The Senate report is filled with such rich details, shedding new light on the wide cast of characters surrounding both Trump and Putin, and the end result is an engrossing tale of modern intelligence and of lust, avarice, squalid opportunism, and incompetence worthy of John le Carre'...It has brought the Trump-Russia story to life.
I don't think so, James. Actually, the Report reads as flat as generic people on yellow legal pad paper. Reader-response theory says we bring page texts to life, like GE and their goodness, but, geez, James, John le Carre'? And you don't even mention the Deep State.
The Report is broken up into two main sections, one that reports on Counterintelligence concerns, and the other that reviews Executive decisions that came to play in the scandal. In the first section we read about Paul Manafort, the Agalarovs, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Konstantin Kilimnik, and Trump's "kompramat" meeting with Miss Moscow, which was not as titillating as you'd expect from a le Carre' novel: Even Jimmy Carter's revelation that he had lust in his heart for other women cared enough about reader prurience to embed the article inside the slick pages of Playboy, where you can more readily empathize with his male gaze and tortured self-confession. The only other possible sexy bit in this "novel" coroner virus was reference to the funky debunked Christopher Steele dossier confabulation about Trump hiring two models to do a Reagan Democrat (see above) on a bed the Obamas supposedly slept in, during their visit to Moscow in 2009. False? No harm, no foul rule applies. Spy stuff? Nyet.
And individual portraits of important personages the Report conjures up are somewhat less than thriller material. In the pre-ramble, the Committee notes of Carter Page, for example, "The Committee found no evidence that Page made any substantive contribution to the Campaign or ever met Trump." Not exactly Reilly: Ace of Spies stuff. Hell, not even Harriet the Spy would follow this guy. And yet, and yet, the unvetted Steele dossier, implicating the guy with a Sylvester Stallone name, was enough to get the FBI a rubber stamp from the FISA court to Get Carter Page and go after the Trump campaign. That nasty fact -- detailed in the Horowitz Report -- is left out of this nailbiter report.
Bigger fish, such as Paul Manafort, are described in such matte-latte ways that you can't really get a grasp of his character. Declaratives seem to lack adverbs and adjectives that would bring him fully to life; he's like the Frankenstein before the Herr Doktor applied the juice to his sorry compound ass. Check out how the Report describes Manafort's doings with key player Konstantin Kilimnik:
At the outset of his work for the Ukrainian oligarchs and for Deripaska, Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik quickly became an integral part of Manafort's operations in Ukraine and Russia, serving as Manafort's primary liaison to Deripaska and eventually managing Manafort's office in Kyiv.
Ho-hum. I've had more fun falling to sleep by counting sheepish grins jumping over Trump's proposed Wall.
Compare the above to the portrait of Manafort offered up by Heather Cox Richardson, in "Paul Manafort in the Spotlight Again," who wants to paint a person rather than a meme character:
Quickly, Manafort began to look to foreign countries for his clients. He took advantage of the anti-communist focus of foreign policy after Reagan, cleaning up shady clients to look good enough to US lawmakers that they could get US dollars to shore up their political interests. Touting his connections to the Reagan and Bush administrations, Manafort racked up clients. He backed so many dictatorial governmentsNigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among othersthat a 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity called his firm "The Torturers' Lobby."
The Tortures' Lobby?! Now we got ourselves an international man of intrigue. C'mon, James.
Now, this Kilimnik fellow is, through Manafort, considered the main link to the Trump campaign. The Report avers, without much evidence, that Kilimnik was a Russian spy. Maybe, maybe not so much; hard to tell with descriptors so limited. But Trump did not know Manafort, who came to the campaign broke, broken and teary, and could only have been helpful as a potential backchannel to Putin, for his own private interests. Lots of elite Americans have those.
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