Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump's International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy

by Seth Abramson

In 2016 and 2017—both before Donald Trump is elected president and after—anti-money-laundering specialists at his longtime bank, Germany’s Deutsche Bank, “recommend[] that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.”1 According to a May 2019 investigative report in the New York Times, the transactions by Trump and Kushner “set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity” and result in the internal production at Deutsche Bank of “suspicious activity reports” that the bank’s money-laundering experts believe need to be sent to the U.S. Treasury Department immediately.

What Deutsche Bank has discovered in Trump’s and Kushner’s financial dealings are “transactions … involv[ing] money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious … [and] a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner … [in which] money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.”

The money-laundering specialist who flags the Trump and Kushner transactions for her superiors at Deutsche Bank, Tammy McFadden, will be terminated in 2018 after “rais[ing] concerns about the bank’s practices” with respect to potential acts of money laundering. McFadden will raise her concerns at a time when “Deutsche Bank … had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians” and federal regulators had ordered it “to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.”5 In 2016, however, when McFadden provides the first “suspicious activity report” to her superiors regarding Trump and Kushner—two men Deutsche Bank has, over the years, lent “billions of dollars to,” according to the New York Times—bank executives bury the report.

At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of November 9, 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton calls Republican Donald Trump to concede the 2016 presidential election.8 Within twenty minutes, Vladimir Putin has had an emissary contact Trump to set up a phone call with the Kremlin.

A few hours later, in the late morning of November 9, Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) director Kirill Dmitriev—who, according to the Mueller Report, has been “kept abreast” throughout the general election of George Nader’s “efforts” to “develop[] contacts” with the Trump campaign—contacts Nader and asks him to “introduce him to Trump transition officials.”14 Robert Mueller will find, during the course of his investigation into Trump-Russia ties, that Dmitriev “report[s] directly to Putin and frequently refer[s] to Putin as his ‘boss,’” a revelation that means George Nader has been in touch with a top Putin lieutenant during the same span of time pre-election that he is regularly meeting with top Trump campaign officials (see chapter 5).

Someone—possibly Nader, as the redacted Mueller Report implies but does not say—writes to Dmitriev on November 9, the day after Election Day, to observe that “Putin has won.”

Seventy-two hours after Trump’s victory, Kremlin operative Maria Butina contacts her handler, Alexander Torshin, regarding the presidential transition team’s plans for a secretary of state nominee.

Butina contacts Torshin because the Trump campaign has already revealed to her whom it is considering picking for secretary of state—one of the most important cabinet decisions President-elect Trump will make—and Butina tells Torshin that “our [the Kremlin’s] opinion will be taken into consideration” when it comes time to make a final selection.

Federal prosecutors, after convicting Butina of being an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation, will tell a federal judge in April 2019 that her work in the United States, including substantial contacts with top Republican officials and operatives and even Trump himself, “provided the Russian Federation with information that skilled intelligence officers can exploit for years and that may cause significant damage to the United States.”

The day after Trump’s election victory, a Saudi journalist living in the United States, Jamal Khashoggi, criticizes Trump’s Middle East policy at a think tank event in Washington. Within days, MBS has “banned [Khashoggi] from writing in newspapers, making television appearances, and attending conferences” in Saudi Arabia, forcing the journalist to seek work abroad.

Khashoggi’s criticism of Trump—calling his agenda for the Middle East “contradictory”—is relatively mild, and yet it touches on a major paradox at the heart of MBS’s plan for cooperation with Trump: inasmuch as the Red Sea Conspiracy requires that America please Russia by various means, and inasmuch as the United States withdrawing troops from Syria would have that effect but also strengthen Iran’s hand, Trump will be granting a major victory to both Russia and its ally Iran if he effectuates MBS’s grand plan for the destruction of Iranian power by changing U.S. policy in Syria.

MBS cannot allow Khashoggi’s narrative to discredit, explicitly or implicitly, the counternarrative that he, MBZ, and el-Sisi are planning to pursue.

The second day after Trump’s election finds multiple Russian officials communicating to the media that “the Russian government … maintained contacts with Trump’s ‘immediate entourage’ during the campaign.”74 Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaks at slightly more length on the issue, telling a journalist, “I cannot say that all [of Trump’s entourage], but a number of them maintained contacts with Russian representatives.… I don’t say that all of them, but a whole array of them supported contacts with Russian representatives.”

Upon his return from the Seychelles, Prince gives Bannon a full briefing on his meetings with Dmitriev—though here again, Bannon will subsequently contradict both Nader and Prince, telling the special counsel that he “never discussed with Prince anything regarding Dmitriev, RDIF, or any meetings with Russian individuals or people associated with Putin.”170 The special counsel is unable to confirm Bannon’s account, or Prince’s, because they have apparently erased all their text messages from prior to March 2017. Both men will claim to the special counsel that their phones automatically deleted the messages—in both their cases, from the exact same time frame—against their wishes.171 The Mueller Report will note, however, that “provider records indicate that [Prince] and Bannon exchanged dozens of messages” prior to March 2017.172

In June 2018, ABC News will report that “several billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities … and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.”294 ABC will add that “at least one oligarch was ushered into Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Day luncheon,” an event so exclusive it is typically “out of reach to donors and even most rank-and-file members of Congress.”

ABC News will also note one significant British and one significant American guest on the list of attendees to the inauguration’s most exclusive events. The Brit is Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who will, fourteen months after Trump’s inauguration, resign his position after an undercover investigation catches him bragging about engaging in illicit election-tampering schemes; the American is Steve Wynn, who will in short order be named the Republican National Committee’s finance chair by Trump—along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy as deputy co-chairs—a position Wynn later must abdicate amid a “swarm of sexual misconduct allegations.”297 Broidy will also step down from his position, in his case due to revelations that he has been making secret “hush” payments to a Playboy Playmate. Cohen, likewise, will step down from his RNC finance position once he begins facing investigations of his own finances.

By August 2017, just sixty days into his tenure as heir presumptive to the throne of Saudi Arabia, MBS is already thinking with great particularity about which of his enemies he needs to harness and which he needs to torture or kill. According to American intelligence intercepts, he issues instructions to his top associates to lure a noted critic of his regime, Jamal Khashoggi—a Virginia resident with three American-citizen children—to a third country so that he can be kidnapped there and taken back to Saudi Arabia.

Under U.S. law (specifically, a 2015 directive to the National Security Act), the receipt of this intercept immediately obligates the Trump administration to warn Khashoggi that he is in danger, as the directive “requires the United States to give ‘non-U.S. persons’ notice of ‘impending threats of intentional killing, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping.’”154 Khashoggi is given no warning about traveling abroad, however, let alone about the danger of entering Saudi consulates abroad.

“An unnamed National Security Agency official told the … [Observer] that US intelligence had learned that Riyadh ‘had something unpleasant in store for Khashoggi,’ at least a day before Khashoggi went to the embassy in Istanbul,” where he was murdered, in early October 2018. “The ‘threat warning was communicated to the White House through official intelligence channels’ … [but] the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has refused to comment on why Khashoggi was not warned.”)156

That some of MBS’s ire toward Khashoggi stems from his belief that Saudi journalists should be organs of the royal family is almost certain. The New York Times reports that “prominent Saudi editors and journalists who have accompanied [MBS] on foreign trips have been given up to $100,000 in cash.”

In September 2017, U.S. intelligence receives more intercepts confirming MBS’s intentions with respect to Khashoggi, by now a Washington Post journalist. According to the New York Times, an intercepted MBS conversation from September includes MBS telling a top aide, Turki Aldakhil, that he will use “a bullet” on Khashoggi if the journalist does not, according to the Times report, “return to the kingdom and end his criticism of the Saudi government.”

Al-Qahtani, whom MBS has given “extensive sway over domestic and foreign affairs” for the kingdom, makes Jamal Khashoggi “one of his first targets.”187 During one of his WhatsApp conversations with Khashoggi, al-Qahtani tells him that “the Crown Prince values your role as an editor. He wants you back in Saudi Arabia.” Khashoggi’s refusal to return to the kingdom leads to his son Salah being banned by MBS from leaving Saudi Arabia.188

By mid-October, the Saudis’ lies about Khashoggi’s death have unraveled. The narrative that is ultimately supported by the evidence begins with Khashoggi realizing that something is wrong shortly after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 to get a marriage license. He is escorted to the consul general’s office. The Washington Post journalist’s sense of wrongness is triggered by seeing there Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a “former Saudi diplomat and intelligence official” known to be a “close associate” of MBS who “has often been seen at the crown prince’s side,” according to Reuters. When Khashoggi asks his escort why Mutreb is there, he is told, “You are coming back [to Saudi Arabia].”224 “You can’t do that,” Khashoggi replies. “People are waiting outside for me.”225

As information about the gruesome nature of Khashoggi’s murder is becoming public—a period of time during which Kushner and MBS are conversing via WhatsApp—Saudi officials falsely claim Khashoggi “left the consulate soon after arriving” and that “video cameras at the consulate were not recording at the time.”249 In the United States, both Trump and his new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, come out “in support of Saudi officials’ denials they know anything about what happened to Khashoggi.”250 Trump tweets that, after speaking to MBS, he can report that the Saudi crown prince “totally denied any knowledge of what took place.”251

Trump adds that “Saudi Arabia has been a great ally to me,” even as he asserts, falsely, that he has no financial interests involving the kingdom.252 The Hill immediately criticizes Trump for his deception, noting that “the president, a longtime business mogul, has long-standing and close business ties to the Saudis, with Saudi businessmen spending significant amounts of money at his hotels and properties over decades. One Saudi royal billionaire, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, purchased Trump’s yacht and a stake in New York’s Plaza Hotel in the 1990s when Trump was in financial distress.”253

In an effort to stem criticism of Saudi Arabia’s handling of the Khashoggi investigation, Trump issues a statement on October 16, 2018, about the apparent homicide of the Washington Post journalist. The statement references Trump’s May 2017 arms deal with King Salman and MBS, noting that the Saudis are “investing tremendous amounts of money” in the United States.256 He adds that Saudi Arabia’s support “against Iran” is critical to his foreign policy.257 In response to calls for Trump to terminate the 2017 Saudi arms deal as punishment for the Saudis’ murder of Khashoggi, Trump tells Fox Business Network, “Aren’t we just hurting our own country? Because here’s what’s going to happen—[they’ll] buy [arms] from China, buy them from Russia. We’re not really hurting them, we’re hurting ourselves. I don’t want to give up a $110 billion order.”

The Trump administration, seeking to quell outrage over the kidnapping and execution of a U.S. resident, lights upon a strategy that would, in effect, ease the pressure on MBS by replicating the Saudi crown prince’s crime: Trump tries to find a way to offer Pittsburgh resident Fethullah Gulen to the Turks for extradition and execution in exchange for the Turkish government letting MBS off the hook for Khashoggi’s murder. Per NBC News, “Trump administration officials … asked federal law enforcement agencies to examine legal ways of removing exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen in an attempt to persuade Erdogan to ease pressure on the Saudi government.”

It is clear that if the United States can be convinced in the coming months and years to withdraw its forces from Syria and cede the country back to its autocratic head of state, it will give Russia free rein to continue its military operations in the country without fear of interference from American forces.

All of the foregoing notwithstanding, on December 19, Donald Trump shocks America and the world when CNN reports that “planning is underway for a ‘full’ and ‘rapid’ withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, [a] decision made by President Trump, [according to] a U.S. defense official.”13 The same day, Trump tweets, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency.”14 In response, a Pentagon official gives the following statement to CNN: “So when does Russia announce their victory?”15 The answer turns out to be “within hours,” as Putin in the midafternoon of December 19 issues a statement through Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova lauding Trump’s decision as offering “a real prospect for a political solution [in Syria].”

Less than two hours after Russia issues its first statement on Trump’s Syria withdrawal, the president takes the unusual step of canceling a meeting with the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee—doing so while Corker is waiting in the White House to meet with him.20 Reports following the snub indicate that Corker was planning to ask Trump about Syria.21 One report notes that Corker, along with “many senators,” was “blindsided … by Trump’s decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria as quickly as possible.”

The day after Trump’s threat against Turkey, the New York Times releases a shocking report revealing that Trump repeatedly told top aides throughout 2018 that he was planning to withdraw the United States from NATO, a decision the Times notes would be “tantamount to destroying NATO” and, in a single gesture, also gifting Putin one of his chief geopolitical ambitions.

“There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance … that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” the Times writes.

The Times further notes that Trump’s desire to end U.S. participation in NATO “raise[s] new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr. Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr. Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”77 Retired admiral James G. Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, te...

December 2018 brings new revelations about Trump’s other major military entanglement with Saudi and Emirati interests: the civil war in Yemen, where the Saudis and Emiratis have been staging a violent intervention since March 2015. Beginning in 2015, heavy U.S. tankers have been assisting the two Gulf nations by offering midair refueling of their warplanes. On December 8, the Atlantic reveals that while “President Donald Trump repeatedly complains that the United States is paying too much for the defense of its allies, [he] has praised Saudi Arabia for ostensibly taking on Iran in the Yemen war. It turns out, however, that U.S. taxpayers have been footing the bill for a major part of the Saudi-led campaign, possibly to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.”

By law, Saudi Arabia and the UAE must both be charged for the refueling of their warplanes by American tanker aircraft, in part because to do otherwise is to put the United States in the position of directly funding a foreign war in which it is not engaged by a formal declaration of Congress. Most troubling in the report by the Atlantic is that it is not that the Trump administration has forgotten to charge the Saudis and Emiratis altogether, nominally the sort of gross error that might result from a bureaucratic snafu, but that Trump’s Department of Defense has in fact charged the Saudis and Emiratis for refueling—but far less than it was supposed to charge them.80 Moreover, the Trump administration’s error is made public only because of a letter sent to the Pentagon by eight Democratic senators.

They “were given specific coordinates of targets that should not be struck,” Malinowski told the Times, “and they continued to strike them.”101 This, despite the fact that in 2017 the Trump administration initiated a $750 million program focused on training the Saudis on how to avoid civilian casualties—money that ought to have given Trump leverage in holding the Saudis to account for civilian deaths, as it could have included benchmarks to measure progress and provisions to withhold new military aid if those benchmarks went unmet.102 Without such benchmarks, the Saudis and Emiratis have been able to, as Malinowski describes it, exhibit “willful disregard of advice they [a]re getting” regarding airstrike targeting and avoidance of collateral damage.

By December 2018, concern over Trump’s support for MBS’s Yemeni adventures boils over into a successful Senate vote to end U.S. involvement in the coalition’s campaign.104 The Republican House refuses to take up the legislation, but the bill will pass in bipartisan fashion in February 2019 once the Democrats take control of the lower chamber of Congress.105 In March 2019, the Senate again passes the bill with bipartisan support—establishing the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and the systemic cruelties of the Saudis’ and Emiratis’ military campaign there, as one of the few issues in recent memory that is both of significant moment and the subject of any concurrence whatsoever between the two political parties.106 Trump immediately vows to veto the measure, which he thereafter does; an attempted Senate override of his veto fails in May 2019.107

In March 2019, the first fruits of the new U.S.-Saudi-Russian axis manifest, with the three nations “shocking” delegates “from around the world” during a global climate conference in Poland when they are the only countries to “object[] to a statement ‘welcoming’ the latest scientific report on the impact of manmade climate change.”108 At the t...

In February 2019, a White House source leaks to the media nearly every day of Trump’s private schedule for the preceding three months. The disclosure reveals that Trump has over that period—at least—been spending at least 60 percent of his “work day” in entirely unstructured “executive time” outside the Oval Office.174 Trump’s public schedule gives the opposite impression to voters, erroneously placing Trump inside the Oval Office from 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. on every day he is in Washington.

Trump’s highly secretive phone use would be less of a concern if it were, like everything else a president does, publicly reviewable through congressional or FOIA oversight.

In fact, as the New York Times reports in late 2018, Trump has been insisting throughout his presidency on using nonsecure phones unregulated by his aides, the Secret Service, congressional oversight, or any governmental transparency mechanisms.

As the Times recounts in an October 2018 article entitled “When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn,” Trump regularly uses multiple personal iPhones—it is not clear why he has more than one—to “call[] old friends … to gossip, gripe, or solicit their latest take on how he is doing,” often discussing topics of sufficient gravity that his words pr...

According to White House officials, during these nonsecure calls to friends and world leaders Trump may well be d...

Despite “repeated warnings” from his aides that “Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on [his iPhone] calls,” Trump refuses to cease putting American intelligence and policy at risk—a reckless practice that seems in direct opposition to the supposed paranoia that causes him to hide ...

The Times notes that at least one hostile foreign nation has been using its intercepts of Trump’s “executive time” iPhone calls to “piece[] together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president.”182

Surely the price of a man’s integrity and a nation’s safety and security is higher than an eleven-figure sum? Surely no man who is a father, a husband, a longtime public presence in American life—and, in the bargain, a billionaire—would risk nuclear war in the Middle East just to earn a little more coin?

Consider, in answer to this question, the following anecdote. In 1990, a “hip, satirical, bomb-throwing magazine,” Spy, concocted a prank to lure fabulously wealthy celebrities into publicly revealing their greed.1 The plan: send a “refund” check for a “miniscule” amount of money, under the cover of a shell corporation, to a small group of extremely rich individuals, and see if they cash it; if they do, send them a check for half that amount and again wait to see if they cash it; and then proceed from there until the ruse discloses which already-rich person in America or beyond our shores is so venal that they would cash even a virtually worthless check.2 Spy learned that twenty-six of its fifty-eight targets would cash a check for $1.11; that thirteen of those people would cash checks for half that amount, 64 cents; and that two billionaires in the world would actually go so far as to cash a check for just thirteen cents. The first of those two people was a billionaire Saudi arms dealer and international “fixer” who had been implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal and lived a life of such “infamy,” “influence peddling,” and “spectacular scandals” that he was ultimately on the receiving end of an indictment for racketeering.3 Imagine, if you can, someone so hedonistic that the band Queen felt it had to write a song about him; that’s the first man Spy caught in its trap.4 The other was Donald Trump.

The question, of course, has never been about what Donald Trump can or cannot resist. Rather, it has always been about what a society that values the rule of law is willing to tolerate. And more recently—since November 8, 2016—the question has been an even more dire one: What happens to a nation when it not only tolerates the worst excesses and degradations of the human condition but celebrates them? What happens when a once-great nation makes of its very worst instincts and proclivities a shudderingly grotesque political and cultural idol? The question is rhetorical, of course, as the answer is what lies before America every day of every week: not just what cable and network news reveal, or what digital and print newspapers disclose, but the story of what is happening that is plainly visible if we merely look for it.

Trump is, after all, a man who withheld billions in disaster relief from storm-torn Puerto Rico because he felt the Americans on that island had shown him insufficient gratitude.22

Trump, according to the New York Times, in 2019 “abruptly reversed American policy” by “issuing a statement endors[ing] a militia leader [Khalifa Hifter] who [was] battling to control Tripoli and depose the United Nations–backed government.”