Unprecedented: A Simple Guide to the Crimes of the Trump Campaign and Presidency

Unprecedented: A Simple Guide to the Crimes of the Trump Campaign and Presidency is a non-fiction book by Sara Azari, released by Potomac Books in February 2020, that serves as a layman's guide to the crimes of the 2016 Trump campaign. In separate sections, it describes the criminal actions of each member of the campaign and administration convicted of a crime, gives a detailed description of the charge of Obstruction of Justice and breaks down the lengthy and complex Mueller report.
Synopsys
Azari wrote her book out of an abiding concern that "the criminal activity involving President Trump and those in his orbit would set a dangerous precedent for the future of our constitution, laws, and democracy." The 150 page volume is an easily accessible guide that simplifies the crimes of "Trumpworld". Azari describes her intent to dispel the myth that the Mueller investigation was a "hoax" or "with hunt", as well as to decrypt the numerous federal charges and allegations that comprise the Mueller report and subsequent investigations.
According to Azari, with the exception of Cohen's campaign finance law violations, the aids and associates of the President were all charged with criminal conduct leading to two conclusions; first to protect the President, there was a contemptible cover-up of a foreign adversary's assault on our election and thus our Democracy, and second no President has ever acted in such a self-serving manner, favoring his own interests over the country's and so blatantly abusing his powers. Although certainly critical of the President, Azari considers her work, "a fair and impartial analysis of the criminal and constitutional violations by President Trump and his aids as unveiled by the Mueller investigation". Azari further wrote that she considers her book a far more detailed, honest, and accurate accounting of the Mueller report than the one written by Attorney General William Barr, which she believed to be biased and written for the sole purpose of deceptively exonerating the President.
Showing her background as a skilled legal analyst, Azari gives specific dates, details, and instances when Trump's advisors broke the law, and where applicable, attempts to determine if they had the intent to break it. For example, she notes that on April 26, 2016, Papadopoulos met with Maltese scholar and diplomat Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud told Papadopoulos he could provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton that had come from Russian intelligence. At the time of this exchange of information, both parties knew Papadopoulos was working for the Trump campaign. To her credit, Azari then provided the additional important information that Papadopoulos lied about this contact to the FBI not once but twice, on both January 20, and February 16, 2017.
Michael Flynn
In her book's Chapter 2, which covered Michael Flynn, Trump's National Security Advisor and a foreign policy advisor during his campaign, Azari insightfully noted that "Flynn had already been under FBI scrutiny when he joined President Trump's transition team", in fact President Obama had informed him of this fact during the transition. Azari included that Flynn actively "contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain" Hillary Clinton's emails, despite the fact they were illegally hacked by individuals working for Russian intelligence. Showing Azari's preference for detail and completeness, she adds that Flynn specifically contacted Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen, among others to obtain the emails. Azari further notes that Flynn's action was an effort to obtain opposition information from a foreign adversary for the purpose of benefitting the Trump campaign.
Lifting sanctions
Even prior to Trump's inauguration in January 2017, on December 29, 2016, the Obama administration had sanctioned Russia for what American intelligence sources strongly concluded to be election interference. Despite the nature of the sanctions specifically stating concern about Russia's election interference, Flynn indicated to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak the following day in a taped conversation, that Trump would likely ease the sanctions once in office. Flynn's discussion of the possibility Trump would lift sanctions was a violation of the 1799 Logan Act which forbids anyone not holding public office from discussing matters of state with foreign agents, though the Logan Act has rarely ever been enforced and no legal charges were brought which involved this law. As Azari asserted, the FBI knew of this oversight as they had access to the taped call to Kislyak which discussed the lifting of sanctions, with the content of the phone call first announced by the Washington Post on January 12, 2017. Flynn lied both to the FBI about the nature of this discussion and to Vice-President Pence, and was therefore removed from office. To add more detail and completeness, Azari noted that Flynn "vehemently denied discussing the lifting of sanctions with Kislyak" during his meeting with the FBI on January 24, 1017, and that on the same day he again lied to the FBI concerning another statement he had made to Kislyak about Russia's vote on a UN resolution, when he denied having suggested Russia vote in a certain manner.
Setting up back-channel to Kremlin
As Azari also noted, only weeks after election day in a meeting with Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower, Flynn "discussed the possibility of setting up a backchannel between the Kremlin and the Trump team". Present at the meeting was a senior transition team member and Jared Kushner. This discussion led the FBI and investigators to suspect that the Trump team may have been planning to discuss issues with Russia that might be illegal and wanted a backchannel to diminish FBI oversight.
Most significantly, in his year long cooperation with Robert Mueller's federal prosecutors, Gates revealed that he had sent internal polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, via the encrypted app Whats App?, and then deleted the messages. A longtime business associate of Manafort, Kilimnik was believed to have strong ties to Russian intelligence. The plan, according to Gates, was for Kilimnik to share the data with contacts in the Ukraine and Russia, though Kilimnik predictably denies this version of the story.
Paul Manafort
In the background information for Chapter 4, Azari noted that Manafort had "helped a generation of Republicans reach the White House", usually through campaign work, but that in his later career, he "befriended despots and tried to make them more relatable to the Western World, lobbying efforts that in some cases led to further fighting and strife in war-torn countries." The despots he worked for included Manuel Noriega, and more significantly Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine, a President of the country whom he helped to elect in 2010 and who was clearly linked to Russian leadership and obtained bribes to further Russian involvement in Ukrainian affairs. Unlike several other authors who dealt with the Russia investigation, Azari noted that the search of Manafort's premises after his arrest turned up a single check from Yanukovych in the amount of seven million dollars for Manafort's work on Yanukovych's behalf. Of equal significance, Azari noted that Manafort had taken a meeting involving himself and campaign aid Rick Gates where both men passed on polling data for the 2016 battleground states to Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee of Yanukovych repeatedly linked to Russian intelligence.
Trump Tower meeting
As most authors writing about the Russia investigation noted, Azari included the fact that Donald Trump Junior and Manafort were present at the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian government-linked attorney set up to obtain "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton". But Azari added that around this time it was revealed that Russian hackers had illegally infiltrated the server of the Democratic National Committee, and that according to Rick Gates, Manafort "was excited" that the damaging emails of Hillary Clinton might potentially be released. Azari then provided with admirable detail that after Manafort was arrested on October 27, 2017, and his lodging was searched, he was charged with laundering more than 18 million dollars, which included 10 million from the Russian backed oligarch Derek Olipaska, and that he had likely converted this windfall to offshore money to buy "property, goods, and services". He was found guilty of failing to file proper financial disclosure forms, conspiracy to launder money, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, and making false or misleading FARA statements, as well as false statements to the FBI.
Cohen was unique among most of Trump's campaign staff convicted of crimes in never receiving a pardon from Trump, which Cohen claimed may partly have been a result of his publishing his book, Disloyal which spoke critically of Trump, and implicated him in other possible crimes including tax fraud, and insurance fraud. Cohen also claimed that his continued incarceration may have partly been an effort to prevent him from writing or publishing his book. If these claims are true, they partially enforce Azari's assertion that Trump may have used his pardoning power to reward those who most supported Trump, and were silent concerning crimes they were aware that Trump had committed. George Popadoupolis wrote a book that was highly critical of the investigation, but received a pardon, as did Michael Flynn who continued to support Trump's attempts to claim victory in the 2016 election, and had at one point supported a Fox news broadcast that was highly critical of the FBI investigation. Cohen's involvement with the building of a Trump Tower in Moscow was not a major focus, and his important claims that Trump's involvement extended through Trump's campaign and into his first weeks in office were not covered in detail. The later half of the chapter described and cited with detail the code numbers of the Federal laws that Cohen violated, but became somewhat monotonous compared to other sections of the book.
Roger Stone
In Chapter 6, Azari discusses crimes committed by Roger Stone, focusing primarily on Michael Cohen's testimony on February 27, 2019 that Stone knew "there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign" and knew the dump was coming from WikiLeaks. Stone was found to be lying about not having knowledge or possession of Clinton's emails, as he had specific contact with Julian Assange about his release of Clinton's emails, lying about contact with right wing media figure Jerome Corsi with whom he passed on messages to Assange, further lying about Corsi communicating with him about WikiLeaks, and particularly lying in his statement that he had never discussed his communications with Corsi with anyone involved in the Trump campaign. Corsi has been linked to various conspiracy theories, particularly Obama being born in Kenya, and his two books have been criticized for containing numerous innacuracies.
Witness tampering
As Azari also expertly included in Chapter 6, Stone further insulted Credico in emails and threatened him to obtain his silence from testifying, an act that was defined by Mueller as witness tampering. This was another instance where members of the Trump campaign, other than Donald Trump, participated in and helped to coordinate the release of information tied to Russia that may have influenced the election.
Trump's use of pardons
In Chapter 7, Azari claims that Trump has used his pardoning power in many cases to reflect, "his own self interests, political rivalries, and legal frustrations". As noted by Azari, most presidents have used the power to pardon individuals unconnected with their own crimes, who, after careful examination of their cases, appear to have received overly harsh penalties. This has traditionally been accomplished after careful consultation with the Justice Department, but Trump, according to Azari, does not use his pardoning power in this more traditional manner. Azari examines a range of individuals Trump has pardoned and shows how in many cases the pardons reflected his own self interest.
The Mueller report
In Chapter 8, Azari notes that the Mueller Report followed the key finding that the "Russian government interfered in the 2016 Presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." She also noted that this form of interference was usually carefully coordinated by Russians linked to the Kremlin. She explained that the inteference took two primary forms, first through Pro-Trump social media efforts that were specifically tied to the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm funded largely by Russian Oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhen who had clear ties to Vladimir Putin. The second form was through a studied hack and release program carried out by the Russian government to obtain primarily Clinton's missing emails, as a way to embarrass Clinton towards a defeat. Russia's military intelligence unit known as the GRU carried out the hack, stealing hundreds of thousands of documents relating to Clinton's campaign, the Democratic Congressional National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee. These efforts Azari classified as a form of coordination. She further noted that the Russian intelligence officers who carried out the hacks were charged with conspiracy to violate the federal computer intrusion statute.
Conspiracy by Trump campaign
Importantly, Azari noted that although the Mueller report found no specific evidence of conspiracy or coordination by the Trump campaign, Mueller "recognized the existence of additional evidence that may have been suppressed by the President's associates". Many of those interviewed to avoid self-incrimination invoked their rights according to the Fifth Amendment. Flynn, Cohen, Manafort, and Popadoupolis, all lied or provided incomplete information during some part of their testimony, thus providing some degree of obstruction. Deleted information or widely used encrypted communications may have further obstructed additional information. To her credit, Azari then noted that "while the unavailable communications may not be relevant to conspiracy, or coordination with Russia, they also carry the potential of obtaining incriminating information that could in fact prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt". She then concluded, "we may never know".
Critical reviews
David Luhrssen, writing for Shepherd Express, believed Azari summed up the Mueller report accurately using the following language, "Putin’s regime systematically interfered in the 2016 election, sowed social unrest through social media and hacked Democratic accounts to damage Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to prove that Trump conspired with the Russians, but collusion—falling short of a crime—between his minions and the Kremlin is as conclusive as Trump’s campaign to obstruct justice."
Kirkus Reviews concluded that best portion of the book is its coverage of the acts of obstruction allegedly committed by the President. The review notes that Azari "examines Trump's attempts to stop, limit, and redirect the Mueller investigation; fire the special counsel; enlist others to create false evidence about his own conduct; and prevent and dissuade witnesses from cooperating in investigations into him and his campaign." It further notes that Azari details nine specific instances of obstruction, and provides considerable detail in explaining how Mueller expertly provided sufficient detail to make each instance fully comply with the legal definition of obstruction.
In their brief review, Project Muse notes that Azari looks carefully at the consequences of each of Trump's acts relating to the Russia investigation, and strongly considers "whether the president of the United States is ever above the law." Though the review deems the book, "an essential nonpartisan guide", Azari's comments indicate she fully takes the side of the FBI investigators, particularly in evaluating the obstructive acts committed by the President, which she believes to be substantive, and closely bordering on criminality if not technically criminal by Mueller's standard. Project Muse clearly broadcasts their own stand when they write " the United States finds itself led by the most corrupt administration in modern American history".

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