While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy
I am pleased to announce the release of my debut book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy.
It is available for purchase here.
In 2016, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian intelligence to execute an active measures and disinformation operation targeting the American presidential election. While the election of Donald Trump was a desired outcome of this campaign, its overall goal was to discredit American democracy in the eyes of its own citizens and the world. It succeeded.
While We Slept provides a side-by-side examination of the lives and characters of Putin and Trump. It details the connections Trump and his campaign had with Russia’s intelligence services, oligarchs, and Eurasian organized crime through a synthesis of the Mueller Report, the Senate Intelligence Report on Russia, Congressional testimony; court documents, U.S. and foreign intelligence findings, FBI 302 interviews and search warrant affidavits; relevant literature and memoirs; and international reporting. Donald Trump’s embrace of the Russian interference campaign was the original sin of his presidency and presaged the rampant criminality and corruption that followed.
While We Slept provides a vivid description of Vladimir Putin’s career in the KGB, his alliance with organized crime in post-Soviet Russia during his early political career, and the role manipulating elections played in his ruthless rise to power. It provides a comprehensive accounting of Donald Trump’s corrupt early career and numerous connections to the American Mafia in New York and Atlantic City. It describes how Trump and Putin share linkages to the nexus of Eurasian organized criminals spanning from the former Soviet Union to Israel to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in New York City.
The book exhaustively details Trump’s suspected money laundering activities and multiple attempts to build a Trump Tower Moscow; Roger Stone’s interactions with Russian military intelligence and WikiLeaks; Paul Manafort’s corrupt activities in Ukraine and his interactions with Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign; George Papadopoulos’ foreknowledge that the Russians possessed Hillary’s emails; Carter Page’s interactions with Russian foreign intelligence and his 2016 trip to Moscow; the June 9th Trump Tower Meeting; the corrupt activities of Cambridge Analytica; the profiles of Erik Prince and Michael Flynn, and the mysterious role Israeli politicians and intelligence sources played in the 2016 election.
Given the magnitude of all that has happened since November 2016, a new narrative of the campaign that gave Donald Trump the presidency might seem like an exercise in ancient history. In fact, it is more important than ever to understand how the battle that rages for the political soul of the United States began.
The vast majority of Americans still do not grasp how Russian information warfare — a disinformation campaign, coordinated with hack-and-leak operations conducted by military intelligence operatives with the cognizance and complicity of Donald Trump’s campaign and inner circle — shaped the most consequential presidential election of the present century and set the stage for the current crisis.
The “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen originated in the widespread expectation that Trump would lose the 2016 election and his psychological need to construct a conspiratorial explanation to avoid being seen as a loser. That lie, eagerly trumpeted by Russian propagandists both then and now, is the key to Trump’s domination of Republican party politics. Many of the individuals at the heart the Russia scandal were later centrally involved in the January 6th insurrection.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine must be understood as but the latest gambit in a string of foreign adventures that included his fateful order for Russian intelligence to interfere in the 2016 election.
Confusion about the events of 2016 persists, even among the well-informed, despite the work of investigative journalists, an avalanche of participants’ memoirs, and an unparalleled official record created by the U.S. Justice Department and Congressional investigators. Several factors account for this ongoing perplexity.
First, the arcane character of redacted official reports, as well as the timing and manner of their release, obscured their meaning and diminished their impact.
Second, the extreme partisanship of American politics, and the promotion of false narratives by right-wing news outlets and social media, sent up a smokescreen behind which Russian support of Trump, and Trump’s cynical embrace of Putin’s gambit, remain hidden from sight. As a result, there is widespread misunderstanding about crucial events that occurred in an election that historians, a century from now, may well recognize as the most consequential in post-war U.S. history.
While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Corruption of American Democracy clears a narrative path through the confusion and misinformation that surrounds the events of 2016.
It explains Putin’s motives and the techniques he used to undermine American democracy, detailing how Trump and his campaign cooperated with Russia’s intelligence services, oligarchs, and Eurasian organized crime.
It weaves together, in a narrative synthesis, the Mueller Report; the Senate Intelligence Report on Russia; Congressional testimony; court documents; U.S. and foreign intelligence findings; FBI 302 interviews and search warrant affidavits; relevant literature and memoirs; and international reporting.
Every significant factual claim is sourced and footnoted. It concludes by tying the main threads together in a dénouement that provides a fuller understanding of the Trump administration as a whole, and of events that continue to unfold in its aftermath.
The book has four parts, using the lives of Putin and Trump as narrative engine to drive the wider account of the causes, course, and consequences of the crisis of 2016.
Part I: The Rise of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, explains how fierce ambition and deep insecurities drove both men to forge alliances with underworld figures and engage in morally compromised acts during their formative years. Both throve in environments where politics and power were cynical and transactional.
As a KGB agent, Putin watched in horror as the U.S.S.R. collapsed, then used his agency’s connections with Eurasian organized crime to forge a path through the ruins of a shattered Soviet state to becoming the most powerful man in Russia and the most dedicated keeper of the dream of a resurrected Russian empire.
Trump sought to create an empire of a different sort in New York real estate and legalized gambling in the casinos of Atlantic City, exploiting relationships with fixers like the mob lawyer Roy Cohn and shady connections to American organized crime. Over the course of his rise, Trump developed decades-long relationships with individuals who later played key roles in his 2016 presidential campaign — Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and others — whose sub rosa influence continues to be felt even now.
In Part II: Convergence, history, corruption and force of personality draw Putin and Trump into each other’s orbit. After the collapse of communism, the KGB, assisted by Eurasian organized crime, laundered billions of dollars into the Western financial system.
Putin oversaw this system as he consolidated power in Moscow and spread corruption abroad. Trump’s connections to Eurasian organized crime dated back to the 1970s and extended into the present century.
Financial crimes experts estimate that the Trump Organization has done at least $1.5 billion in business with entities that fit money laundering profiles. In 2013, Trump and Putin exchanged letters and came tantalizingly close to meeting during the Trump-owned Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow.
During this timeframe, Putin’s years-long, combative relationship with the United States deteriorated, and his animosity toward Hillary Clinton, based on his belief that she was meddling in Russian elections, motivated him to order the 2016 election interference operation.
Part III: The 2016 Campaign — A Narrative of Russian Influence details how cyber-operatives controlled by Russian military intelligence officers targeted the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in a hack-and-leak operation that collaborated with Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.
At the same time, a St. Petersburg-based troll farm, The Internet Research Agency, used online disinformation and propaganda to sow division in the U.S. electorate. As all this unfolded, Trump was denying any connections to Russia while at the same time his personal lawyer Michael Cohen and the shadowy, Zelig-like convicted felon Felix Sater were secretly negotiating a multi-million-dollar deal to finance a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Part IV: The Inside Story of the Trump Campaign, describes the activities of Trump and his senior associates, including his campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s interactions with Russian oligarchs and intelligence; George Papadopoulos’s advance knowledge that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s emails; the June 9th Trump Tower meeting; Roger Stone’s communications with Wikileaks and Russian military intelligence; and much else.
Damning circumstantial evidence suggests that individuals on Trump’s campaign and in his inner circle were not only aware of the Russian operation but were in secret communication with Russian intelligence as its attack unfolded.
The consequences of Russia’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election are even now working themselves out in the halls of Congress, on the campaign trails of candidates seeking election in 2022 and those looking ahead to 2024, and in the darkness and blood of the Ukraine war: sites of struggle, all of them, for the future of democracy.
My goal is to offer a clear and compelling account of how the struggle was joined in 2016, While We Slept.