Getting Away With It

In this airplane-avoidant age of COVID I have had to make multiple long road trips to and from Boston over the past year, and I have done it enough times by now to have developed a routine. When I need to pick out some listening material for the journey, I always go with a Trump/Russia-related book. I don't know why this has become so compulsory to me, but nothing else seems to go as well with a long day on the road. It's something about the fact that these sorts of journalistic accounts alone manage to marry the guiltier pleasures of the true crime yarn with the ability to tell myself that I am just doing my patriotic duty of catching up on the last few years' political news and keeping abreast of current events. 

Whatever the reason, I have tried to have a Trump/Russia book at my side—or rather, piping through my phone's speakers—on every multi-day road trip I have undertaken since last fall; and the trouble with that plan is that they are finite in number. Having exhausted some of the more staid and cautious among them, I didn't know where else to turn. That is, until I learned from The Guardian that a new book had come out offering some of the more sensational revelations on this subject yet—including a former KGB agent who claims to have seen a memo circulating in the Washington Rezindentura in the 1980s that named Trump's full-page newspaper ads of the time (calling for things like the abandonment of the U.S. strategic alliance with Japan) as the Soviet intelligence "active measures" they were long rumored to be; a convoluted argument somehow linking these events to Jeffrey Epstein's secret blackmail operation; and so on. 

It may seem ironic that I would choose to lap up this thinly-sourced gossip—involving numerous logical leaps and questionable inferences, all on a scaffolding of real and publicly-available information—right after I penned on this blog a lengthy denunciation of what I described as the perils of conspiracy theorizing. There is, however, a more logical connection between the two than may at first appear. Part of the reason I wrote that last post, after all, was to shield myself mentally from what I was about to listen to, knowing that on my drive up to Boston I would be unable to resist the temptation of Craig Unger's book, American Kompromat. Seeing as I would shortly be dipping my toes into these perilous waters, rife with the potential for conspiracism, I wanted to remind myself ahead of time of all the good reasons to take this style of thinking with a grain of salt. 

I think the prophylactic worked. I did not find myself bowled over by all the connections Unger draws, nor persuaded by every insinuation he makes. The notion that Trump has been a compromised asset of the Russian intelligence services since at least his trip to Moscow in the 1980s, if not earlier, continues to be one plausible version of events, based on the available public record. But Unger's reporting does not add greatly to what we already knew; nor did he locate a smoking gun to prove this narrative, which we have long suspected. The "Russian asset" theory remains merely a plausible read, not a proven fact. The closest thing to a new revelation in the book, as mentioned above, comes from a former Russian intelligence operative who is far from a highly credible source. (And of course, he does not supply visual evidence of the memorandum he claims to have seen.)

The same goes for the latter half of Unger's narrative, in which he seeks to tie the sordid tale of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking (and possibly blackmail) operation into his Trump story, through a tangled intrigue involving various intelligence agencies. At the end we are left thinking: it all could be true; or it could not be true. It is possible that part of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's nefarious scheme involved secretly taping famous people in compromising and depraved sex acts, and then blackmailing them for money, access, or leverage for foreign intelligence. If so, however, why have these recordings not come to light, or been used as the basis for further criminal prosecutions of high-profile people? To believe that all this information simply disappeared once it entered the hands of federal prosecutors is to fall prey to the classic flaw in all conspiracy theories—in order to make them work, it is necessary to make the conspiracy bigger and bigger, to paint an ever-larger number of independent actors as in on the scheme. 

There are those, of course, who claim to have seen and even to possess the purported Epstein/Maxwell-harvested "kompromat." One of them is a rogue former member of the Palm Beach police department who says he made copies of this material, for purely idealistic and public-spirited reasons, rather than for blackmail and intelligence purposes, before disappearing to seek political asylum in Russia. Unger spends a considerable part of the book recounting the activities of this eccentric individual, and in fairness he cocks a skeptical brow at some of his wilder claims. 

He also, however, seems to believe that such a trove of compromising video and photographic material exists, and that this individual may have access to it; whereas, to my mind, the giveaway comes when he asks the former cop to show him some of this material, and the latter refuses, saying he would never share images of the abuse of minors. Presumably if he really does have access to hours' worth of CCTV footage from Epstein's properties, though, he could have found something to send the journalist that would have substantiated his claims without involving him in this level of moral compromise—a video of an empty room, say, or of a recognizable exterior of Epstein's house when no one was present. 

We are plainly in the domain here of the UFO researcher or Bigfoot enthusiast who claims that, at the critical moment of the encounter, their camera just happened to malfunction. Or the followers of Joseph Smith who said that, if they hadn't exactly "seen" the fabled Golden Plates with their worldly eyes, then they had seen them nonetheless "in a spiritual sense." Perhaps the "Epstein tapes" should, as E.E. Cummings once wrote of Joe Gould's nonexistent "oral history," be subtitled "a wraith's progress."

While none of this reporting, therefore, is likely to convince anyone of anything they didn't already believe, Unger's book is not a waste of time. He lays out in detail a convincing narrative of events in which Trump was cultivated by a KGB contact in New York in the 1980s, was fed Soviet talking points during his trip to Moscow to discuss a supposed new "Trump Tower" that Russian authorities never actually intended to build, and then went on to become a—perhaps not entirely witting—mouthpiece for Soviet and later, Putin-era propaganda. Unger's reporting, as I said above, does not add a lot of highly credible new evidence to buttress this narrative, but the very fact that he does not do so allows us to perceive all over again how much of this narrative makes sense and how plausible it is already, simply on the basis of what has long since been publicly reported and acknowledged. 

All of which—Unger notes—raises the question of why this hasn't been a bigger deal. Surely it should shock us that the previous U.S. president was quite possibly an asset of a hostile foreign intelligence service. Why isn't this possibility consuming our every waking moment? And to that important question, Unger supplies some suggestive answers. Part of the situation we must take into account, he notes, is that Trump's actions, however horrifying and perilous for our national security, may not ever have been illegal in the technical sense. It's not actually against the law, Unger observes, to meet with foreign intelligence agents and parrot their talking points; nor is it illegal to engage in certain forms of money laundering for people linked to such intelligence services, if one can maintain plausible deniability as a potentially unwitting dupe. Robert Mueller's probe, says Unger, was focused solely on criminal activities, and the counterintelligence implications of what Trump was doing may never have crossed that critical line. 

All of which makes this just one more example of a pattern that has recurred time and again in Trump's public career. How many times have we asked ourselves: how is he getting away with this? Why isn't everyone horrified by what Trump just did? Why aren't people holding him accountable? Haven't they noticed the fact that basically every single major associate of his who helped him win the 2016 election has since been indicted, and that the only reason Trump was not charged with the same crimes is because federal prosecutors acknowledged he was likely shielded from indictment so long as he remained in office, leaving impeachment and removal as the only recourse for holding a sitting president to account? And haven't people noticed that he then in fact was impeached twice for his actions, even if the Senate ultimately failed to convict and remove him? 

The questions imply their answers. Trump got off in the court of public opinion because he also got off in the court of law. So long as he wasn't legally held to account for his actions, people could assume that meant he wasn't really guilty. So it was too, alas, with Jeffrey Epstein, prior to his long-delayed downfall. This is a connection one can draw between the two men confidently, without need of conspiracy theories or reliance on the testimony of non-credible sources and likely scam artists or mere insinuation. Both Trump and Epstein were permitted to engage in criminal acts in the public's mind so long as they did not go to prison for it. Until the day he was jailed in New York, a decade after his original conviction on significantly reduced charges, Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and sexual abuse of children was an open secret, which many people in politics, the media, and high society chose to wink at or ignore. 

So it is with Trump's crimes. Most of them, by this point, we all know he committed. Yet 40% of the nation continues to like and support him anyway, and would likely still vote for him again if he ran for another term. 

There is something deep-rooted in this that reflects our society's hypocritical attitude to vice and crime in general. We are willing to tolerate it—even to admire and celebrate it—so long as it is being committed by the people with the power to get away with it. It is only when they do not, when they never had the power to avoid prosecution and incarceration to start with, that we turn against them. One of the most sad and damning details from reporter Barry Levine's account of the twisted Epstein saga, The Spider, for instance, is that the same Florida prosecutor who ultimately helped cut a sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein, during his original 2008 prosecution, was also a celebrated "tough on crime" lawman—previously noted, among other things, for having charged a 13-year-old Black child as an adult for having shot a white teacher. 

Theodore Dreiser's harsh words for American public morality from a 1911 novel come to mind; plainly, they suggest that our society has not changed so very much in its fundamental hypocrisies and vices since then: the "guardians of so-called law and morality, the newspapers, the preachers, the police, and the public moralists generally," writes Dreiser, "so loud in their denunciation of evil in humble places, were cowards all when it came to corruption in high ones." We are in this respect much like the people in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, who admire the tale of a man who claims to have killed his father, until they witness his crime for themselves and start to imagine that the arm of the law might therefore fall on themselves. Then, they try to lynch him, declaring it to be "the will of God that all should guard their little cabins from the treachery of law."

To be other than the foolish people of Mayo in Synge's play, or the puritanic "law-and-order" hypocrites Dreiser is denouncing in the passage above (one is reminded here too of Ken Starr, who—both Levine and Unger observe—once relentlessly prosecuted Bill Clinton for having a consensual affair with an adult staffer, and who failed to see the contradiction of then proceeding to join the criminal defense team for Jeffrey Epstein—a man facing overwhelmingly-substantiated evidence of having engaged in the systematic trafficking of children)—to be better than these two-faced sanctimonious frauds, that is to say—requires that we hold vice and evil and iniquity in contempt not only when it is punished. Indeed, when it is punished, the soul of the freedom-loving person tends to shift in sympathy, even in spite of oneself, toward showing favor and mercy for the damned. We should not be harsher in our mind's judgment toward those who are caught, therefore, but precisely toward those who go uncaught. The Trumps of the world, that is to say, who commit their crimes in plain sight, in full view of us all, and yet who still to this day have not been held to account.