The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her

by Joe Rothstein

  That terror was compounded when he was told of the hotel explosion. Waves of guilt washed over him then, and remained until the FBI found the militia clowns who had detonated the bomb. That was all behind him now. Tomorrow, as planned, as predicted, Rusher felt confident that Carmona and those Carmona had enlisted in this cause, whoever they were, had spent their money wisely and that they would, in fact succeed.

  44

  Attorney General Robin Birch was frantic this morning. If tomorrow’s Senate vote removed the president from office, as seemed possible, the attorney general’s role would be central to the transition. Already understaffed and deeply enmeshed in countless major investigations and ongoing proceedings, Birch had no time for distractions. If the president was removed, she most likely would be sent packing, too. Rusher would want his own AG, and right away. She had diverted six key staff people to plan and manage the transition, if it came to that. Now here was the national security director asking her to make the forty-five-minute drive to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, for a talk.

  “Can we do this tomorrow?” she pleaded.

  “I need to see you right away,” was the curt message. “No. It can’t wait. I’ll send a chopper for you.”

  Birch climbed aboard the chopper, accompanied by two staff aides, a number of work binders and considerable apprehension. A request like this meant serious trouble.

  Robin Birch was surprised that President Tennyson had appointed her out of a very talented group of other possible candidates. Her background was corporate law, financial corporate at that—the very target that had been in Tennyson’s sights all the while she had been in Congress. Birch had represented some of the very people Tennyson considered the biggest obstacles to reform. When Tennyson called Birch for an interview they had pulled no punches with one another. The new president was out to shrink the banks, toughen Dodd-Frank, get a twenty-first century version of Glass Stegall passed, and she needed an AG who was so familiar with all of the ins and outs of global corporate banking that she would not be tricked, fooled or bought off. The key question was whether Robin Birch shared those goals.

  In fact, she did. She had become increasingly soured on the whole megabank enterprise. She voted for Tennyson and was excited that someone who might actually take up reforms was elected. Not many of her colleagues knew of Birch’s passion for reform. She wasn’t overtly political. But one of her clients, Carmen Sandoval, knew. Carmie was outspoken, a known friend of Tennyson’s. It was easy to share private hopes and doubts with her. After the election, Carmie steered Tenny to Birch with confidence that she would be a good fit for their agenda.

  None of this, of course, had much to do with the activities of the NSA. Birch guessed that the summons to the meeting had something to do with domestic terror. Maybe a potential attack NSA had in its sights. One of those accompanying her on the chopper ride was a key FBI terrorism expert.

  Birch was ushered into the NSA director’s office. Her aides were told to wait outside. It would be just the two of them.

  “Can I get you anything?” asked NSA Director Kenneth Kloss, “coffee?”

  “No.”

  “I’m having a double espresso and suggest you have one too. You may want to fortify yourself for what I’m about to tell you.”

  Kloss used his office coffee machine to make his drink, then gestured to her to sit next to him on a sofa. He pulled a digital device from his coat pocket.

  “I know being here’s an effort for you, with a possible transition tomorrow. But after you hear this you’ll know why this couldn’t wait. You had to know this now.”

  Kloss punched the play button.

  45

  The U.S. Constitution mandates that a Senate impeachment trial be presided over by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. That role fell to Brian Kamrath, who had led the Court for the past ten years. It was said of Kamrath that the best thing about him as chief justice was the fact that he looked like a chief justice. A trim, tanned outdoorsman, Kamrath had been plucked from the Tenth Federal Circuit bench and appointed to the Supreme Court by then President Marcus Lowell. Kamrath and Marc Lowell had been Yale classmates, partying together for years. Brian Kamraths’s family had been rooted in Boston for six generations. But Kamrath felt constricted by life in New England. After his obligatory two years in a Wall Street law firm he moved to Colorado where the skiing was better, where the hiking trails were longer and more challenging, and where there was more opportunity to floor the hot Porsches he loved to drive.

  Brian Kamrath proved an effective corporate lawyer at a time when Denver was transitioning from an overgrown western town to the financial capital of the Rocky Mountain west. Kamrath was not a particularly driven personality. He did not burn the midnight oil or give up weekends and vacations to make a few extra dollars. Despite that, his legal practice thrived. For decades, he had settled into a very appealing routine. Tennis or hiking or skiing on weekends. A month during summer steering his sloop, the Betty Bee, along the Maine coast. He and his wife and two daughters would migrate to Camden, Maine and their rustic, comfortable cabin, just two blocks from the dock where lobstermen brought their daily catch.

  For Kamrath, corporate legal work was both lucrative and incredibly boring. So when his good friend, Colorado Senator Robert Rager, asked whether he would like to be considered for an opening on the Tenth Circuit, Kamrath was interested. The new job gave him considerable time freedom and flexibility, and he found it for the most part only mildly challenging.

  Then came the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Jacobs, the call from his old friend, Marc Lowell who explained that he was being pressed to appoint any of three ideologues, none of whom he agreed with. Kamrath, on the other hand, came from the same New England Republican DNA as Lowell. Proper Republican. While legal scholars rolled their eyes at a Kamrath appointment, no one could find anything particularly wrong with the way he’d lived his life nor with decisions he had written, speeches he had made, or clients he had represented.

  And besides, Kamrath looked like a Supreme Court justice. He charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his hearings and displayed just enough irreverence to charm the media as well. Two years later, Chief Justice Alfred Wagner died suddenly, and President Lowell moved Kamrath into the presiding chair.

  Now here he was, Brian Kamrath of Denver, Colorado, in December, in Washington, presiding over an impeachment trial and not a bit happy about it. For one thing, he considered the charges against President Tennyson thin and suspect. If this were his case to decide on the Tenth Circuit, he would have dismissed it long ago and spent the summer where he should be, in Maine, on the Betty Bee, eating lobster fresh out of the traps and corn three hours off the stalks. But it wasn’t his trial or his say. He was merely a figurehead, plunked down to establish and maintain decorum in a chamber that had lately lacked much of it. Tomorrow it would be over, one way or another, and he could begin thinking seriously of the two weeks the family would spend at Aspen over the Christmas holidays.

  Finally, after weeks of testimony interrupted by the delays necessitated by Federico Aragon’s death and the Washingtonia Grand explosion, the Senate was ready to render a final judgement on the fate of President Isabel Aragon Tennyson. The public already had made its judgement.

  Judgement 1: the public was weary of the story, seemingly the same story each day after the early revelations. She was being pummeled like a boxer on the ropes and the public just wanted the beatings to stop.

  Judgement 2: Whatever prompted the impeachment process, while originally shocking and at times pornographic, the public was unconvinced that President Tennyson was either a crook or a sexual pervert. Since Washingtonia, her favorability numbers had been rising. Now they were as high as they had ever been, except for the weeks after her election.

  Chief Justice Kamrath sat through it all, saying little, answering parliamentary questions, and trying as best he could to adhere to precedent. After the summations, Kamrath anno
unced that the roll call vote would take place tomorrow, the appointed hour of noon, when the Senate would reconvene for this, their only piece of business. Kamrath then adjourned himself to his comfortable apartment in Washington’s upscale Kalorama neighborhood, its balcony overlooking busy Connecticut Avenue and the National Cathedral.

  As the chief justice, Kamrath had a small security guard to protect his person, and also, among other things, to periodically sweep his apartment for listening devices. There wasn’t much contact with neighbors, although they were friendly enough. He drew little attention to himself. The locals were used to political celebrities. Rarely did anyone create a fuss when they saw him.

  Kamrath was packing up for a quick exit from Washington after tomorrow’s vote when his private cell phone buzzed. It was the attorney general.

  “Mr. Justice, General Birch. Sorry to disturb you at home but Ken Kloss and I have to see you on a matter of the gravest importance. May we come to your apartment in about half an hour?”

  Strange. The attorney general and the head of NSA, coming here? On short notice?

  “Can you give me a preview? What topic?”

  “Can’t say by phone. But I assure you it’s important and very time sensitive.”

  “Well, of course,” he agreed.

  He didn’t know Attorney General Birch very well. His legal world had been in the West. Birch was what Kamrath was groomed to be, a New York corporate lawyer. Their paths seldom crossed, though his impression was that Birch was an excellent lawyer and certainly a great choice for what President Tennyson was doing to rein in the banks.

  Ken Kloss, on the other hand, was an old buddy. Kloss, a retired Air Force general, had been head of the North American Air Command at Colorado Springs. They belonged to the same local golf club. Their wives became good friends and the couples socialized together. In fact, the Klosses and the Kamraths had dinner right here in this apartment not six months earlier. That’s probably why Kloss felt comfortable asking to meet here. He knew it was secure, and away from prying eyes.

  Birch and Kloss came with company. Two technicians swept the apartment for any bugs that might have been installed since the last sweep. All clear. Then they were gone, leaving three of the most important figures in the U.S. government alone at the dining room table.

  “Let me get right at it,” said Kloss.

  “As soon as we heard about the explosion at the Washingtonia we enhanced all of our monitoring. We needed to know if this was a solitary act or a major effort to take down the government. We monitored everyone of importance in the DC area.”

  “Even me?”

  “Even you. At a time like that we have no idea what’s happening. The prelude to a major attack on a disrupted leadership? A coordinated effort to bring down the top leaders in government? We just don’t know. So, yes, we monitored your phones and computers, too. But we were particularly alert to calls made to or received from foreign countries. One of our devices blanketed the vice president’s home. And here’s what we heard:

  Kloss punched play on his digital recorder and played this conversation:

  “What have you done? I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Murder, not impeachment, that’s what I mean.”

  “The bomb. The bomb. You didn’t have to kill her.”

  “Kill her? Why should we kill her? Nothing’s changed since we spoke. The plan’s working. It’s all working just as I told you it would. I know nothing of a bomb.”

  “Then who?”

  “Wait. Where are you calling from?”

  “My residence. My cell phone. It’s secure.”

  “Secure!? There are no secure lines, you damn fool.”

  The party on the other end abruptly hung up. One of the voices was immediately recognizable to Justice Kamrath.

  “The vice president knew there was a conspiracy to get rid of the president and he was in on it?”

  “Pretty evident, isn’t it? But that’s not all. We tracked the person on the other end of the call. It’s Javier Carmona, CEO of the Aragon Group, the president’s old family company.”

  “Really? Her own company trying to depose her?”

  “It gets worse. After the vice president’s call, Carmona heard about the explosion. Not knowing whether the president was alive or dead, Carmona sort of panicked. It could have been one of his operatives who went rogue on him. He had to know. So he made a number of phone calls himself, even after warning Rusher about phone security. Listen to these:

  “Peter, you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “I think your president is dead.”

  “Dead! No! What happened?”

  “You don’t know, then?”

  “Javier, what are you talking about?”

  “I just had a call from Rusher. He says she was killed. Sounds like a bomb.”

  “My God! Why should I have known?”

  “We need to know whether any of our people are involved.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Anything’s possible with, well, with those we’re working with.”

  “You mean the cartel guys? I thought you had them under control. After what happened to her brother...

  “Stop! It’s best we say no more. We’ll talk later.”

  “Who’s Carmona talking with?” asked Justice Kamrath.

  “Pete Garner, Texas Global Oil.”

  “Texas Global!”

  “There’s more.”

  Kloss punched play again.

  “Jack. Pete. You heard?”

  “Shit, I heard all right. What have those Mexican idiots done? First that priest, now this. We were going to win the vote.”

  “Carmona called me. He heard it from Rusher. I don’t think he had anything to do with this one.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Carmona thinks maybe some of the cartel guys got nervous and needed to make sure. You know, if she survives and beats the vote there’s a trail of stuff that could lead right back into their laps.”

  “We weren’t going to lose the fucking vote. It was all arranged.”

  “Time to start burning paper and wiping out hard discs, just in case.”

  Kloss hit the stop button.

  “That’s Peter Garner talking to Jack Hurley”

  “Jack Hurley! Blue Bank’s Jack Hurley! My God!”

  “One more,” said Kloss.

  “Javier, Pounds. I hope this isn’t what it looks like. That you people took a shortcut.”

  “Not me. Not anyone here. I’m checking up and down our group now. So far no one is involved. They say it and I believe it.”

  “I hope to high heaven that’s true. I promise you, if you or any of the people you’ve enlisted in all this are responsible I won’t defend you. I was aghast when I learned about the president’s brother. Just sick about it. You assured me you had nothing to do with that. Now this. You know what this means, don’t you? Every intelligence agency in the government will be crawling all over to find out who did it. Well, when they come asking questions about how I got all those news stories that set her up I’ll tell the truth. We hated that woman. I wanted to run her off, not run her over.”

  “Please. Stay calm. We’ll talk when I know more....Wait. Wait. I hear now she might not be dead.”

  The conversation ended.

  “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Yes, Irving Pounds.”

  Kamrath was as focused now as he had ever been in life.

  “There are other calls,” said Kloss. “We’ve counted eleven people who very clearly are part of the conspiracy, half of them like Carmona, not even Americans, none of them foreign government people but all them well known and personally powerful. They didn’t set the bomb. They were far too clever for that. But they were involved in a scheme to take down the president and replace her with Rusher. And with a deeper dive into all this we’re likely to find that Federico Aragon’s murder was total
ly connected.”

  “Good lord! And you’re here because you think I need to stop the impeachment vote tomorrow?”

  “Someone has to. Or else this crowd will wind up running the country through the vice president, who obviously is one of them, and would be in debt to them. This is nothing less than a coup to take over the United States government.”

  Kamrath walked to the open balcony window. Long seconds passed.

  “The Constitution is written, for the most part, in very general language, leaving much room for interpretation. That’s what gives so many of us judges lifetime employment. But when it comes to impeachment, the words are detailed and specific. The chief justice presides and the Senate decides. That’s it. Cut and dried. I’m powerless to intervene in the process other than to see that it happens.”

  “But you can meet with the Senate leaders before the session and give them this information,” said Birch.

  “Yes, I can. Then what happens? They call off the day’s vote while they consider the evidence and the options. Do they tell the real story and place cuffs on the vice president? Or is there a cover story because it gets entangled in partisan politics? With this Congress, that’s the most likely outcome. What a mess that would be. We have to think through all the consequences of anything we do.”

  “But what if we go to the media in the morning, before the vote and just reveal what we’ve learned,” Birch pressed on.

  “Well, you’re the attorney general with a lot of skin in the game. Her guy. Excuse me. Her woman, making a last ditch effort to save her. Ken here loses credibility to protect the nation’s security because the other side will accuse him of interfering with a political decision. And me? What am I doing here? I review cases that require interpretation of the Constitution. Where’s the case? What interpretation is in question? There’s a delicate line here between legality and politics, and if we make the wrong move, or possibly any move, the credibility of all our institutions are compromised.”

  “But we can’t just let this happen,” said Birch.

  “We don’t know that it will. The vote tomorrow could go either way. If she’s retained, you can go to her with the evidence and decide how to move the case through the normal criminal process. If she’s not.... well let’s hope we don’t have to face that.”