The Russians are coming

Russian Roulette

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

Michael Isikoff and David Corn

Hachette

339 pages; Rs 699

The co-authors of Russian Roulette were aware that the book would be overtaken by events.  But even they would have had difficulty predicting the deluge of developments surrounding Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 US elections since their book was published. 
 

Watergate is nothing to this. “Golden showers,” disreputable political operators with links to dictators, shadowy oligarchs, impresarios, thugs, seedy lawyers, hackers with names such as Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 and fishy meetings surge through Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book. Alas, they sent it for publication before lawyers-turned-informers entered the stage, pursued by a former New York mayor and current lawyer of US President Donald Trump, who everyone suspects is more deranged than his client. 

This weekend, Rudy Guiliani has managed to fox Trump cheerleader Fox News by claiming, first, that the president hadn’t colluded with the Russians to win in 2016, then stating that even if he had, it wasn’t a crime.

On Monday, he unwittingly offered a news break, referring to a meeting that preceded the notorious meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and a couple of Trump campaign staffers and the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

This pre-meeting conference was not public knowledge, and Mr Guiliani assured his confused auditors that it took place with Mr Trump’s estranged former lawyer Michael Cohen in which everyone present confirmed, contrary to Mr Cohen’s revelations last week, that the president did not know his gormless son was meeting a Russian operative, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton during the campaign.

If they were to publish a sequel tomorrow, Messrs Isikoff and Corn would also have to unearth the inside story of the US president’s extraordinary mid-July press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and its hilarious post-event clarification when he sought to transform the verb “would” to “wouldn’t”. That performance came after a one-on-one, no-aides chat between the two leaders and convinced doubters that the Russians have kompromat on the 45th US president. 

Much water has flowed down the Potomac since the Helsinki Happenings, so rapid is the tempo of Russiagate revelations.  This week, the criminal trial of Mr Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, gets underway, the first yield from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. 

Mr Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, and Mr Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine, haven’t just assembled the evidence from secondary sources. Both were deeply involved in investigating the controversy and broke key stories that formed part of reports to Congress. Both veteran Washington hands, they start from the premise that something is rotten in the Trump White House and collusion with Mr Putin only needs proof.

Their principal approach is to follow the money. The infamous dossier that revealed Mr Trump’s links with Russia alleged that Moscow had been “running a secret project to cultivate Trump for years (and dangling business opportunities in front of him).” Deals with all manner of oligarchs emerge, only to inexplicably fall through. The inference we are led to make is that Mr Putin, who harboured a visceral hatred for Hillary Clinton because he believed she had orchestrated the opposition to his re-election, dangled the promise of the Trump name emblazoned across the Moscow skyline in return for a free hand in shaping American politics to Russia’s purposes. 

So far, the controversy thrives on leaks, liaisons and lies. The public evidence is still circumstantial (for instance, the hacks of Democratic Party emails and servers were always preceded by hints from the Trump campaign of a coming storm). 

The book has two persuasive leads. First, Mr Trump’s initial pick for secretary of state was Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, known for his implacable hostility to Russia. The two met, and nothing happened for a month after. In between intelligence suggested that the Kremlin had requested a more Russia-friendly appointment. A month later, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, deal-maker with oligarchs and recipient of the Russian Order of Friendship, bagged the job.

Second, the “golden showers” info could be a distraction. Fancy Bear & co have also hacked into emails and servers of the Republican Party. Those hacks have not been leaked, and it’s possible that those are the real source of kompromat. 

If you are bewildered by this hydra-headed controversy, this book offers a lucid refresher. In the end, though, non-Americans may wonder what the fuss is all about. Mr Trump was never expected to win, and Ms Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election because of the quirks of the American electoral system. Thanks to the strength of American institutions, the debilitating sanctions on Russia remain in place. The Democrats have flipped many Red seats since 2017. 

Having watched Ken Burns’ compelling 10-part documentary on Vietnam, the righteous anger of the American liberals seems disingenuous. “Putin’s war on American democracy,” is the authors’ ringing accusation. Sure, no foreign power should meddle in another country’s politics and collusion is a very bad thing. So you wonder what Ho Chi Minh would make of this uproar had he been alive. Or Patrice Lumumba, Jacobo Árbenz, Salvador Allende, Mohammad Mossadegh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi. If they had had a sense of humour, they may have enjoyed the sheer irony of it all.