Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Harding Luke

Author:Harding, Luke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

7

Tuesday Night Massacre

Spring–Summer 2017

Washington, D.C.

A nut job.

—DONALD TRUMP on James Comey, speaking to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak

The scandal that engulfed Washington in the spring of 2017 took place in a remarkably compact area. It had begun at the Democratic National Headquarters at 430 South Capitol Street. When I walked by, the signs on the DNC’s perimeter fence looked—given everything that had happened—mordantly superfluous. They said: “Beware, you are under video surveillance.”

The intruders who had busted into the building were incorporeal. They hadn’t jumped the wall or broken a window. Instead, the Russian hackers had entered electronically, an unstoppable army of ghosts. They had grabbed what they wanted and exited—not that they were in. The Times ran a memorable photo from inside the building. It showed a computer server next to an old filing cabinet, broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary.

I found the DNC office locked up and deserted. It was a Sunday. I sat outside in the spring sunshine and scrawled a few notes. The building looked modernist, with a curvilinear design. There was a Stars and Stripes in one window; on the sidewalk daffodils. Cars droned over a flyover; in the middle distance a factory belched gray smoke—all was urban normality.

Two blocks away, along a shaded road of handsome brick houses and front gardens decked out with pansies, was another building. The road climbed upward. This was the Republican National Committee at 310 First Street SE. Outside pink cherry trees blossomed. If you believed U.S. intelligence, the ghosts had got in here, too. The RNC’s emails hadn’t been released but sat on a server somewhere in Moscow.

A few hundred yards north was Capitol Hill. Here was the U.S. Congress. By this point Congress was home to an inquisitorial process—or, to be more accurate, processes. They involved the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Senate’s judiciary committee, and the House’s oversight and government reform committee. Four committees in all.

Their broad subject was what Twitter had taken to calling #Russiagate or #Kremlingate. These names hadn’t quite stuck, but the political scandal was real, and getting bigger.

Another investigation was going on nearby. A diagonal walk from Capitol Hill led to Pennsylvania Avenue and the J. Edgar Hoover building, the headquarters of the FBI. From the outside the building looked impermeable, its secrets safe. Trump, however, had changed that. The concrete 1970s complex—unlovely, lumpish, and softened only by a line of trees—was now one of the most porous places in Washington, a palace of leaks.

Almost next door was D.C.’s former post office and clock tower. In autumn 2016 Trump reopened it as a luxury hotel, just before he became the forty-fifth president. It was raining when I got there. I went inside to dry off. A giant U.S. flag hung in a cavernous atrium. There were security guards with earpieces; above the bar TV sets were tuned to Fox and CNN. Families were having lunch. The women and their daughters had Alice bands; the men wore golfing sweaters.

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