After a month of sitting on the couch, scrolling through Twitter with the news constantly on in the background, I watched in real time as Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable. The only thing about it that surprised me was the increasing number of people willing to enable him.
As I watched our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies, I kept thinking about Susanne Craig’s letter. I found her business card and called her. I told her that I wanted to help but I no longer had any documents relating to our lawsuit years before.
“Jack Barnosky might still have them,” she said.
Ten days later I was on my way to his office.
The headquarters of Farrell Fritz was located in one of two oblong buildings sheathed in blue glass. Bitterly cold air pushed between them across the wide-open space of the enormous parking lot. It’s impossible to park anywhere near the entrance, so after I found a spot, it took me ten minutes to get to the lobby on my crutches. I negotiated the escalator and the marble floors very carefully.
By the time I arrived at my destination, I was tired and overheated. Thirty banker’s boxes lined two walls and filled a bookshelf. The room’s only other contents were a desk and a chair. Jack’s secretary had kindly put out a pad of paper, a pen, and some paper clips. I dropped my bags, leaned my crutches against the wall, and half fell into the desk chair. None of the boxes was labeled; I had no idea where to start.
It took me about an hour to familiarize myself with the contents of the boxes and compile a list, which required wheeling around the room on my chair and lifting boxes onto the desk while standing on one leg. When Jack stopped by, I was flushed and soaking wet. He reminded me that I couldn’t take any documents out of the room. “They belong to your brother, too, and I need his permission,” which wasn’t at all true.
When he turned to leave, I called after him, “Jack, wait a second. Can you remind me why we decided to settle the lawsuit?”
“Well, you were getting concerned about the costs, and, as you know, we don’t take cases on contingency. Although we knew they were lying to us, it was ‘He said, she said.’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate was only worth thirty million dollars.” It was almost word for word what he’d told me when I had last seen him almost twenty years earlier.
“Ah, okay. Thanks.” I was holding in my hands documents that proved the estate had actually been worth close to a billion dollars when he died; I just didn’t know it yet.
After I was sure he had gone, I grabbed copies of my grandfather’s wills, floppy disks with all of the depositions from the lawsuit, and some of my grandfather’s bank records—all of which I was legally entitled to as part of the lawsuit—and stuffed them into my bags.
Sue came by my house the next day to pick up the documents and drop off a burner phone so we could communicate more securely going forward. We weren’t taking any chances.
On my third trip to Farrell Fritz, I methodically went through every box and discovered that there were two copies of everything. I mentioned the fact to Jack’s secretary and suggested that it obviated the need to get my brother’s permission, which was a relief since I didn’t want to involve him. I would leave a set of documents for him in the unlikely event he ever wanted one.
I was just beginning to look for the list of material the Times wanted when I got a message from Jack: I could take whatever I wanted, as long as I left a copy. I hadn’t been prepared for that. In fact, I had plans to meet Sue and her colleagues Russ Buettner and David Barstow (the other two journalists working on the story) at my house at 1:00 with whatever I’d managed to smuggle out. I texted Sue with the news that I’d be late.
At 3:00, I drove to the loading dock beneath the building, and nineteen boxes were loaded into the back of the borrowed truck I was driving since I couldn’t work the clutch in my own car.
It was just beginning to get dark when I pulled into my driveway. The three reporters were waiting for me in David’s white SUV, which sported a pair of reindeer antlers and a huge red nose wired to the grill. When I showed them the boxes, there were hugs all around. It was the happiest I’d felt in months.
When Sue, Russ, and David left, I was exhausted and relieved. It had been a head-spinning few weeks. I hadn’t fully grasped how much of a risk I was taking. If anybody in my family found out what I was doing, there would be repercussions—I knew how vindictive they were—but there was no way to gauge how serious the consequences might be. Anything would pale in comparison to what they’d already done. I finally felt as though I might be able to make a difference after all.
In the past, there had been nothing I could do that would be significant enough, so I hadn’t tried very hard. Because being good or doing good didn’t count for much; whatever you did had to be extraordinary. You couldn’t just be a prosecutor; you had to be the best prosecutor in the country, you had to be a federal judge. You couldn’t just fly planes; you had to be a professional pilot for a major carrier at the dawn of the jet age. For a long time, I blamed my grandfather for my feeling this way. But none of us realized that the expectation of being
