Welcome to Book Readers Heaven! Find Books, Reviews, Short Stories, Authors, Publicity, a little poetry, music to complement...and other stuff including politics, about life... "Books, Cats: Life is Sweet..."
Epigraph. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death. —Revelations 21:8
Graffiti sprayed on the concrete walk in front of the convenience store halted Cash in his tracks. Red block letters screamed, “Go back to India, you brown bastard.” Cash shook his head and pulled the door open. Inside, he approached the distraught station owner. “Who decorated your sidewalk, Avi?” From behind the counter, Avi Rao blinked as if awakening from a trance. “Probably the same asshole who blew up my station.” “Do you know something I don’t?” “Just a guess.” “Maybe the surveillance footage would show us.” He shook his head. “I’ve got cameras trained on the pumps and here inside the store but nothing outside the door.” “Are any of the cameras inside pointed toward the door? It’s made of glass.” “Yes, but all it shows is some guy wearing a hoodie. He kept his back to the camera the whole time.” “Let’s take a look.” “Sure. Let’s go in the back.” Cash couldn’t blame Avi for looking shell-shocked. He had purchased the station only six months ago and now a significant portion of it lay in ruins. Cash still recalled the excitement on Avi’s face the first time he had seen him behind the counter. He had saved for years to buy the place and move his family from Houston to pursue the American dream. Since then, he had become active in the Chamber of Commerce and the local Kiwanis Club. He sponsored a Little League team, donated generously to the high school football team’s fundraiser, and decorated his antique Ford Mustang to showcase it in the annual rodeo parade. In short, Avi had made himself a part of the community. He loved Pinyon, and in return the people of Pinyon loved him. Most of them, anyway, the ones who didn’t spray graffiti. But in Cash’s experience, there were jerks in every community.
As Cash followed Avi into the back office, he said, “Insurance will cover the damage, right” “Yes, but I’ll be out of business for a while. Even when I reopen, I’ll be short two pumps.” “People will still need gas. They’ll use the pumps that do work.” “I suppose.” His voice betrayed disbelief. “But even a small drop in business will hurt. The profit margin of a gas station is thin.” They reached the office. Avi flipped a laptop open and tapped on the keyboard. The screen displayed a grid of images of the outside pumps seen from different overhead angles. When he clicked on one, it enlarged to fill the screen. “It happened around two-thirty. I was filling the soft drink cooler. Thank goodness no one else was outside.” “Was there anyone else in the store?” “Yes, a man on his phone. He left pretty quick.” “Did you know him?” “No.” They each settled into a chair. Avi tapped the keyboard a few more times. “Okay, we should see it soon.” They watched as the Chevy Silverado pulled into the station. The driver, whom Cash recognized as the dead man, got out and knelt beside a pump. “What’s he doing?” said Cash. “I can’t tell.” The driver inserted the nozzle into the gas tank. Cash said, “He’s getting diesel. Took him long enough.” They watched some more. “And look how he’s checking those tires. He’s moving slower than molasses.” As the screen showed the man entering the store, Cash said, “The name on his license is Ralph Spencer. Do you know him?” “No. I’ve seen him a few times, but he doesn’t talk much. Just buys cigarettes, maybe a lottery ticket, and goes on his way.” “Okay, here we go,” said Cash as Spencer returned to the truck. He replaced the nozzle, closed the gas cap, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. A blinding flash lit up the screen. Cash winced. It reminded him of explosions in Afghanistan. “It’s when he lit his cigarette,” Avi said. “That’s strange.” “It’s strange that gas fumes explode?” “He was on the other side of the truck. Away from the pumps. Sure, you shouldn’t smoke when you’re pumping gas, but I see people do it all the time. None of them ever blew up. And this man was getting diesel, which isn’t very combustible.” “Show me the guy in the store.” Avi clicked the mouse and an inside view of the store popped onto the screen. “That’s him.” The man was large, with short black hair, and dressed in jeans and a denim work shirt. His back was turned to the camera as he held a phone to his ear. “Is there audio?” “No.” “Too bad.” The man took the phone from his ear and appeared to look at it. His head swiveled to give him a view outside. Moments later, several items fell from the shelves. “That’s when the truck blew up,” Avi said. “He doesn’t look very surprised.” The man turned around so Cash could see his face. He was in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven with the tanned skin of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. “And you don’t know him?” “No.” Cash turned to leave. “Where are you going?” Avi asked. “I’m gonna go take another look at that truck.” Frida was finishing up her examination of the body as Cash returned. “Do you have a tow truck coming?” he asked. “Why would I need a tow truck?” “To take it back to the station. Don’t you need to examine it more?” “It looks like an accident to me.” “He was pumping diesel. Avi says that’s not very combustible.” “Not combustible and not very combustible are two different things.” “Hang on a second.” Cash walked to the rear of the truck. He dropped to his back and pulled himself beneath the vehicle. The chemical stench of burned rubber, metal, and plastic overpowered him, making him momentarily lightheaded. Fighting off the assault on his nostrils in the cramped space, he eyed what remained of the gas tank. A fill pipe coursed down from above to enter the tank, but what was that next to it? Another, thinner pipe dangled from the undercarriage. When Cash shook it, the pipe rattled against the tank’s side. He slid a finger toward it and found a hole in the tank the same size as the diameter of the pipe. Cash extricated himself from beneath the truck and stood up. “What did you see?” Frida asked. Without answering, Cash hopped into the truck bed and poked among the rubble. “Look here.” Frida peered into the bed. “See this melted plastic? I think it was a water storage tank.” “So?” Peering behind the misshapen plastic mass, Cash saw a pipe poking up through the truck bed. “So, it could have been used to hold something other than water. I think he was stealing gas.” He jumped out of the truck. “You need to take this back to the station and really search it.” “What am I looking for?” “Some type of electronic device. Probably in the cab, if it wasn’t completely destroyed in the fire. Hang on, I’ll take a look.” Cash walked to the passenger door and yanked it open. With Frida peering over his shoulder, he spotted an amorphous lump on the floor stuck to a small square of charred plywood, from which four blackened bolts protruded. Pointing at it, he said, “I think that’s it.” “Educate me. How did he use that to steal gas?” “It was capable of disabling the flow meter so it looks like he got, say twenty gallons, when in fact he filled up the auxiliary tank in the truck bed.” “Great idea. Unless it leaks fumes. And he’s dumb enough to smoke while pumping the gas.” “Maybe.” “The stupid son of a bitch blew himself sky high.” “I’m still bothered by the fact that Avi says diesel isn’t very explosive.” “I think we’re looking at evidence that says otherwise.” The pieces weren’t adding up for him. “I guess.” Another thought came to him. “When I check the credit card number he used to pay, I’ll bet I’ll find out it was stolen.” “This guy had it all worked out.” “He could have been working with someone else. Maybe that’s who killed him.” “Sounds like you’ve got an investigation on your hands, Deputy.” Cash felt his heart rate kick up a notch. “Indeed, I do.”
~~~~
Kerr's Texas roots inject real-world authenticity into his gripping stories, keeping his readers up way past their bedtimes.
I thought I would quote the above sentence as part of my review... You see, there were so many issues that were included in this book, that I felt like I was counting off criminal activities now taking place in the U.S. The book starts out with prejudice against immigrants--legal ones who have become a part of the community as are many now being harassed. Hate is a worthless emotion that should have no place in a supposed "Christian" nation... But, when religion is used for criminal reasons, which this book indeed includes, somehow violence is deemed acceptable...for "God's" sake...
“What happened to all that holier-than-thou crap? I thought you guys were members of the God squad.”
Then we have the usual criminals, out for making money the easiest way possible for little physical labor, of course... Normally accompanied with drug use/sales... And then there is the white supremacy activities when the election of an incumbent by the name of Santos is being hooked up against a rich white dude with too much "good ole boy actions" to make him honest...
“Are you working hard or hardly working?” Santos forced a weak chuckle at the lame joke. “It isn’t work when you like doing it.” Virgil Hall, president of the Pinyon Rotary Club, slapped Santos on the shoulder and let loose a genuine laugh. “That’s the spirit I like to see in a man.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “We’re having chicken fried steak today. Mashed potatoes and cream gravy. Although I can do without the gravy. I like ketchup on mine.” Unable to think of a response, Santos nodded and smiled. He wished Hall, a short, stocky man with thinning hair and ruddy cheeks that looked like ripe tomatoes, would stop yakking and start the meeting. Making small talk with the man was taxing his patience. He had already listened to an endless story about a happy customer at Hall’s tire store. Hall leaned in again and Santos braced himself. The club president had a habit of thrusting his head forward with each sentence as if he were about to reveal a juicy secret. “How’s your new deputy playing out?” “Do you mean Cash?” “Yeah. You know, I knew his daddy. We didn’t always see eye to eye but he was all right.” “Cash is doing great. He’s a good man.” “I heard you’re hiring another deputy too.” Santos blinked in surprise. He hadn’t told anyone but Cash and Fred Uecker. Cash would keep the news to himself, so Uecker must have blabbed. He should have known the county commissioner couldn’t keep that to himself. “Yes, her name is Keisha Hodge.” Hall drew back in feigned surprise. “A woman deputy. Well, I’ll be dogged. Noble County is going woke.” Santos kept his mouth shut. He had expected such a reaction from at least a few folks in town. “Keisha, huh?” Hall went on, a puzzled look on his face. “That’s an unusual name. Is that Russian?” “No, sir. She’s Black.” Hall leaned in again. “She is, is she? Do you think the people of Noble County are ready for that?” Heat rose up Santos’ neck. Some people had asked that same question about his hiring. “If they’re not, they better get ready, because she starts next week.” Hall clicked his tongue and gestured toward a table. “Why don’t you take your place, Sheriff? The meeting’s about to start.” Santos’ anger at Hall had the fortunate effect of pushing his anxiety over today’s gathering to the back of his mind. He spotted Edie James at the back of the room chatting with two men. He had asked her only this morning about being his campaign manager and was relieved when she said yes. The meeting was being held in the private dining room at the Firewheel Café. Although he dined at the Firewheel regularly, Santos recognized few faces in the room. There was Jeanine, manager of the credit union, and Frida Simmons, the county medical examiner. One-time Houston Oiler and current antique shop owner Will Anson was sitting in the front row. Beyond that, Santos drew a blank. Hall stepped to the lectern and rang a bell to start the meeting. He read through a list of announcements before leading the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. As he started to recite the Rotary Club’s Four-Way Test, loud laughter interrupted him from just outside the door.
Moments later, three men strode in. Two of them were strangers to Santos, but the third man’s face was well-known to him from the campaign posters already showing up around town. Mitch Eaton. Eaton caught Hall’s eye and waved. “Howdy, there, Virgil. I hope we’re not too late for the meeting.” Hall spread his hands in a gesture of welcome. “Not at all, gentlemen. We were just getting started.” Eaton took his time finding a seat, stopping along the way to shake hands and greet people. Watching him, Santos’ stomach sank. The man was a natural politician. What chance did he have against someone like that? Once Eaton finished with his glad-handing, Hall got through the rest of the club’s business and introduced Santos. “I’m sure y’all know him by now,” he said, “so I don’t have to say much about him. What you might not know is that he’s running for sheriff.” A hand went up. “Isn’t he already sheriff?” “Yeah, but then Mitch pointed out to the commissioners the rule about calling a special election if there’s an opening with this much time to go in the term of office.” Hall caught Eaton’s eye and grinned. “Pretty sneaky, Mitch.” Everyone laughed. Santos swore under his breath. So the election was Eaton’s doing. Hall rapped his gavel. “All right, everybody, let’s give a warm Rotary welcome to Acting Sheriff Santos.” As Santos stepped to the podium, he decided to throw out his prepared speech and speak off the cuff. Everybody was fawning over Eaton as if he was predestined to win? So be it. Santos would go down swinging.
~~~~
Adam Cash--normally just called Cash--is a character that makes this series comes alive. You know what I mean, don't you? Even as a deputy, he runs cases like he sees that they should be run, normally based upon sound gut feelings, or based upon hypothetical options that's been explored in his mind based upon investigation results.
A new deputy has just been hired by the unit. Keisha Hodge has more experience and training, but she has come back home to be with her grandmother. The entire team has accepted her... But soon the heckling started when calls started coming in talking about two non-whites now being in the department that needed to be replaced... Keisha is a fantastic addition to the series in my opinion. She's not only got the experience, but has the physical attributes that makes her easily able to handle herself in any situation. In fact, I enjoyed the author throwing in basketball games between her and Cash...with Keisha winning all games! Cash's respect for her easily was improved after a couple of games... LOL
And let us not forget the entrance of religion into the political arena as a group of individuals have moved into town and immediately trouble started, beginning with a man's truck being blown while he was stealing gasoline... But upon investigating, it was determined that there had also been a bomb placed under the vehicle... Later, a similar activity occurred with Cash's new truck... Now it was personal! Cash would take off, head into another state to discover who these new people were, for instance... Always after the fact letting Santos know what he's learned... Until, finally, Santos had heard enough to accept that the scenario presented by Cash was indeed a sound concept...
Now all they had to do is prove it... And the main clue was...gold coins... Folks, there were so many related issues that we are all now facing, that it was hard to not see the correlation as I read... Fortunately, Kerr had totally created a fantastic story, even if pointing out the primary criminal actions now happening in the United States. I found it the best fiction novel that pointed out the criminal actions, while creating a method by which a story flows easily, with appropriate investigations being done that actually resulted in finding and punishing the criminals... Something now yet achieved for the majority of issues the United States is now dealing with...
If I didn't already have a major TBR list, I'd be reading this entire series--it's that good!
“Hi. I don’t mind. Honestly, it’s rare to meet someone who actually reads more than a page before getting distracted.” “Guilty of staying up way too late reading. Once a book hooks me, I can’t put it down.” I smiled at the screen, my fingers moving before I thought too hard. “Same. I tell myself “just one more chapter,” and suddenly the sun’s coming up.”
“So, you have obviously mentioned you’re from India, tell me more about India.” “Yes, I’m from Mumbai, but I’ve been in the States for a little over four years, first to do my bachelors and then to finish my master’s degree. That’s why I was in Chicago.” He replied. “Ok I see, it seems you are familiarized with american culture… Maybe you can teach me some Hindi? I mean if that’s ok? Not sure if that’s offensive?” “Yes, even before moving to the states, I watched many American TV shows, films, and obviously books by American authors… Not offensive at all, I’m very proud of my culture” Soon, our chats became a part of my days. At first, it was just short, casual messages, but within weeks, we were writing paragraphs. About the music that shaped us. The books that stayed with us. Even little things, like how I preferred the quiet of late nights and he loved the way mornings felt before the world was fully awake. Our conversation had drifted easily, like an old jazz record playing softly in the background, smooth, unexpected, and impossible to stop. "I didn’t realize how late it was," I said. Glancing at the clock in the corner of my laptop screen. 12:03 a.m. It blinked at me like it knew something I didn’t. "Guess that’s a good sign. Either we talk too much or time’s just playing tricks on us." "Or both." "What were we even talking about just now?" "Books, You were ranting about how On the Road is overrated." "Because it is!" he continued with a second long text “Kerouac was romanticizing being broke and irresponsible like it was a lifestyle choice.” I raised an eyebrow reading his message. "So you’re telling me if someone handed you a map and a full tank of gas, you wouldn’t go?" It took him a while to reply. "Okay, maybe I'll go. But I’d bring snacks and a charger. You know, the modern version of being spontaneous." I laughed texting back. "Spontaneity with Wi-Fi. Revolutionary." His sarcasm kept our conversations. “I do want to see it, though. All of it. The desert, the redwoods, diners in the middle of nowhere… places where no one knows your name but they still pour your coffee like you’ve been coming there for years. There is this place though it's been on the top of my list since before moving to Colorado. Four corners. Have you heard of it?” "Oh interesting I haven’t, what's there? I questioned back. Although I had never heard his voice, I would imagine it through our texts, it felt as if he was there in the room with me. "It’s where the four corners of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico meet. I keep saying I will go once I have the time. Then, once I figured out who I was going with. I guess I just never went." "Maybe you don’t need a reason, maybe you just need to go." He was quiet for a beat. "You’d come with me?" I blinked, surprised. "What, to four corners?" "To anywhere," he said "Just… hypothetically. If I rented a beat-up car and played terrible playlists, would you sit in the passenger seat?" I bit my lip, smiling. "Only if I get to DJ at least half the time." "Deal" he texted back
immediately. "But only if you don’t skip bollywood songs" "That's a non-negotiable, You’re safe there." In my head I could imagine, like we were sitting next to each other on a porch swing somewhere, not separated by miles and glowing screens. "You think it’s weird," he asked after a moment, "how we never run out of things to say?" "No, I think it’s rare." And in that quiet night, just past midnight, I realized something else too: rare things aren’t meant to be ignored. They’re meant to be followed, even if it means going a little off map. “Nice talking to you pyaari, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” “Pyaari?” “It means “dear” in Hindi, it’s how we refer to our friends or close ones” “Oh okay, good night.” I felt butterflies as I texted back. “Good night.”
~~~~
“So, if you had to choose, books or music?” “That’s cruel. Books feed my mind. Music feeds my heart. I need both.” “Good answer. If you had chosen one, I would’ve known you were lying.” I laughed to myself, shaking my head at my phone.
I must admit that I chose this book because of the title and book cover. I'll never get to see this building, but it has always been on the top of my list of places I would like to have visited... It is indeed a fascinating structure that is well deserved as one of the 8 Wonders of the World!
Meeting online can become a problem, of course. For Kyra she was delighted to have somebody asking her to connect that actually had substantive information on his profile--poetry, mentions of books/literature. She of course accepted! Everything was going fine, they became friends immediately because of these common interests and were soon talking almost daily. Until Kishan discovered that she was only 16 and immediately pulled back because of the age difference.
Still, they had developed such a close connection that later they reconnected and began a closer relationship. I must admit that I was hoping for this to continue, given my common interests in books and music myself, LOL... But, along comes a big problem. Kishan's mother saw the close connection and explained to Kishan that she would not accept his marrying outside of their culture. He had to choose...
There went my chance to see the Taj Mahal through their eyes... LOL Because, the author quickly moved on from First Love...to...another... which actually became the major portion of the book. Other than my thinking that the title could have been better chosen, I was surprised when she promised to find her First Love in the afterlife and continue on... Ah, first love, unfortunately, is replaced when you're still at an early life...
For the remainder of the book takes place, having nothing to do with India, disappointingly for me...
“Hi Kyra, would it be ok to call you? I would like to hear you translate this new Spanish song.” The Despacito trending song was the first he had asked me to translate. I agreed with hesitation. I saw my phone ring, I was nervous. “Hi Kyra.”
Not meant to be
but meant to meet
I was just a girl
with stars in my eyes,
You were the boy
from another life.
We ran hand in hand,
chasing the rainbow’s light,
Two worlds apart,
but together that night.
Up on Lookout Mountain,
snow in the trees,
Your jacket on my shoulders,
the cold on the breeze.
The sky turned saffron,
then crimson and gold,
Like Diwali flames
in the stories you told.
You were my Indian summer
In the heart of winter’s freeze,
Like silk sarees
in the moonlight
Dancing in the midnight breeze.
We weren’t meant
to be forever,
But we were meant to meet,
Now you’re just a memory
That still smiles inside of me.
You spoke of your home
half a world away,
Sacred temples
and kites in the warm Bombay bay.
I told you my dreams,
you told me your fate,
We knew from the start
we could never stay.
You were my Indian summer
In the heart of winter’s freeze,
Like silk sarees
in the moonlight
Dancing in the midnight breeze.
We weren’t meant to be forever,
But we were meant to meet,
Now you’re just a memory
That still smiles inside of me.
Not every love is meant to stay,
Some are lanterns that light the way.
And I’ll keep that light, quietly,
Like you still keep a piece of me.
~
On the other hand, Dirmilli takes Kira into another world where she is not only able to share much more with her new friend, but has a rich and full life, with a child... And begins an entirely different life...
Tom hung on every word, like he was reading the final chapter of a suspense novel. “Did you see her after that?”
Barely audible Kevin sang the second verse of “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys while drumming along on the steering wheel. His eyes remained focused on the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. After a few minutes, the door to the Colorado State Patrol car opened, and the trooper started approaching his vehicle. Kevin ejected the cassette, then rolled down the window. Leaning back, he waited patiently. The trooper shined a flashlight in Kevin’s face for a couple seconds, then aimed it at the passenger seat, then the backseat, then back to Kevin. “Where are you heading?” “Home. I just got off work,” Kevin said. “Where’s home?” “Off Highway 9 south of Kremmling.” “Have you had anything to drink tonight?” “No sir, I never touch the stuff.” “Good for you. Can I get your license, insurance, and registration?” “Yes sir.” Kevin removed his license from his wallet, then rummaged through documents and maps in the glovebox until he found his insurance and registration. He handed them to the trooper. “Please sit tight for a few minutes.” Kevin watched the man walk back to his patrol car in the rearview mirror. “You are doing so good,” Kevin whispered. “And if you stay quiet, I won’t make this any worse than it has to be.” He started humming the melody of “Good Vibrations”, watching cars drive by, oblivious to the situation. Ten minutes later, the officer returned. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” “I don’t.” “Your passenger-side taillight is out.” “Really? I had no idea,” Kevin said, turning back to look. “I’m going to let you off with a warning tonight, but if I see you again and that light isn’t fixed, I’ll have to issue you a ticket.” “Thank you very much, and I’ll get it fixed first thing tomorrow.” “Have a good night and drive safe,” the trooper said as he walked away. “You as well. God bless.” Kevin rolled up the window and watched the patrol car drive toward the horizon and out of sight. When he was confident it was gone, he stepped out of the car and made his way back to the trunk. He delicately slid his hand across the metal. “You were so good,” Kevin whispered. He slid the key into the lock and turned it. The trunk popped open, and he stared down at the girl, who lay motionless on the carpet. Terror was seared into her eyes. Her hands and feet were bound with zip ties, and her mouth was covered with duct tape. Kevin put his hand on hers, and she squirmed. “Nothing to worry about, sweetie, it’s only me,” he said while caressing her soft hair. The girl tried to yell, but it was muffled. Her eyes were bulging. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but it’s just me and you. No one can help you now. No one.” Kevin leaned into the trunk and hovered over her. “I promise you, this will all be over soon.” He slammed the trunk, got back in the car, put it in drive, and pulled onto Highway 40.
Kevin Strand was Colorado’s second most notorious serial killer only behind Ted Bundy. Six confirmed victims, and some speculated the number could have been closer to twelve or fifteen. All the victims were abducted in Grand County, mutilated, burned in a steel drum, then scattered on his four-acre property outside of Kremmling. Almost two dozen forensic scientists and members of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation had spent ten days searching the property, and the largest human remains they found was the left foot of his first victim, Diane Moore...
The room was too Agatha Christie for my taste. Who-done-its aren’t really about murder. They are about the cleverness of detectives, not something I was interested in thinking about at the moment.
It makes me regret I never left this bourgeois republic for the eminently more civilized country of France. Oh, well. Que sera sera, as Doris Day sang.--Real Estate Killer
MURDERS UNDER THE SUN SEASON ONE;
INTRO MOLLY: Welcome to Murders Under the Sun, a podcast that explores a series of unusual crimes that have occurred in sunny Southern California. I’m Molly Shure, your host.
For the past five years I’ve worked as a journalist at a local news outlet. Stories of murder and mayhem come across my desk weekly, if not daily. However, one day last March, I noticed something startling. There seemed to be a connection between several crimes that transpired over a five year period—seven crimes to be precise. What connected them? Location for one. They all took place within a twenty-mile radius of each other, but that alone wasn’t significant. The thing that pinged in my brain was that many of the people at the center of these crimes knew each other. Not the criminals, which would be an obvious thread, but the victims.
I know, I know, six degrees of separation. Didn’t I already say the crimes took place in a twenty-mile radius? But we’re not talking six degrees here. It’s more like one degree. You’ll see if you stick with me for all seven seasons of the show, the crimes circle back around. The people you meet in the first season play a role in Season Seven’s story. Am I imagining things? Is the connection real? Is there one mastermind behind the crimes? Or are they linked by some kind of social, psychological or even spiritual force? I’m afraid that’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Each season, I’ll do a deep dive into just one of these stories. You’ll hear from the people who were victimized, and listen to transcripts of journal entries, memoirs, and letters from others who were involved—sometimes the criminals themselves—and behind-the-scenes information you can’t get anywhere else.
So, get out your sunglasses. We’re pulling back the curtains and letting the light shine on some of Orange County’s darkest mysteries.
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 68, 1788
THE SHIELD
Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks… the steady administration of the laws… the protection of property… [and] the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. —ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 70, 1788
PART I March 28, 2019
The large wooden desk had seen thousands of moments like this, moments of decision. It had been in the Oval Office for more than a hundred years, a gift from Britain to the United States fashioned from the timbers of an abandoned naval vessel, the HMS Resolute. The desk was a national stage for presidents to pronounce formidable words, a platform for celebrating triumphs, and in certain tumultuous periods, a graveyard of bad decisions. Seated behind the iconic helm of American power, Trump weighed his options. He squinted his eyes as a bevy of advisors took turns speaking about the issue at hand. On the Resolute desk, his fingers hovered near a red button—prepared to make a fateful decision. The mood was tense as aides argued with each other. But it became clear by the look on his face that he’d made up his mind. His finger was now on the button. The president pressed it, decisively. Click. The door to an anteroom swung open almost instantly, and an attendant strode into the Oval Office, placing an ice-filled glass on the desk and popping open a Diet Coke. “Does anyone want anything?” the president asked insincerely. No one was stupid enough to answer. The waiter poured the soda into the tall glass. When it was full, the president waved him away and Trump resumed the heated conversation. It was late in the day. Donald Trump was growing impatient with the strictures of the office. His team was trying to talk him off a ledge, but he was really ready to jump this time. I sat on one of two couches in the center of the Oval Office, alongside Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff; Pat Cipollone, the president’s lawyer; Kirstjen Nielsen, the embattled homeland security secretary; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and, of course, Stephen Miller. The meeting had been scheduled as a quick fifteen-minute sync, but as it approached two hours, Trump meandered between grievances. At present, his ire was trained on the border and the increase in crossings of undocumented immigrants. He seethed. “I can’t believe we are doing so badly. This is not a strong response. This is not General Patton. By now, General Patton would be killing the enemy.” Trump turned to Jared. “Mexico is full of shit. They are totally full of shit. Stop groveling to them. They are swindling us, Jared.” Trump wanted to cut off all assistance to Mexico and the Northern Triangle governments because they were “busing their worst people into our country.” Jared tried to reason with him, clarifying that U.S. funds actually helped those governments manage the migrant flows and weed out criminals. Trump interrupted. “I don’t give a shit. Close the fucking border. Seriously, close it.” The conversation had been months in the making, though no one in the room seemed ready for it. Trump had mused about closing the entire border and now he seemed serious. I sat taking copious notes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but as the Trump presidency devolved, “Anonymous” loitered subconsciously. My alter ego wanted me to act. “Shut it down, okay?” We were three months into the new year, which had already started off badly in January. The government shutdown dragged from the holidays well into 2019, throwing the Trump administration deeper into turmoil. Everything was on hold. Whether it was DHS operations, Trump’s plans to gut his own administration, or—to my frustration—unfulfilled discussions about exit planning, nothing moved forward. Kirstjen had heeded Defense Secretary Mattis’s parting recommendation, much to my chagrin. She remained in office to provide a voice of reason in the cabinet, seeing herself as one of the few who could end the shutdown and reopen the government. Meanwhile, I was supposed to leave for my wedding in Latin America in January. With everything falling apart, I felt stuck. Anabel had already dealt with a dozen canceled vacations, lost weekends, and my near-total absence, seven days a week. But I was now officially the chief of staff of a massive department with hundreds of thousands of employees, who wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if we didn’t get Trump to cut a deal with Congress, fast. In any other administration, someone would have covered for me. In this one, the bench was thin. I was forced to shorten my absence and punt the honeymoon down the road to an undetermined date. As if that wasn’t enough, someone broke into our home before we left. The intruder picked the locks of two doorways into the Capitol Hill row house, including an iron grate and a thick wooden front door that I found ajar. In the process, the individual somehow disabled the alarm system and the video doorbell, both of which went dark during the incident—blacked out for about five minutes. Even stranger, the inside of the house was undisturbed. Not a single possession was moved, broken, or stolen. I contacted the police, but I didn’t think this was any ordinary burglar. Neither did DHS. The department dispatched security personnel to do a sweep of my house, particularly because of the sensitive communications equipment installed in my residence. My own reasons for alarm were different. After the unsigned essay was released, I suspected that a foreign intelligence service might try to unmask Anonymous.
The fastest way for world leaders to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump was to flatter him, or attack his enemies. How better to curry the president’s favor than to hunt down and expose the dissenter in his midst? Luckily, nothing in my house tied me to the op-ed. There was no paper trail anywhere, save for a single signed document affirming my authorship, which the Times kept in a locked safe at their headquarters. Still, I felt uneasy about home security. We upgraded our alarm system, replaced the deadbolt with a keypad lock, and added more video cameras which ran on batteries even if the power was cut off. I knew also that I needed to share the truth with Anabel. She didn’t know I was the author of the piece. But after the intruder broke in, I felt like I couldn’t keep the information from her any longer. Anabel reacted the way I’d expected. While she was no fan of Trump, she knew that vocally opposing him as a nameless internal objector was risky and guaranteed to result in retribution if I revealed myself. I had bought a gun in the aftermath of the decision to blow the whistle. When I casually asked a military buddy, he advised me to purchase a Sig Sauer P365, the perfect concealed weapon. That’s what I did. The thin, lightweight pistol held ten rounds and boasted a tritium night sight that allowed it to be aimed with deadly accuracy even in the dark. I needed a refresher on how to shoot. An off-duty Secret Service agent (I’ll call him Mitch) took me to an outdoor range on a chilly winter afternoon to practice. I’d gone shooting a few times growing up in Indiana, but it had been years since I fired a weapon. You couldn’t easily get approval to keep a gun in Washington, D.C. Buying the wrong box of ammunition was proof of my inexperience. “These are full metal jackets,” Mitch explained. The agent emptied my new box of ammo, pointing to the smooth tips. “Round nose. You can use these for practice, but if you really want to stop a bad guy, you want these.” He placed one of his cartridges on the counter. The tip of the projectile was a tiny crater, not a smooth edge. “These are hollow-point rounds. For home defense.” Mitch did a demonstration. Twenty or so feet down the firing lane, a paper target was suspended from the track. A 1950s-era bad guy stared back at us in a blazer, pointing a pistol in our direction. We were about to obliterate him. First, Mitch retrieved a gallon of water from his trunk. He tied it up so that it hung in front of the target. I was confused. He loaded his pistol with my round-nose ammo and pointed it downrange. He fired. Two small streams of water poured from opposite ends of the jug. “See? Straight through. Entry wound, exit wound.” Then Mitch reloaded, this time with his ammo. He shoved the magazine back into the pistol and racked a round. He fired again. The jug exploded. All that remained was a mangled piece of plastic, dangling on a string of yarn, and behind it the fifties goon was drenched. “That’s hollow-point. If you want to stop somebody in their tracks, this is your buddy.” Mitch explained that the bullet would mushroom inside a target, rather than pass straight through. He warned that if I fired one of the round-nose bullets at a burglar, it might keep going into another room or a nearby house and hit an innocent person. “Got it,” I told him. The gun weighed a pound-and-a-half and felt good in my hand. My aim was poor at first. Bullet holes dotted the paper target randomly, without any clear pattern. By the end of the afternoon my groupings were tight and on target. We practiced until the tips of my fingers burned with cold. Afterward, we went to a brewery to warm up. On the way home from my truncated January wedding in Latin America, I hoped to find normalcy back at the office. Little had changed while I was away. The government remained shuttered, and the situation at DHS was dire.
We held emergency meetings at the White House. The secretary and I used the looming deadline of missed paychecks to force Trump’s hand, raising the visual specter of DHS families standing in food lines—something the president knew would be deeply harmful to his re-election. He finally blinked. Congress passed a budget without the billions in border funds Trump had demanded. The president had nothing to show for the debacle except for thirty-five days of political wreckage and an exhausted federal workforce. Up to that point, I thought I’d seen the nation’s chief executive unglued. But after he lost the showdown with Congress, his remaining reservations (if any) were gone. In the three months that followed, China could have launched a nuclear strike on the United States, and Trump wouldn’t have cared. Everything was about the southern border. The best way to describe the mayhem of that period is merely to recount Trump’s words and actions, which proved—once and for all—that quitting the administration was the only appropriate option. On a January flight down South, the president demanded that we involve him in negotiations with contractors over the border wall. “Two things matter to me,” he said, leaning back in the chair in his Air Force One office. “Price and beauty. I want it to be cheap, and I want it to be fucking beautiful.” It was legally problematic for a president to engage directly in bidding wars with federal contractors. His involvement could ruin the entire selection process. I explained this to Trump, who ignored me, waving his hand for silence so he could unmute a Fox News segment about himself. He smiled back at his own smiling face on the television. A week or so later, the president called the secretary with a different order. He wanted to “bus and dump” all illegal aliens picked up at the border into Democratic cities. He wanted to punish those localities for protecting undocumented immigrants by trying to stir up mayhem. Trump later told us he wanted to send the worst ones—the “murderers, rapists, and criminals”—into the cities to create even more instability. I consulted our lawyers, who reached the obvious conclusion that this would probably be illegal for any number of reasons. I put several of Trump’s aides on an email and told them our position. None of them responded. The next week, Trump called again to submit more instructions about the design of the border wall (which had long since been designed). In a rambling conversation, he told us to paint the wall “matte black”—he didn’t want it shiny—and complained that the contractors building it were “filthy fucking rich, having lunch with each other every week and deciding how they are going to divvy it all up.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. We muted him for most of the rant. Painting and repainting the border wall was the conversational equivalent of Trump’s pre-naptime coloring book. We would let him go and go, until he wore himself out. On February 19, Kirstjen and I met with the president about a diplomatic issue. During the meeting, he asked yet again about the U.S. aid money being sent to countries in Latin America’s Northern Triangle and instructed that the funds be shut off until those nations started arresting more migrants. Once more, we told him it was unlawful to cancel funds that Congress had already appropriated to be spent. He couldn’t veto something that was already signed into law. Trump pretended not to hear the explanation by changing the subject, venting about a comment Lindsey Graham had made on cable news. Two weeks later, we were summoned by the president to the White House to talk about—what else?—immigration. This time he was mad that DOJ lawyers had resisted his ideas for how to take control of the situation. “Jeff Sessions is the dumbest human being ever created by God,” Trump spat, deriding his former attorney general, whom he blamed in part for the situation. The president insisted that we use his “magical authorities” to keep more people out of the United States, a reference Trump sometimes made to a loose assortment of emergency presidential powers and special immigration authorities that can only be invoked in extreme circumstances, such as a global health crisis or an armed foreign invasion. “Mr. President,” Kirstjen explained patiently, “you’ll get enjoined by the courts if you do that.” “What the fuck happened to the good old days when someone arrived at our borders, and we told them to just get the hell out?” Trump protested, harking back to an era I wasn’t familiar with. “The Northern Triangle countries are sending us the worst. They stick their shittiest people in the flows and send them up. These are robbers and rapists, okay?” (I made a mental note. He really did bring up “rape” and “rapists” a lot.) For the umpteenth time, I chimed in to remind him we didn’t have much flexibility beyond working with Congress to close legal loopholes and undertake immigration reform. Trump chafed at the suggestion. He wanted to act unilaterally. On March 7, we were back in the Oval Office because Trump wanted to continue the conversation on the border wall. This time, the president told us he had received a letter from Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota about a company that could build the wall cheaper than anyone else. The firm proposed constructing it with concrete. Trump had called for a concrete wall during the presidential campaign, but he’d begrudgingly changed his mind when border agents said the material was unsuitable. “I don’t care anymore,” Trump said. “Let’s do concrete.” A Pentagon official in the room from the Army Corps of Engineers reminded the president that the wall design had been finalized a long time ago. The structure was already being built so that law enforcement agents could have visibility to the other side. “I don’t care. Tell them to put cameras on top or drill holes to see through it. I like concrete. Politically, concrete is better for me.” Out of nowhere, Trump complained that ranchers in Texas were being allowed to open doors in the wall to allow their cattle to reach the Rio Grande River. “No doors. I don’t want doors,” he said. “How crazy is this? There are doors in the border wall? It’s stupid. They can just walk up, open the door, and thousands of [illegals] rush in.” Kirstjen told him that wasn’t exactly true. Border Patrol monitored the gates. And there were very few of them. The president didn’t care and said that in order to end the practice for good DHS needed to acquire any land where ranchers had access to the Rio Grande. “Just buy the land. I know more about land than any other human on Earth. Let’s do it, okay? Give the ranchers ladders. They can use ladders to get to the other side, but not doors. You could use small fire trucks. Call the local fire stations, and use the ladders on their trucks to help them get over.” Hold on, I thought. We’re going to tell Texas ranchers not to use the gates, borrow fire trucks instead, lean the ladders against the border wall, walk their cattle up the ladders (and over the other side, somehow?), let the animals drink from the river for a little bit, and then hoist them back over? It was so incandescently stupid I couldn’t laugh. “You know why we need this?” Trump continued, pointing to a photo of the border wall on his desk. “Mexico is a hellhole. Have I said that yet? Because it is. It’s a hellhole, and no one fucking wants that place. Forty thousand murders. Can you believe it? Sheesh.” No one said anything. On the way out, Trump asked me if he should use the word “apprehended” or “captured” when talking about migrants arrested at the border. “Well, apprehended is the appropriate legal and operational term—” I explained before he cut me off. “Eh, come oooon. No one knows what that means. I want to say ‘captured’ because it sounds tougher. What do you think?” He polled others. Vice President Pence, who had stood there quietly for the meeting, spoke up to agree with the president. The secretary sided with me. “We’ll see,” Trump retorted. “I like ‘capture.’ I think we should start using that.” On Saturday, during the president’s weekend tweet storm, he posted: “Border Patrol and Law Enforcement has apprehended (captured) large numbers of illegal immigrants at the Border. They won’t be coming into the U.S. The Wall is being built and will greatly help us in the future, and now!” The afternoon of March 15, we returned for another immigration meeting. The Oval Office lights were off. “Oooh.” The president smiled as he entered. “Dark in here. Kind of sexy.” As he settled into his chair behind the desk, Trump told us he wanted to get creative with immigration policy. In particular, he wanted us to revisit the travel ban. He was still fuming that we’d convinced him to pare it back, and thought the latest iteration was “too watered down.” “We just need more countries,” Trump insisted. “We need to ban more countries, okay?” There was a process, I told him. The Supreme Court had only upheld the limited travel restrictions because they were designed by career officials after an impartial review based on intelligence community threat assessments, not politics. We needed to defer to the experts. Stephen Miller corrected me, noting that the president had the ultimate say and could overrule his agencies. Trump preferred Miller’s analysis. “Imagine the headlines!” the president mused. “ ‘Trump’s Newest Travel Ban’—it will be beautiful.” He told us to come up with a bigger list of countries. I dutifully documented the order in my notebook, along with a doodle of a man (me) jumping off of a three-dimensional box. The president went back to his greatest hits—“a big, big border wall!” “cut off the cash!” “screw the Mexicans!”—and we sat there listening to the diatribe that had begun to sound like a Broadway sing-a-long from hell. We left without any clear direction about what was happening next. Two days later, on March 19, he did the song and dance for us again. The Oval Office meeting was supposed to be about combating opioid addiction, but we didn’t spend more than a few minutes talking about the millions of Americans suffering from the drug epidemic. Why would we do that, when we could use the valuable time to talk about immigration again? Trump steered the briefing to his favorite subject. He ran through his list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies once more. This time there was a tangent to the already tangential conversation, as he paused to pay homage to the MyPillow CEO. “This guy, you’ve seen him? He’s unbelievable! The pillow guy. He buys all the airtime, it’s so brilliant. He’s also a Trump supporter, you know.” The pattern continued until the end of the month. Meetings. Phone calls. Late-night tweets. More meetings. Trump’s border obsession was consuming him—and as a consequence—consuming us. The month concluded with a volcanic tirade in the Oval Office on March 28, 2019, which brought the situation to a head. The president went from steaming hot to full eruption over the crisis at the southern border. DHS was standing in his way, he said, and he was sick of it. Why was the department stonewalling all of his requests? The president told us to reinstitute his family separation policy. Trump was angry that we’d persuaded him the year before to shut down DOJ’s disastrous zero-tolerance program. Disaster is what he wanted. “Now we just get these women coming in with seven children saying, ‘Oh, my husband he left me.’ ” The president had briefly switched into a high-pitched Mexican accent. “They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.” If we didn’t do something fast, he’d look politically weak. Immigration was his signature issue, he said. “Close the border, and they’ll kiss our asses!” Trump barked at Kirstjen, who remained silent. “These countries are horrible,” he fussed, referring to Latin American nations. “They are—I’ve used a term before, you know the term.” He was alluding to his controversial “shithole countries” comment without saying it, although he’d used “hellhole” days prior. Trump complained that the troops he’d sent to the border were ineffective. They needed to use deadly force. “But we can’t do that,” he said ruefully as an afterthought, recalling that the Pentagon had told him to stop talking about “shooting migrants.” Trump scanned the room and stopped at me. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked. “Excuse me, sir?” I replied. “You’re taking notes! I don’t want any fucking notes. Stop taking notes.” I slowly closed my legal pad and sat there, hands folded on top. Trump’s admonishment was two years too late. I had paper notes and mental notes he couldn’t touch. I just didn’t know what to do with them yet.
He moved on to poll numbers. “I’m at 55 percent, this is crazy.” He was corrected by a communications staffer who joined the meeting late. Rasmussen said 49 percent today, she updated him. No, no, he assured her, the real numbers are higher. Then he was back on the border. “Man, we are fucking this up, you guys,” he fumed. He said his friend Kim Jong Un knew how to do it better at the Korean DMZ. “Have you seen his border? Guns. Tanks. Barbed wire. Land mines. Am I right? Hard-ass. Look at North Korea—that is border security.” Trump turned again to Kirstjen and Mike Pompeo, who were seated opposite each other in armchairs in front of the desk. “Close the border, I mean it. Do it immediately.” Kirstjen was deflated. “Mr. President, we’ve been over this. Closing the whole border is impractical and possibly illegal.” “Fine, do one port,” he shot back. “Let’s just close one land crossing. It’s really bad in Texas. Do El Paso and tell them we are closing it in twenty-four hours.” The communications aide interjected. For political purposes, it would be better to seal a crossing into California. Texas loved Trump, and the Democrats in California hated him. The president thought it was a great idea. “You’re right. I don’t want to hurt Texas.” Meanwhile, a staffer entered to let the president know his helicopter was waiting. Trump was slated to speak to a rally in Michigan. I turned to Mick Mulvaney and Jared Kushner on the couch, as the room was overtaken by pockets of conversation. “We can’t do this for partisan reasons,” I said. “We’ll get killed for it.” Jared agreed. Despite his flaws, the young real estate scion was one of the few reliable checks on his father-in-law, when no one else could be. “Mr. President,” Jared jumped in, “closing a port will not stop the migrant flows. They can just go around the port. It won’t stop the actual flows. It will just hurt U.S. businesses and tourism.” “Jared, I don’t care. That’s not the point! The point is it will make Mexico hurt. It will make California hurt. Kirstjen, announce it. Tomorrow at noon.” After that, he said, the plan could be scaled to the entire southern border. Pompeo and others nodded in agreement. Kirstjen knew it was pointless to protest, though Trump seemed to anticipate an objection. “That’s it! No more excuses. Shut it down, okay? You heard me, noon tomorrow.” With that, a red-faced Trump stood up and walked out the door to the Rose Garden, stalking off in a huff to Marine One. Neither Kirstjen nor I said anything on the way out of the West Wing. We were slated to fly to Europe in a few days to meet with allies about cyber threats. Given the president’s blowup, I feared Kirstjen would scrap the entire trip and prove my point: that Trump’s insatiable border fetish was preventing us from doing our day jobs.
As we exited the side door to the West Wing, dark purple clouds were pressed against a pink sky. Rush-hour traffic hummed in the distance beyond the compound walls. “Madam Secretary,” I implored her, “we’re losing here.” “I know,” she replied, getting into the waiting SUV. “Let’s talk this weekend.” An agent closed the door, and she was whisked through the White House gates and out of view. The situation was enough to drive anyone to drink. It certainly did that to me. I went out for a cocktail near the White House and ended up having a lot of them, which was becoming the norm. I browned out at the bar, so a colleague drove me home. I stumbled upstairs to put myself to bed in the guest room, where I was staying frequently. I didn’t want to disturb a sleeping Anabel down the hallway. In the morning, I would quietly slip out for work before sunrise—and do it all again. “April Fools” The firm knock at the door wasn’t housekeeping. I opened it, coming face-to-face with one of the secretary’s military aides, Nick. “Chief, I’m sorry to bother you. The president was trying to get in touch with the secretary last night. I thought you should know.”
It was April 1, 8 a.m. in London and 2 a.m. in Washington. “Did you tell the switchboard we’re overseas?” I asked. “Yessir. I told them she was asleep and that we’d have the secretary call back when it was morning, D.C. time.” In the lobby, I updated Kirstjen. She was as anxious as I was to hear that Trump had called overnight. We piled into our car, flanked by British police officers on motorcycles. The armored convoy snaked through the streets of London toward the U.S. Embassy, lights and sirens clearing the way. The secretary’s decision to go forward with the trip had been a small act of defiance—a signal that DHS had other work to do besides monitoring the border—but the decision was about to be tested. By leaving the country, we were calling Trump’s bluff about sealing the border. To go forward, he needed us. And he knew it. After a morning of preparatory meetings before visits to the Home Office and UK Parliament, we broke for lunch, dining at a chic restaurant nearby. The military aide’s phone rang just as we ordered our entrees. POTUS was awake and wanted to talk. Secret Service agents cleared a quiet area in the basement of the restaurant for us to take the call. “Good morning, Mr. President,” Kirstjen said, forcing a cheerful tone. “What the fuck are you doing in Europe?” Trump demanded, his voice audible from her ear. “The border is fucking melting down, and you’re on vacation?” “Sir, it’s not a vacation. There’s serious—” “No, Kirstjen. This is your job. Get the fuck back here right now. I want to see you on TV at the fucking border, do you understand?” The secretary tried to calm him, but Trump wasn’t having it. He reiterated the demand—“get your ass to the border”—and abruptly ended the call. I broke the silence. “Let him fire us. Seriously. This is more important.” “He seems like he’s going to do something erratic,” she responded. “So what?” I made my most forceful case yet. Whether or not we tried to prevent another crisis, Trump was well beyond being contained. The best move we had was to sacrifice ourselves. If we tempted him to fire us for doing our jobs, we could call more attention to the president’s perilous mismanagement of the government. Kirstjen and I were at loggerheads, but I knew I’d lost the dispute before the secretary made up her mind. “Let’s call the vice president,” she said, “and we’ll see what he thinks.” If it was about Donald Trump, Mike Pence wouldn’t present a contrary point of view or alternatives. When we called him, his advice was unsurprising. If the president wanted us to come home, the vice president said, we should come home. It was “April Fools Day,” and fittingly the White House was making a mockery of us. Through inch-thick glass, I watched orange dust clouds envelope our line of Chevy Suburbans. The motorcade roared through the desert as if it were fleeing an attack. In a sense, it was speeding toward one. The president was flying to the border to meet us. Donald Trump wanted to ensure that his Homeland Security team knew that we served at his pleasure, and apparently it wasn’t enough to make us do an embarrassing about-face and return from Europe. He wanted to send the message personally. The White House had leaked the humiliating news. I saw a Fox News Alert on the television behind the secretary’s head on the plane ride back. “BACK TO THE BORDER,” the headline read. And below it: “HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY CUTS SHORT TRIP TO EUROPE.” While we were enroute back across the Atlantic, I got a frantic text message from a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. The envoy had seen Trump’s public threat to seal the border, and our team in Mexico City was caught off guard. It was the first they’d heard of it. We hadn’t briefed the U.S. diplomats because we intended to bury Trump’s stupid idea before it came to fruition. Clearly we were failing. The embassy warned that the move would severely rupture relations with our southern neighbor, as Trump’s self-imposed deadline loomed. Anabel was surprised to see me come home. I warned her it wouldn’t be for long, as I barely had time to switch clothes and shower before leaving the house again. Coast Guard One was refueled and ready to hit the skies within hours. I returned to Reagan National Airport, this time bound for the American Southwest on what felt like a suicide mission. Kirstjen organized a phone call of the whole cabinet to seek help from other agencies. The appeal was little more than a performance because none of them could fix the underlying problem—the president. I was beyond ready to quit, but for anyone to pay attention, the secretary herself needed to resign. This trip needed to be the final one. On the ground in Arizona, I asked the Secret Service to floor it. We needed time to get organized before the president arrived. Our next stop was Yuma, where we would hold meetings and calls before driving an hour away over the state line to join the president in Calexico, California. The last thing we needed was an unsupervised Trump wandering the facilities, giving errant directives to DHS agents. We were going fast. The armored SUV creaked and moaned painfully as the motorcade tore across the uneven dirt road. Outside the only sign of life was a multitude of camouflage-green saguaros standing motionless on the desert floor. The cacti were like soldiers who’ve just realized the war is lost, their spindly arms surrendering to the sun. I considered them through the window. Up front, the dust-crusted windshield was getting harder to see through, so our driver turned on the wipers. Just then, we struck a sizable rut, launching us from our seats. Neither Kirstjen nor I had seat belts on and—for a moment—she seemed to float in midair. She was small enough that her head only grazed the ceiling before coming back down. I was thrust into the roof of the vehicle and thrown to the floor, as the car came to a halt. The detail leader whipped around from the front seat. “Is everyone all right?” “Yes, but can we slow the hell down?” Kirstjen responded, visibly annoyed. She turned to me. “Are you okay?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I offered, pulling myself back into the bucket seat and scooping up papers that had flown from my briefing book. The car started rolling again. I buckled my seat belt and knew immediately that I had a concussion—nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. We reached a border patrol facility and were escorted to a conference room that had been converted into a miniature command post for us. No one was there yet, and silence was a welcome sound. I excused myself to the restroom and vomited, crouching on the floor in a daze. I don’t know how long I was kneeling there when one of the agents, Mike McCool, entered. “Hey, the secretary needs you. The president is on the line,” Mike said, noticing I was doubled over. “You all right?” I steadied myself and nodded. I brushed past the man with a football player’s frame, whom I should have asked for help, and hobbled back to the conference room. The scene was no longer tranquil. A familiar voice—like an indignant drunk with a working-class Queens accent—filled the room on speakerphone. Despite the pounding headache, I reflexively grabbed a pen and paper and sat down. “Kirstjen, did you watch Lou Dobbs the other night, like I asked you?” Trump quizzed her. “Yes, Mr. President. I told you I did.”
“Well then why the hell aren’t we doing what Kris Kobach said?” He was referring to the controversial GOP Kansas secretary of state, whose anti-immigrant views were often touted during the program. We had heard credible rumors that Trump was considering replacing Kirstjen with Kobach. “He’s got ideas for securing the border.” “Most of what he said is out of our lane—like taxing the money people send back to their home countries, the remittances,” Kirstjen told him. Trump wanted to find a way to keep migrants from sending money back to relatives abroad. The move would be a way to punish them and their families and discourage others from coming to the United States to work. We didn’t think it was possible, and it might not be lawful. “Those goddamn remittances. Every time I ask [Steve] Mnuchin about this, he’s got another excuse. ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that.’ What good is he? I thought we had the right guy at Treasury. But now I don’t know. Maybe not so much. What do you think—personnel mistake?” The question was actually a veiled threat, as if we were personnel mistakes, too. He shifted gears to illegal border crossings. “The numbers are too high, Kirstjen. They are too high. You’re not doing your job.” “Mr. President I am doing everything possible. We have tried every option, but it’s the law—” “I don’t want excuses. That’s what you always give me. Just do it, okay? How many times have I told you to stop them?” “Sir, with respect, I’ve said it a million times, and so have you. It’s the laws. I cannot legally stop them. The laws prevent me from detaining and removing people who claim asylum.” “What do you need?” “I need Congress to fix loopholes in the law that are exploited by the traffickers. It’s the same loopholes we’ve been talking about for years.” Nielsen listed off the ways the immigration system was broken, but she was cut off again. “Why are we still talking about it? Why haven’t you given Congress the bill, Kirstjen?” “We’ve written text to reform the immigration system, Mr. President. But it’s been stuck in your White House. No one seems to think this is an emergency.” He exploded at the comment. There was chatter in the background, and we realized other people were in the room with Trump. He was clearly in the Oval Office and, thankfully, not yet in the skies headed our direction. “Goddamnit! Stephen, tell them to get that bill done today. Send the fucking bill to Congress today, you understand? It needs to fix the loopholes. And we need to get rid of asylum. Just get rid of it. We are full, and no one should be able to claim asylum.” The background cross-chat around Trump grew louder. The secretary rolled her eyes. Getting “rid” of asylum—which allowed people to seek humanitarian protection in the United States—was not part of the draft bill, nor was what Trump said next. “And it needs to get rid of the fucking immigration judges. There should not be any judges at all. These guys are unionized, when the fuck did that happen?” “Many years ago, sir,” Kirstjen said. “All right, well just do it. Get the bill sent. I just need you to do your job.” “Mr. President, I’m doing everything within my power—everything—to respond to this emergency. I’ve sent requests over and over to the White House for help, and I don’t get anything. You need to order other departments to assist.” “Oh, so now it’s on me? You’re saying it’s on me, Kirstjen, the President of the United States?” “Sir, I have asked your staff for more space to hold migrants, a supplemental appropriation to Congress to build bigger and more humane facilities, legislation to fix the loopholes, a single person to be in charge at the White House—” “Space? Kirstjen I told you to tell DOD to build some goddamn tents!” “Sir, I am not the Defense Department. I cannot order them what to do. You are the commander in chief.” “So now it’s my fault? I have 100—130—140 fucking things I’m supposed to do. I’ve got North Korea. China. You should just do your job!” “What do you want me to do that I am not already doing? Tell me, Mr. President. Tell me what I am legally allowed to do that I’m not doing.” “Keep them out. That’s your job.” “Sir, I just, I just don’t know what you want. You have said it yourself so many times that our hands are tied because of the loopholes and the court decisions. I can’t just keep everyone out. I can’t break the law.” “Why are you telling me all this shit now?” “I have been telling you for months what problems we have. Months. And your staff every single day. Stephen, have you told DOD what we need? Have you made these asks on behalf of the president?” Trump started yelling at the people seated around him. “Sir,” the secretary interjected. “SIR! I even had to call your cabinet together myself this week because the White House is so disorganized—” Trump hung up. “Fuck!” Kirstjen threw her cell phone, which hit the floor and slid to a halt across the room. We sat for a long time, saying nothing. I avoided eye contact and answered emails. This wasn’t the time to say, I told you so. I hoped it was glaringly obvious that this man couldn’t be fixed. He couldn’t be managed. He certainly couldn’t be convinced to do the right thing. The time spent trying to put bad ideas back into the box was over. Whether she was thinking the same or not, I didn’t know. “Okay, let’s go,” she sighed and walked across the room to pick up her phone. There was a small silver lining to the day. Trump concluded that a diplomatic crisis was risky for him, politically. So, without telling Kirstjen, he decided to back down off the threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border. An aide handed me a copy of USA Today on the way to meet Air Force One. A modestly reassuring headline on the front page—“TRUMP TO KEEP BORDER OPEN”—was tempered by my knowledge of the man. The president surely had another heedless idea up his sleeve. When Trump landed on April 5, our cars merged with his motorcade en route to a public event with border patrol agents. The room was packed with reporters, sweltering under the hot glare of TV lights. They weren’t interested in the scripted roundtable discussion. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen with Trump’s on-again, off-again border threat. Would he seal the roads? Would he halt cross-border trade and travel?
A rush of anxiety hit me in the crowded room. My hands got sweaty, and I felt the now-familiar darkening in my peripheral vision. I sought refuge backstage. Moving past Secret Service agents, I got to the green-room area. The president was mingling with the border agents. And Kirstjen was looking on from a distance, warily. “We are full,” Trump told a border official. “Tell the judges we are completely full—‘the bins are full’—and we can’t let anyone else in.” Oh no. He was back on it. The president was pressuring agents to seal the border. “Just say, ‘Sorry, Judge, I can’t do it. We don’t have the room.’ ” He was telling them to ignore federal judges and deport people anyway, even if they had a right to be in the United States. I strained to hear what the agents were saying to the president. A Customs and Border Protection leader tried explaining to him why that would be unlawful. “Seriously, keep them all out,” Trump countered. “Don’t let anymore in. If you go to jail for it, I’ll pardon you.” The president left the holding area and went onstage. I was bewildered. Had I heard that right? Trump offered a presidential pardon in exchange for an illegal act. When the roundtable was done, I went straight to the CBP official to confirm the president’s wording. I also wanted to make sure that no agents were planning to follow the order. Yes, the man recounted, that’s what Trump said. The two of us met the secretary back in the motorcade. “Wait, are you serious? What the actual fuck,” she muttered. “What exactly did he say?” The CBP chief recounted the episode. “We need to document this,” I responded, composing an email to the department’s lawyers with a real-time summary and a question. Did the president just break the law? The secretary got a notification from one of her Secret Service agents. She was being summoned to Stagecoach, the nickname for the president’s limousine. Kirstjen disappeared for a few minutes and then returned to the car. She said nothing when she got back in, and we started moving to the next location. I got a text from her in the seat in front of me—something she didn’t want to say out loud. “This is far and away the most abusive relationship I’ve ever had or ever will have,” she wrote. Trump had excoriated her in his limo once more for not shutting down the border, making no reference to the fact that he’d decided to stand down on the threat himself. It felt like the film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray keeps reliving the same events over, and over, and over. But Trump wasn’t fooling us with his unpredictable mood swings and flip-flopping. We were the idiots for enduring it. I paid little attention at the final stop. Standing in front of his border wall, Trump backslapped law enforcement officers. He posed for photos and did a self-congratulatory interview with Fox News to tout the wall, during which he declared that “the country is full,” presumably laying the predicate for his border agents to lie to federal judges about being unable to process any more immigrants. My head was elsewhere. I stood on the sidelines and drafted two resignation letters on my cell phone, making sure no one was peering over my shoulder. One was for me and the other was for Kirstjen, though she hadn’t officially asked for it. In my mind, Trump had given us a gift—a reason to resign and shine a light inside his haunted house of a presidency. This was all about to end. The ride back to the airport had the feeling of finality. For months, we’d watched Trump cross our supposed redlines. If a pardon offer to break the law wasn’t enough to justify quitting, then we deserved the label assigned to Trump officials who stayed too long: enablers. A day after the border trip, Kirstjen went to the White House. She told Trump she was unable to do what he wanted. She couldn’t violate federal statutes to repel what he termed an “invasion” at the southern border. There was no permanent fix if the president didn’t want to pursue immigration reform through Congress. He fired her on the spot. The news leaked before she even left the White House. And not long after, another story rocked Washington. Media outlets revealed that the president had proposed a pardons-for-lawbreaking scheme to his DHS lieutenants. A vengeful Trump denied it and launched a wider purge, ridding DHS of officials who were seen as insufficiently MAGA.
The White House removed the acting deputy secretary, the heads of multiple immigration agencies, the director of the Secret Service, and eventually the DHS general counsel, who had provided the legal basis for resisting most of the president’s outlandish ideas. The alliance of officials who had come in to run DHS was broken. John Kelly was gone. Kirstjen Nielsen had been fired. Chris Krebs and Elizabeth Neumann had burrowed into the bureaucracy, where they hoped to protect important operations from Trump’s whims. Gene Hamilton had decided to join the Justice Department and lean into the MAGA agenda. And Chad Wolf remained on the DHS leadership team. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I remained for a few weeks to provide the thinnest sinew of an orderly transition. Members of Congress panicked that DHS was falling apart and that Trump’s firings had decapitated the nation’s domestic security apparatus. But there was no sense in putting back together what the president wanted to break. I submitted my resignation letter to the temporary DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenan, a border official who Trump hoped would be a hard-liner. “Mr. Secretary,” I wrote, “the American people are depending on you to do what is right.” The entreaty was meaningless. Right and wrong were lost in the fog of war that was the Trump administration. Morality is an extravagance for people huddled in trenches, bracing for the next attack. Survival is the only necessity. I felt clarity return on that April border trip. Maybe it was from the shock of what I’d witnessed—or just the throbbing concussion headache that was like a siren in my mind. But as Air Force One took off in the glinting sunlight, I knew what I had to do. One way or another, I would help burn Donald Trump’s presidency to the fucking ground.
EPILOGUE November 1, 2022 We drove fast out of Washington, but not in a hurry. As we entered Virginia, the light ignited the countryside. It was the week—or maybe the final day—before the trees would begin shedding until they became skeletons. The last time I’d seen an autumn afternoon like this, my life was different. I was alone and looking over my shoulder and had just been assigned a bodyguard. Now a passenger with flowing red hair sat next to me as we drove home. We appreciated the scenery, knowing we might not see it again for a while. A drifting melody called “Harmonia’s Dream” played on repeat, and she said I was running it into the ground. Back home, I got a message from my younger brother. He was in Mexico City with friends for el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The holiday was a celebration of the departed, and Patrick sent photos of his cohort in a rainbow of spectral costumes, their faces painted as bone. It gave me an idea for how to mark the evening, so I made a trip to the corner store to pick up firewood. At dark I scouted the map for an open field. I found a place that looked like it might give us almost as much open air as land, and I packed the car with supplies. I convinced my companion to bring the dog, ironically named Martini. I’d gotten sober since then. On the road, the once-colorful trees had become tall silhouettes, forming a nocturnal hallway to our destination. We drove for a while in contentment but quiet. The hum of the motor was a steady white noise behind my thoughts. “What guardrails protect us against vices?” The question was on my mind, as I relived the past few years and conducted a sort of spiritual accounting. Had I been a healthier person, I would’ve been safeguarded by the faction of my subconscious that raised doubts; the moral deputy who cautioned me; the judge who knew I was at my limit; the assembly of confidants who held up a mirror; a thin shield of inhibitions; the sword of self-defense; and the citizen in my soul that served a final notice. But I wasn’t. I was distracted by secrets that I kept from others and from myself, which almost ended up destroying me. An angel on overwatch—the truth—saved my life. I thought about the woman next to me. She spent many months gently helping me build myself back up and was now living a clean life with me. Her ring pressed against my skin as we held hands, the way it probably would on long drives like this to come. Earlier in the day, we had decided that we would soon embark on a yearlong journey across the country. We pulled up to a dark field, parked the car, and unpacked. I carried a fire pit into the expanse, as a distant circle of maple trees stood sentry. My passenger set up two folding chairs in the grass, and Martini scouted the area in zigzag fashion with the aid of clear skies. I arranged the kindling and wood in an upright pile. Kneeling down, I placed the tinder in the center and lit it. The blaze warmed my face as it grew, and I stepped back to take my seat. We talked for a long time, as we always did. About our parents and siblings. The future. The dog. And as you do around a campfire, we found ourselves reminiscing about the past and the peculiar fact that the lights we were peering at above were thousands of years old. When I look at art, I don’t want to be thinking about the artist, but it’s not the same way with nature. Mysticism is for people who can’t make sense of the world. I spent two years directly coming to terms with my own impermanence and finally accepted it. The conclusion caused me to treat my life with greater care than ever before and to better understand its foundations, which made me grateful for—and almost reverent of—the pain that it took to get there. I wasn’t mourning past losses. Tonight was a celebration. I got up from my chair and walked across the leafy park back to the car. In the trunk, there was a briefcase. The metal box was cold to the touch as I scrolled the combination on two separate dials. The password was the answer to a math problem from school—why I still remembered it, I didn’t know. I slid the buttons to the side and popped open the latches with a soft click. I lifted the lid. Inside, there were several loose papers, a few charging cords, and the corners of cash peeking out from beneath it all. What I wanted was on top. A newspaper clipping yellowed with age, and a hardback book with a sparse white cover. I pulled them out and closed the lid, snapping the latches shut. I walked back over and told my fellow traveler what they were. She asked if I was sure about it. I said I was, and she smiled. I placed the only copy of the newspaper clipping that I had into the fire pit and watched it curl up and disappear within seconds. The second item took longer. I set it on top of the pyre, and for a moment it didn’t catch. A thin circle of flame lazily enveloped the cover. Like the border of a closing wound, it shrank toward the center until the words were gone. The blaze caught hold of the spine and consumed the book from within, causing the pages to flutter in the heat like butterflies. They fell away in charred flakes. “Nobody ever tells you that books burn so pretty,” she said. The remaining pages became fire, and after a while, the last wooden support collapsed into the heap. Briefly, the embers blended with the stars as they drifted into the night sky.
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This post is created for historical documentation, and for providing access to an important book that doesn't need a review, in my opinion... It was written by "Anonymous." Some of you may remember when this man first wrote an op ed which was published during the first term... If you are not aware of this activity, then you need to learn about that time period. It was the beginning of people pointing out the lawlessness being attempted even during the first term of DJT. There are additional interview videos with Miles Taylor if you wish to gain more insight without reading the book. With the audiobook preview--about 5 chapters and epilogue--and what I've shared here, you can see why this whistleblower made his choice to begin speaking out...The epilogue reminded me of just how far he (and I during my career) can easily be pressed into reaching job burnout due to the actions, pressures, and, even, inaction of those in higher level authority, can bring about extreme physical and mental response in an individual's inability in just doing their job, as they understand its rules, regulations, laws, etc.
We have already seen what the second term has brought about. More terrible than any of us could even have imagined... Mainly because, we saw only one man as the instigator... After Project 2025 was published and immediately implemented through those "yes-men" who followed a mandate written by a "foundation" not even associated with government itself... No wonder we now have the mess that we have...
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