I Pled Guilty to Robert Mueller. Here’s My Story

Sam Patten became briefly notorious during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 U.S. presidential election when Patten pled guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian politician. An international political operative, Patten had worked on the same team in Ukraine as Paul Manafort, later one of Donald Trump’s campaign chairmen. Patten had also worked for the London-based Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining political operation made infamous during the 2016 election, prompting commentators like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to question whether he was the missing link in some foreign plot to put Trump in the White House.

For much of his career, before all the controversy and legal battles, Patten says he promoted democracy abroad – for the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Russia and Iraq, and for Freedom House where he oversaw Eurasia programs. From 2008-9, he served as senior advisor to the undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs. 

After the second Bush administration, Patten became a private consultant working for clients in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Africa. In Northern Iraq, he worked for a major Kurdish faction and later the Arab Sunnis in the immediate run-up to ISIS’ 2014 massive land grab and declaration of an Islamic state. He also worked for multiple sides in the country of Georgia – both for and against former president Mikheil Saakashvili, and in Ukraine. It was there his fortunes changed.

His establishment roots stretch deep: On both his maternal and paternal sides, Patten is a direct descendant of John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and America’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His biological grandfathers were a U.S. foreign intelligence officer and a British politician who resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty over Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler. In 1996, Patten was stabbed in Washington, D.C., while defending his grandmother, Susan Mary Alsop, a Georgetown doyenne. He was stabbed a second time in November 2020 while leaving Washington, surviving a seemingly random and brutal attack in broad daylight on a busy street.

In this exclusive excerpt from his memoir Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a Foreign Agent, Patten takes us to Ukraine in the years preceding Russia’s invasion and gives us unique insights into the country’s political class in a time of tumult and change. This is his version of the events that embroiled the early years of the Trump administration and caused so much rancor and division. In this chapter, Patten offers one of the best descriptions of his former business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom Mueller tagged Person A in his 2019 report, and whom the Senate Intelligence Committee called an asset of Russian security services. 

(Full Disclosure: Patten and Rolling Stone’s Editor-in-Chief, Noah Shachtman, have known each other for more than 25 years.)

October 2014

The steel door had been torched earlier in the year. Russian journalists had holed up here during the government-toppling events of February, and I suppose that made sense. It is a conveniently located apartment with a narrow view of the nearby Maidan — Kyiv’s central square, where protestors camped out during the winter months both in 2004 and 2013. Now the door is still charred, with bits of black and rust-colored metal flaking off if you close it with too much force. But it served its purpose then, and the landlord sees little point in replacing it now. I’ve just gotten used to it and handle it gingerly.

Looking up as I climb the stairs, I see three men in leather jackets standing right in front of the door, ringing the bell and waiting. That’s a bad sign, which I suddenly connect with the guy standing by the entrance and the van parked in a way that almost blocked the building’s front door. Instinctively, I keep climbing past my landing, pretending not to notice the men. One of them must smell my fear and starts to follow me up the stairwell, but the man in charge tells him to hang back. I keep climbing up several flights, though I feel I’m just going deeper into a trap.

Breathlessly, I’m standing on the fourth floor, with my limited options racing through my mind. I can keep going, although access to the roof is probably locked, and what would I do up there anyway? I could try to talk my way into one of these apartments to hide, but “frantic foreigner” just isn’t a good look, and this option is likely to draw even more attention to me. Or I can bolt, using the only practical technology at my disposal: an old-fashioned elevator with a wall-less cab. That’s my best bet. I press the button to call for it.

At first none of the leather-clad door lurkers below notice as I descend in the humming and clanking old elevator behind them. Then, just as my head is level with their feet and almost entirely out of their view, one catches sight of me out of the corner of his eye, and I hear him rally another to join the chase.

The door opens, and I run for daylight, bursting out of the building’s entrance and cutting a sharp left up the hill. I’ve already been jogging nearly an hour this morning, and I’m both loose and anticipating the hill, so I’m already a couple of blocks up by the time my pursuers get onto the street.

Neither the Canadian embassy nor a large Catholic church that I pass is likely to protect me, so I keep climbing. I’m more focused on running than looking back. Darting across a street without stopping, I dive into the park at the top of the hill and straight for a trail that cuts through to another part of town.

Once I’m in the park, I know for sure I’ve lost them. Who could they have been? The government? Maybe they were hired thugs there to settle someone’s score with me? Whoever it was, they almost got me right where I was living. I make like I am jogging to the Hyatt Regency in Sofiivska Square. Once inside the Hyatt’s protective cocoon, I allow myself to get angry. My first call is to Kostya, otherwise known as Konstantin Kilimnik.

“I’m not getting paid anywhere near enough for this kind of shit,” I bark into the cell phone, trying vainly to sound cool when in fact I am terrified.

This is a test, I tell myself as I walk back down the hill. Just a test, and I’ll pass it like the others. Everything is going to be OK. My mind flashes back to a conversation I wasn’t meant to understand soon after I arrived here.

“Sunshine” — my chosen code name for my translator — and I were meeting a shady fixer called Michael. He is in charge of printing and distributing pamphlets attacking our enemies. These pamphlets are based on the scripts I’m writing with Sunshine’s help. Under his breath, Michael asks her in Russian, “Is this guy strong enough?”

My heart sings when, after a beat, she tells him that I am indeed. Now the gauntlet has been thrown again: Am I going to let a botched kidnapping, followed by Lord knows what, throw me off task? Or am I going to be the guy who would neither bend nor buckle and take whatever danger and difficulty thrown in his path in perfect stride?

How did I wind in Ukraine anyway? A U.S. Senate campaign in Oregon has just fired Cambridge Analytica, the firm that sent me there, and I’m standing in the parking lot of a strip mall outside Portland smoking a cigarette and considering my scant options when I get a call from a Ukrainian phone number.

As it turned out, it was Kostya calling. Would I be interested in a short-term gig in Kyiv for a month? It’s as good an escape as any, and unlike the Brits, Kostya’s guy there is ready to pay above my rate because of the short notice. That’s $30,000 for three weeks. They want me on the ground ASAP.

When I ran the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute, a democracy promotion group, Kostya had been my deputy. Standing just a whisker over five feet tall and with a tousled mop of brown hair, Kostya was the eldest of the Russian team, maybe a couple of years older than me. His wry, understated humor is what struck me at first, and before long we were not just colleagues, but also friends.

I could tell he thought my sunny hope for a democratic Russia was naive, even if charmingly so. He must have thought my hero worship of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, whom I followed across the country’s eleven time zones for more than a year, was quixotic, even if he was careful never to say so.

Kostya had since hooked up with a heavyweight, Darth Vader–esque American political advisor Paul Manafort, and landed a significant piece of work steering Ukraine’s Party of Regions through parliamentary and presidential elections. The man Manafort helped shape into Ukraine’s next president, Viktor Yanukovych, had once served time in prison for stealing a hat. If Manafort could make an ex-con president, he must be a magician.

Up to a point anyway. Manafort was able to persuade Yanukovych, the president, to make his first foreign trip to Brussels, not Moscow — an important signal of intentions. But that was in 2010, and by 2013 Yanukovych’s government needed cash and forbearance on gas debts badly, so it switched gears, putting the European Union membership dream of many Ukrainians on hold indefinitely.

Slamming the gears into reverse like that sent a shock wave through the increasingly westward-leaning country. It was headed somewhere bloodier than the Orange Revolution had been in 2004–2005.

I’d crossed paths with Kostya just after that, in 2007, when I was doing media work for the political party of Viktor Yushchenko, the appealing central banker who was poisoned before pro-Russian consultants tried to rig the election for Yanukovych in 2004.

The backlash to these events came in the form of crowds who swelled in central Kyiv despite the harsh winter. The authorities then folded in a deal brokered by an ex-Polish president. Yushchenko took the presidency, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a blonde with a Princess Leia hairdo, got the prime minister’s chair — both promising reforms. After cheating to avoid defeat in the first round, Yanukovych then lost the re-match badly.

That defeat prompted a group of industrialists from the Russian-speaking, southeastern city of Donetsk to westernize their own approach by hiring Manafort instead of Russian “political technologists” who botched Yanukovych’s first presidential run. They “learned from their mistakes,” as I later heard then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst tell students at Georgetown University — and tried a new approach by hiring a Westerner instead. I don’t know what precisely Paul did for Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, or Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, Zairian strongman Mobutu Sese Seko, or Spanish-Lebanese businessman Abdul Rahman el-Assir, who reportedly hired him on behalf of French presidential candidate Édouard Balladur in the 1990s.

But what he and Kostya did for the eastern Ukrainians was essentially party building — something Paul knew about ever since he was in his teens, when his dad was elected mayor of New Britain, Connecticut. While my old boss at Freedom House, David Kramer (who would later carry the Steele Dossier from London to John McCain in Washington), told the Guardian “advising Yanukovych is like putting lipstick on a pig,” there was actually a bit more to it.

Flash forward to 2013. As it tends to happen in Ukraine, one side pushed too far. Yanukovych had jailed his likeliest opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, allowed even more flagrant corruption than usual to take root and was now saying “no” to the one thing that allowed Ukrainians to overlook those first two offenses: a European future.

In mid-November 2013, crowds of mostly young protestors encamped on Kyiv’s Maidan, or central square, and refused to leave until Yanukovych reversed course or stepped down. Early the next year, blood spilled down the little hill on which the presidential administration stands after snipers picked off protestors in the crowd. A “Holy Hundred” were killed as protestors tore cobblestones from the streets to build barricades, and the street started shooting back. That’s when Serhiy Lyovochkin, Yanukovych’s chief of staff, resigned in protest. INTER, the Eastern-focused TV station he co-owns with exiled oligarch Dmitro Firtash, showed continuous live broadcasting of the events on the square and played a role in shocking a nation’s conscience. When Yanukovych’s government fled under the cover of night, there were those who went to Russia with the toppled president and those who stayed behind. The ones who didn’t run, they hired me, on Lyovochkin’s — and Kostya’s — recommendation.

Kostya, my old deputy, had become the link between Manafort and his clients. If Lyovochkin needed to know what Manafort, a.k.a. “the wise old owl,” thinks about something, he went to Kostya. This made Kostya much more than a translator and, as Manafort told me, “a powerful little dude.”

As soon as I land in Kyiv, Kostya briefs me on the political state of play, now six months since Maidan. Yanukovych voters are up for grabs and the client’s competitors have been staking claims on them. To reverse this, I draft a strategy to stop them in their tracks and title the plan “Operation Clawback.” Reading it in front of Kostya and me, the Ukrainian power brokers beam appreciatively.

By Lyovochkin’s design, I don’t report to Manafort. But I am now practicing the dark arts of negative campaigning so Manafort can focus on the positive case for Opposition Bloc. As such, I’m doing Darth Vader’s dirty work.

My job is the “minus,” Serhiy has made clear. Making the Opposition Bloc look like it’s on the side of the people is Manafort’s job, while mine is simply attacking Serhiy’s array of enemies. I do this well — well enough that someone sent a welcome party to my doorstep to thank me. The internet ads I make with Sunshine’s help pull no punches as they expose the hypocrisy baked into our major competitors’ claims, for example: a rival oligarch who also said he represents the people was sunning himself on the French Riviera while dozens of our target voters were burned alive during political violence in Odessa, or one of the former president’s sharpest critics is seen taking a knee and kissing the ring of the very man he piously rebuked in public.

To be successful, negative campaigning must accentuate doubts or concerns that the audience already has. You find and exploit any chink in the armor that exposes real weaknesses. Ukrainians are savvy and already frustrated with their existing crop of politicians — so much so that four years from now they will elect as a president a comedian who became famous by tapping into that very frustration.

“You earned your money, kid,” Manafort tells me over dinner the night after the election. Opposition Bloc won about 10 percent, which is more than twice what they were polling at when I arrived a month ago. When you consider our guys were overthrown in a revolution less than nine months ago, it actually does seem like an achievement of sorts.

When Manafort talks to me about his role in Ukraine, it’s largely in the past tense. He’s proud of how he’s integrated with the client — “They consider me one of them,” he tells me — and he has played some role in geopolitics, he says wistfully. He’s checked out of this place, it seems to me. Either he’s headed off to retire on a golf course somewhere, or he must have some new, better gig in the offing. With a mellifluous voice and a careful eye, it’s easy to see why clients pay him such deference: his cool affect conveys a sense of gravitas. Two years from now, candidate Trump will order his helicopter to descend to cell phone range so he can call Manafort and yell about “guys like you with your hair and skin,” meaning Manafort is good-looking for his age.

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I feel like a baton is being passed. Kostya explains the clients are no longer in a position to pay Paul’s princely fees, especially now that they are in the opposition. The new government is squeezing them in the yin-and-yang flow of Ukrainian corruption, and they’re going to have to do more with less. This being the case, he says, they are pleased with my performance at a fraction of Paul’s cost. This can be long-term work if, he pauses, we can somehow manage the constant infighting. That means regular trips over years to make the same argument: put aside your differences and unite — if you do, you can win back power. The stakeholders — mostly oligarchs or “mini-garchs” in their own right — would gather and listen to the American who Kostya and Serhiy had brought to the party.

Walking out of one of these recurring, almost identical shadow politburo meetings, I turn to Kostya and ask him if he’s seen Groundhog Day. He hasn’t, so I explain the idea, in which Bill Murray is a TV weather reporter who ends up reliving the same day over and over again.

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess that’s pretty much it.”

February 2015

Of the three epic knights who in legend defended the Kievan Rus from attackers both from east and west, Ilya Muromets is the best remembered. Tall and strong and good-hearted, he rises from the stove on top of which he had been convalescing his entire youth at age 33 to defend the motherland. The one figure on Ukraine’s political horizon who most reminds me of Muromets is former world heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko.

Just a few days older than me, Klitschko came onto the political scene after my first campaign here for Yushchenko. The man is built like a brick shithouse and keeps in prizefighting shape. And people know where he got his money: he fought for it fair and square.

I heard him tell a group of students how a crooked bureaucrat tried to stiff his mother out of his late father’s military pension. Had she paid the apparatchik a regular cut, he would have allowed her to get some of what was rightfully hers.

“When he became president, Yanukovych asked me the name of this man and promised to find and destroy him,” Klitschko told the kids, “but I said, ‘No, Viktor, it’s the whole fucking system that is crooked. It needs to be torn down and rebuilt.’”

Despite years of being a hard-nosed political operative, I haven’t lost my soft spot for underdogs or political heroes in waiting. My old friend Boris Nemtsov is now marching on the streets of Moscow for the freedom of assembly and an end to the war in Ukraine. There is a commonality between him and Klitschko, who is big enough to speak truth to power in this crooked country. Maybe the future should be his.

I first meet Klitschko in January 2015, after literally years trying to get an audience. He is finishing his first term as mayor of Kyiv, putting together his reelection team. A second term is by no means assured — Kyivans are restless and angry the way only those in a capital city can be.

Low-intensity war drags on in the east, but you wouldn’t know it walking down the city’s central Khreshchatyk Street, with its expensive stores and high-end European autos illegally parked left and right. The city’s residents have high expectations, and with things falling apart everywhere else, it seems somehow more important to deliver now than ever.

Klitschko and his kitchen cabinet hire me, and I bring on a couple of U.S. pollsters with experience in Ukraine. We are basically plugged into a team of Ukrainian consultants, and for the most part, everyone gets along. At my inspiration, we call our headquarters the “bread factory,” because it is there that we take the raw ingredients and turn them into a necessary product. It’s a uniquely hybrid setup, where the integration of foreign and local consultants can work as smoothly and effectively as any I’ve known.

It is on my return flight to Washington from a trip to Kyiv to set up the bread factory in late February that I learn Nemtsov has just been assassinated in front of the Kremlin in Moscow. He was shot multiple times in the back by people who knew where the security cameras were and when a passing snow removal truck might lend them cover.

I’m devastated, even though I haven’t seen Boris in years. At the time of his killing, Nemtsov was about to release a report on the Ukraine war that would throw water on the claim that the so-called “separatist” regimes in Donbas and Luhansk were anything but Russian puppets. He had been here during the Orange Revolution. The girlfriend who was with him when he was shot is Ukrainian. Klitschko announced he is changing the name of the street in Kyiv where the Russian embassy stands to Nemtsov Street, which wins me over more than anything he has said or done so far.

Now Klitschko’s reelection is my raison d’être. I spend a month working with him on what we call the “big speech” that lays out an agenda for the city in his second term. We identify that young to middle-aged women are open to him but not yet sold, so we create a program that gives them something they really value: free English lessons. It’s good for the city, too.

We strong-arm the actual bread factory to keep prices down and show the people we’re plowing the snow from the streets as soon as it begins to fall. Critically, we give the Ukrainians what they deserve: an elected official who is in touch, down-to-earth, and driving comfort and progress.

Now I’m flying back and forth from D.C. to Kyiv at least once a month and sometimes every other week. My enthusiasm for the campaign becomes so great, Vitali has to tell me to hang back more and be less visible. In a local cabinet meeting, where I’m lurking in the eaves, the head of the city’s SBU, or state intelligence, also whispers something in Klitschko’s ear that prompts him to whisk me out of the room. “Go back to the hotel,” he tells me. “It’s safer for you there.” He knows this because he owns the hotel.

When October comes, Klitschko beats a pack of more than a dozen opponents with a commanding plurality of 40 percent, but since it’s less than 50, there is a second round three weeks later. Finally, he wins with a little more than two-thirds of the vote. This is almost 10 points higher than his initial victory in 2014. When I think back over all the campaigns I’ve fought up until now, this win is somehow the most satisfying.

Six months later, when passing through Kyiv to see Serhiy, I catch a glimpse of Klitschko riding around the city on his comparatively tiny bicycle, with no cameras in tow, looking for potholes to fix. I’m in a taxi and terrified of what would happen if his huge frame tumbled from the small bike, so I don’t call out to him but just watch instead. The guy is really trying. I hope he really makes a difference. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think I ever heard him lie, which is very strange for a politician. Ukraine can use more politicians like him.

JANUARY 2017

Tickets to Trump’s inauguration are the last thing I need to worry about right now; I’m trying to get out of Congo alive. Because Ukraine business has been so slack, I’d taken on an account helping to ease the transition of power in the same central African country over which the United States and the Soviet Union had vied for influence 70 years earlier. Why not ask Manafort to get the damn tickets, for crying out loud? Kostya is texting me between flights and asking to get Serhiy and some Opposition Block shareholders into the ball. He tells me Serhiy is trying to build some distance with Manafort, so it would be great if there were any way I could possibly arrange it. “Fine,” I tell him, “I’ll look into it.”

What I would love now is just a little time to decompress, having spent the last few months in Kinshasa hoping the city wouldn’t explode. There I’d been advising the outgoing president on how to reduce the chances of violence when his second and constitutionally limited term came to a close. It was early in the morning there when the media called the U.S. presidential election for Trump. To make it even more dramatic, no sooner had the news crossed the lips of the BBC anchors on the ancient TV set in my room than the screen went to fuzz and then black as a puff of white smoke emerged from behind it.

At home, there is no peace in the air. And now, instead of relaxing with my wife and son, I need to play host to Serhiy and whomever he brings. Also, in order to get the tickets, I need to attend the ball myself, which I’m not at all enthusiastic about doing. The things we do for clients . . .

Kostya and I watch the “American Carnage” speech in the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel, where he and Serhiy are staying. (Editor’s Note: When reached for comment Konstantin Kilimnik didn’t recall watching the speech with Patten. And their stories diverge in key places. What follows is Patten’s account. )The expensive tickets came with preferred seating to the speech, but it’s raining, and Kostya tells me Serhiy prefers to spend the afternoon in the gym instead, so I give those seats to my Trump-supporting uncle, who is delighted. Serhiy is resting up for the ball, I figure.

My Russian-Ukrainian partner and I look at each other in amazement as Trump delivers his inaugural address. Deeply cynical though I’ve long known Kostya to be, even he is a little shaken by the near-apocalyptic tone of Trump’s first presidential address. The random assembly of itinerants also taking shelter in the hotel bar looks similarly mind-blown. As former president George W. Bush, who was struggling with his poncho in the grandstands behind Trump, puts it best: “That was some weird shit.”

When it comes time for the ball, Kostya tells me he’s not going, because he doesn’t want to run into Paul, so it will just be Serhiy and me — arguably a strange couple, but it’s Washington in 2017, so perhaps not that odd after all.

The Washington Convention Center is built for big events, but not for counterprotests. On one traffic island in front of it stands a pretty Carnegie-built library that is now a construction site, as it’s being turned into an Apple Store. Parallel fencing provides a corridor for us “penguins” — in black tie and ball gowns — to wait in line before going through security.

It feels a bit like a processing center on the Hungarian border, made worse by the fact that an angry mob of protestors stands on the other side of the chain-link fence, which they’re clawing at and pressing against while screaming terrible things at us and spitting.

Serhiy finds humor in various aspects of the evening, like the bountiful clouds of marijuana smoke in the air as we sat stuck in traffic for an hour, or now the increasingly confrontational standoff with angry demonstrators.

“This all looks very familiar to me,” he says with a wink.

It does look and feel a bit like the Maidan. And, for a moment, it seems like the barbarians have breached the walls of Rome, undoing all of that republic’s efforts to impose a civilizing effect on the empire. The authors of The Federalist Papers, including my ancestor John Jay, were concerned about mob rule back at the founding. In 1788, Jay and Alexander Hamilton were nearly stoned by the crowd during the New York Doctors Riot. For all practical purposes, we are witnessing a certain degeneration of a democracy — just not an unprecedented one.

In front of us, a little girl attending the ball with her parents is less conflict-hardened than my date. She is dressed like the princess from Frozen, but the virulent hatred hits her harder than it does her parents, Serhiy, or me. She breaks down in tears on the sidewalk. Instead of having a moderating effect, this spectacle only makes the crowd more vicious.

By the time we’ve all moved up toward the security station, they have nearly toppled the fence. The sight of the crying girl has no effect on the mob. They’re angry and letting it be known that violence churns in their hearts. There will be lots more of this in the years to come.

Included with the $12,500 entrance tickets, Serhiy and I each get a coupon for one free drink. At the bar, we meet another Ukrainian businessman with a breathtakingly beautiful wife and make small talk as we wait for our drinks. The newly inaugurated president and First Lady arrive, are announced, and share the first dance on stage to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” while we all watch.

The fact that something feels off in an uneasy way — the same kind of feeling I often had in Iraq on my first assignment there — is no surprise. I didn’t vote for Trump and am in essence behind enemy lines, but I’m doing it for my client. When the song is over, Serhiy smiles and says, “That’s it. We can go now.”

I don’t know it at the time, but this will end up being an even more expensive party than I thought. In nine months, I’ll be called before the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI, an acronym pronounced as “sissy” on the Hill) for a grilling on what I know about Kostya — whom they’ll later call a Russian intelligence asset — and Manafort. I have yet to see evidence that convinces me this was the case: in their report, SSCI hinges their claim on Kostya’s holding a Russian diplomat passport (few things in Moscow can’t be bought) and his use of “foldering” emails (sharing a Gmail account with the recipient and saving messages within it as drafts rather than sending them) to protect them from prying eyes — hardly an example of proprietorial KGB tradecraft. Did he know Russian intelligence figures? Quite possibly, but then again my wife was a ten-year employee of the CIA and went on to work as a contractor for the FBI so epithets like “connected to intelligence” strike me as facile.

In gratitude for my cooperation, SSCI will refer me to special counsel Robert Mueller for prosecution. I will cooperate with his probe and plead guilty to the charge of failing to register as a foreign agent in connection with my work for Lyovochkin. The Justice Department will charge Kostya with witness tampering, and Manafort will serve nearly two years in jail before a compassionate release under the CARES Act in the spring of 2020 and a pardon by outgoing President Trump.

Rick Gates and I will end up the only characters convicted in Russia-gate whom Trump does not pardon. I never asked for one, but was told by my lawyer that we were hand-picked out of a blanket pardon intended to stick it to Mueller. I’ll nearly get murdered in broad daylight on a D.C. street, get divorced, move to Maine and become a line cook, motorcoach operator, and AirBnB host. But on inauguration night 2017, I’ll know none of these things. I’ll just be relieved to be going home.

Buy a copy of Sam Patten’s book at dangerouscompanybook.com

Adapted with permission from the book Dangerous Company © 2023

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