Harper: I don’t know that it’ll tie every single one of them, because despite my best efforts it could very well turn out to be that a number of them won’t fit into the larger puzzle, but [I think] there’ll be enough of them that fit into certain puzzles that all of a sudden there’s a story that makes sense here and is proven with facts — and provable with facts, I should say. I think one theme will continue to be important will be the money trail. I think another theme will be just noticing or being aware of how events throughout the summer campaign of 2016 are awfully difficult to explain as coincidences, whether you call them hacking, Trump advisers interacting with Russians, Trump’s refusal to disengage from his Putin bromance. I think all of those things are going to be of a piece.
A third theme that has become prominent since I started the original timeline is what I would call the erosion of Trump’s sequential defenses, and unfortunately, the willingness of the GOP to let him get away with it. Just to illustrate the point, you know this all started with Trump and his team assuring everybody there had been no contacts between the campaign and Russians. That was defense No. 1. Defense No. 2 was, well, if there were contacts, there was no collusion. And then that has disappeared. Defense No. 3, particularly in light of the June 9, 2016 meeting among Trump’s senior advisers and the Russians, is, look, anyone would do it; it’s oppo research. Well, that isn’t really selling very well. So defense No. 4 has become, well, the Russians didn’t provide anything that was helpful anyway, so no harm, no foul. And now we’re up to [Nos.] 5 and 6, which I would summarize as whatever happened didn’t affect the election outcome, and No. 6, the newest one, is no matter what happened, Trump is still a legitimate president. And I think that No. 6 is a big one because I think that’s very much in question based on the failure of defenses 1 through 5.
