In December 2016 Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect’s connections with Russia. Harding decides to follow the money and the sex. In Washington, January 2017, Steele’s explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been ‘cultivating, supporting and assisting’ Trump for years and that they have compromising information about him. Trump responds on Twitter, ‘FAKE NEWS’.
COLLUSION is a gripping, alarming exposé about the biggest political scandal of the modern era, in which Harding reveals the true nature of Trump’s decades-long relationship with Russia and presents the gripping inside story of Steele’s dossier. Drawing on exclusive new material and key sources from the intelligence community, Harding tells an astonishing story of offshore money, sketchy real-estate deals, a Miss Universe Pageant, mobsters, money laundering, hacking and Kremlin espionage. He shines a light on powerful Russian players like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have come from Vladimir Putin himself. COLLUSION is up-to-date to the minute, including the indictments of campaign manager, Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, which threaten to engulf Trump’s administration.
Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize). Two of Harding's books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.
