Thread by @SethAbramson

(BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT and THREAD) I'm thrilled to announce that my new book, PROOF OF CORRUPTION, is coming soon and available for preorder! I hope you'll preorder it and RETWEET this thread detailing the *epic* scope of the work—and some of its key findings. amazon.com/dp/1250272998?…

1/ For those who don't use Amazon, the book—published, like its NYT-bestselling predecessor PROOF OF CONSPIRACY, by Macmillan—is available everywhere books are sold. Macmillan has created a site where you can easily access preorder links from many vendors. read.macmillan.com/lp/proof-of-co…

2/ First, some basics: the book is 525+ pages in print, with another 325+ pages of digital endnotes. The number of major-media investigative reports—as ever, from all over the world, and only trusted outlets—is larger than any book I've ever written: 4,600+ major-media citations.

3/ Anyone who has read my 2019 book, PROOF OF CONSPIRACY, will tell you that it crossed decades and continents and hundreds of key figures in a way most books do not. You will find the same is true here—with even tighter interweaving narratives that cross decades and continents.

4/ PROOF OF CORRUPTION is a work of curatorial journalism—so Trump's bribery scandals are documented in ways they've never been before. The book covers major 2019 and 2020 Trump bribery scandals in:

🔹Ukraine
🔹China
🔹Turkey
🔹Syria
🔹Iraq
🔹Iran
🔹Venezuela
🔹The United States

5/ As a side note, I know most of you know this, but I thought I'd mention that Amazon—and most book-purchasing websites—have price guarantees that ensure you pay the far lower day-of-release price when you pre-order a book. So you can pre-order this massive tome with confidence.

6/ The book's 4600+ citations were fact-checked by a team of professional fact-checkers—the largest such team I've ever had. None of the facts in PROOF OF COLLUSION or PROOF OF CONSPIRACY have been found erroneous and the same will be true here. This is a work of fact—not theory.

7/ What I'll do in this thread is review the book's key topics and give a sense of why the book—when it drops this summer—will break wide open our understanding of a significant chunk of the president's foreign dealings, including those you may think you already have a handle on.

8/ COVID-19. First and most importantly, the book offers the most comprehensive account of the corruption of Trump and his administration in the COVID-19 pandemic to be committed to print: hundreds of major-media reports establishing the COVID-19 crisis as *two* bribery scandals.

9/ The book details the Trump White House's first notice of the pandemic—in November 2019—and traces Trump's systematic 2019-20 rejection of virus intel even as (a) he expected clandestine personal benefits from China, and (b) may have worried he himself had contracted the virus.

10/ That's right: there is enormous—all major-media—evidence that the Trump White House not only had fulsome intelligence about COVID-19 in November 2019, but that there may have been concern among elements in the White House that Trump's "cold" in mid-November was the new virus.

11/ PROOF OF CORRUPTION is the most detailed, day-by-day analysis of Trump's COVID-19 response that will appear in print pre-election—and across multiple chapters and scores of pages it positions Trump's actions as motivated by bribery from two sources: one foreign, one domestic.

12/ I trace the timeline of Trump demanding *and receiving* Biden dirt from China, and it tracks with the timeline of the president (a) pushing a trade deal with China that gave it special, obscure exemptions for a pandemic and (b) rejecting any intel that cast a shadow on China.

13/ PROOF OF CORRUPTION *also* traces the months of delay in vaccine development established by two whistleblowers—an HHS and Kushner-team whistleblower—and the major-media investigative reports in the book establish that *these delays also* were attributable to Trump's venality.

14/ America will learn from PROOF OF CORRUPTION that—per evidence in major-media investigative reports—Trump's desire for millions in 2020 campaign contributions appears to have informed his pushing of a drug that has since been shown to *kill people*.

And he's still pushing it.

15/ IRAN. Many Americans have forgotten—understandably, given all that's happened since January—that we were, for 48 hours, minutes away from entering a devastating war with Iran. Sadly, we still are. But the reasons for Trump keeping this war on standby are not what he has said.

16/ PROOF OF CORRUPTION details the clandestine foreign negotiations between Trump and members of the Red Sea Conspiracy (see PROOF OF CONSPIRACY) that predated—in some cases by months—Trump's deliberate attempt to spark a Middle East war under false Iraq-War-lie-level pretenses.

17/ The extensive treatment, in PROOF OF CORRUPTION, of the likely-still-coming Iran War establishes that Trump's actions in Iran—based on lies later proven to be lies—caused U.S. casualties. There are soldiers and military families whose lives have been destroyed by the scandal.

18/ The Iran War scandal—ongoing, but covered in up-to-the-minute fashion in PROOF OF CORRUPTION—is another bribery scandal, as it's clear from major-media investigative reports that Trump's actions aimed to appease Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE, *not* protect U.S. interests.

19/ Note: this thread will be long as hell. Why? Because frankly I don't *want* anything in this thread to be a mere "teaser"—I want you to have an actually strong sense of what I've found in major-media investigative reports, *knowing* there'll be *5000%* more intel in the book.

20/ Those who read PROOF OF COLLUSION and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY understand that curatorial journalism is a digital journalistic method with one—among many other—*very* big benefit: it creates a report that is *up to two years* ahead of the news.

And so PROOF OF CORRUPTION will be.

21/ The news from last week about Trump-Israeli collusion—and the news this week about Trump-Saudi collusion being hidden by Pompeo—is only discernible if you first have access to a *massive* landscape of harrowing intel on these topics. PROOF OF CORRUPTION is an epic landscape.

22/ UKRAINE. Many Americans think they know what the Ukraine scandal was about—but don't. The reason? Democrats decided (in order to appease moderates in their party) to present America with "Impeachment Lite," which bears little resemblance to the *full* scope of what Trump did.

23/ The real Ukraine scandal—not the TV one—is a bribery scandal in which Trump exchanged official acts for items of value offered to him by one of Putin's top agents, Dmitry Firtash. And he did it with no intermediaries besides members of his legal team—that's how brazen it was.

24/ Over hundreds of pages and thousands of major-media citations, PROOF OF CORRUPTION traces Trump's direct involvement—along with Kremlin agents—in attempts to destroy Ukraine's economy by taking over its oil-and-gas industry. We have all the facts—and I put them in one place.

25/ The facts—i.e., the fully sourced, major media-reported *facts*—of these scandals are going to sound extraordinary to most readers. And in one sense, they are. There's a reason that readers of PROOF OF CONSPIRACY (my 2019 book) report having nightmares after reading the book.

26/ But what you'll notice most when you read PROOF OF CORRUPTION this summer is how meticulously—even mundanely—each well-sourced, major media-reported fact builds upon others to establish harrowing corruption. As you know, my background is in the law and criminal investigation.

27/ The Ukraine scandal is about companies you've never heard of: Naftogaz, "oblgazy," RosUkrEnergo, Gazprom, UkrHazEnergo, Russian/Ukrainian banks and more. On its face it sounds dull—I promise that when you see how Trump and his agents worked these companies, you won't feel so.

28/ TURKEY. This—hard to imagine but true—is the *worst scandal* described in the book...even if it seems impossible given PROOF OF CORRUPTION outlines the entirety of the scandal behind the pandemic and the scandal behind the impeachment and the scandal behind a coming Iran war.

29/ What Trump did in northern Syria—as part of a bribery scandal involving his business interests in Turkey—was a war crime. There's no other way to describe it. Future historians will find no other way to describe it. Donald Trump permitted the slaughter of innocents for money.

30/ The Turkey chapter in PROOF OF CORRUPTION—the book's longest chapter—is the only chapter I've ever wept while writing, and I don't say that to be maudlin or mawkish but because it's true. It's what happened. I cried as I wrote parts of the chapter because it's... a nightmare.

31/ When I call Trump a "monster" and say that my assessment comes from research, not preexisting animus, it's the Trump-Turkey chapter in PROOF OF CORRUPTION (chapter 36 of a book with 44 chapters) to which I refer. Trump traded the lives of innocents for money—it's that simple.

32/ VENEZUELA. My two prior books on Trump's foreign policy—both of which became (I'm deeply honored to say) NYT bestsellers—focused on Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. This book reveals Trump's corruption extends into South America, too. Why should anyone be surprised?

33/ The Trump-Venezuela scandal is one of the strangest exhaustively detailed in the book, as it sees *the same actors* as in the Ukraine scandal doing *the same types of things* to—again—a) please the Kremlin b) apparently with Trump's blessing c) counter to U.S. foreign policy.

34/ It remains a mystery—sort of—why Trump was publicly saying he supported democracy in Venezuela even as his agents were fanning out around that nation to try to cut deals with the Kremlin's puppet there. This is a scandal whose contours we'll continue to learn about for years.

35/ Those of you who read PROOF OF CONSPIRACY won't be surprised to learn the list of key figures in PROOF OF CORRUPTION is equally massive—and while there's overlap in the names in the two books, you'll discover all sorts of new shady characters you haven't encountered before.

36/ HUNGARY. One new key figure is Viktor Orban, the President of Hungary, whose actions just downgraded that nation (officially) from a full democracy to a pseudo-autocracy—something that happened 100% because of Orban's design. And Trump allies say Trump "wants what Orban has."

37/ Viktor Orban, whose nation hosts the European HQ of Russian intelligence, is a longtime Putin ally who tag-teamed with Putin himself to—in private meetings with Trump—seed the Kremlin-born conspiracy theories (about Biden, Manafort, Clinton and others) Trump now pushes daily.

38/ Hungary—and Orban, with an assist from Putin—is also the origin-point for the sinister, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving George Soros that Trump, Giuliani, and indeed his entire team have been pushing as a way to win the 2020 presidential campaign. It's scary stuff.

39/ THE BLT PRIME TEAM. I keep referring to Trump having a "team"—and I mean it literally. PROOF OF CORRUPTION exposes the names, meeting places, and actions of a *team* Trump put together to engage in international corruption. I detail the major-media reports exposing that team.

40/ This thread details the tip of the iceberg that is PROOF OF CORRUPTION. The book's 525+ pages—densely packed with facts, with no filler—cover more ground than I can say here, from all I said already to a long list of topics that have received little or no treatment in print.

41/ Some examples of other critical topics PROOF OF CORRUPTION addresses (with scores of major-media citations, all fully sourced and fact-checked): the 2020 election, new Trump-Russia scandal revelations, new Trump-Israel scandal revelations, new Trump-Saudi scandal revelations.

42/ ISRAEL. Major media has uncovered evidence that Trump's longtime friend/adviser Roger Stone was working with Israeli agents—while in touch with Trump about it—to get an anti-Clinton "October surprise" from Israeli intelligence in 2016. We now know Israel *did* tamper in 2016.

43/ SAUDI ARABIA. We've learned today that Trump continues to work in clandestine fashion to entrench the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia's conflict in Iran—an ongoing bribery scandal (because Trump stands to benefit personally) that'll cost U.S. lives and has just ensnared Pompeo.

44/ RUSSIA. As soon as the full scope of the Ukraine scandal is revealed—as it is in PROOF OF CORRUPTION—it becomes undeniably clear that Russia is one of the major actors in Trump's scheme in Kyiv, and that the Ukraine scandal is a mere *extension* of the ongoing Russia scandal.

45/ BARR. I hope you don't think an epic narrative with 4,600+ major-media citations would fail to include what Barr—alongside Durham and a few others hoping to aid Russia's false discrediting of the Mueller investigation—has been doing to dismantle our democracy.

It's in there.

46/ PENCE. A common question I get from readers of PROOF OF COLLUSION and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY is, "Where's Pence—is he involved?" And I always give the honest answer—we don't have evidence of it.

Well—that's changed. Pence is a key figure in PROOF OF CORRUPTION—and he earned it.

47/ IMPEACHMENT. As we just lived through it, the main focus of the impeachment sections of PROOF OF CORRUPTION is to tell you about the things you likely *don't* already know—the behind-the-scenes machinations that made the January '20 impeachment a historic travesty of justice.

48/ An example: did you know that if the GOP senators who were also material witnesses in the case they were adjudicating had recused themselves consistent with hundreds of years of recusal ethics, the Democrats would have won *every vote* on witnesses and other evidence? *True*.

49/ In the coming weeks, I'll regularly talk about things I learned while reading thousands of major-media articles to write PROOF OF CORRUPTION. I can be so transparent about my research because no matter what I say, I assure you it's only 10% (*maximum*) of what's in the book.

50/ I also expect to do a lot of media to spread the word about PROOF OF CORRUPTION, as it is a *big* book—the biggest I've ever written, in terms of scope and complexity and evidence of wrongdoing—and I believe it can become essential reading for *every* U.S. voter in 2020. /end

BARNES & NOBLE/ For those of you who shop at Barnes & Noble, here's the link to *pre-order* Proof of Corruption, due out this summer: barnesandnoble.com/w/proof-of-cor…

COVER IMAGE/ For anyone interested in seeing and/or sharing the book's cover image in a larger format, here it is: