The greatest spy hunt in history

by David Benjamin

“[The Mueller investigation is] the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” 

― Donald John Trump

MADISON, Wis. — The most thrilling, dramatic and earthshaking revelation of the Trump era in America is still almost entirely secret and might well remain uncovered beyond many of our lifetimes. It has been kept deep under wraps by the very people chosen to expose it. Out of bureaucratic timidity, mixed with surprising incompetence and misplaced lèse-majesté, well-meaning civil servants have conspired with the malefactors they were investigating to smother the 21st century’s greatest geopolitical crime so thoroughly that it will be years — probably decades — before the truth can trickle out.

The tip of this criminal iceberg appears in a quote, lifted by New York Times reporter Charlie Savage from Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann, one of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s key lieutenants in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Writing about Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in the Trump election effort, using internal data from the campaign, provided by campaign manager Paul Manafort to a Russian intelligence operative named Konstantin Kilimnik, Weissmann writes in his book: “It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request [for cooperation in sabotaging the election] before a presidential candidate. This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”

Starting from this staggering premise, neither the cautious legalist Weissmann nor the institutionally circumspect Gray Lady functionary, Savage, is inclined nor equipped to carry this explosive plotline forward toward its spectacular and cinematic denouement. This is where the story needs a great spinner of Cold War espionage fiction, a writer with the spycraft knowhow to sift through the clues, who could infuse into its painstakingly excavated evidence the drama it deserves. This saga of deceit and sedition, which cannot be told yet because of the veritable stampede of oxen it will gore, needs a storyteller intimately versed in the inner workings and bowel rumblings of the FSB, GRU, MI6 and the CIA, a writer for whom triple agents are grist and kompromat a second language.

Worthy authors in this genre whose names come to mind are John LeCarre, Geoffrey Household (Rogue Male), Brian Freemantle, Robert Harris, Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park) and the underrated Bill Granger (The November Man). 

But these guys won’t be around for this story. The writer who unspools this spellbinder might not actually be born yet. The truth behind the plot to subvert the 2016 vote and install Donald Trump as premier has been muddled and muellered by the spy-hunters who couldn’t grill straight. Their turgid tome has failed to land Trump in jail, or even soil, while he’s alive, his already feculent escutcheon. 

Clues will emerge only hint by hint, drop by drop, coughed up almost randomly —like the dying words of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt — years apart and seemingly unconnected, until at last a literary sleuth whose name is yet unknown weaves them into breathtaking fabric. Then, we’ll know how all these bizarre, disparate shards of fact and fancy fit together: the Trump Tower meeting, the fat music producer and the Agalarovs, the secret affair with Natalia Veselnitskaya, Ivanka’s lobby rendezvous with the Russians, Stormy’s trip to the gynecologist and Michael Cohen’s deal for Trump Tower Moscow, the three amigos, Kilimnik, Deripaska and Derkach, the Pecker connection, the Steele dossier and the pee-pee tape in Vlad’s safe, the flow of billions of rubles, dollars and euros through the men’s room at Deutsche Bank, Roger Stone and Julian Assange talking dirty tricks on a FISA recording, all of it! So creepy and so much more. 

There will be, some day, a page-turner that combines the tense suavity of Ian Fleming, the sleaze of Mickey Spillane and the logorrhea of James Michener. And every word will be — finally — gospel, building up to the climactic revelation we knew but couldn’t prove, that the president of the US of A was an active, functioning — perhaps unwitting but not unwilling — agent of the Kremlin’s spy agencies and a Putin foil in the Oval Office, spilling secrets over his little Twitterphone like a teenage girl talking about the cutest boys in the eighth grade. 

This political scandal, mixing horror with suspense and a dash of slapstick, will be to the 21st century — but more devastatingly — what Teapot Dome, Sacco and Vanzetti, the death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Japanese Pearl Harbor betrayal, the Hollywood Eight and the McCarthy hearings, Watergate and Iran-Contra, all rolled together — were to the 20th century. The inevitable movie will make words like “blockbuster” and “titanic” sound hollow and trivial.

As Weissmann admits in his book, the cover-up that will make this story impossible to unearth in this generation was the handiwork of unlikely Trump enablers — ostensibly on Mueller’s team — who include Weissman himself and acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein. Weissmann’s book cannot, however, reveal the vast trove of incriminating evidence that went unsought by the pusillanimous Mueller probe. It can’t credibly explain the investigation’s genteel acquiescence with Trump, when Robert Mueller meekly agreed not to interrogate — about their smirking corruption — Donald Trump, all of Trump’s children, Jared Kushner and anyone at the Trump Organization. Nor can it justify Mueller’s choice not to seize Trump’s tax returns, and financial records — from Deutsche Bank, Alpha Bank, Sberbank and a host of other offshore laundromats. 

The cover-up is deepening before our eyes, right now, as “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, whose hoarder’s greed for collecting youthful right-wing judges has made him one of Putin’s most useful idiots, contrives to stack the Supreme Court with Trumpian toadies. These grateful judges in service to Trump will, to quote Weissmann, “peel the world around him away from the rule of law — away from reason itself — and mold it to accommodate his desire for unchecked power.” Court rulings that veil Trump’s secrets will postpone any reckoning until mortal attrition, many years from today, finally thins the loyal justices’ numbers and crumbles the wall of silence.

We will wait years — decades and generations. Trump will be dead. His successors to the throne that Bill Barr built — Ivanka, Junior and Eric (but God forbid, not Tiffany or Barron) — will be ancient or also dead. And far in the past, the words of Weissmann, who went scrupulously by the book (its pages already lit afire by Donald Trump), will evoke Whittier’s timeless couplet:

“Had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts? I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.”