The Unbearable Rightness of Seth Abramson
A secret follower of the much-reviled #resistance tweeter comes clean
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I have an embarrassing confession to make: I kind of like Seth Abramson.
Actually, no, not kind of. Fuck it. I like him.
I will no longer cower in shame. The college professor, former public defender (and Harvard Law ’01 alum), occasional HuffPost blogger, popularizer of a newish cultural philosophy known as “metamodernism,” published experimental poet, and self-described “horizontal journalist” or “curatorial journalist” counts me among his as-of-this-moment 548,264 Twitter followers.
For those who haven’t encountered his work, Abramson is what’s more commonly called a citizen journalist in that he writes about the Russia probe (which he would probably describe as a “Russia-Saudi Arabia-UAE-Qatar-Israel probe”) but is not connected with a major media institution.
Or he wasn’t, that is, until he landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster, to the deep annoyance of just about everyone I know in the business.
Not me. I’m fine with it. I got my hands on a review copy, and it turns out — contrary to early indications — not to be a collection of his tweets after all. Instead, Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America is a straightforward 400-plus page distillation of the available reporting on the subject to this point, culled almost entirely from published news articles and court filings, all boiling down to a simple if troubling contention: “Donald Trump and a core group of ten to twenty aides, associates and allies conspired with a hostile foreign power,” as Abramson put it, “to sell that power control over America’s foreign policy in exchange for financial reward and — eventually — covert election assistance.”
The evidence Abramson assembles is compelling, and we don’t know the half of it.
It is, as the author concedes, merely a “theory of the case” at this point. But it’s the only plausible theory, he adds, that “coordinates with all the existing evidence” and “explains decades of suspicious behavior by Donald Trump, his family, and his closest associates.”
