A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  The truth was in fact far more complicated than the Barr summary indicated. Mueller had done his work meticulously and exhaustively from one of the drab, slightly dreary federal government office blocks.

  For 22 months, Mr Mueller and his team dug into the fertile soil of the Trump family, and the President’s associates, many of whom had been through only the most scant vetting. Robert Mueller, the man tasked with this assignment, had been a director of the FBI, a decorated Vietnam veteran and a lifelong Republican. And he had a reputation for granite-like integrity. Serious. Independent-minded. Unflappable. From the moment of his appointment, through to the completion of his investigation, Mueller became a spectral figure. His modus operandi was to say nothing, reveal nothing, reply to nothing. And in a town where the exchange currency is how often you are seen and how much you’re heard, this was startling. Visibility is everything. But he was the Scarlet Pimpernel de nos jours – ‘They seek him here, they seek him there …’ But Mueller’s brief was not to save the élite from the guillotine’s blade; his job was to see who should face justice.

  Many found this disquieting – there were no leaks, no whispers, no unmarked manilla envelopes falling into journalists’ grateful hands. There was just the deafening sound of silence. And the person who found this most disquieting was the President himself. He likes to have an enemy he can visibly punch at, an enemy he can intimidate and stare in the eye. But though Donald Trump kept on swinging, his haymaking right hooks were doing nothing but disturbing the air around him. They were not landing on their target. More infuriating still, despite all the provocations from the President, not once did they yield a response. Trappist monks have been more raucous.

  There were occasional reports of sightings. Mueller was spotted at Reagan National Airport waiting to board a flight to New York – ironically Donald Trump Jr was a passenger on that flight too. There was an Italian restaurant he would go to in Spring Valley – but he would slip in via a rear entrance and disappear into the night equally quickly. There was also a fish restaurant in Palisades that he would go to with his wife. But photos? None. Clips of him speaking? Zilch. And then that weekend in March 2019, when his report had been delivered and his work was done, an apparent apparition: he was seen with his wife emerging from church. And not just any church. He was seen coming out of St John’s Episcopal, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. The church the President traditionally attends on the weekend after his inauguration. Mueller had resurfaced, and in the heart of establishment Washington.

  This has been an epic drama in which the two principal actors were Donald Trump and Robert Mueller. But there were two important co-stars of the show – the director of the FBI and his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Remember Donald Trump is extremely conscious of his own height, and is very conscious of the physical demeanour of those around him. It was reported he wouldn’t appoint John Bolton to a senior position because of his moustache, while his first press spokesman was too fat and was ordered to get better fitting suits. The former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie was told by the President that he ought to change the way he tied his tie, so that it didn’t emphasise the width of his sturdy girth. He comments on the appearance of women freely (and some would say inappropriately). So, it was an almost clichéd piece of casting that the FBI director, James Comey, was a lofty 6 feet 8 inches, while the Attorney General was physically diminutive, standing at just 5 feet 5 inches in his little stockinged feet. And each was to the President’s distaste. Trump didn’t like that he had to look up to the slightly imperious and supercilious Comey – that grated; while Sessions was too small, and quickly became a punchbag for Trump’s withering contempt towards the former Alabama senator, who had done so much to help get the New York tycoon elected (he was the first senator to come out and endorse him).

  The Comey character was killed off early, stripped of his directorship of the FBI without warning as he was addressing federal agents on the West Coast. He was holding a town-hall meeting, TVs were on in the office but muted, when the breaking news strap appeared across the screens informing them that the boss they were listening to attentively had been fired by the President. Sessions would live on for much longer but it was a painful existence, in a near permanent state of being half alive and half dead politically. The President would ridicule him, demean him, taunt him and provoke him – on Twitter, and at rallies, where he would mock Sessions’s southern drawl. As a political spectator, it was like spending every Thursday night in the same wine bar with a friend who keeps telling you she’s about to dump her useless boyfriend, but never gets round to it. And you want to scream, ‘Just chuck him then.’ But instead the presidential mithering went on and on. It would take until November 2018 before Donald Trump moved decisively against him.

  But before we get to the detail of the personalities and the meat of what Mueller investigated and what he found, in the interests of clearer understanding, forgive me if I set out a bit of a timeline of what unfolded and why. And then we can get back to the compelling and gripping psychodrama that has been the continuous and dominant thread running through the Trump administration. I am making the starting point the beginning of 2017, two weeks before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.

  6 January:

  American intelligence agencies release a report outlining why they believe Russia was behind the hacking during the election campaign. Comey and others go to Trump Tower to brief Trump about the intelligence community assessment concerning Russia’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election. Comey pulls Trump aside for a one-on-one meeting to brief him on the contents of the unverified Steele Dossier, with its lurid and unproven allegations that the Russians have kompromat of a ‘pee pee’ tape, in which prostitutes allegedly hired by Mr Trump urinate on a bed in the presidential suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton where Barack Obama had once slept and where Mr Trump was staying after a Miss Universe pageant.

  10 January:

  The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the heads of the FBI, CIA and the NSA brief Congress on their findings on Russian influence in the 2016 US presidential election. They say in explicit terms Putin was directly involved and that the Russians sought systematically to interfere in the 2016 election.

  20 January:

  Trump inauguration.

  27 January:

  Comey and Trump have dinner together. Comey recalls that, at the dinner, the President said, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.’ Comey testified that he replied, ‘You will always get honesty from me.’ Trump apparently paused and then said, ‘That’s what I want, honest loyalty.’ Trump says he never asked for loyalty. Comey made a contemporaneous note of the meeting, which given his standing as an FBI officer would make it admissible as evidence in a court of law.

  13 February:

  Michael Flynn resigns as National Security Advisor over lying to the Vice-President about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the US, and what he said to him. Flynn who had led the anti-Hillary Clinton chants of ‘lock her up’ at Trump rallies would soon face being locked up himself as he is charged and pleads guilty to a single charge of lying to the FBI.

  14 February:

  Trump and Comey meet in the Oval Office following a larger meeting. Trump says to Comey, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.’ Trump has denied asking for the investigation to be alleviated. In later testimony, Comey said that given the setting and the fact that Trump asked to see him alone, he took the President’s words as a directive. ‘It rings in my ear as kind of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”’ Comey said, referring to Henry II’s alleged words that led to the murder of Thomas Becket.

  2 March:

  Jeff Sessions the Attorney General recuses himself from overseeing the Russia Investigation being led by the FBI. Because he had been so closely involved in the Trump presidential campaign, he felt he couldn’t also be the referee
of what went on during it. Another complication was that he had been – how can one put this – less than forthright in answers to the committee overseeing his confirmation hearings about his own contacts with the Russian ambassador.

  20 March:

  Comey testifies before the House Intelligence Committee and, for the first time, confirms the existence of an investigation into Russian hacking and possible links to the Trump campaign.

  9 May:

  Comey is fired. In his note to Comey, Trump says, ‘I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.’ The letter dismissing him, written by the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, states two reasons – one, his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga, and two, that Comey had lost the confidence of the FBI.

  10 May:

  Trump meets with Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak at the Oval Office. Knowledge of this meeting only emerges after the Russian Foreign Ministry release photographs. No US press were allowed. The New York Times is leaked an official minute of the meeting in which Trump says, ‘I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job … I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.’ In other words the reason for firing Comey was not as stated in the Rosenstein letter; it was because of the Russia inquiry.

  11 May:

  The President now confirms this publicly, telling NBC’s Lester Holt that the firing was because ‘this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story’.

  17 May:

  Because Sessions has recused himself from anything to do with Russia, and with the scandal not going away, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to, in effect, take over the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller a month later asks Rosenstein whether he can widen the scope of the inquiry to look into whether Donald Trump once he had become president might have obstructed justice as well – Rosenstein accedes to that request.

  This is not part of the timeline, but I would add one other date, just for its jaw dropping, eye popping, head swivelling extraordinariness, and that is 11 January 2019. That is when the New York Times had on its front page a story with this headline: ‘FBI Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia.’ Hold on. Hang on a sec. Say that again. The FBI opened an investigation into whether the president of the United States was actually a Russian agent? Are you kidding me? That has to be fake news, I thought, when I read it. Either that, or a plotline from a sub-standard espionage novel that no publisher would ever put into print. But it was true (true that the FBI launched that investigation, not that the President actually was an agent). After the firing of Comey and the Lavrov meeting, and the earlier dissembling of Flynn and Sessions, law enforcement officials were spurred into action. According to the NYT report, ‘They began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests … the inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.’

  Wow. Even more amazing, given the febrile atmosphere, was that the President’s communications team felt he couldn’t just ignore it – he had to address it. The President had been posed the question about whether he was a Russian spy by a super-friendly Fox news anchor the weekend after the report appeared. He called it ‘the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked’. But that didn’t shut anything down. It was a non-denial denial. So, a couple of days later as he was preparing to fly to New Orleans, Trump answered the question directly of whether he had worked for the Russians: ‘I never worked for Russia,’ he told the gathered media on the South Lawn of the White House. In the history of the United States of America has a president ever had to deny being an asset of a foreign adversary?

  There is a scene in one of the episodes of the evergreen TV drama The West Wing where the chief political advisor character, Josh Lyman, is prepping the President for a news conference. A couple of staff are pretending to be journalists, and the fictional President Bartlet repeats a part of the reporter’s question during his answer. Lyman tells Jed Bartlet never to do that. ‘Don’t repeat the phrase, sir, that will be the soundbite.’ Someone could have done with telling the real-life President Trump that. ‘I never worked for Russia’ most definitely became the soundbite.

  So why was there such suspicion over the President, over the Trump campaign? Where did it all start? The genesis of the concern over Moscow’s involvement is actually a wine bar in London. And as plot lines go, like so much to do with the Trump campaign and presidency, there is much that strains credulity. A young foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, finds himself in the Kensington Wine Rooms. It is May 2016, with just six months to go until polling day. And this man has a huge amount of swagger and consumes the alcohol to match, an unwise combination in a political operative. He brags about the dirt that the Russians have on Hillary Clinton, and how the Trump campaign are going to be able to access it and weaponise it.

  Except the person he is shooting the breeze with is Australia’s High Commissioner, Alexander Downer. Downer is so alarmed by what he hears that he gets in touch with US contacts based at the embassy in London; these people then report back to FBI HQ, and, hey presto, a counter-intelligence operation is born. According to former FBI Director James Comey, this report – and not the Steele dossier, written by the former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, and ultimately paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign – was the seminal event that raised concerns about Donald Trump’s ties to the Russians and the major reason it launched its counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

  I should say there is a counter-narrative which portrays a deep state and rotten establishment and ‘bad cops’ (a phrase Donald Trump regularly uses) encouraged by a president who hated him (Barack Obama) abetted by foreign agents (the British secret service) doing their all to scupper the Trump campaign. In this version of history, the FBI illegally spied on members of his team, lying to the courts to get the authorisation to eavesdrop on campaign members. Let me add that this account is long on assertions and conspiracy theories and short on facts. But in the wake of the conclusion of the Mueller report there are many Trump allies – along with Trump himself – insisting this must be investigated by the Department for Justice.

  But that wasn’t part of Robert Mueller’s remit; he had to look into whether there was collusion between the campaign and the Russians; and if there was, why. What motivated it? There was a whole series of events which were decidedly odd, and would lead to charges being laid against various individuals. He found dots. What he didn’t find was a thread that joined them.

  Papadopoulos was the first to be indicted. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI to conceal his contacts with Russians and Russian intermediaries during the presidential campaign. A federal judge also sentenced him to one year of supervised release and imposed a fine of $9,500. The operatives whom Papadopoulos met offered him ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton that he fed back to the Trump campaign. His lawyers said Papadopoulous acted out of a ‘misguided sense of loyalty to his master’ and to preserve his career options in the new administration.

  He was a minnow in the Trump orbit – a young political operative who had just turned 30 when he found himself swimming out of his depth. However else you describe Paul Manafort, the word that would not attach to him is minnow. At the time he is picked to lead the Trump campaign he is in his mid sixties. A multi-millionaire, he’d made a fortune with a lobbying firm, representing a variety of unsavoury clients around the world. And with wealth came a certain ostentation: jackets made of ostrich skin or brown python. He had accrued around $30 million in real estate dotted around. He would be forced as part
of his plea deal with prosecutors to give up a 43rd-floor condo in Trump Tower in New York, his 1890s Brooklyn brownstone, and a loft in SoHo. Another three-bedroom condo in Lower Manhattan would be put up for sale, as well as a ten-bedroom house in the Hamptons equipped with a pool, tennis court and putting green.

  The Trump team never really asked any questions about where the money came from; they were just keen to get someone who had plenty of miles on the clock as a Republican political operative. And he had plenty, having worked on political campaigns going right the way back to President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. If they had followed the money they would have found that much of it had come from working for pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine. He was in charge of the Trump campaign during the Republican convention in 2016 when the candidate’s policy suddenly changed. The proposed weakening of US support for Ukraine was a policy shift that was very much to Moscow’s liking.

  He was also present for a meeting at Trump Tower on 9 June when he, Donald Trump junior and Jared Kushner met Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with known links to the Kremlin who was offering ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton. The meeting had been set up by a British intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Goldstone was a publicist working mainly in the music industry who had helped the Trump Organisation bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow years earlier, and so had good Russian contacts. Post election, when details start to emerge about the Trump Tower meeting, Donald Trump Jr issued a highly misleading statement, saying that they were there to discuss policy around adoption of Russian children. It would later emerge that the statement had been written by President Trump, not Don Jr. But then emails emerge which cast a very different light on the meeting. The following is an exchange between Goldstone and Donald Trump Jr.