Trump on Trial

"Page-turning….riveting….colorful and detailed…a barometer of the health of our democracy." –Barbara McQuade, *The Washington Post*

“Well written ... The reporting is panoramic” —Joe Klein, The New York Times Book Review

“Sets a standard for political storytelling with impeccable research and lively writing.” –Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

Auteur

Kevin Sullivan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Washington Post and a bestselling author. His book, Trump on Trial, coauthored with his wife and Washington Post colleague Mary Jordan, features reporting from dozens of Washington Post journalists, and traces the investigation, acquittal, and aftermath of the impeachment of Donald Trump. The last book Sullivan and Jordan wrote was the #1 New York Times bestseller, Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland, the story of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who were kidnapped in Cleveland and held for a decade. They previously wrote The Prison Angel: Mother Antonia’s Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail. They were the Washington Post’s co-bureau chiefs in Tokyo, Mexico City, and London for fourteen years.

Texte du rabat

A compelling and masterful account, based on fresh reporting, of the investigation, impeachment, and acquittal of President Donald Trump.
 

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Prologue Prologue
March 6, 2019, Washington, DC, and Kyiv, Ukraine

Nancy Pelosi strode into her majestic office suite in the U.S. Capitol, her forehead marked with a prominent black smudge. It was Ash Wednesday, and the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives had received her ashes that morning from Father Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain.

“Father just came at me with a vengeance,” she joked to her waiting guest, Washington Post reporter Joe Heim, with a big laugh. “People have gotten their ashes off of my forehead today because it was just, like, dripping.”

It was a cold and gusty morning in Washington, which Heim could see through the speaker’s windows, with their stunning view of the National Mall. In her private office, the yellow walls covered with historic and family photographs gave the space a feel both commanding and comfortable. Four upholstered yellow wingback chairs flanked a fireplace. Her desk had no computer. The highest-ranking elected woman in American history still preferred face-to-face talks and phone calls to email. On display was a favorite gift—pink boxing gloves, monogrammed for the five-foot-two-inch fighter.

Heim was there to interview Pelosi for a Q&A to be published in The Washington Post Magazine. He didn’t cover Congress. He had never met Pelosi. But he had immersed himself in her biography, a mixture of privilege, promise and prowess: Her political lineage, a mini-dynasty, her father winning five terms in the U.S. House, her father and brother each serving as Baltimore’s mayor. Her family’s towering influence on that city, wielding its power from a red-brick house in Little Italy with portraits of FDR and Harry Truman on the wall. Her early real-life lessons as the youngest of six children, and the only girl. Her formal education at an all-girls Catholic school and then at all-women Trinity, a small Catholic college in Washington, just three miles north of the Capitol, where she watched President John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president, give his inaugural address on that frigid January day in 1961.

Then, coming into her own: Her move to San Francisco, where she raised five children. Her immersion in community issues while her husband built the family’s wealth through real estate and other investments. Her volunteer work for local Democrats, gradually establishing her own political base. Her 17 terms in Congress and her rise to the top of her party’s ranks. Her election as speaker of the House in 2007, the first woman ever in the powerful post. Her strategic finesse in beating back a challenge to her leadership after the Democrats recaptured the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Her second stint in the job, a resurrection of sorts. Her current difficulties in controlling her rowdy and diverse caucus.

Pelosi had also done her homework on Heim. She had learned he was a fellow Catholic who had spent five childhood years in Kenya, where his father had worked for Catholic Relief Services and his mother had been a State Department nurse. Heim was surprised by Pelosi’s preparation and attention to detail. “Tell me about growing up in Kenya!” she said, and then told him of taking her children to Kenya when they were young, going on a safari and a dig with famous anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey.

“I feel close to Kenya,” she said. “I found an ancient tooth there on an excavation.” She paused, adding dryly, “Not mine.”

Preliminaries done, rapport established, Heim eased into the interview. It started with a no-fireworks discussion about the country’s political divisions, standard fare. Pelosi was waiting. She had a message to convey, something she wanted to say explicitly, more explicitly and forcefully than she had ever said it before. She didn’t need to force an opening. She knew Heim would ask the question. He had to. Members of her own caucus were asking it, too. She couldn’t avoid it, so she might as well confront it, contain it, control it.

The Q&A format was perfect. She could guarantee the way her answers came out, without a media filter. She had a good phrase, she thought, a phrase that would stick, a phrase that CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all the other networks could reduce to one of their crawls at the bottom of the TV screen.

The moment came, more as a statement than a question, as she was making light of her combative relationship with Donald Trump. Heim said, “There have been increasing calls, including from some of your members, for impeachment of the president.”

Impeachment.

She pounced. Leaning forward in her chair, she said deliberately, so deliberately that Heim could tell it was planned: “I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.”

She pointed her index finger at Heim and, with an actor’s timing, slowed her delivery even more, making each word its own weighted sentence: “And. He’s. Just. Not. Worth. It.”

The day before, in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, nearly 5,000 miles away, U.S. ambassador Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch had given a strikingly direct speech about the country’s pernicious and persistent corruption, a subject that had become her specialty during more than 30 years in the State Department.

Danger isn’t always a part of a career diplomat’s biography, but it was central to Yovanovitch’s. She had been caught in crossfire during a violent showdown between Russia’s president and parliament, worked in an embassy in Uzbekistan sprayed with gunfire, served amid civil war in Somalia and heard the thud of falling artillery shells on the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia. She had managed to reach the age of 60 without getting hurt and without a blemish to her reputation.

The diplomat’s life suited Yovanovitch. She was good at it. That’s what her colleagues and her awards told her. Her name wasn’t well known…