A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  The second use of allied cruise missiles against Syria came in April 2018 after President Assad was held responsible for the use – again – of chemical weapons against his own people. This time dozens were killed outside Damascus, in the suburb of Douma. The President had repeatedly made clear that the use of chemical weapons was a red line. Three sites were targeted.

  In Washington there was no great mystery that the attack was going to take place. It was very much a case of when not whether. On the Friday evening I got a tip from a source that it was indeed going to be that evening. I put out a tweet saying that I had heard action would be taken in the coming hours; and then a little later another one saying that the President would address the nation.

  The normal thing at times like this is for the White House to simply say they had no comment to make; that they never comment on matters relating to national security. Except they didn’t this time. My tweets were widely picked up around the world – and of course at the White House, where in the Briefing Room journalists were told I was wrong, what I had written was factually incorrect and that they should go home. Nothing was going to happen this Friday evening. I have to say I spent a sweaty few hours thinking I had screwed up, and that I had been given duff information, by someone usually reliable.

  Sure enough the missile strikes did take place, and the President addressed the American people from the Treaty Room of the White House, as I had predicted he would. There were lots of recriminations, with journalists furious that they had been deliberately lied to by the press team. It’s one thing to deflect, to obfuscate, to play a dead bat, to say you don’t know; it’s another to tell a downright untruth.

  Anyway, I didn’t think much more about it, except that I was out at a dinner a couple of weeks later and I noticed that on my iPhone I had a text message from someone who could have been construed as my source. But despite trying to open the message repeatedly, it wouldn’t open. I thought it was just a glitch on my mobile device. But a little later I ran into this person and asked whether they had been trying to reach me, and explained about the text message I couldn’t open. This friend had had the same thing happen: a text message from me, which they were unable to read. Neither of us had sent a text message to the other. I took advice from people who know about these things. Our phones had been tampered with. I was told my phone had been compromised. It certainly looked like someone was very keen to know where my information had come from and who my source was.

  Meanwhile US forces and their partners, particularly the Kurds, were making progress all the time in the fight against Islamic State. The caliphate would be declared over in March 2019, as the last scraps of land were surrendered. But at the Pentagon they had long understood this would not be the end of US involvement. The great mistake in Afghanistan after the expulsion of the Taleban in 2001 was to think it was job done. As America switched its focus to Iraq, the Taleban regrouped and came back. US forces would need to remain vigilant, and boots would have to remain on the ground.

  So imagine the surprise for General Mattis when, from nowhere, he saw the President tweet that he was withdrawing all US forces from Syria. Just as the decision to stop military exercises on the Korean peninsula had been a decision heavily influenced by President Xi, so it looked as though the decision to pull the American military out of Syria had been taken after a telephone conversation Trump had had with the Turkish leader, President Recip Tayep Erdogan. Remember the fight against IS had been led by the Kurds, with the US providing air cover and special forces support. To abandon them, with a Turkish leader who had his own agenda against the Kurds, was unconscionable to Mattis. It was wrong every which way Mattis looked at it. The lack of orthodoxy, the impetuous decision making, the policy on a whim, the confusion over who were friends and who were foes, had finally become too much. He quit.

  His resignation letter is worth quoting in more or less its entirety – not because it says things that hadn’t been said in any number of critical articles from foreign policy think-tanks or political enemies. No, it is worth quoting at length because this is, very politely but determinedly, the most thinly disguised repudiation of Trump’s foreign policy from someone who had been on the inside and had been working to make the 45th presidency a success.

  Dear Mr President:

  I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defence of our citizens and our ideals.

  I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong U.S. global influence.

  One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defence, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9–11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

  Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbours, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defence.

  My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

  Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.

  The President was incensed by this public dressing down, and the way it was received. But it didn’t change his modus operandi – over the period I have been writing this section of the book, the Treasury department announced new sanctions against North Korea in coordination with the White House national security team; the President’s own National Security Advisor said they were an important step in turning the pressure up. The following day the President announced on Twitter he was cancelling them, undercutting his own Treasury Secretary and his NSA. Why, we asked Sarah Sanders, the President’s spokeswoman. Because he likes President Kim, we were told. Growth figures came in that were lower than expected. The President put the blame entirely on the chairman of the Federal Reserve for his mismanagement of the economy. The education secretary was going to cut funding for the Special Olympics, and went to Congress to defend the move. The President told reporters she’d got it wrong and he was reversing that. On anything and everything the President marched to his own drumbeat.

  Nowhere was that more evident than in his relations with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. When Jim Mattis wrote in his letter, ‘My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four
decades of immersion in these issues,’ it felt as though he was saying to Donald Trump, you don’t really know what you’re doing. The confusion between allies and adversaries; the gap between how the administration might act and what the President might say was never more evident than when it came to Russia.

  There have been two meetings and one summit, each peculiar in their own way. The first, in Hamburg, came during the G20 summit. At that meeting the President was joined by his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, but after it ended, Donald Trump demanded that the translator on the US side hand over his notes, and not breathe a word of what was said to anyone else. They would meet again at the G20 a year later in Buenos Aires. What was remarkable about this was that it had been announced just beforehand that their scheduled meeting had been called off by the Americans in protest at the Russian detention of Ukrainian sailors and vessels in the Black Sea. But it would later emerge they did meet, and the only people present aside from the two presidents were the first lady, Melania, and Putin’s translator – in other words there is no US record of the meeting.

  At their summit in Helsinki in the summer of 2018 it was even more bizarre. For nearly two hours the two men met alone with only translators present. It is hard to exaggerate how unusual and how abnormal this is. It just doesn’t happen. Even if the British prime minister is on the phone to one of the UK’s closest allies, the principal private secretary, the Foreign Office and the ambassador of the country concerned would be on the call. Officials should always be present so there is an official record of what is said.

  A joint news conference took place afterwards. I was sitting next to someone who had clearly planned to disrupt it in some way. He was writing out slogans on large sheets of paper. I suddenly had Finnish security and Secret Service agents clambering over me to remove my neighbour from the room. The news conference was equally unexpected. President Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to the allegations of meddling in the US presidential elections. ‘President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,’ he replied. In other words, given a straight choice between accepting the unanimous assessment of the CIA, FBI and the director of National Intelligence, Donald Trump chose the word of the Russian leader. It caused a furore back in Washington. In a strongly worded statement, the Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said Mr Trump ‘must appreciate that Russia is not our ally’. Senator John McCain weighed in too: ‘No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.’

  The President returned to Washington under serious pressure to clear up the mess he’d left behind in Helsinki. So what did he do? Without batting an eyelid, the president called the cameras in and explained that when he said he didn’t see why it would be Russia interfering in the elections, what he meant to say was that he didn’t see why it wouldn’t be Russia. Those pesky double negatives. It was an explanation that didn’t really hold water, as throughout that news conference with Vladimir Putin it was clear that the US president had bought the assurances given by his Russian counterpart.

  In the copious output of the Trump Twitter feed you will find attacks on anyone and everyone – allies like Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, Macron and Merkel. You will even see him piling into cabinet colleagues if he feels they’ve fallen short; he goes after sports stars and TV personalities. Even Meryl Streep was told she was an overrated actress by the President after she had said something disobliging. And, of course, he goes after political enemies with a rare gusto. But Vladimir Putin? Try to find a critical word that he’s ever said about him. You won’t: there isn’t one.

  And this is where the gap between what the administration does and how the President acts is so striking. After the Salisbury Novichok attack, the US administration acted as it always had in support of an ally. And remember this was a chemical weapons attack on the soil of a NATO ally. Russian diplomats were expelled from the US, statements of condemnation came thick and fast. Donald Trump did sign a joint letter condemning Moscow – and that there was ‘no plausible alternative explanation’ for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, other than Russian action. But when he found himself in front of a microphone or a television camera, or when he was on his own Twitter feed, he seemed to be rendered mute.

  In many of its actions this administration has been tougher on the Russians than previous ones. Look at Ukraine. Where Barack Obama supplied Kiev with blankets and weapons (not what the government wanted), the Trump administration has supplied them with offensive weapons to thwart Russia militarily. They have expelled diplomats, they have issued stern warnings to Moscow over Russian involvement in Venezuela. It may be that Donald Trump’s uniquely accommodating approach to Putin is part of some elaborate tough cop/soft cop routine that the administration is performing.

  Or maybe it is something altogether different. To misquote Churchill, Donald Trump’s approach to Russia was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. And unravelling it would become the overwhelming, all-encompassing issue of this presidency.

  Chapter 9

  A federal building somewhere in Washington

  Twenty-two months into the Mueller investigation, word finally starts to seep out that his investigation is wrapping up. It is the middle of March 2019. Throughout the week rumours had swirled about when and how. The report would be delivered to the new Attorney General, William Barr, and then it was anyone’s guess what would happen next. It is now Friday, and still nothing. But by mid-afternoon rumours start to intensify that it could come at any moment. Finally, we thought, Mueller would deliver his report and reveal his hand. At about 4pm the skies suddenly darkened. There was a tremendous thunder clap and then crazy lightning, our TV screens flashing severe weather warnings. And, as one in perfect harmony, everyone in the newsroom in our Washington office called out ‘Mueller!’ And then mirth. An hour later, though, came confirmation: his 400-page report had indeed been delivered to the Attorney General. In literature I think they call this pathetic fallacy.

  The stakes could not have been higher. The fate of the presidency was in his hands. Mueller’s report was the result of hundreds of interviews given on oath by those who had been closest to Donald Trump, who had seen his ways of operating, and it would thus offer the sharpest – and most testing – light yet shone on his administration. Donald Trump had raged against the Special Counsel from the day he was appointed. There were literally hundreds of tweets about this being the greatest hoax of all time, an unacceptable witch-hunt, persecution, a Democrat plot. He declared himself to be the most persecuted president ever. Mueller was variously an investigator who had gone rogue, and a man who was deeply compromised. His investigators were angry, Trump-hating Democrats. For a man who repeatedly claimed he had nothing to hide and was guilty of no wrongdoing and was entirely sure of vindication, he behaved in a way that suggested he was anything but.

  William Barr now had the report, and holed up in the Department of Justice he plotted the next moves. While his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, had earned the president’s undying disdain and scorn by setting in train the set of events that would lead to the establishment of the Special Counsel investigation, Barr proved himself to be a figure much more to Trump’s liking. Forty-eight hours after taking delivery of the report he boiled down the 400-plus pages to four, and released his verdict to an agog American public.

  At face value it seemed to give Donald Trump the vindication and clean bill of health that Trump had insisted he deserved. The Mueller report was broken down into two distinct parts. The first question his team investigated was whether there had been collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. On that, the Barr summary said that Mueller had been emphatic: there had been none. The second question the investigators looked at was whether the President by his actions had sought to obstruct justice by interfering with issues arising from the presidential election that the FBI had been looking at. Obstruction of justice
is one of the ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ in the US Constitution that can lead to impeachment.

  On that issue Barr quoted one tantalising line from the Mueller report: ‘While the report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’ What did that mean? We would have to wait a few weeks to find out. But here Barr and his deputy stepped in and made the adjudication that Mueller had apparently ducked: ‘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 offence.’

  It looked like Trump was in the clear. No collusion, and the Attorney General saying no charges to answer on obstruction. Happy days. I reported that this had to be the best day of Trump’s presidency. Democrats who had put so much faith in the work of Robert Mueller were feeling decidedly deflated. The week before the report came out I had been in Paris with the former CIA Director, John Brennan, who was confidently predicting that it was going to be a disaster for the President; that Donald Trump junior was certain to be indicted, that the whole house could come tumbling down. But in the White House, nothing had tumbled. Donald Trump and those closest to him were dancing a happy dance.

  But was that it? After the endless speculation and anticipation had Mueller served up a whitewash of a report? Barr had delivered a prebuttal. And this wily operator knew exactly what the effect of that would be. It gave the President exactly the headlines that he had spent two years craving. It would hopefully have the effect of satisfying the American public that the whole investigation was a ‘nothing-burger’ and that they need detain themselves no longer with the intricacies of the matter. Barr’s four-page letter was of inestimable value to the President. It wouldn’t be the only time that Barr would give the appearance of being more Trump’s personal defence attorney than the senior law officer of the United States.