The attorney general answered without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Totally massive. Lethal actually.’
‘Lethal to whom?’ Wilbur Brown asked.
‘To President Craig, of course,’ Dirk Goddard replied. ‘People have tried to argue the contrary, but in my view – and I’m attorney general – there’s no presidential immunity for crimes committed before taking office.’
‘You’re talking about violations of the Logan Act?’ Brown said.
‘You bet I am,’ the attorney general replied. He pulled down a thick, brown volume from a shelf. The page was already marked.
‘Listen to this,’ he said.
‘Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.’
‘Now, I’m a supporter of the president,’ Dirk Goddard continued. ‘He appointed me to the high office, which I now hold. But when I took up my job, I solemnly swore to uphold the Law and Constitution of the United States. So help me God. What we’ve just heard is a clear violation of the Logan Act.’
‘Nobody’s ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act, not for the last two hundred years or more,’ Bud Hollingsworth said.
‘They darn well should have been,’ Dirk Goddard countered. ‘Do you remember, back in 2007, when then-House speaker Lucy Wainwright went to Syria to negotiate with President Bashar al-Assad? Or 2015, when another House speaker, David Draper, invited Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Moses to address Congress without President Matlock’s permission? I would have used the Logan Act then, if I’d been attorney general. But that’s chickenfeed besides the deal that Candidate Craig was trying to set up with the Russians.’
There was a long pause, as the two very senior officials tried to digest the full implications of what the Attorney General was saying.
Wilbur Brown shook his head. ‘You’re a lawyer, Dirk. If you based your case on the evidence of that tape, you’d lose. The president would set the pack on you. They’d ask you where you got the tape. Did the Russians send it to you as their way of signalling that the honeymoon is over? Or if the Chinese sent it, which is another possibility, did they manage to bug the Russian Embassy? The government’s lawyers would query its authenticity every which way. They’d argue that it was in any case inadmissible because it must have resulted from an unauthorized surveillance operation, so the court would have to ignore it.’
There was another long pause. Dirk Goddard, an honest man, looked truly crestfallen. He had always believed that Washington was indeed a “shining city on a hill” and, if what Wilbur Brown said was right, he was going to lose the chance to prove it.
‘Shall we tell him the good news, Wilbur?’ Bud Hollingsworth asked. ‘Will you go first? Or shall I?’
‘You go first, Wilbur.’
Bud Hollingsworth took out a pen and doodled some stick-figures on the yellow legal pad in front of him.
‘Let’s take first things first. In my view, the conversation we just heard actually happened and this is an accurate recording. I can say this with total confidence.’
‘You mean it rings true?’ Dirk Goddard asked.
‘I mean more than that. I mean it is true. We have exactly the same recording ourselves.’
The attorney general looked stunned. ‘You’re not telling me, after all these denials, you actually bugged Ronald Craig, after all?’
Hollingsworth sighed. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’
He pushed the pad aside.
‘Let me explain,’ he continued. ‘You may not be familiar, Dirk, with the executive order that President Brandon Matlock signed on May 18th, 2016. President Brandon was worried that Ronald Craig’s personal security could have been compromised. I’ve still got the text on my iPhone. Only half a dozen copies of that executive order were ever produced and I was one of the recipents.
‘Let me read it out:
‘Whereas it appears to be possible, if not probable that Ronald C. Craig may unwittingly have been the target of an unauthorized attack by a hypodermic dart or some other intervention while visiting the Russian Far East.
‘Whereas it is necessary through a clinical examination to establish whether such an attack or intervention has indeed taken place, and to take all appropriate measures,
‘Whereas the implications for national security of the said event need to be fully evaluated,
‘Now therefore: I, President of the United States, have decided and determined that the said Ronald C. Craig should be immediately brought by federal marshals to the Walter Reed Medical Centre, Bethesda, Maryland, and that the said federal marshals are authorized to use all necessary means, including force, towards that end. Signed: Brandon Matlock, 44th President of the United States, May 18th , 2016.’
‘To cut a long story short,’ Bud Hollingsworth went on, ‘as soon as that executive order was issued, Craig was picked up in Florida, whisked up to the Walter Reed Medical Centre in Maryland and subjected to a clinical examination as specified. We didn’t, as a matter of fact, find any evidence of a Russian bug, though we still believe that such a bug may still be in place, but not where we were looking.’
‘So?’ Dirk Goddard was looking for some light at the end of the tunnel.
‘I want to make it clear,’ the Director of the CIA explained, ‘that Wilbur and I were determined to act strictly in accordance with the law. The issue here is quite simple. I’ll read that paragraph again:
‘Whereas it is necessary through a clinical examination to establish whether such an attack or intervention has indeed taken place, and to take all appropriate measures…’
‘The crucial phrase, of course, is that we had the president’s explicit authorization by means of an executive order not just to ensure that Craig was submitted to a clinical examination but to “take all appropriate measures.”’
‘I still don’t see how that helps us get the tape we just listened to into evidence before a court,’ the attorney general said.
‘Oh ye of little faith,’ Hollingsworth sighed. ‘Wilbur and I have heard every word of that conversation before. We have listened to it a dozen times, if we’ve listened to it once. How did we do that? Well, while we looking for the Russian bug, we planted a bug of our own in Ronald Craig’s posterior. I can tell you that our recording of that fateful conversation repeats word for word, phrase for phrase, the text we heard earlier.
‘The vital point is that while the tape you just played us would not be admitted in evidence, our own tape, properly sworn and notarized, undoubtedly will be since it was authorized under a specific presidential executive order.’
‘Mah, oh mah!’ The former senator’s Mississippi drawl was working overtime. ‘You two ole boys really have got it all worked out.’
Dirk Goddard rose to his feet. What was he going to do? He had surely come to a fork in the road. Which path should he take? How did that poem go? The one less travelled by?
‘I’ll let you know my decision,’ he said.
A last thought occurred to him. ‘So basically you’re telling me that the 45th president of the United States is at this very moment walking around with three bugs implanted on his person, like a bloody pincushion? The Russians put one on him, though not where we originally thought. We’ve put one on him, on his backside if I understand correctly.’