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

New York: Vintage Books [a Division on Penguin Random House], 2017. A Vintage Books Original [stated] First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good/No DJ issued. [6], 354 pages. Illustrations. Notes on Sources. Index. Ink marks noted. Luke Daniel Harding (born 21 April 1968) is a British journalist who is a foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He was based in Russia for The Guardian from 2007 until, returning from a stay in the UK on 5 February 2011, he was refused re-entry to Russia and deported the same day. The Guardian said his expulsion was linked with his critical articles on Russia, a claim denied by the Russian government. After the reversal of the decision on 9 February and the granting of a short-term visa, Harding chose not to seek a further visa extension. His 2011 book Mafia State discusses his experience in Russia and the political system under Vladimir Putin, which he describes as a mafia state. In November 2017, Harding published Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win on the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The book examines the dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, and alleges that Trump was the subject of at least five years of "cultivation" by Soviet/Russian intelligence services prior to his election. On 27 November 2018, Harding co-authored an anonymously sourced article for The Guardian claiming that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met several times at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2013, 2015, and 2016 possibly in relation to the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak. Manafort and Assange both denied that they had ever met. No other news organization was able to corroborate the story. 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. 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.