High crimes The corruption, impunity, and impeachment of Donald Trump

Michael D'Antonio

Book - 2020

"Two award-winning 'journalists' offer the most comprehensive inside story behind our most significant modern political drama: the House impeachment of Donald Trump. Having spent a year essentially embedded inside several House committees, Michael D'Antonio and Peter Eisner draw on many sources, including key House leaders, to expose the politicking, playcalling, and strategies debated backstage and to explain the Democrats' successes and apparent public failures during the show itself. High Crimes opens with crazy Nancy Pelosi deciding the House should take up impeachment, then, in part one, leaps back to explain what Ukraine was really all about: not just Joe Biden and election interference, but a money grab and o...il. Where's Hunter? In the second part, the authors recount key meetings throughout the run up to the impeachment hearings, including many of the heated confrontations between the Trump administration and House Democrats. And the third part takes readers behind the scenes of those hearings, showing why certain things happened the way they did for reasons that never came up in public. In the end, having illuminated every step of impeachment, from the schemes that led Giuliani to the Ukraine in 2016 to Fiona Hill's rebuking the Republicans' conspiracy theories/facts, High Crimes promises to be Trump's Final Days"--

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group 2020.
Language
English
Main Author
Michael D'Antonio (author)
Other Authors
Peter Eisner (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 436 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [366]-426) and index.
ISBN
9781250766670
  • Introduction
  • Part one: The call. International man of mystery ; Worlds collide ; Why not get along with Russia? ; Alternative facts and dezinformatsiya ; Forrest Gumps of the GOP ; Men on a (secret) mission ; Ambassadors, oligarchs, and mental midgets ; The three amigos ; The drug deal ; Sho? ; The whistleblower
  • Part two: Mueller and his report. Waiting for Mueller ; Enter William Barr ; Robert Mueller reporting ;\ "[Not] full exoneration" ; "You lied, and now we know" ; Conflict escalation ; Self-impeachment ; Barr's predicate ; A partisan thing ; Mueller in the House
  • Part three: High crimes. A profile in arrogance ; Witch hunt garbage ; "Pray for the President" ; The pizza protest ; Angels ; Open hearings ; Scholars in Washington ; House rules ; Impeachment day ; The waiting game ; The real articles
  • Epilogue: This is what autocracy looks like.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A swiftly paced history of the events surrounding the Mueller report and its aftermath. Donald Trump likes nothing better than to double down: First, he solicited Russian help in gaining office, then tried to extort Ukraine to assist his second run by withholding military aid. The result was impeachment. Write award-winning journalists and longtime Trump watchers D'Antonio and Eisner, given "Trump's extraordinary need to create a fantasy self who occupies the center of a fantastical story that he demands that others accept" and seeming belief that he is above the law, impeachment was the only option. The authors provide a comprehensive account of the process of impeachment, support for it steadily growing as more evidence was revealed--and that accelerated with such events as Trump's sacking of the ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was dedicated to the cause of battling corruption. "Take her out," Trump ordered, which "sounded like something a movie mob boss might say." In this account, like in countless others, Trump emerges as an inveterate liar and bush-league gangster, if one ever quick with a lame excuse: Mueller had it in for him, Trump complained, "because of a long-ago dispute over a charge at a Trump golf course"; of course, the charges against him were all witch hunt and hoax. His incompetence, they add, would be underscored by his handling of the pandemic. That the impeachment charges were narrow and specific meant that many impeachable offenses did not enter into discussion, such as committing perjury under oath and illegally diverting funds to build the border wall; omission of these "high crimes and misdemeanors" may well have been a strategic error that doomed the enterprise. The end of their account deems the impeachment, though seemingly forgotten a year later, "the inevitable product of the dangerous experiment begun when a demagogue who had made corruption and impunity part of his public identity gained the presidency." A readable and maddening account of the ongoing constitutional crisis that is the Trump White House. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.