Trump's campaign is suing the NYT's Max Frankel for writing about the "grand bargain" that's the subject of PROOF OF CONSPIRACY. I searched his column for inaccuracies and found none. Indeed, Frankel pulled his punches—presenting only some of the evidence. nytimes.com/2019/03/27/opi…
1/ Frankel operates under the same understanding of quid pro quo that we find—by other names—in the Mueller Report: that it's possible to publicly take actions you know from direct and indirect contact with other parties those parties will reply to with actions that benefit you.
2/ Trump's team is pushing what we might call the "cartoon" or "B-movie" version of criminal enterprises, which Trump—as someone who's run what is nominally a criminal enterprise—knows is unrealistic. Frankel does a good job laying out what Trump and his campaign did with Russia.
3/ For instance, Yulya Alferova confirms that when Trump went to Moscow in 2013 to meet with (he said) "the top people" in and out of the Kremlin, he was talking U.S. foreign policy the *whole time*—even as he discussed what would be the most lucrative business deal of his life.
4/ His business partner in the venture—which Trump lied to America about for the whole of the general election campaign—wrote Trump notes *on their business dealings* that also talked about how people in the Russian government were responding to Trump's pro-Russia foreign policy.
5/ In their since-released private communications, Sater and Cohen *repeatedly* said *explicitly* that Trump's business dealings and his policy prescriptions were inextricably intertwined. These were Trump's *top 2 fixers in Moscow* during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
6/ Trump told Cohen that his campaign—i.e. the series of policy prescriptions he was offering America, including the most pro-Russia policy of any politician in U.S. history (while he was secretly negotiating a tower deal with the Kremlin)—was just an "infomercial" for his brand.
7/ Indeed, there was hardly a *second* from 2013 onward that Trump wasn't simultaneously putting forward his pro-Russia foreign policy on TV and elsewhere—which he said he "knew" Vladimir Putin was watching—even as he backchannel used Cohen and others to demand favors from Putin.
8/ He ultimately used a man Putin calls a "friend"—Dmitri Simes—as his top campaign adviser on Russia. Simes now works for the Kremlin in Moscow. While Simes was advising Trump, Trump was secretly pursuing a tower deal with the help of Simes' "friend" Putin—and there's much more.
9/ There's a slate of people who were campaign advisers but not in the campaign proper—including Don Jr., Sater, and Cohen—who were simultaneously working on business deals with Russia (all secret of course) even as they worked for Trump on Russia policy. The evidence is endless.
10/ Then, after Trump was *directly briefed* on August 17, 2016 about *Russia's attack on America*, he *continued to deny the attack* even as he still had open negotiations—even an open *Letter of Intent with Agalarov*, Putin's *favored land developer*—to build a tower in Moscow.
11/ Amidst all this—and *so much more* that it required *1,500 pages of text and citations* in two books, PROOF OF COLLUSION (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY (Macmillan, 2019)—Trump claims there can't be a quid pro quo unless it is express and recorded. Uh...nope.
12/ Frankel is 100% correct that, by various means detailed in my books and across *hundreds* of major-media articles, Trump made sure the Kremlin fully understood his foreign policy and had access to his people even as he was *doing secret business deals with Kremlin officials*.
13/ That there was a Trump-Russia quid pro quo is undeniable. That there was Trump-Russia collusion is undeniable. That there was—in lay terms—Trump-Russia coordination is undeniable. Mueller found a before-the-fact Trump-Russia *criminal conspiracy* couldn't be established BRD.
14/ But Mueller also laid out in his report some of the reasons why he couldn't *either* "exonerate" Trump *or* reach the highest evidentiary standard in American law ("BRD," or "beyond a reasonable doubt") on the question of criminal conspiracy. And it's because of Trump crimes.
15/ Trump's obstruction, witness tampering, and witness intimidation frustrated law enforcement's attempt to investigate a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy. So did Mueller's later finding that certain Trumpists hid, withheld, and destroyed evidence to protect (ahem)... *someone*.
16/ Who was the "someone"? Per Trump, *him*. In 2018, NBC reported Trump saying Manafort could hurt him if he flipped. The judge in Stone's case said Stone was covering for Trump. Trump called Flynn to tell him to "stay strong" and expressed concern to aides Flynn might hurt him.
17/ So yes, there was a quid pro quo in *exactly* the explicit and implicit ways that you'd expect to find it in the criminal underworld Trump has long inhabited. And Robert Mueller found collusion and evidence-tampering. And Trump was never "exonerated" of a criminal conspiracy.
18/ Moreover, while it's true Trump may've obstructed discovery of a "before-the-fact" conspiracy—we can't know, we just know his "consciousness of guilt" is spectacular—an "after-the-fact" aiding/abetting charge was never even looked into at all. We have *no* findings on *that*.
19/ So who knows what game Trump is playing. Presumably, it's a PR stunt—and the second the NYT tries to demand the very same evidence Mueller found was hidden, destroyed, withheld, lied about, or otherwise obstructed, Trump will commit crimes *again* to make sure no one sees it.
20/ In the meantime, you can read the *mountain* of evidence that what Frankel said is true in PROOF OF COLLUSION and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY. No one who has read these books has any doubt Frankel spoke clearly and accurately.
A link to the latter book below: amazon.com/Proof-Conspira…
A link to the latter book below: amazon.com/Proof-Conspira…
PS/ That a lawyer agreed to take this case is shocking. To think you can advocate for Trump's position in this suit without being subject to disbarment you must keep yourself from reading *anything* about—for a start—the Mueller Report, PROOF OF COLLUSION, or PROOF OF CONSPIRACY.
