Rage

by Bob Woodward

  The question at the end of these long, seemingly endless investigations was always: What’s next? There was no what’s next. What happens tomorrow? The answer so far: No official action. Trump’s opponents and the Democrats would beat the Russian interference drum whenever possible. But it would sound hollow and be yesterday’s stale news, Graham believed.

  Graham gave a summary of the good news to Trump.

  * * *

  At 4:46 p.m. that afternoon, Trump stepped before reporters on the tarmac at Palm Beach International Airport and spoke for the first time about Barr’s version of the Mueller report’s conclusions.

  “So after a long look,” Trump said, “after a long investigation, after so many people have been so badly hurt, after not looking at the other side where a lot of bad things happened, a lot of horrible things happened, a lot of very bad things happened for our country—it was just announced that there was no collusion with Russia.

  “It’s complete exoneration,” Trump added—directly contradicting the Barr letter, which quoted the Mueller report’s statement that it “does not exonerate him.”

  “What do you think?” Trump asked Graham after he boarded Air Force One.

  “Well, Mr. President, very few presidents get two terms in their first term, but you just have,” Graham said. “This is the first day of a new presidency.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it,” Trump replied.

  “Mr. President, this cloud has been removed,” Graham said.

  Trump seemed contemplative—probably the least demonstrative of anybody on the plane. It was out of character for him.

  Trump, his staffers and Graham deplaned from Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington to board Marine One and fly back to the White House.

  Graham and Trump sat across from each other. It was a beautiful early spring evening.

  “Isn’t that great?” Trump said, now in a good mood. “Can you believe we’re doing this shit? Can you believe I’m here, president of the United States, and you’re here? Can you believe this shit? Isn’t it the greatest thing in the world?”

  It was apparently his way of absorbing the reality that, after two years of Mueller, it seemed over.

  Marine One flew so close to the Washington Monument it felt as though they could almost touch it.

  As the helicopter approached the White House grounds, a throng of journalists waited.

  “There are the animals,” Trump said. “They’re the most heartbroken people in America.”

  “Yeah, be easy on them,” Graham replied. “This is a bad day for them.” Graham recommended Trump be brief in his comments to the reporters. “Here’s my two cents,” Graham said. Say something like, “America’s the greatest country on earth. Good night.” He added, “If you’ll say that and nothing else, they’ll all fall over dead.”

  Marine One landed at 7:04 p.m. Trump walked onto the South Lawn, looked directly at the cameras and said: “I just want to tell you that America is the greatest place on earth. The greatest place on earth. Thank you very much. Thank you.” And he walked away.

  When Graham got home, his phone was ringing.

  “Did you see them?” Trump said.

  “Who?” Graham replied.

  “The animals,” Trump said.

  “No.”

  “When I said that, they all were stunned. They were speechless. The first time in my life nobody asked me 120 questions,” Trump said. “That was the perfect thing to say.”

  * * *

  Years of countless headlines detailing possible ties or flirtations among Trump people and others connected to the Russian government were replaced by a new story.

  “Mueller Finds No Conspiracy” was the next morning’s banner headline in The Washington Post. In The New York Times, the banner headline read: “Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy.” A news analysis in the Times was headlined “Burden Lifts, Leaving President Fortified for Battles to Come.”

  The Barr letter likely did more to shape public perception of the special counsel’s investigation than the 448-page Mueller report itself, which was released in redacted form to the public nearly four weeks later.

  On March 27, Mueller wrote to Barr complaining that his widely publicized four-page summary letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” He wrote, “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”

  The basis for Mueller’s criticism became evident once the report was made public in April 2019 and could be compared to Barr’s four-page summary. But Mueller took no steps to change the outcome, nor could he in a practical sense. His work was within the Justice Department, which Barr controlled.

  * * *

  On April 29, 2019, Rosenstein submitted his one-page resignation letter to the president. In what was almost a fan letter, Rosenstein raised the American flag and Trump’s campaign motto.

  “We staffed the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices with skilled and principled leaders devoted to the values that make America great,” Rosenstein wrote.

  “I am grateful to you for the opportunity to serve; for the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations; and for the goals you set in your inaugural address: patriotism, unity, safety, education, and prosperity.”

  Trump’s inaugural address would probably not be remembered for those themes but for his invocation of “American carnage.”

  The central flaw in the Mueller investigation was that the prosecutors never found an inside witness who could tell a story of corrupt, illegal conduct. There was no comparable figure to John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, who testified in 1973 to both his own illegal actions and Nixon’s. There was no Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky to testify that President Clinton had lied in public statements and in a civil suit about Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton.

  The investigation would not hang over Trump into the 2020 election. Rosenstein felt that on the Mueller investigation he had made Trump bulletproof for the election and had done him a favor.

  The president was not guilty of obstruction of justice in Rosenstein’s view. “I knew there was no basis to indict the president,” Rosenstein told an associate. “I knew months before.”

  * * *

  When Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 1, Democrats pelted him with accusations that he acted politically in his handling of the Mueller report—more as Trump’s defense attorney than as the head of the Justice Department.

  “You put the power and authority of the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice behind a public relations effort to help Donald Trump protect himself,” Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said.

  Several days later, more than 700 former federal prosecutors released a statement arguing that Trump’s conduct described in the Mueller report “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the [Department of Justice] Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting president, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

  But after 22 months of investigation without the bombshell findings anticipated by some of Trump’s opponents and critics, Mueller and his report faded from the headlines. In an April 2019 column, “Public Has Mueller-Report Fatigue and Wants to Move On,” San Diego Union-Tribune political columnist Michael Smolens wrote that the Mueller report had become “white noise.”

  * * *

  In a March 2020 opinion issued in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking the lifting of redactions in the Mueller report, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote that Barr “distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”

  Walton wrote that Barr failed to note in his letter that Mueller’s probe “identified multiple contacts… between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” On the obstruction issue, Walton wrote, Barr “failed t
o disclose to the American public” that the reason Mueller determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment was because of the Justice Department’s policy against charging a sitting president with a federal crime.

  “The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements,” Walton wrote in his opinion, “made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”

  Walton’s opinion did not address the substance of the investigation or whether Mueller or Barr should have reached different legal conclusions regarding the president’s actions. The legal case in which he issued the opinion focused on whether the Justice Department properly redacted the report, or whether some redactions should be removed under the Freedom of Information Act. It was a public relations critique accusing Barr of carrying water for Trump.

  * * *

  Trump never let up on his attacks on the Mueller investigation into Russia’s role in his 2016 victory. On May 23, 2019, Barr announced a new investigation into alleged spying on the Trump campaign, potentially by law enforcement and intelligence agency officials. The Justice Department was turning the tables.

  Dan Coats and CIA director Gina Haspel made an appointment to see Barr.

  The Mueller investigation had already torn inconclusively through the intelligence agencies, they said. Why did this need to be done? It will be very disruptive to the agencies.

  Barr said he thought there was more out there that had not been investigated.

  Haspel said the investigation could have a negative impact on morale at the CIA. Her people were spooked by the new investigation, and some wondered if they would need to get an attorney.

  No, Barr said, he did not think so. He tried to be reassuring. It’s not going to have that much of an impact.

  Haspel disagreed. It was like Mueller Two. It would be a “nightmare” for the agency.

  Coats suspected Barr had former CIA director Brennan in his sights but did not say so. He asked if John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed to oversee the case, would be looking at Coats’s own people at the office of DNI.

  Potentially, Barr said.

  Coats was worried about the GS-14 employee who had just done his or her job and passed along intelligence and seemingly routine reports. He also thought that Durham would be looking at Obama’s former DNI James Clapper, who was one of the persistent public critics of President Trump.

  Coats and Haspel said they would give the Justice Department any documents they requested because the president had so ordered. They had no choice.

  But hopefully you will do this in the right way, Coats said.

  “I hope you can do this in a way that it’s not going to cause a lot of problems,” Haspel said. “And can we stay informed in terms of what you plan to do and make sure we know what’s happening?”

  “Don’t worry,” Barr said. “We will. We will. Your people won’t need to be concerned.”

  Barr said he would let them know what he had learned and if there was anything they should do. Before anything was released, he said, they would have an opportunity to respond. Presumably they could make their case. But there was a lawyerly caution, though he was obviously trying to calm them down.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Barr said. “This is not a witch hunt. There’s more out there and we just need to know what it is.”

  * * *

  Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee on July 24, 2019, giving an uneven performance that frustrated Republicans and Democrats alike with fumbling, incomplete answers. He appeared, at times, to lack familiarity with his own report. He did little to help the public understand the dense legal document his office had produced.

  Barr and Trump had defined the report, and Trump continued to publicly assail the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”

  Ultimately, Mueller’s investigation led to 34 indictments, including Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, national security adviser Michael Flynn, political confidant Roger Stone and a number of Russian nationals. But Trump emerged relatively unscathed, and in doing so had dealt a blow to his political enemies.

  Trump later told me, “The beautiful thing is, it all evaporated. It ended in a whimper. It was pretty amazing. It ended in dust.”

  He had weathered the greatest threat to his presidency to that point, and perhaps come out politically stronger but no doubt more emboldened than before.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The three months since Coats had withdrawn his resignation letter at the president’s request had not been good. Coats’s insistence he would not get involved in the Russia probe had only further isolated him. When they met, the president’s body language not only radiated distrust, but contempt. Coats knew there was no way to survive such a personal rift, and as the animus grew, so too did Coats’s despondency.

  On Saturday, May 25, 2019, of Memorial Day weekend, at his grandson Jack’s soccer game in the Maryland suburbs, Coats felt as low as he ever had.

  “Hey, I need to make a phone call,” he announced to his family. He walked off into the wooded park alone and dialed his friend Mattis, who had been out of office for five months.

  “I’m really having a hard time here,” Coats confided. It was a cry from the heart. “I just need to talk to somebody who kind of knows what I’m going through. You do.”

  Coats said he needed some guidance. He did not have to tell Mattis that the current situation was untenable. This is not at all what I came here to do, Coats said. He felt depleted.

  “I haven’t spoken out,” Mattis commiserated. He had maintained his silence since his resignation in December. “I’ve made my case before the president. He listened. In the end he just didn’t agree with me.” Trump’s disdain for the allies and decision to pull out of Syria with no warning, no consultation, had been Mattis’s red line. “I’ve buried too many boys. That was a terrible decision.”

  Coats said the mounting personal tensions between him and Trump and their fundamental differences on the nature of the security threats were debilitating.

  “This is not good,” Mattis said. “Maybe at some point we’re going to have to stand up and speak out. There may be a time when we have to take collective action.”

  “Well, possibly,” Coats said. “Yeah, there may.”

  “He’s dangerous,” Mattis said. “He’s unfit.”

  Speaking out didn’t seem to work, Coats said. Admiral Bill McRaven, who had led Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, had continuously mounted an aggressive, personal and public criticism of Trump. In an open letter to Trump published in The Washington Post in August 2018 after Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance, McRaven had written that the president had “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” He challenged Trump to revoke his security clearance: “I would consider it an honor.”

  McRaven, a Navy SEAL, was one of the most celebrated military figures, a warrior scholar, bestselling author and now chancellor of the University of Texas system.

  Trump had blasted back, calling McRaven “a Hillary Clinton fan” and suggested he should have captured bin Laden earlier. As best Coats could tell, McRaven’s gutsy stand seemed to have had no impact.

  Mattis said they still had to consider stepping forward.

  “Jim, what would that be?” Coats asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mattis replied, “but we can’t let the country keep going” on this course. He repeated, “This
is dangerous.”

  “Look,” Coats said, “others have tried and it’s had no impact whatsoever. They get tarred and feathered.”

  “What would make a difference?” Mattis asked.

  “If the Senate stood up,” Coats said. He knew the Senate intimately, especially the Republicans. He had served 16 years as a Republican senator. And he kept in touch with half a dozen Republican senators who were friends. None were bailing on Trump—not out of conviction, but for political survival. “The Senate’s not going to stand up.”

  But Coats pursued the question with some of his old friends from the Senate.

  “I bet you have some interesting conversations in closed session,” Coats said to one senator.

  “Yes, we sure do,” said the senator.

  Others expressed the same view, and Coats realized nobody in the Senate needed to be told what was happening. They knew. The senators just desperately wanted to get past the November 3 election. If he was still in the Senate, Coats believed the worst course of action would be not to speak up, lose the Senate majority and lose your reputation. He believed the Senate had not fulfilled its obligation under the Constitution to be a check and balance. There should be a moment to demand accountability from Trump.

  Should Trump be reelected, Coats hoped one Republican senator would lead the charge and insist on a change in the way decisions were made in the interactions with the president.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Trump began following a series of op-eds written by John Solomon in The Hill newspaper alleging that former vice president Joe Biden had interfered in a corruption investigation in Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe and a former member of the Soviet Union. The unproven allegation was that Biden, who had the Ukraine account for the Obama administration, worked to block the investigation of Burisma, a large Ukrainian gas company. Biden’s son Hunter was a member of Burisma’s board and was reportedly paid $50,000 a month.