Proof of Collusion: Introduction

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{Note: The thousands of endnotes—each pointing to major-media citations—that appear in the print edition of this book are exclusively in that volume. Click here to purchase Proof of Collusion (by Seth Abramson, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2018) in print. If you would like to comment in the comment fields below, feel free to do so whether you are a paid Proof subscriber or not. Comments may be lightly moderated as/if it becomes necessary. Note that Proof of Collusion is only 300 pages of a four-book, 2,500-page series, so this volume is just one piece of a massive trove of evidence relating to the political career of Donald Trump.

This text has been carefully reviewed by a team of lawyers and professional fact-checkers at a cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. See the print edition of this book for all citations and endnotes, which are implicitly incorporated into this republication. This republication also incorporates all five volumes of the 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election and the two-volume Mueller Report, which can be found here and here, respectively. Any disparity between this book and those reports—though this author isn’t aware of any—should be resolved in favor of the latter.

Any typographical errors in the text below have been accidentally introduced as a result of the transition of the text from a print to a digital format, and do not appear in the print edition. The text here is otherwise identical to the text of the print edition, excepting a small number of minor edits made to maximize clarity. The substance of the volume remains untouched.}

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Table of Contents

The chapter you are now reading is in bold. Any chapters already published are active links to those chapters as published here at Proof.

• Introduction: A Theory of the Case

  • Date: October 2018

• Chapter 1: Russia and the Trumps

  • Dates: 1987 to 2012

• Chapter 2: Trump and the Agalarovs

  • Date: 2013

• Chapter 3: Kompromat

  • Date: November 2013

• Chapter 4: The Campaign Begins

  • Dates: 2013 to 2015

• Chapter 5: The National Security Advisory Committee

  • Dates: January to March 2016

• Chapter 6: The Mayflower Hotel

  • Date: April 2016

• Chapter 7: The Back Channels

  • Dates: May to June 2016

• Chapter 8: The Republican National Convention

  • Date: July 2016

• Chapter 9: The Hunt for Her Emails

  • Dates: July to September 2016

• Chapter 10: The October Surprise

  • Date: October 2016

• Chapter 11: The Transition

  • Dates: November 2016 to January 2017

• Chapter 12: The Firings of Flynn and Comey

  • Dates: February to May 2017

• Chapter 13: Testimony and Plea

  • Dates: June to December 2017

• Chapter 14: A Nation in Suspense

  • Date: 2018

• Afterword: The Death and Rebirth of America

  • Date: 2019

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Introduction: A Theory of the Case

October 2018

The Trump-Russia investigation may be the most multifaceted, wide-ranging, high-stakes federal criminal investigation in American history. It crosses continents and decades and has swept into its vortex more than four hundred people, millions of pages of documentary evidence, and scores of unanswered questions about the state of our democracy. It has already resulted in dozens of indictments and a host of guilty pleas and prison sentences. If Donald Trump colluded with Kremlin agents to secure his election or to benefit his real estate empire down the road, or if he knows that any of his associates did so, it gives the Kremlin leverage over him in a way that endangers our national security and even our national sovereignty. Whatever your political views, and whatever your opinion of President Trump, you have a vested interest in finding out the truth about Trump-Russia collusion if you want America to be governed by the consent of its people and not the Kremlin.

In view of all this, you may be surprised to learn that, as a legal term, “collusion” is meaningless outside antitrust law. In lay terms, collusion is simply a clandestine agreement between two or more parties, implicit or explicit, to act in a mutually beneficial way. That collusion is always clandestine underscores that it is almost always a transgression, no matter the venue or the participants. That certain acts of collusion can violate criminal statutes means that collusive behavior is sometimes criminal behavior as well. The notion of an American politician colluding with a foreign power, let alone a hostile one, is antithetical to our values and has been since the nation declared its independence in 1776.

Because foreign nationals are not permitted by U.S. law to interfere in our elections, foreign governments generally refrain from commenting on our electoral processes and certainly do not seek to contribute money or other benefits to our candidates. Doing so is a federal crime. In the few instances in which a U.S. politician has been caught receiving money or in-kind contributions from foreign entities, it’s been regarded as a rare scandal. Should it also be discovered that the politician and his staff reached out to that foreign entity with the aim of securing a hard-money or in-kind contribution, the scandal would become generationally significant. And should that politician be running for president, and should the nation he sought contributions from be a hostile foreign power that was waging cyberwar on America’s critical infrastructure, that generationally significant scandal would become unprecedented.

In short, it is likely that the Trump-Russia story ends with Americans choosing a new archetype for “American traitor” besides Benedict Arnold. 

Proof of collusion in the Trump-Russia case is in plain sight. When the president or his allies say “there was no collusion,” what they mean is that the type of collusion the president undoubtedly engaged in does not constitute a criminal offense—whether or not it constitutes an impeachable one. And this latter distinction is important: Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been at great pains in the latter half of 2018 to say that the Trump-Russia case is predominantly a political one, and to the extent most legal scholars believe a sitting president can’t be indicted, he is correct. The House of Representatives has to vote to bring charges against a president, and the U.S. Senate has to preside over his trial and find him guilty.

In this current climate, there is a chance that may not happen. 

This said, it so happens that much of this president’s collusion may in fact be criminal. The particular forms of collusion in which Trump, members of his family who are also political advisers, and his presidential campaign engaged may include Aiding and Abetting or Conspiracy connected to Election Fraud, Computer Crimes, Bribery, and Money Laundering, as well as acts of Witness Tampering, Making False Statements, Obstruction of Justice, and much more.

Conspiracy occurs when two or more persons have a “meeting of the minds” and set as their ambition the commission of a criminal act. The federal Conspiracy statute is violated when the parties take an “act in furtherance” of the commission of the intended crime. But the crime does not have to be committed for a violation of the Conspiracy statute to be found.

While several chapters of this book contain original reporting, the bulk of Proof of Collusion aggregates and curates information rather than reporting it. My hope is that readers of this book will not only benefit from this presentation but also find, in this text, many opportunities to discover new connections within the curated pieces of evidence. 

In America’s adversarial system of justice, those designated to prosecute a case are obligated by the rules of professional ethics to be relentlessly zealous advocates for their position. The system doesn’t work, otherwise; without zealous advocates, we might as well adopt the so-called inquisitorial system of justice employed in most of Europe’s courtrooms rather than the one we have here in America. To an outside observer, zealous advocacy often looks like radicalism—but in fact it’s a civic duty for trial advocates, and one that’s emotionally and intellectually exhausting to fulfill. That’s certainly the case with my ongoing public accounting of the Trump-Russia investigation, though the work is made easier, I’ll confess, by the almost historic absence (and I say this advisedly) of any exculpatory evidence suggesting the president of the United States did not conspire with our enemies to violate federal law.

I make this statement not as a political partisan but as an American citizen and legal professional who for many years pored over thousands of police reports, witness statements, lab results, and documentary and photographic evidence looking for any trace of information that could exculpate my clients. I am trained, by years of experience and habit, to search for an alternative explanation besides the obvious one: that the defendant is indeed a criminal, responsible for either the charges as leveled against him or some lesser offense included in or ancillary to the ones he’s currently facing. That roughly 95 percent of defendants in criminal cases in America accept responsibility for their actions and enter a guilty plea in exchange for a fair punishment is at times a testament to law enforcement and at times an indictment of our ability to give defendants the resources to adequately defend themselves. Most commonly, though, it denotes a body of evidence that is overwhelmingly inculpatory. 

It’s within this framework of experience, principle, and philosophy that I say that I have never before encountered a criminal investigation in which the entirety of the evidence is as damning as it is in the Trump-Russia investigation. From a professional rather than partisan perspective, the conclusion of the Trump-Russia scandal is all but certain: an untold number of indictments, prison sentences, and dispiriting revelations about public figures, all of which will momentarily cast doubt on our ability to move forward as a functioning democracy. That the evidence against Trump and his associates is so thoroughly in one direction makes it all the more startling that there has yet to be any published defense of Trump or his allies on the facts whose contentions would be taken seriously in a court of law.

I’m as surprised by this fact as anyone, especially given who the defendant is here and what is so conspicuously at stake in this investigation. 

As a longtime criminal defense lawyer, I’ve long sympathized most—philosophically, at least—with the role of defense counsel in our adversarial system of justice. Defense teams are commonly under-resourced, outgunned by a state or federal apparatus with a built-in investigatory arm, a judiciary systematically tilted toward the needs and values of the government, and well-trained prosecutors who are ruthlessly ambitious if not always efficient. But Donald Trump is a different type of defendant; his defense team is a different sort of defense team; and the defense he and his team have mounted so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all. 

From his Twitter feed, Trump daily launches baseless ad hominem attacks against prosecutors, investigators, and witnesses alike, and he does so with a seeming impunity from the allegations of Witness Tampering and Obstruction of Justice that any of my clients at public defender offices in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or D.C. would have faced had they behaved similarly. His attorneys daily play semantic games that don’t so much advance their client’s interests as function as a pervasive campaign to misinform Americans about how our system of justice works and why.

For instance, their contention that collusion isn’t a crime goes beyond mere rhetoric and into a profoundly unethical misrepresentation of the real state of affairs: within the umbrella term collusion there are dozens of federal criminal statutes that federal law enforcement can and does routinely enforce. As for the broader defense strategy Trump and his attorneys have fashioned against his critics, the strategy seems to be a political rather than a legal one. Every time I see Giuliani or Jay Sekulow on television implying, if not outright alleging, a “deep state” conspiracy to frame President Trump, I do not see a fellow “brother at the bar” but a high-priced political operator. 

This book is a compilation, at times in summary form and at times in minute detail, of not just the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign (now administration) and Russian nationals, but also of the criminality born of that collusion. The book’s subchapters are drawn from major-media news stories linked to on my Twitter feed since January 2017 and supplementary news stories and factual updates supporting and expanding upon the materials available on my feed. Taken in sum, these articles, threads, and analyses compose the current state of affairs in the Trump-Russia investigation—at least that part of the investigation that is open to public view. 

An accounting of this evidence is made necessary not just by the frenetic pace of Trump-Russia news and the gravity of the investigation behind it, but the fact that Americans are likely to remain in the dark for months. What originally was six investigations in Congress—the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism—is now just one: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The other investigations have either been shut down or turned their attention toward harassing, impeaching, and in some cases even seeking criminal charges against the law enforcement officials and U.S. intelligence partners who have been, and in many cases still are, investigating the president and his team.

While a separate congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—better classified as a “hot” cyberwar than “interference”—is ongoing, it has yet to lead to new election safeguards instituted by the Trump administration or to new funding for election security from Congress. Meanwhile, the one professional, nonpartisan investigation of Trump-Russia ties, conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at the Department of Justice, is at once virtually leak-free and under constant assault and threat of termination by Trump, his allies in Congress, and his advocates in the media.

The result of all this chaos is that Americans are either misled by partisan evidentiary summaries released by Trump allies in Congress; disheartened by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its lack of progress (and its odd unwillingness to subpoena critical witnesses); or bewildered by the lack of information forthcoming from the Office of the Special Counsel under the direction of the Department of Justice. Every few weeks or months a new indictment or plea hits the news, or a leak from the White House by an attention-seeking staffer gives the public some insight into what might be going on behind the scenes. But it’s never enough; nothing ever seems to get resolved. This is the state of America in 2018: we wait for news on the possibility that our president may be beholden to a foreign power and the final verdict never arrives, despite feeling tantalizingly close. 

America deserves and demands an accounting of the evidence compiled by media outlets, congressional investigators, and law enforcement in advance of a final, comprehensive special counsel report that might not arrive until mid- to late 2019 or even 2020. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is currently overseeing the investigation, isn’t obligated to make that report public once he receives it—though as a fellow attorney I certainly hope and expect he will, for the good of the nation. So the public might never get the full details of what went on between the Kremlin and Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and allies of Trump in and out of government. 

Proof of Collusion aims to move forward the public discussion of the most significant criminal investigation of our lives. But readers should know that there is one type of evidence that is entirely absent from this book: financial records. Breaking a forty-year tradition, Trump refused to release his tax returns prior to Election Day, and we’ve since come to learn that they will never be released. And, breaking a tradition much longer than forty years, the U.S. Congress has refused to subpoena or otherwise force the disclosure of any financial records through any of its investigations, even though they may well hinge on the flow of money into shell corporations and hidden bank accounts. Even the Treasury Department has recently been accused of failing to turn over documents that might have informed America much sooner of suspicious transactions involving accused Russian spy Maria Butina (also spelled “Mariia”) and her boyfriend, GOP operative and NRA member Paul Erickson.

Unfortunately, these are derelictions of duty and lapses of honor that no public investigation can remedy. We in the public do not have subpoena power, and can only encourage those who do to do their jobs by how we vote every two years and during special elections. So while the Trump-Russia investigation may end up revealing one of the most audacious money-laundering schemes in the last century, perhaps involving one or more European banks or banks in Cyprus under investigation for Russian money laundering, this book cannot go there yet.

That said, the investigatory model my Twitter feed and this book uses to contribute to public discussion of the Trump-Russia case relies on the development of a “theory of the case”—a narrative that connects all other narratives. A good theory of the case must be dynamic as well as encompassing; it must adapt as new facts emerge and quickly supplant old presuppositions with fresh analyses. To develop a theory, a criminal investigator must first know all the facts of a case, which is a task that, with a fact pattern as complex and wide-ranging as that of the Trump-Russia investigation, can feel daunting or even impossible. Nevertheless, a committed criminal investigator builds a timeline of events, a mental gallery of major witnesses and suspects, and a compendium of hard and circumstantial evidence. In doing so, the investigator is able to author a grand narrative that works in concert with, rather than against, the presently available evidence. 

In the case of the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, the only plausible theory of the case that coordinates with all the existing evidence is that Donald Trump and a core group of ten to twenty aides, associates, and allies conspired with a hostile foreign power to sell that power control over America’s foreign policy in exchange for financial reward and—eventually—covert election assistance. This theory doesn’t contend that anyone in the president’s sphere participated in any hacking or even knew about Russia’s cyber-intrusions in advance; it doesn’t allege that the conspiracy many members of the Trump team were involved in was finely wrought, as opposed to chaotic, amateurish, and quickly capable of producing a mountain of incriminating evidence; it doesn’t require that all elements of its grand narrative take place in private, as indeed many of them occurred in the plain sight of millions of Americans; and it doesn’t allege that any of the actions involved rose to the level of statutory Treason—a federal criminal statute that applies only if America is in a declared state of war.

What this theory of the case does do is explain decades of suspicious behavior by Donald Trump, his family, and his closest associates, behavior that suggests that these bad actors expected and received a massive financial reward for taking policy positions friendly to the Kremlin and adverse to the interests of the United States.

The theory further maintains that once Trump had sufficient knowledge of Russian crimes to be legally responsible for not aiding and abetting them with promises of policies unilaterally beneficial to the Kremlin—a point Trump reached on August 17, 2016, at the very latest—any additional actions taken to advance Russian interests were criminal. The theory organizes a clear and discrete roster of those Trump aides, associates, and allies who were complicit in Trump’s financially motivated appeasement of a hostile foreign power, and in so doing it explains why nearly every name on that list attaches to a Trump campaign, transition, or administration figure who has lied about his associations with Russian nationals. 

In a criminal investigation, even a single significant lie can signal a witness’s or suspect’s guilty conscience. In the Trump-Russia investigation, the combined half-truths and outright falsehoods spread by ten to twenty “Team Trump” coconspirators now number in the dozens. Right now, the inaction of congressional Republicans—a failure to prosecute those who have lied to Congress or to subpoena those who won’t speak to Congress at all—enables these lies to continue. 

Proof of Collusion aims to provide a careful, comprehensive, and compelling presentation of the evidence supporting the only theory of the case that answers the question of what’s happening in America right now and how we can stop it.

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