Mini Book Review: House of Trump, House of Putin

This new book provides much more than appears in the news, and may be, in effect, a preview of the Mueller investigation agenda for 2019. Journalist Unger does cover in his last few chapters the familiar ground of Russian intervention in the 2015 and 2016 election campaign, but he also traces the story back to the 1980s and 1990s, as the fall of the Soviet Union leads to expansion of the Russian mafia at home and internationally, where it intersects at many levels with the rising real estate career of Donald Trump, money laundering in real estate and gambling, and the shadow world of Republican operatives such as Paul Manafort. Unger shows how the spiderweb of connections was woven, and puts names one may have heard in passing in the news in context. At the same time, his story makes crystal-clear why those investigating the Russia connection are precisely those law enforcement officials who have specialized in investigations organized crime.