| HOUSE OF TRUMP, HOUSE OF PUTIN The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia Craig Unger New York: Dutton, August 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-524-74350-5 | ||||
| ISBN 1-524-74350-X | 354pp. | HC/FCI | $30.00 | |
Look between the covers of this book, and you will step into the world of the Vory: the Russian Mafiya. They rose after the fall of Boris Yeltsin as Russia's president, and now operate worldwide. In the United States, their power is probably concentrated in New York City and Florida. It is no coincidence that they focused on New York City, where Donald Trump got his start following in the footsteps of his mob-connected1 father Fred, and at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, and his other properties in Florida. Trump-branded properties, mostly hotels and clubs, are also found around the globe (although a number of them have gone bust and the residents of others demanded removal of the Trump name.) But though he switched his official residence2 to Florida, Trump Tower in Manhattan remains the seat of his power.
Craig Unger lays out for us here the intricate details of Trump's career as it wends/winds its way forward, intersecting with the convoluted history of the Vory v Zakone (thieves in law) who have bought suites in Trump Tower and other Trump properties as well as the immensely wealthy figures like Semion Mogilevich who keep a discrete distance, wielding power in more subtle ways. It is a lot to take in. Fortunately, Unger provides a list of "Trump's Fifty-Nine Russia Connections" at the end of the book for those who want to keep track. A good deal of this is also covered in other books, but I don't fault multiple books for covering the same topic. But Unger does the most thorough job I've read so far of covering the obscure world inhabited by Trump's partners in crime and deception.
This background is useful, and I hope to see it someday form the basis of criminal prosecutions — difficult as that may be with these powerful, transnational figures. But the most relevant parts of the book for me are Chapters 18 through 20, which cover the actual intervention in the 2016 campaign. These form an excellent complement to Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Cyberwar,3 which dissects foreign incursions into the campaign through Facebook, Twitter and Web sites and the hacking exploits of Russian intelligence services.
Also important, and an aspect I had not appreciated, was the covert retention by Russian oligarchs of the services of prominent Americans like Bob Dole and Louis Freeh.
Controversy over whether interference from Russia actually changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election persists to this day. Craig Unger's research says that it did.
As to the impact of all tthe "active measures" undertaken by Russia leading up to the 2016 election it is difficult to quantify exactly how much they changed the outcome of the presidential race. However, according to the study by the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, automated tweeting by thousands of bots added 3.23 percentage points to Trump's vote in the US presidential race. Given Trump's narrow victory in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—states that were predicted to vote Democratic but were won by Trump with a margin of less than 1 percent, and which put him over the top in the electoral college—it is more than likely that the Russian interference made the difference. – Pages 262-263 |
The author's source for this is Twitter Bots Helped Trump and Brexit Win, Economic Study Says (Jeanna Smialek, Bloomberg Quint, 21 May 2018).
The phrase comes from page 254, where Unger points out that the news media tended to focus on superficial aspects of the story while important events took place "under the radar." For example, Manafort resigned from Trump's campaign when it was learned he'd taken unreported money from Ukraine. But he remained connected to Trump, and kept exerting influence. Similarly, coverage doted on Trump's outrageous public behavior and missed his more substantive actions, such as involvement in money-laundering.
Another aspect of this conflict that is under-appreciated is what Unger refers to as 'War by Other Means": flooding the zone with contradictory and even absurd assertions in order to distract your adversaries and undermine the very understanding of truth among the populace. He begins the chapter of this name by citing Peter Pomerantsev on the genius Vladislav Surkov, who devised the strategy. After an eclectic career, Surkov rose to the position of "political technologist" for the Kremlin, a role somewhat similar to that played by Steve Bannon early in the Trump administration. A better title for his role as general of Putin's info-war might be "Master Propagandizer." As Pomerantsev notes in his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,3 modern Russia is awash in fantasies painting Putin as the indomitable hero and Russia besieged by the West but on the brink of its former glory. Following Surkov's lead, Putin has had some success using those techniques on the West, and especially America.
Also unreported, AFAIK, was the fact that several officials and prominent politicians had Russians as clients.
Like a slow-motion train wreck that can't be stopped, a national security catastrophe of historic proportions was in the works. And it was happening under the noses of the top figures in American law enforcement, whom the Russians were going to for criminal representation. It wasn't enough that William S. Sessions had taken on Mogilevich, the most feared mobster in the world, as a client. Sessions's successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, was also working for the Russians. In Freeh's case, the client in question was Denis Kstsyv's Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings, a giant real estate firm that hired Freeh to negotiate a settlement with the US government over an alleged money-laundering/tax-fraud scheme involving Kremlin officials. Katsyv is a Ukrainian businessman whose company appeared to be a beneficiary of the $230 million tax fraud. – Page 218 |
Those politicians included Bob Dole, who lobbied for Oleg Deripaska (see pp. 215-216.)
All the various threads were coming together. The Russians had, in effect, activated a channel from the Trumps through the Agalarovs to the Kremlin, from Don Jr. to Emin to Emin's father to Putin, with Rob Goldstone forwarding messages as necessary. Manafort was still in touch with Kilimnik and was offering private briefings to Deripaska. Even though Bayrock was no longer operational, its presence had opened ongoing relations to the Kremlin through Chabad and through Felix Sater, who had continued to develop Russian contacts and go to Moscow on behalf of Trump. Moreover, according to a report in Christopher Steele's dossier, "a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship was being played by the Republican candidate's personal lawyer Michael COHEN." In Freeh's case, the client in question was Denis Katsyv's Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings, a giant real estate firm that hired Freeh to negotiate a settlement with the US government over an alleged money-laundering/tax-fraud scheme involving Kremlin officials. Katsyv is a Ukrainian businessman whose company appeared to be a beneficiary of the $230 million tax fraud. – Pages 243-244 |
Craig Unger's account makes it clear that this was a well-planned and carefully executed scheme to undercut not just the 2016 campaign, but the foundation of American democracy itself: public trust that government and the news media could tell the truth. Various oligarchs, based in Russia and elsewhere, played important parts because they benefited financially. But at the top of the pyramid was Putin, quietly calling the shots.
By this time, Donald Trump's ties to Wikileaks and the Russian bots were fully operational and more than capable of coming to Trump's Rescue when necessary. That became apparent on October 7 [2016], when the Washington Post released the infamous video of Trump with Billy Bush, then host of the television show Access Hollywood, in which Trump says about women that you can just "grab 'em by the pussy." Within an hour of the story's release, Wikileaks was fighting to win back control of the narrative by releasing hacked emails form the account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. In addition, at least 2,752 Twitter accounts from Russia's Internet Research Agency went into action on Trump's behalf whenever they were necessary. On September 17, Trump reversed his lies asserting that Obama had been born in Kenya and declared instead that Obama "was born in the United States, period." Russian tweets came to the rescue, with various Russian accounts now asserting that it was Hillary who started the birther controversy. And so it went, Russian hackers and bots leading a supine press corps by its nose. After all, it is far easier to write stories about hacked emails that are delivered on a silver platter than to probe a multifarious political conspiracy to sabotage a presidential election. – pages 255-256 |
Like Cyberwar, this is a long read. It will repay the effort. But those in a hurry can limit themselves to those last three chapters and still pick up the essential message: powerful forces are conspiring to damage our democracy, and keeping it intact requires constant vigilance from all of us.
The book is very well researched, and the text is supplemented by 45 color and black&white photographs. It carries a thorough set of notes, and the index is also thorough. I give the book full marks. And because of its notes and index, and the list of fifty-nine contacts, I rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.