A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  Goldstone: ‘Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting. The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin.’

  Trump Jr responds: ‘Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it.’

  Steve Bannon, who would succeed Manafort as campaign chairman, described the meeting as ‘treasonous’ and ‘unpatriotic’. But it was what Mueller found in Manafort’s past that rang alarm bells. He had made millions from his work for pro-Russian groups in Ukraine, and never declared it. He was eventually sentenced for a variety of offences, including witness tampering when he was under house arrest, and will serve several years in a federal prison. Rick Gates, his deputy on the campaign and long-time business associate, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements in the investigation into Russian interference. But if those activities predated their involvement in the campaign, they certainly got up to quite a bit that was crucial to the Mueller investigation. They provided sensitive internal polling data to a Russian operative, Konstantin Killimnik, who Gates understood to be a ‘spy’ for the Kremlin. And they engaged in various bits of subterfuge to meet him in New York.

  The other person who fell afoul of the Mueller investigation was General Michael Flynn. He had been a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign and was rewarded after the election by being made National Security Advisor. It is, arguably, the most pivotal role in the administration that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. But he was fired within weeks of the Trump inauguration. He had misled the Vice-President over conversations he had had with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. More telling is that for three weeks, Donald Trump knew that Flynn had lied to the VP, but it was only when it got out into the media that Flynn was forced to walk the plank. He had broken the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not get caught.

  When the Mueller investigation started, Flynn was questioned about those contacts with the Russian embassy. Again he dissembled – but this time the FBI had phone intercepts to match against Flynn’s account. He would plead guilty for having ‘impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election’. The man who had led the chants of ‘Lock her up!’ against Hillary Clinton during Trump rallies was now the one looking at jail time. As many commentators noted at the time, karma’s a bitch.

  The other prominent Trump aide netted by the Mueller probe was the President’s personal Mr Fixit, Michael Cohen. The New York lawyer had been at Trump’s side for a decade and was his go-to person when there was something difficult or delicate that needed sorting. He had once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, but cornered by Mueller and cut adrift by Trump, Cohen now ‘flipped’ and started cooperating with the Special Counsel investigation. Far from taking a bullet, he was now aiming a gun at the President’s head. He admitted to lying to Congress over the ambitions of Donald Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The President had consistently maintained that he had no business interests in Russia, but throughout the campaign his team was working on getting permission to build a flagship property in the capital, that could have made Mr Trump hundreds of millions of dollars.

  The court filings were even more astonishing. Another of the crimes that Cohen pleaded guilty to was the breaking of campaign finance laws. And if that sounds dry as dust, it isn’t. This relates to the hush money paid to the pornstar Stormy Daniels, and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom had claimed to have had affairs with Donald Trump. Attorneys from the Southern District of New York state explicitly in their court submission that Cohen ‘acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1’ in handling payments to the two women. In this and other filings by US attorneys ‘Individual-1’ is identified as the man who ‘was elected President’. Just think about this for a second – these lawyers are federal employees. They work for the Department of Justice. And in their filing to the court they say – in terms – that Cohen broke the law ‘in coordination with and at the direction of’ the man who is now the president.

  To summarise, a former head of the Trump campaign, his deputy, a foreign policy advisor, the national security advisor and Trump’s personal lawyer had all been found guilty. And that is not to mention the pile of indictments against various Russians who had sought to interfere in the election.

  The focus on collusion in legal terms has always been a bit of an oddity. There is no federal offence of ‘collusion’. The criminal offence is conspiracy and that was the focus of Mueller’s investigators: whether the Trump team purposefully worked with Russia to win the 2016 election. What he found boils down to this: yes, there were members of Trump’s team at different stages who had deep and troubling links with Russia. The Russian government for its part was doing all it could to get Trump elected president. And as for the campaign team, they were keen as mustard to benefit from any embarrassing leaks that would hurt the Democrats – and no, they never thought it was necessary to alert the authorities to the source of the information they were receiving. Despite that, ‘the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ the report said. That’s the good news as regards the confidence that Americans can have in the integrity of the election. This is the bad: ‘The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,’ according to Robert Mueller.

  Having covered the campaign throughout 2016, travelling extensively with candidate Trump as he clocked up the air-miles all over the country, it always seemed far-fetched to me, the idea that there was conspiracy/collusion. There was a compelling defence that Trump and those closest to him could have mounted, but would never make because it would require too much self-awareness and an acceptance of frailty (not the President’s strongest suits). The campaign was simultaneously wonderful and a total shit-show. It was as different as could be from the tightly controlled and disciplined (but ultimately useless) campaign of Hillary Clinton. Trump’s was careering down a hill, extremely fast, with dodgy brakes and the possibility that anyone and everyone could be tipped over the handlebars at any moment. A conspiracy with Russian agents? You’re having a laugh. The people in Trump Tower were making it up as they went along. There was no playbook, no bible that had to be consulted. Messaging was haphazard (but effective); travel plans changed regularly; command and control over the candidate was partial, at best. But as I say, this was a defence Donald Trump would never mount.

  But if you look back at the names of the people who have been found guilty during the course of the Mueller investigation, what is the one thing that unites them all; what is the common denominator? They were all found to have lied over their contacts with Russia. Why did Michael Cohen lie about the Moscow building project? Why did Flynn feel it necessary to tell untruths about his conversations with the Russian ambassador? Why did Donald Trump instruct the participants in the Trump Tower meeting to invent a cock and bull story that it was about adoption, when it was really about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton? If you don’t think you are doing anything wrong – and that has been Donald Trump’s line throughout – why the almost industrial scale quantity of untruths?

  The second part of the Special Counsel investigation looked at whether there was obstruction of justice by the President (as he was by then) in his efforts to halt the Russia investigation
– whether being carried out by the FBI director James Comey, or later by Robert Mueller. But these, of course, are not two entirely discrete entities. They are overlapping circles. Nowhere more so than in how the President reacted to the indictments and charges laid against the individuals from the campaign – and in particular the extent to which Donald Trump felt they did or didn’t cooperate with the authorities.

  The President has previously said that two of his favourite films are The Godfather and Goodfellas. Certainly, the language he used at times seemed to borrow more from the Cosa Nostra than from the high-minded idealism of the founding fathers in The Federalist Papers. Michael Cohen, his long-time consigliere, was a ‘rat’ for having cooperated with the Mueller investigation. He was a ‘flipper’ for having done that. Trump told Fox News, ‘I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful, and then they get ten years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.’

  But Paul Manafort, who initially refused to cooperate, was lauded by the President, even though he had committed serious crimes that might have caused him to spend the rest of his life in prison. He tweeted, ‘I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” – make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!’ Manafort had obeyed the mafia code of omerta and so was venerated; Cohen hadn’t and so was vilified. This from the man who is there to uphold the laws of the land and be in charge of the justice system. The White House General Counsel, Don McGahn, was similarly lauded by Trump for keeping schtoom (although once the Mueller report came out and it emerged just how extensively McGahn had cooperated, that all changed). The President said he wasn’t a ‘John Dean type “rat”’. That’s a reference to the former Nixon White House counsel who cooperated with Watergate prosecutors, helping to end Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. Trump didn’t argue that Dean got his facts wrong, just that he’d flipped – making him, in Trump’s mind, a ‘grass’.

  This led Mueller to investigate whether there was more to this than met the eye. Was this intimidation in the case of Cohen; was Manafort being given a nod and a wink that if he stayed being ‘brave’ and kept stonewalling Mueller, there might be a presidential pardon at the end of it? Certainly, the President never ruled out the possibility. According to Mueller’s report, ‘In January 2018, Manafort told [Rick] Gates that he had talked to the President’s personal counsel and they were “going to take care of us”. Manafort told Gates it was stupid to plead, saying that he had been in touch with the President’s personal counsel and repeating that they should “sit tight” and “we’ll be taken care of”. Gates asked Manafort outright if anyone mentioned pardons and Manafort said no one used that word.’

  Did that amount to interference? In the case of Cohen, Mueller wrote that the evidence could ‘support an inference that the president used inducements in the form of positive messages in an effort to get Cohen not to cooperate, and then turned to attacks and intimidation to deter’ cooperation and undermine Cohen’s credibility. Mueller went down a similar path with the treatment of Michael Flynn, who was also the beneficiary of a range of sympathetic messages from the President. Were they also code for ‘limit your cooperation and there’ll be a pardon at the end of it’?

  The Flynn case was really the starting point for the obstruction of justice part of the investigation. The day after Flynn had been fired, President Trump calls the FBI Director James B. Comey to come and see him at the White House. It is 14 February, but there was not a lot of love around. Immediately afterwards, as had become Comey’s MO in his dealings with the President, he made a detailed note of the meeting. Comey wrote that the President shooed everyone else out of the room so he could speak to the FBI director alone. Trump denies this. But Mueller finds that ‘other Administration officials who were present have confirmed Comey’s account’. Both Reince Priebus, who was then Chief of Staff, and Jeff Sessions, then the Attorney General, told the Mueller team that the President had ‘asked to speak to Comey alone’.

  Finally it is just the two of them and, as we’ve seen, Trump says to Comey, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go’ – which Comey interpreted as an instruction to drop the investigation. The President would much later refute that, writing on Twitter, ‘I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!’ But Mueller reports that this was contradicted by Priebus and the then White House counsel Don McGahn. Trump apparently told them that he ‘spoke to Comey about Flynn’ and called Flynn ‘a good guy’. In any case, why would Trump need to have the room cleared and see Comey alone if it was merely to tell the FBI director what a good egg he was? Mueller also takes evidence from other White House officials who tell him that the President was furious that he couldn’t simply instruct his attorney general who or what should be investigated.

  Trump’s judgement was that with the firing of Flynn he had put to bed the whole Russia investigation. It would be in the rear-view mirror. The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie recalls, in his book Let Me Finish, a telling lunch he had with Trump and Jared Kushner the day after Flynn had gone. According to Christie, Trump said to him: ‘This Russia thing is all over now, because I fired Flynn,’ and Christie starts to laugh – the former prosecutor told them it was nowhere near over.

  Christie was spot on. This was going to go on and on. Christie also said he gave the President a piece of advice. He told Trump there was no way he would be able to shorten the process, but he could sure as hell lengthen it – and that was by continually talking about it. Christie’s advice was that he should say nothing. It was advice the President was unable to take, and it was true the ‘Russia thing’ went on far, far longer.

  The next stage in the decline of the Trump/Comey relationship came in March, when Comey testified in public that there was an FBI investigation going on into Trump and the Russians and the 2016 campaign – and it had been going on since well before the election. This was the first time it had been said out loud. It was fascinating to see how the same people presented with the same facts could reach such wildly differing conclusions. Trump supporters thought (and continue to think) this was ‘bad cops’ at the top of the FBI trying to engineer a coup against the President. Democrats who had seen Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions go up in flames when Comey announced, just days before the election, that he was reopening the inquiry into her use when she was Secretary of State of a private email server, thought this was deeply unjust. Why reveal the Clinton investigation, but not the fact that there was one relating to Trump? How did that serve the American people? Wasn’t that gross interference in the election? Those questions will stay with Comey for the rest of his life.

  And when Trump decided it was time to dispatch the man at FBI HQ, this was the slightly risible pretext – because Donald Trump was so concerned about the treatment of poor old Hillary. Because of the implications over obstruction of justice, the Russia inquiry was not mentioned. The bureau, Trump asserted, was in turmoil. Comey was a general who had lost the confidence of his troops. Trump was claiming that hundreds of rank and file officers had contacted the White House to pledge their support for the decision to fire Comey. I was at the White House briefing when the President’s then deputy press secretary, Sarah Sanders, repeated it, saying, ‘I can speak to my own personal experience – I’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the President’s decision.’ And she went on, ‘I’ve certainly heard from a large number of individuals. And that’s just myself.’ But interrogated by Mueller, under the threat of perjury charges for lying, she would admit that her assertion ‘was not founded on anything’. She had lied from the podium. She would later explain it as a ‘slip of the tongue’. A slip of the tongue repeatedly mad
e.

  A memo drawn up by the deputy attorney general argued that Comey had overstepped his authority in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Rosenstein said that Comey had been wrong to usurp the authority of the Attorney General to announce the reopening of the investigation, and had compounded that by giving ‘derogatory’ information about someone who was not going to be subject to criminal charge.

  Of course, this explanation – concern over the way the FBI had treated Hillary Clinton – did not withstand any scrutiny. It soon became clear that was all a smokescreen. The President wanted Comey fired because – just as he had mistakenly calculated over the firing of Flynn – he thought this would end the Russia pain; it would put a stop to the questions. But this was an even greater misreading of the situation than in the case of Flynn. It only made things worse. Far worse. And set in train a chain reaction that would shake his presidency to the core. According to Mueller, the White House buried Trump’s original termination letter, which exposed his true motives. According to notes discovered by his team, the White House counsel’s office concluded that the letter should never see the ‘light of day’.

  As the outrage over the firing of Comey grew, so the Attorney General Jeff Sessions would make a hugely consequential decision on the way forward. He decides he has to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation because of his involvement in the Trump campaign, and because of questions that had been raised over his own contacts with the Russian Ambassador. This sends Trump apoplectic. But then worse follows. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, decides that the only way forward is to appoint a Special Counsel to oversee the investigation. Now add incandescent to apoplectic. The President was not a happy camper. And from that moment on he would launch lacerating attacks on Jeff Sessions until and beyond the day he fired him 16 months later.