influence, and if the collusion is secret, the chances that one’s self-justification is personal rather than patriotic are high.
In the case of the Trump-Russia scandal—not just that segment of it investigated by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, but the full scope of the scandal as it has come to encompass other entities and crimes besides those directly connected to Russian election interference in 2016—there is conspiracy to be found in both the lay and legal senses. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, used an encrypted messaging app to conspire, throughout 2017 and 2018, with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in a way that altered permanently the geopolitics of the Middle East (see chapter 7); while these clandestine discussions were not in themselves illegal, they appear to have been coupled with the Trump campaign’s acceptance of donations from Saudi and other foreign nationals during the 2016 campaign (see chapters 3, 5, and 7). Just so, while the Red Sea Conspiracy hatched in 2015 was not, at its birth, an illegal act—foreign nationals are entitled to passively root for one U.S. political candidate over another, and to form geopolitical alliances based on shared policy agendas—it became so when it blossomed into a course of covert pre-election assistance that included, per reporting, collusive behavior in both the lay and legal senses. And to the extent that this collusion continues today in the form of President Trump’s historically idiosyncratic foreign policy in the Middle East—one that places the interests of the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, and even Russians ahead of those of Americans—it is criminal not because the president cannot form whatever foreign policy he wishes, but because he cannot form a foreign policy for which he has received compensation. Likewise, his agenda cannot induce continued crimes against America by foreign nationals or entities.
Just as I focused on two types of collusion in the prequel to this book, Proof of Collusion—both collusion in the lay sense and collusive behavior as we find it encoded in certain criminal statutes—in this book I consider both conspiratorial conduct of the geopolitical sort and also statutory conspiracies such as conspiracies to commit bribery or fraud, launder money, or obstruct justice.
Here, as in Proof of Collusion, I use the term “proof” in the sense it is commonly understood by laypeople: as evidence that helps establish the truth of a proposition. Proof exists, in a given situation, if there is evidence that helps establish something as true—whether or not the standard of proof required to reach a final conclusion is met. For instance, in a criminal prosecution, proof beyond a reasonable doubt is needed for conviction; in a counterintelligence investigation, proof by a preponderance of the evidence—or even less—may be sufficient cause to believe someone is acting under the influence of a foreign nation, and therefore is a potential national security threat. Used in this way, the term “proof” is equivalent to the legal phrase “probative evidence”: that is, evidence that tends to point toward the truth of a proposition, whether or not it conclusively establishes it.
The backdrop for the conspiracies and collusive behavior described in this book is a geopolitical landscape in the Middle East markedly different than it was just twenty years ago. Today, Israel and many of its Arab neighbors—including and most particularly the Sunni nations Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt—meet secretly on peaceful terms to share military technology and plot the destruction of their common enemy, Iran. Russia, a newly omnipresent superpower in Middle Eastern politics, is increasingly seen by many of these nations as a viable economic and even military partner, in some instances more so than the United States is. The once all-encompassing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while still on the minds of many in the Arab “street,” has faded from view among certain leaders in the capital cities of Riyadh, Doha, Cairo, Manama, and Abu Dhabi. Many of the region’s power brokers have come to believe that economic development and joint opposition to Iranian gambits in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere is more important to the future of the Middle East than the achievement of a hard-won two-state solution in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories—especially if pursuit of that ambition threatens a burgeoning Arab-Israeli alliance.
As fears about the continued viability of oil as a nation’s chief export grow, the two most influential nations in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, increasingly lust not just for the expansion of their present dominant role on the global oil market but