukraine amendment, excellent work.”
13. “Next they’re going to put polonium in my tea.”
14. “We’ve been told to stand down.”
15. “He’s got me as the fall guy.”
16. “Does it even matter who hacked this data?”
17. “It also could be somebody sitting on their bed who weighs four hundred
pounds, OK?”
18. “Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these
activities.”
19. “We’ve been ratfucked.”
20. “This is the real reset of the Western world.”
21. “We got a sinking feeling.… It looked like a season of Homeland.”
Afterword: “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Also by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
Notes
Newsletters
For Mary Ann and Zach
—M.I.
For Amarins, Maaike, and Welmoed
—D.C.
INTRODUCTION
“It’s a shakedown.”
D
onald Trump was suspicious from the start.
It was the afternoon of January 6, 2017, and for two hours, the president-
elect had sat in a conference room at Trump Tower and listened to the leaders
of the U.S. intelligence community brief him on an extraordinary document: a
report their agencies had produced concluding that the Russian government had
mounted a massive covert influence campaign aimed at disrupting the country’s
political system and electing him president of the United States. Trump had
controlled his anger during this meeting—at times raising questions, expressing
doubts, and clinging to the idea that it might all be a lie, part of some Deep
State plot to taint his defeat of Hillary Clinton the previous November and
undermine his authority as president.
When the spy chiefs—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
CIA director John Brennan, and National Security Agency director Adm.
Michael Rogers—left the room, one of them stayed behind. FBI director James
Comey then handed Trump something else. It was a two-page synopsis of
reports prepared by a former British spy alleging that Trump and his campaign
had actively collaborated with Moscow. The memos claimed Russian
intelligence had collected compromising material on Trump that could be used
to blackmail him, including a tape of him engaging in sordid behavior with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. The FBI was not giving him this
information because it believed the reports, Comey explained to Trump. In
fact, the Bureau hadn’t confirmed any of the lurid details—and Comey told him
that he was not personally under investigation. But the material was circulating
within the media and might become public. The intelligence community, Comey
said, merely wanted to provide him a heads-up.
When Comey left, Trump was incensed. “It’s bullshit,” he told his aides.
None of this was true. The discussion turned to why Comey had gone through
this exercise. Suddenly, it all made sense to Trump. He knew exactly what this
was.
“It’s a shakedown,” Trump exclaimed. They were blackmailing him. Comey
—no doubt, with the approval of the others—was trying to send him a
message. They had something on him.
Trump had seen this sort of thing before. Certainly, his old mentor Roy
Cohn—the notorious fixer for mobsters and crooked pols—knew how this
worked. So too did Comey’s most famous predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, who
had quietly let it be known to politicians and celebrities that he possessed
information that could destroy their careers in a New York minute.
Now, as Trump saw it, Comey and the rest were trying to do this to him.
But he was not about to let them.
Trump’s anger that day helped set the tone for one of the most tumultuous
presidencies in American history. His first year in office would be filled with
fits of rage at his political enemies, bizarre early-morning tweet storms, and
repeated denunciations of the purveyors of “fake news” who challenged his
honesty, his competency, and even his mental stability. Much of this turmoil
related to the relentless investigations of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election
—a subject that infuriated Trump more than anything else. Russia had become
a rallying cry for his tormentors—the original sin of his presidency, a scandal
that raised questions about both his legitimacy and the nation’s vulnerability to
covert information warfare. Yet Trump defiantly refused to acknowledge
Russia’s extensive assault as a real and significant event. In his mind, any
inquiry into the matter was nothing but an effort to destroy him.
The Russia scandal, though, dated back decades. For years, Trump had
pursued business deals in Russia, continuing to do so even through the first
months of his presidential campaign—and this colored how he would engage
with the autocratic, repressive, and dangerous Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.
The Trump-Russia tale was rooted in the larger post–Cold War geopolitical
clash between the United States and Russia, a conflict that Moscow in 2016
shifted into the cyber shadows to gain a strategic advantage.
With Trump unable or unwilling to come to terms with Putin’s war on
American democracy, it fell to government investigators and reporters to piece
together the complete story—an endeavor that could take years to complete.
This book is a first step toward that. No matter how Trump regarded the
scandal, one thing was for certain: To prevent a future attack, the American
public and its leaders had to know and face what had occurred. A thorough
accounting was a national necessity.