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

by Seth Abramson

At home, Trump has installed a new attorney general, William Barr, whose recent holding that a president cannot obstruct justice was in early May disputed by more than one thousand former federal prosecutors of both political parties, who collectively declared that the evidence from the Mueller Report that Barr said did not rise to the level of obstruction of justice in fact provably did so.

Even the famously taciturn and retiring special counsel, Robert Mueller, could not help but angrily conclude, in a letter he must have been certain would become public, that Barr had done a disservice to the work of the special counsel’s office through the DOJ’s misrepresentations of its substance and context.

According to Newsweek, Barr even has conflicts of interest involving the Russians, with the magazine noting that “Barr’s previous employers are connected to key subjects in the [special counsel’s] probe … [and] his financial ties to companies linked to aspects of the Russia investigation raise questions about whether he should—like his predecessor, Jeff Sessions—recuse himself.”43 The media outlet references, in particular, a “public financial disclosure report [in which Barr] admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.… [Vector’s] president, Howard Lorber, brought Trump to Moscow in the 1990s to seek investment projects there. The trip is widely seen as the first of many attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.”

William Barr’s evident hostility to conventional legal judgments and processes is of course mirrored by similar traits in appointees and advisers found throughout the Trump administration, which in spring 2019 began opposing all House subpoenas intended to further Democrats’ investigative oversight, regardless of their purpose, scope, or target.48 It is mirrored, too, in revelations about former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who despite overseeing a federal investigation that found substantial evidence that the president of the United States had run afoul of the law nevertheless secretly assured the president that he was “on his team” and that he could “land the plane” for Trump with respect to the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

At a Time 100 gala in April 2019, Jared Kushner minimized the massive disinformation campaign the Kremlin deployed during the 2016 general election, describing a coordinated assault on America’s information architecture that infected as many as 135 million U.S. voters as nothing more than “a couple Facebook ads”;

Kushner’s recalcitrance in recognizing the awesome influence of Russian (or American) psy-ops in this decade, and the continued danger these operations pose in 2020 and beyond, may be connected to the fact that, increasingly, Americans are also being subjected to psy-ops coordinated by Kushner’s autocratic friend, MBS. Indeed, after the release of the Mueller Report, thousands upon thousands of Twitter bots descended upon unsuspecting Americans with the message that the report revealed a massive deep-state “hoax”—Twitter bots that were ultimately traced to pro-MBS forces within Saudi Arabia.55 That the Saudis increasingly have the hacking capabilities they do because of dangerous Israeli technology sold to them by private Israeli companies with the blessing of Netanyahu’s government (expressly because that government wants the Saudis as allies in future campaigns, political and otherwise, against Iran) only underscores how complicated America’s foreign policy debates will become in the years ahead.

At the end of December 2018, the United States for the first time in its history became one of the five most dangerous nations in the world for journalists.

Recently, one of Trump’s attorneys and closest campaign advisers, Rudy Giuliani, announced on national television that receiving stolen material from a hostile foreign power during a presidential election is hereafter, as his view was summarized by NBC News, “fair game”—a new doctrine of political corruption that former acting attorney general Sally Yates told NBC is “shocking” and a “devolution” of American patriotism.

The New Yorker quotes Tamir Pardo, the director of Israel’s chief spy agency Mossad from 2011 to 2016, as saying of the Russian election-interference operation in 2016—which appears to have received significant assists from Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati entities—“It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart.”79

Yet U.S. media still spends more time dissecting Trump’s tweets than seeking to curate the hundreds of major-media investigative reports from around the world that confirm that it is Trump who is, piece by piece, dissecting our nation’s foreign policy and domestic institutions.

Trump’s influence on the national psyche is so powerful that the violence of his language and his psychology has transformed into actual violence in the spaces to which he sends his words and ideations. Indeed, U.S. counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 sa...

It’s no wonder, writes Tamir Pardo, that when Russia considered its anti-Western geopolitical ambitions, it “took a look at the political map in Washington, ‘and thought, which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals? And they chose him [Trump]. From that moment, they dep...

In April 2019, Bloomberg published a satellite photo of Saudi Arabia’s nearly completed first-ever nuclear reactor (at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh), a construction that marks the beginning of the Saudi-Iranian arms race and its attendant “risk[] of the [Saudi] kingdom using [nuclear] technology without signing up to the international rules governing the industry.”

In late April 2019, for instance, Americans discovered that former secretary of defense Jim Mattis had to routinely ignore directives from the White House—an astounding, perhaps even unprecedented recourse for a respected lifelong soldier atop the country’s military infrastructure—in order to save the world from further bloodshed in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.96 This is news that should send a chill down the spine of the world.