Seth Abramson - Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump

On February 20, 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation in eastern Europe.

In seeking to assume partial dominion over the second-largest country by land area in Europeand the largest located entirely within the continentRussian president Vladimir Putin had cause to apprehend a dramatic response from the United States, particularly if Democrat Hillary Clinton won the U.S. presidency in 2016.1 If Proof of Collusion, the first book in the trilogy that Proof of Corruption concludes, detailed Putins anti-Clinton, proDonald Trump interference in the 2016 election, and if the second book in the trilogy, Proof of Conspiracy, described attempts by Trump and Putin and their agents to partner on geopolitical schemes involving Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the book you now hold concludes the trilogy by telling the story of how Putin came to see Trumps 2020 reelection as every bit as important to the Kremlins global adventurism as Russias 2016 election interference had been. It is also the story of a presidency so venal and unscrupulous that its agents sought to cooperate not only with autocrats in Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE but also with governments around the world hostile to U.S. interests.

This is the big picturesprawling, complex, untidy. Yet the narrative at the core of what we now call the Ukraine scandal is surprisingly uncomplicated. It is admirably summarized by a New York Times editorial calling for the impeachment of the president. President Donald Trump abused the power of his office, wrote the Times editorial board in December 2019, by strong-arming Ukraine, a vulnerable ally, holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid until it agreed to help him influence the 2020 election by digging up dirt on a political rival.2

For those who read about the Trump-Russia scandal in Proof of Collusion, this fact pattern is familiar. As the New Yorker has written, The Russia and Ukraine scandals are, in fact, one story. Indeed, the Presidents false denials in both of them capture the common themes: soliciting help from foreign interests for partisan gain, followed by obstruction of efforts to uncover what happened.3 Just so, those who read Proof of Conspiracy will know that several still sparsely reported Trump scandals involving nominal U.S. allies in the Middle East also featured apparent bribery and obstruction of justice. In Proof of Corruption, this same coupling of offenses reappearsnot just in the presidents public and clandestine dealings with Ukraine, but also in his back-channel negotiations with China, Turkey, Israel, Venezuela, and even domestic political donors pushing supposed miracle drugs during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives confirm Trumps behavior as predictable and unchanging. The question is whether America can dynamically respond to a novel threat to its rule of lawand whether we will continue to abide the horrific losses this threat has imposed on us.

The word corruption, applied to a U.S. presidential administration and its foreign policy, denotes a perniciously systemic penchant for four types of activity: criminal activity enumerated as impeachable by the U.S. Constitution; other criminal activity qualifying as a high crime or misdemeanor under the Constitutions impeachment clause; noncriminal activity that nevertheless is eligible for impeachment under the U.S. Constitution as a threat to national security or a violation of the nonstatutory catch-all component of the impeachment clauses high crimes and misdemeanors proviso; and noncriminal, nonimpeachable conduct that indicates a president is unfit to serve as a matter of ethics, conformity to democratic norms, and commitment to the rule of law. The Trump administration may be regarded as corrupt because many of its offices and departments have from January 2017 onward exhibited in abundance all four forms of malfeasance.

If the impeachment and trial of President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s ultimately focused on conduct unrelated to the presidents execution of his official duties, President Trumps impeachment and trial could not have been more intimately concerned with the responsibilities of the nations highest office and the federal statutes that ensure politicians remain faithful to voters. The criminal statutes in play in the narrative this book unfolds include the following: bribery, extortion, illegal solicitation of foreign campaign donations, obstruction of justice, wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, witness tampering, making false statements to Congress or federal law enforcement, perjury, the Logan Act, and the Hatch Act. Noncriminal impeachable offenses appearing in the narrative include abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, violations of the presidential oath of office, and breaches of the Constitutions emoluments clause. Two additional offenses investigators are considering with respect to individuals discussed in this book are Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) crimes and money laundering.4

Above all, however, the question remains whether Trump is a national security risk as a result of foreign compromisea term encompassing both sensational scenarios and the mundane possibility that a geopolitical enemy of the United States has so much more knowledge of the presidents clandestine activities at home and abroad than Congress or the American people that the revelation of such secrets could be leveraged against him to the detriment of U.S. interests. Compromise can also occur if Americas head of state has so many pecuniary conflicts of interest and countervailing motives that he cannot be trusted to uphold his oath of office, conform to the norms of international diplomacy, or put the safety and security of the United States ahead of personal avarice or ambition.

The Atlantic has written that, federal statutes and the Constitutions impeachment clause aside, what Trump and his aides, advisers, allies, agents, and associates perpetrated in Ukraine in the presidents first three years in office is a conspiracy against American democracy. Fearing that the 2016 election was a fluke in which Trump prevailed only because of a successful Russian hacking and disinformation campaign and because of a last-minute intervention on Trumps behalf by the very national security state Trump defenders supposedly loathe, Trump and his advisers sought to rig the 2020 election by forcing a foreign country to implicate the thenDemocratic front-runner in a crime that did not take place. If the American people could not be trusted to choose Trump on their own, Trump would use his official powers to make the choice for them. It was, in short, a conspiracy by Trump and his advisers to keep themselves in power, the exact scenario for which the Framers of the Constitution devised the impeachment clause.5