Collusion

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

By: Luke Harding

Narrated by: Ralph Lister

Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

With the recent indictments of Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, and George Papadopoulos, Russia expert Luke Harding lays out the most in-depth look to date at the Trump campaign's dealings with Russia. Beginning with a meeting with Christopher Steele, the man behind the shattering dossier that first brought the allegations to light, Harding probes the histories of key Russian and American players with striking clarity and insight. In a thrilling, fast-paced narrative, Harding exposes the disquieting details of the Trump-Russia story - a saga so huge it involves international espionage, offshore banks, sketchy real estate deals, mobsters, money laundering, disappeared dissidents, computer hacking, and the most shocking election in American history.

©2017 Luke Harding (P)2017 Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group

excellent perspective

Impressive narrative of what we know so far about "Stupid Watergate". Harding does an amazing job of putting all of the details together in a highly readable and engrossing narrative. The narrator does an excellent job with his tone and pacing.

Very Timely

This book made me feel better about the state of the world. Proves collusion in my mind.

Absolutely astonishing

Every person needs to read this. Unequivocally. This is absolutely astonishing. Very well sourced and written as well.

#TrumpRussia

If this much is out there...Robert Mueller will not fail us and help us to win our democracy back.
I see the daily slide into authoritarianism and the true horrible state our country is in and we will be dealing with his regulation changes and filling of our judiciary with incompetent judges for a generation.

This book stays relevant

Got this book as soon as it came out. It is informative and is a book I go back to time and time again as the pieces of the puzzle come together. Not a one time read. I also really love the narration, Narrator has a great voice for this material.

well researched book with the excellent context

now have a better understanding of all the pieces in the game that don't make sense in isolation. the level of research and the admirable objectivity makes this a very good read.

Good summation, but gaps, patched with spin

This offering rolls up the whole narrative against Trump end to end, and is very timely in recent details (up to the first wave of special counsel indictments). I suppose a person who religiously read New York Times, Washington Post and maybe Guardian would know everything here (and probably agree with the tilt). In case the reader-listener does not know what should be thought about all this, the author is always an inch away with suggestions, not always explicitly flagged as such. (A post-script: the book opens with a breathless and uncritical promotion of Steele and his famous Trump-Russia Dossier, a big driver of this whole story in and out of the FBI and public discourse, and the veracity of which have since become hotly disputed.) In the journalistic manner, some straw person is summoned onstage (often not identified, or not clearly) to ask the pregnant question, the inference or supposition the slower mind ought to get, to hold up the cue card and make it quite plain. But as a first draft of history, plenty of this, I think, will hold up, while some of the guesswork will not be substantiated. An awful lot of the truth rests outside our jurisdiction, and doubtless a cottage industry will flood us with books over coming years claiming essentially anything the antic human mind could cook up, as with JFK, Watergate, et cetera. Ralph Lister as narrator is superb as always.
All the global intelligence-related books I've read lately have been useful, but require swimming upstream sentence by sentence through a tide of polemic spin. One has to wade through the ads, so to speak, to get to the meat of things, and all this is not always clearly labeled (though the title gives a pretty ringing clue). It is not too hard, and is worth the effort. There are plenty of facts here, names and dates and places and conversations, plenty to be concerned about, but for me, not a full closing of the sale, so to speak. We await Mr. Mueller, perhaps, for that. The take-away for me now is that Trump and entourage were very Russian-friendly, excessively, some corruptly so, some naively, they really were played, by some seriously crooked people, from a classic USA point of view of legitimacy. But over here, the constitutional-institutional-open system strength of the USA system has held, and the bad actors with whatever motives and to whatever degree have already been largely thwarted, for now. The campaign to hook our leaders up a little too cosily with deeply questionable Russians at high levels was blunted. Many offshore actors (and onshore) are still getting away with banking crimes and money laundering and so forth to a troubling degree, but this particular campaign, clever as it was fell flat. (That doesn't mean the psy-conflict in social media and so on will end -- it is only beginning. This was the first big salvo at the retail cultural level). Trump's friendliness to that general lot of people (and defense of them, and profiting from them, and the lack of public outrage at this) disturbs me, as does their seepage into this society generally, but he is the most self-defeating player I've seen. He's no Putin. I can't think of any medium, game or setting in which Putin wouldn't beat the tar out of him, blindfolded. It's a strange cross of ludicrous-dangerous, but for now I'm sleeping OK. This book, while it brought no big smoking gun I hadn't seen, did tie the story together quite well. Around the ninth hour through the end it really picks up and pulls things together.
Fun factoid: one prominent Russian financier in this book who bought a mansion from Trump at (some would say) an inflated price, was the recent seller of the Da Vinci painting for purportedly $400 million plus. Nothing dodgy there, right? Factually, I can't say . . . .

Excellent... It all makes sense now.

Have you listened to any of Ralph Lister’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Ralph Lister does an incredible job, probably one of the best performance I've heard on Audible.

Any additional comments?

This book explains so well the roles of all the players on Trump's election team and his White House staff had in connection with Russian's involvement/manipulation of the 2016 election and beyond. You see how the genesis of it all really goes back to the 1980s. Trump is a traitor, plain and simple. He's compromised. So obvious. This book is like listening to a spy/espionage novel. Ralph Lister's performance brings this book to life.

100% Accurate

Not only was this a detailed, well-sourced account of Trump-Russia collusion, it was incredibly entertaining & engaging.

well documented and presented.

The book was well presented with facts and supporting interviews. I liked it very much!