Thread by @conrmahr

live tweeting my "cliff notes" of @sarahkendzior new book Hiding in Plain Sight. 📖 amzn.to/2U6lazx

1/ "You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you'll have a [chuckles], you know, you'll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great." - p12
video.foxnews.com/v/3179604851001

2/ "Lovejoy printed article after article railing against Andrew Jackson, the favorite president of Donald Trump, and calling for slaves to be freed." - p24
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah_Pa…

3/ "Write this down, to remember I said this, because no one is going to believe me. People don't know how this shit works. I guarantee you that in 2016, you are going to see the return of Richard Nixon." - @UmarLeeIII (2014) p37

4/ "In May 2018, when the Missouri House subpoenaed Greitens for New Missouri documents, he chose to resign as governor rather than comply; even the prospect of revealing his true backers made the Greitens team panic" - p45

stltoday.com/news/local/cri…

5/ "This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets..." - @LoisRomano (1984) p51
washingtonpost.com/archive/lifest…

6/ "In 1984, one year after the tower's completion, Soviet army veteran David Bogatin purchased five luxury condos for six million dollars--a purchase so substantial that Trump made sure to personally oversee the closing." - @craigunger (2017) p55
newrepublic.com/article/143586…

7/ cont... "In 1987, Bogatin admitted he had purchased the Trump Tower condos 'to launder money, to shelter and hide assets,' and a Senate investigation revealed him to be a leading figure in the Russian mafia." - @craigunger (2017) p55

8/ "Throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump insisted thst he had nothing to do with Russia, he had no ties to the Russian government, and had never made any business deals with Russians..."

9/ cont... "This flew in the face of recent interviews--such as his claim on Fox News in 2014 that Putin had reached out to him during the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow on 2013, but also in the face of his 1987 autobiography The Art of the Deal." - p66
video.foxnews.com/v/317960485100…

10/ "'Sarah, what the fuck,' my mother texted me in 2016, 'why is no one reporting all the shit we knew about him when you were little? I need to find my Spys!'" - p71

11/ "In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 policy that had required broadcast networks to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was--in the FCC's view--fair and balanced." - p81

12/ "In June 2016, an anonymous plaintiff, using the pseudonym Katie Johnson and later Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her when she was thirteen years old..."

13/ "Jane Doe's claim was consistant with verifiable facts from the court case against billionaire underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein...Trump told NY Mag that he had known Epstein...and thought he was a 'terrific guy'." - @Landonthomasjr (2002) p84
nymag.com/nymetro/news/p…

14/ "'40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest buliding in downtown Manhanttan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest--and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became know as the second-tallest.'"- p113

15/ "[Rove] said guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community...We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" - @RonSuskind (2002) p114
nytimes.com/2004/10/17/mag…

16/ "In 2010, the Trump Organization was sued for fraud over Trump SoHo. The lawsuit describes their business pracitces as 'a consistant and concerted pattern of outright lies.'" - @eisingerj & @JustinElliott (2017) p119
propublica.org/article/ivanka…

17/ "In 2006--the same year Trump SoHo was showcased on The Apprentice, the same year Sater took the Trump children to the Kremlin, and the same year Manafort moved into Trump Tower--Michael Cohen became Trump's personal lawyer." - p122

18/ "'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,' Sater wrote in an email to Cohen. 'I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.'" - @mattapuzzo & @maggieNYT (2018) p122
nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/…

19/ "According to a senior FinCEN intelligence analyst, illicit coordination with Russia was disguise as an investigation into ISIS. 'Russia's subsequent actions suggest that it was a cover,' the official said." - @JasonLeopold & @a_cormier_ (2018) p126
buzzfeednews.com/article/anthon…

20/ "The Trump administration is, in fact, very competetent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidders. That is not kakistocracy but kelptocracy, with elements of bourgeoning authoritarianism." - p135

21/ "Adult children of authoritarian leaders are useful in multiple ways. First, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states are..."

22/ cont... "Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough distance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track..."

23/ cont... "Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile, which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with “pictures of their happy families or glamorous lifestyle..."

24/ cont... "Fourth, a dynastic kleptocracy is the most reliable way to keep assets stolen from the state in the family. It therefore falls upon the authoritarian ruler to legitimize his offspring as successors should he be forced to leave office." - p137:138

25/ "This is like the 12th time I’ve been on your show talking about Jared & the fact that he lied on his clearance forms, that he's done illicit dealings, that he's giving away state secrets & that he's a massive national sec. risk & so is Ivanka." - p140
msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/j…

26/ "It was in the Grand Havana Room of 666 Fifth Avenue that convicted felons Paul Manafort and Rick Gates gave Kremlin operative Konstantin Kilimnik US election polling data on August 2, 2016." - @PostRoz & @thamburger p141
washingtonpost.com/politics/how-m…

27/ "In Nov. 2016, Jared Kushner's Observer newspaper wrote a hit piece on me. It ran 13 days after the election, a time period where the attention I received for predicting Trump's win and warning of catastrophes to come spurred the worst death threats of my career." - p148

28/ "Networked authoritarianism...describes an internet that is just open enough so that it can be exploited by bad actors, who use it to bombard users with propaganda, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks." - @rmack p155 muse.jhu.edu/article/427159

29/ "If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness." - Jaron Lanier (2010) p158
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

30/ "In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l'Nasah Crockett launched the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to expose accounts impersonating black users and making obnoxious political claims." - @broderick (2014) p162
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…

31/ "The internet strategy of Trump’s team is reminiscent of 'the Big Lie,' a theory of control employed by the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler—whose speeches Trump long kept by his bedside..." - p169:170
businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-…

32/ "Two major Supreme Court rulings—the 2010 Citizens United ruling and the 2013 partial repeal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)—shifted power away from the people and into the hands of elites with extremist views and shady foreign ties." - p171

33/ "..June 2016, the lawyer of the Agalarovs, Rob Goldstone, attended Donald Trump Jr.'s infamous Trump Tower meeting with other Kremlin allies and Trump campaign members..."

34/ cont... "At this meeting, they discussed easing the sanctions that had been enforced by the Magnitsky Act presumably in exchange for Russia helping to ensure a Trump victory." - @_DanMangan (2019) p174
cnbc.com/2019/01/08/nat…

35/ "The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before..."

36/ cont... "through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network." - p176

37/ "On October 31, 2016, journalist David Corn at Mother Jones published the first summary of what would become known as the Steele dossier..."

38/ cont... "Corn reported that an Corn reported that an intel. source...had, during the course of an investigation for a private intel. firm, discovered that Trump had been working with the Kremlin since at least 2011." - @DavidCornDC (2016) p182
motherjones.com/politics/2016/…

39/ "What Americans rejected in 2016 was not trust but discernment. A criminal can bury the truth in a conspiracy because no one will believe it except those accustomed to parsing absurdities, who are then mocked as insane." - p186:187

40/ "I was also not surprised when, over the course of the next few years, officials gradually revealed that Russian hackers had targeted election systems in 2016 in all fifty states." - @thepacketrat (2019) p187
arstechnica.com/information-te…

41/ "...I answered a question about Breitbart hiring members of ethnic minorities to write bigoted articles about other ethnic minorities:" - p190

42/ "I was placed on a panel with one conservative who disliked Trump, and two conservatives who glorified him, one of whom, Stephen Biegun, ended up becoming Trump’s special representative to North Korea in 2018." - p196

43/ "On July 29, 2016, two days after he had asked Russia to get him Hillary Clinton’s emails, Trump gave a speech that strikes me as his most revealing."- p201

44/ "Autocratic consolidation is a matter of power, not protocol, and if you cannot tell the difference between the two, you have no business leading an investigation. You cannot go by the book while the book is burning." - p202

45/ "there is a diff. between expecting an Amer. autocracy & accepting it, & I refuse 2 accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, & of our obligation 2 fight 4 a better future 4 the next gen. I will never settle. I want 2 settle the score." - p218