In stark contrast, Paul Manafort refused to cooperate or testify in his own defense. That same day a jury declared Manafort guilty on eight felony counts.
Trump leaped on the disparity in an interview with the Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt. As for Cohen, “he makes a better deal when he uses me. Like everybody else. And one of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial—you know they make up stories. People make up stories. This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they—they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It—it almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair.”
As for a pardon for Manafort, “I have great respect for what he’s done, in terms of what he’s gone through. . . . He worked for many, many people many, many years, and I would say what he did, some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does.”
(In an apparent effort to curb Trump’s worst instincts, Giuliani later walked back Trump’s remark and said any discussion of a pardon would be inappropriate.)
* * *
—
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, the Justice Department provided Congress with many of the missing Page-Strzok texts that had fueled a wave of conspiracy theories, which soon appeared in the media. No one had been trying to conceal them. It had merely been a technical glitch, and the inspector general’s team had managed to recover them. In contrast to the first batch, they were relatively innocuous.
Page did finish All the President’s Men. “Did you know the president resigns in the end?!” she’d texted in March.
“What?!?! God, that we should be so lucky,” Strzok answered.
Trump and his allies leaped on a text saying, “I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ before you go,” which Strzok sent Page on April 10.
“More text messages between former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are a disaster and embarrassment to the FBI & DOJ,” Trump tweeted. “This should never have happened but we are learning more and more by the hour. ‘Others were leaking like mad’ in order to get the President!”
But Strzok’s lawyer issued a statement that the text referred to a meeting at the Justice Department to discuss a strategy to stop leaks, not a plot to leak.
A little more than a week later, on Friday, September 21, The New York Times had another scoop. “The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit,” the reporters Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt revealed.
“The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
The Times story added, “A Justice Department spokeswoman also provided a statement from a person who was present when Mr. Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire. The person, who would not be named, acknowledged the remark but said Mr. Rosenstein made it sarcastically.”
No one, however, mentioned (nor did the Times report) that Rosenstein had made the offer to record the president twice in front of McCabe alone—none in a sarcastic tone—and that Page had taken notes on one of those occasions.
Still, a close reading of Rosenstein’s response showed that he didn’t really deny anything specific in the story. Rosenstein had just handed Trump all the ammunition he needed to fire him. Hardly anyone expected Rosenstein to survive the weekend.
On Friday evening, Rosenstein met with John Kelly, the chief of staff, at the White House and offered to resign. He also called McGahn with the same offer. But Kelly and McGahn thought only the president could accept his resignation. Neither was eager for a replay of a Comey-type disaster just weeks before the midterm elections.
On Monday, Rosenstein was still in his job, but the Justice Department was deluged with press calls about his imminent ouster. Sarah Flores, the chief spokesperson, started drafting a statement for Sessions. Rosenstein headed to the White House. News channels broke into coverage of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to report he was on his way to resign.
But Comey’s perception that Rosenstein was a “survivor” proved apt. Just before 1:00 p.m., Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted that Rosenstein and the president had had an “extended conversation,” presumably by phone, because Trump was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. She added that they’d meet in person on Thursday, which gave Rosenstein at least a three-day reprieve.
On Wednesday, during a press conference at the United Nations, Trump described his Monday talk with Rosenstein as “a good talk. He said he never said it, he said he doesn’t believe it. He said he has a lot of respect for me, and he was very nice, and we’ll see.”
By Thursday, with everyone at the White House consumed by the Kavanaugh hearings, Trump postponed their get-together. It was only in October, after Kavanaugh was confirmed, that Rosenstein and Trump spoke in person on a flight to Florida. Trump didn’t fire him or ask for his resignation. A White House spokesman said they discussed routine Justice Department matters, and Trump said only that the conversation was “great.”
If, indeed, Rosenstein told Trump he “never said it”—either in the Monday conversation or on the plane or both—he had just given the president further leverage over him. It was one thing to vaguely describe a newspaper story as inaccurate. It was another to mislead the president, as Michael Flynn had discovered.
In many ways, it was even better for Trump than carrying around a resignation letter in his pocket. He now had ample grounds for firing Rosenstein, the man overseeing the Russia investigation, whenever he wanted.
* * *
—
AMERICAN VOTERS WENT to the polls on November 6 in what was overwhelmingly interpreted as a referendum on the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump. The next day, Trump was in a surprisingly upbeat mood, given that Republicans lost a net thirty-nine seats and Democrats seized control of the House, giving them the capacity to launch investigations of the president that the Republican-controlled House had stalled.
“It was a big day yesterday,” Trump exulted at a news conference. “An incredible day,” adding, “This election marks the largest Senate gains for a President’s party in a first midterm election since at least President Kennedy’s in 1962.”
Even then, he veered into the Russia investigation, nearly taunting the Democrats to pursue it. “I keep hearing about investigations fatigue. Like from the time—almost from the time I announced I was going to run, they’ve been giving us this investigation fatigue. It’s been a long time. They got nothing. Zero. You know why? Because there is nothing. But they can play that game, but we can play it better.”
Later, CNN’s Jim Acosta returned to the subject: “On the Russia investigation. Are you concerned that you may have indictments . . .”
“I’m not concerned about anything with the Russia investigation because it’s a hoax,” Trump interrupted. “That’s enough. Put down the mic,” the president directed.
A White House aide tried to grab the microphone, but Acosta resisted.
“Mr. President, are you worried about indictments coming down in this investigation?” he finally asked.
“I’ll tell you what: CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN.”
Trump avoided a question about the fate of Session
s, but even before the press conference Kelly had called and demanded Sessions’s resignation that day. Sessions delivered a letter to the White House, which Kelly accepted. Trump didn’t give him the courtesy of a personal send-off.
“Dear Mr. President, at your request I am submitting my resignation,” Sessions wrote. He added, in what many took to be a pointed jab at Trump’s almost constant efforts to subvert the Mueller probe, “Most importantly, in my time as attorney general we have restored and upheld the rule of law.”
In a slap at Rosenstein, who, as the deputy, would ordinarily have stepped in as acting attorney general, Trump instead named Matthew Whitaker, a little-known former Iowa football player and Iowa U.S. attorney whose principal qualifications seemed to be his close relationship with the Iowa senator Charles Grassley—a fierce critic of the Comey and McCabe FBI—and his hostility to Mueller’s investigation.
Whitaker was widely distrusted by career lawyers at the department as a blatantly partisan advocate for Trump. Just before his appointment to the Justice Department, he’d gone so far in a CNN interview as to propose starving Mueller for funds. “I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment and that Attorney General doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt,” Whitaker had said. In a radio interview he said, “There is no criminal obstruction of justice charge to be had here. The evidence is weak. No reasonable prosecutor would bring a case on what we know right now.”
Whitaker’s appointment drew immediate condemnation from Democrats in Congress and a lawsuit that tried (unsuccessfully) to block his appointment. Even Republican senators were wary. Referring to Mueller’s work, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said, “No new Attorney General can be confirmed who will stop that investigation.” There was little chance that Whitaker would secure Senate confirmation.
That was of little concern to Trump and his legal advisers. A reliable and far more illustrious alternative to Whitaker was waiting in the wings. One month later, Trump announced that he’d chosen William Barr to be his new attorney general. “He was my first choice from day one,” he told reporters.
With Republicans in control of the Senate, Barr was easily confirmed over Democratic objections to his pro-Trump op-ed pieces and unsolicited legal memo.
* * *
—
ON NOVEMBER 20, Trump’s lawyers finally submitted written answers to a limited number of questions from the Mueller team. “What I can tell you is they’re complete and detailed,” Rudolph Giuliani said in an interview. “But there’s nothing there I haven’t read in a newspaper.”
As agreed, the answers were limited to the time period before Trump became president and excluded any questions related to obstruction of justice. But that left one precarious area for the president: Trump Tower Moscow, which did relate to Russia, and any efforts by Trump to influence Cohen’s testimony, which overlapped the obstruction probe. And neither Trump nor his lawyers, at this juncture, knew what Cohen was telling Mueller.
Mueller and his lawyers had asked Trump to describe the timing and substance of discussions he had with Cohen about the project, whether they discussed a potential trip to Russia, whether the president “at any time direct[ed] or suggest[ed] that discussions about the Trump Moscow project should cease,” or whether the president was “informed at any time that the project had been abandoned”—all subjects Cohen had addressed.
“I had few conversations with Mr. Cohen on this subject,” Trump responded. “As I recall, they were brief, and they were not memorable. I was not enthused about the proposal, and I do not recall any discussion of travel to Russia in connection with it.” He continued, “I vaguely remember press inquiries and media reporting during the campaign about whether the Trump Organization had business dealings in Russia. I may have spoken with campaign staff or Trump Organization employees regarding responses to requests for information, but I have no current recollection of any particular conversation, with whom I may have spoken, when, or the substance of any conversation. As I recall, neither I nor the Trump Organization had any projects or proposed projects in Russia during the campaign other than the Letter of Intent.”
That answer was exceptionally vague and didn’t answer any of Mueller’s specific questions.
Nine days later, Cohen pleaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow and agreed to cooperate with Mueller. That same day Trump told reporters that he had decided to scrap the project, although “there would have been nothing wrong if I did do it. If I did do it, there would have been nothing wrong. That was my business. . . . It was an option that I decided not to do. . . . I decided not to do it. The primary reason . . . I was focused on running for President. . . . I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would’ve gotten back into the business. And why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
That contradicted Cohen’s version that the project was still on a list of Trump Organization projects at the time of the inauguration; that Trump had never terminated it; and, in Trump’s written answer, that he had “no current recollection” of any specific conversation about it.
So Mueller’s lawyers asked again whether Trump had participated in any discussions about the project being abandoned, including when he “decided not to do the project.”
“The President has fully answered the questions at issue,” Trump’s lawyers curtly responded.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on December 12.
“Time and time again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass,” Cohen told the judge. “My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump, and I was weak for not having the strength to question and to refuse his demands.”
* * *
—
WITH GIULIANI IN charge of his legal team, and the Mueller probe now in seemingly safe hands with Barr as attorney general, Trump eased off his attacks on Mueller and the Justice Department. His advisers said he was well aware by this point that even if he wanted to or needed to, it was too late to remove Mueller. Mueller had given up his efforts to interview Trump, or even insist on more written answers to his existing questions.
Speculation in the media turned from whether Trump would have Mueller fired to when Mueller would deliver his feverishly anticipated report. There was a flurry of rumors in February that delivery was imminent. CNN reported, “Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report.” The Washington Post reported, “The special counsel’s investigation has consumed Washington since it began in May 2017, and it increasingly appears to be nearing its end, which would send fresh shock waves through the political system.” Vanity Fair observed, “The great national psychodrama that has touched every corner of our politics and culture over the past two years is coming to an end.”
By mid-March 2019, it had still not arrived, which only added to the suspense. Then, the week of March 18, the rumors heated up again. By Friday morning, they were at a fever pitch. Media crews staked out the special counsel’s offices and the Justice Department.
A New York Times reporter spotted Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House, waiting as anxiously as everyone else in the city. “They said it was going to be at noon or 12:30,” Mr. Giuliani told the reporter.
At 4:00 p.m., thunder rumbled, followed by a hailstorm.
At almost precisely that moment, an inconspicuous security guard from Mueller’s office slipped by news crews waiting outside the Justice Department and delivered a thick envelope to Rod Rosenstein.
The Mueller report
had arrived.
CONCLUSION
The decision to make any or all of the Mueller report public, as well as how to react to its recommendations, fell to Barr, the new attorney general, and Rosenstein. Rosenstein was no longer overseeing the investigation, but had remained immersed in it.
The report’s conclusions didn’t come as much of a surprise to them: in a top secret meeting on March 5, 2019, Mueller had briefed them on his conclusions and explained his reasoning behind them. Forty-eight hours after receiving it, on Sunday, March 24, Barr summarized Mueller’s findings in a letter to congressional leadership.
The “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Barr stated.
As for obstruction of justice, Mueller hadn’t reached any conclusion. Instead, “the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction,” Barr stated. He added that Mueller stated, “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
“Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” Barr continued. “In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that ‘the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,’ and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.”
Barr seemed to be suggesting that absent an underlying crime—in this case, collusion with Russia—Trump’s intent couldn’t be to obstruct.
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