Following Seth Abramson on Trump, Russia, And Now Khashoggi And the Saudi Ties

I was reading enough retweets of Seth Abramson on Twitter, that I decided I should follow him as well.  He has been tweeting prolifically about Trump, particularly about the Russia scandals.  He knows a lot about this because he's been writing a book on the topic which comes out in November - Prood of Collusion:  How Trump Betrayed America.

He seems to know a lot.  He seems particularly good at putting all the pieces together, at picking up any new bit of news and showing how it fits into the larger picture.  We don't get a lot of that in the media.  Mostly, it's a lot of jumping from one thing (which then disappears) to the next, without all the pieces being fit together.

Anyone who knows the Trump-Russia case knows Trump's inaction on Khashoggi is tied to a 6-nation "grand bargain." More proof—Khashoggi was banned from Saudi TV, newspapers and conferences for criticizing the Saudi Crown Prince's involvement in the bargain: https://t.co/Gfnxpoqy6s

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) October 14, 2018

You can read the whole thread here.  (While each tweet is limited to 280 characters, Twitter now lets its users set up threads of tweets that you can read consecutively.  There are 25 tweets in this thread, then comments.)


I also checked on Wikipedia about Abramson.  He's a got degrees from Dartmouth, Harvard Law, Iowa Writers Workshop, and a doctorate in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Related to this thread on Trump-Russia and Saudi Arabia, here's a some of what Wikipedia has on Abramson and which seems to confirm my sense that what he's writing is important.:

After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Abramson received widespread attention for his tweets alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. By synthesizing reporting from major news outlets, Abramson has documented repeated contacts between multiple members of the Trump campaign and the political network surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin.[19] Based on the timing, publicly known content, and personnel involved in those meetings, Abramson suggests that, through intermediaries, Trump and Putin came to an understanding in 2013 that Trump would run for president and push for an end to U.S. sanctions against Russia, and that Putin would in return greenlight a multibillion dollar Trump Tower Moscow deal and other potential Trump ventures in Russia while using Russian capabilities to aid the Trump campaign.[20] 

Writers at several media publications – including The New Republic,[21] The Atlantic,[22] and Deadspin[23] – have described Abramson as a conspiracy theorist. While Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate argues that Abramson is "not making things up, per se; he's just recycling information you could find on any news site and adding sinister what-if hypotheticals to create conclusions that he refers to, quite seriously, as 'investigatory analyses.'"[24] The Chronicle of Higher Education also contests the moniker, noting that Abramson "feuds with anti-Trump conspiracy theorists whom he sees linking to dubious sources and making claims without evidence."[25] 

Meanwhile, Virginia Heffernan writes in Politico that Abramson's "theory-testing" is "urgently important."[26] Der Spiegel calls Abramson "a quintessential American figure: an underdog who became an involuntary hero."[27] The New York Observer writes that "events like Trump's 2013 trip to Russia for Miss Universe were covered extensively on Abramson's feed prior to the mainstream media catching on, a fact that has given him a reputation for being early to connect events within the broader Russia story."[28]

[This link tells how to create a twitter thread.  There's also something Twitter calls  a moment.  From what I can tell, the difference is that threads are one person's tweets collected, but in a moment you can add other tweets in.  But if someone knows this better, please enlighten us.]