Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Luke Harding Narrated by Ralph Lister

Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ An explosive exposé that lays out the story behind the Steele Dossier, including Russia's decades-in-the-making political game to upend American democracy and the Trump administration's ties to Moscow.

“Harding...presents a powerful case for Russian interference, and Trump campaign collusion, by collecting years of reporting on Trump's connections to Russia and putting it all together in a coherent narrative.”*-The Nation

December 2016. Luke Harding, the Guardian reporter and former Moscow bureau chief, quietly meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele in a London pub to discuss President-elect Donald Trump's Russia connections. A month later, Steele's now-famous dossier sparks what may be the biggest scandal of the modern era. The names of the Americans involved are well-known-Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page-but here Harding also shines a light on powerful Russian figures like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have been coming from the highest echelons of the Kremlin.
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Drawing on new material and his expert understanding of Moscow and its players, Harding takes the reader through every bizarre and disquieting detail of the “Trump-Russia” story-an event so huge it involves international espionage, off-shore banks, sketchy real estate deals, the Miss Universe pageant, mobsters, money laundering, poisoned dissidents, computer hacking, and the most shocking election in American history.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/18/2017
Harding (The Snowden Files), former Moscow bureau chief for the Guardian, turns his investigative eye to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the case for Russian influence on its outcome. Exploring well-worn cable news talking points—including the notorious Steele dossier of Trump’s alleged links to Russia, Trump Tower meetings with politically connected Russians, the Russian ties of Trump associates such as his onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, and the firing of FBI Director James Comey—Harding adds depth and context to create a riveting, novelistic narrative. He uses his firsthand access to Steele dossier author Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, to build the credibility of this explosive, albeit unverified, report. Steele emerges here as a level-headed, scrupulous intelligence veteran. Harding supplements his reliance on the dossier, summed up here as claiming that “for at least the past five years Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump,” with a helpful synthesis of existing reporting from sources such as the New Yorker, Politico, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post. He also details a few instances of his own reporting, including an interview with real estate tycoon Aras Agalarov, a longtime Russian ally of Trump’s. The politically charged subject matter is bound to make Harding’s work divisive, but one point not in dispute is Harding’s ability to bring together diverse strands of a complicated story to make a book that is informative, accessible, and hard to put down. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

If you thought Michael Wolff’s book was dynamite, just wait till you read Luke Harding’s Collusion. Utterly damning. Devastating. Meticulously, scrupulously researched, leaves no room for doubt…. [A] detailed exposé of [the] dark world of spies, bribes, mega money-laundering, Russian mafia and Trump cronies. Like a non-fiction John Le Carré. Mesmerising.” —Richard Dawkins

“[Collusion] should be read by every conservative in this country.” —Glenn Beck

“Essential…I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it…. Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy…. There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and the precise nature of it, remains opaque…. [Collusion] is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

“Harding…presents a powerful case for Russian interference, and Trump campaign collusion, by collecting years of reporting on Trump’s connections to Russia and putting it all together in a coherent narrative. It’s the sheer breadth of connections, many of them dating back 20 years or more, between Trump and his associates and Russians with close ties to the Kremlin that put the lie to Trump’s repeated claims that he has no ties to Russia.” —The Nation

“A superb piece of work, wonderfully done and essential reading for anyone who cares for his country. Amazing research and brilliantly collated.” —John le Carré
 
“Damning indeed…. Harding is at his best connecting dots that may not always be obvious…. If readers emerge from this fast-paced narrative convinced that the Trump White House is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian oligarchs, then there’s good reason for it.” —Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2017-11-22
Guardian foreign correspondent Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, 2014, etc.) offers a sneak peek at details of the "Steele dossier" that have yet to unfold—and the evidence is damning indeed.Apart from his well-known work documenting Edward Snowden's exposé of American intelligence, the author has logged considerable time as a reporter inside Russia. It was there that he gained firsthand information about the ways of the Putin kleptocracy that lends credence to reports proffered by British intelligence analyst Christopher Steele, who in turn has extensively documented contacts with members of the team working with Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, many of them subsequently placed inside the administration. Harding makes no bones of characterizing this as collusion, as the title of his book proclaims, and the crime committed by that collusion as treason, even if "vehemently denied, contested, and in certain key respects unprovable." Some of those respects have since gained a broader airing with the arraignments of Paul Manafort and Carter Page, though many key players on the Russian side will be far from household names. Harding is at his best connecting dots that may not always be obvious, including Trump's long history of business dealings with Russia and alleged connections to organized crime ("Trump's links to the underworld were multifarious"), dealings that were often unsuccessful enough to force him into borrowing money from shady figures and cutting deals that may land him in prison before it's all over. Among the most intriguing of the threads are Trump's astoundingly checkered relations with a German banking giant that continued to lend him money even as the worst of credit risks—and that at the same time was laundering Russian money, "not small amounts but many billions of dollars." If readers emerge from this fast-paced narrative convinced that the Trump White House is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian oligarchs, then there's good reason for it.Collusion? The Trump administration, by Harding's account, is soaking in it. Stay tuned.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171790325
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/16/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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Prologue
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Collusion"
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Copyright © 2017 Luke Harding.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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