MixedThe New YorkerWhether Simpson and Fritsch’s score-settling, tell-all account will change any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players—particularly those from the former Soviet Union—are both real and go back decades ... Critics will likely take issue with some of the authors’ others claims, including their contention that others bear the brunt of the responsibility for the confidential dossier leaking, not them ... it becomes evident that in the past few years [the authors] have thrown nearly as much chum to the media as the keepers have to the seals at the National Zoo, up the street from their Dupont Circle offices ... Some readers of Crime in Progress may begin to wonder if the special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t miss the mark. The authors praise Mueller for documenting more than a hundred and forty suspicious contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russians, and for criminally indicting thirty-four individuals, including six in Trump’s inner circle and a dozen Russian agents behind the hack of the Democrats’ e-mails and thirteen individuals and three companies tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. But they criticize Mueller’s probe for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate: to \'follow the money\' ... By getting their version of events out to the public, in advance of that of the Justice Department, the authors have performed a neat bit of publishing jujitsu. But the truth about Trumpworld is that no form of journalism is quite fast enough to keep up with every new development, because there is always another potential \'crime in progress.\'
Christopher Leonard
PositiveThe New Yorker...an even-handed telling of how the two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, built up Koch Industries ... [Leonard] manages to dig up valuable new material, including evidence of the Kochs’ role in perhaps the earliest known organized conference of climate-change deniers ... Others have chronicled the cap-and-trade fight well, but Leonard penetrates the inner sanctum of the Kochs’ lobbying machine ... Leonard’s grasp of political details isn’t always completely firm ... But Kochland is deeply and authoritatively reported, and, while it can be overly cautious in the conclusions that it draws, it marshals a huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries.
Michael Isikoff, David Corn
PositiveThe New YorkerRussian Roulette also sheds more light on Steele’s sources—whose identities he has fiercely guarded ... In other words, as they put it, some of the incendiary allegations against the President of the United States contained in the Steele dossier may have begun literally as 'pillow talk.'”
