A Year At The Circus
Page 29
My experience of reading official reports is that they tend to be extremely worthy, but immensely dull. The Mueller report is not that. It is a gripping page turner. From the interviews conducted with all the key witnesses to events – all conducted under oath – Mueller pieces together (with annotations and footnotes) what happened when Trump found out about Sessions standing aside from overseeing the Mueller report. Much of the report has this strong narrative thread – but here is the key paragraph, from page 78 of the report:
On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller, III as Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the Russia investigation and matters that arose from the investigation. The President learned of the Special Counsel’s appointment from Sessions, who was with the President, Hunt [Jody Hunt was Jeff Sessions chief of staff], and McGahn conducting interviews for a new FBI Director. Sessions stepped out of the Oval Office to take a call from Rosenstein, who told him about the Special Counsel appointment, and Sessions then returned to inform the President of the news. According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’ The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How could you let this happen, Jeff?’ The President said the position of Attorney General was his most important appointment and that Sessions had ‘let [him] down’, contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the President said to him, ‘you were supposed to protect me,’ or words to that effect. The President returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, ‘Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.’
As an aside, when the report was eventually published on the Department of Justice website there was an exercise in speedreading by journalists across Washington. It seemed only minutes after its publication that one of our colleagues working for CBS news came across the gemstone nugget: the ‘This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked’ quotation. It was the stand-out phrase from the four hundred plus pages. But how to report it on the news? He used an expletive? He used the F word? Well, ladies and gentleman, I made broadcast history that evening by being the first person in BBC News to use the work ‘fucked’ on the flagship Ten O’Clock News.
But, this being the BBC, nothing is that straightforward. The decision to use it was relatively simple – then, however, came questions over context and what sort of ‘health warning’ you give before you ignite the F-bomb to the audience. The initial decision from London was that I should say the President used ‘extremely offensive’ language beforehand. But – hey – this is 2019. Isn’t ‘extremely offensive’ reserved for the C-word? And back and forth it went. We eventually settle on very strong language.
Then came the debate about whether I say it live to camera, or do we quote it in graphic form in the body of the piece. I don’t want to say it to camera, as I think that will look like grandstanding, or worse still accidental. So it was eventually decided I would say the word, but the graphic animation would say f*****. I went to the White House to do a ‘live top’ to my piece, and as per instructions I finished my introduction by saying, ‘I should say my report contains very strong language.’ I did wonder whether by the time I got back to the bureau it would be my career that would be f*****.
If you read the Mueller report you can see why the administration were so keen to pre-spin the verdict. What the report does is show that most of the ‘exclusive’ reports delivered by the Washington Post and New York Times in the near two years that the report was being conducted were spot on. Though nothing leaked from the federal office building where Mueller and his team were doing their work, there was plenty seeping out of the White House.
The report conveys a White House in meltdown during the summer of 2017, as an angry president seethes at the Mueller investigation and looks at ways of shutting it down. That is the Nixon nuclear option: the Saturday night massacre when he fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox conducting the Watergate investigation. A move that ultimately led to the President’s resignation (but more rapidly resulted in the memorable bumper sticker ‘Nixon is a Cox-sacker’). Again, on what was unfolding within the White House, I can do no better than quote from the report itself.
McGahn’s clear recollection was that the President directed him to tell Rosenstein not only that conflicts existed but also that ‘Mueller has to go.’ McGahn is a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House. McGahn spoke with the President twice and understood the directive the same way both times, making it unlikely that he misheard or misinterpreted the President’s request. In response to that request, McGahn decided to quit because he did not want to participate in events that he described as akin to the Saturday Night Massacre.
At this point McGahn drove to the White House to pack up his personal belongings and prepare a resignation letter. He told Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, that the President was asking him to do ‘crazy shit’, and that he had had enough. Mueller in his conclusions said that substantial evidence indicated that the President’s attempts to have the Special Counsel removed were driven by Donald Trump’s concern that he was being investigated for potential obstruction of justice. Or, to put it in layman’s terms: Trump sought to obstruct justice because he was being investigated for obstruction of justice.
Since the report’s publication, this is the one detail of the report with which the President has taken issue. He has said that he never ordered McGahn to contact the deputy AG and instruct him, in turn, to fire Mueller. And Trump has said that even if he had done that he would have been within his rights to do so. He has further added that if he wanted to fire Mueller he would have done so himself. The one caveat that needs to be added to this is that the President was not interviewed face to face by the Special Counsel, whereas the conclusions that Mueller reaches are based on those interviews with key members of staff like McGahn, Priebus and Bannon – which were all conducted under oath. The President, who has previously boasted of having ‘one of the best memories in the world’, would only agree to answering a number of written questions – and more than two dozen times in the published testimony the phrase ‘I can’t remember’ or ‘I do not recall’ appears.
There is another reason why Trump has singled out this particular finding. What McGahn and others did was disobey orders. They ignored the President’s instructions. And that makes Trump look weak, and not in command. Some days later he would tell reporters everyone obeys his instructions.
Mueller goes on to list a number of other ways in which the President might have obstructed justice, and the public learned of hitherto unknown attempts to neuter the investigation. But for all that the report is comprehensive and compelling in its research and its attention to detail, Mueller ducks making a determination of whether Trump crossed a line and actually broke the law. Yes, he lays out ten specific examples where there was an arguable case for obstruction of justice, but to use an American metaphor, it’s as though he takes the baseball bat up to the plate, and leaves it for others to pick up and go for the home run. What he very clearly doesn’t do – though some have tried to paint it otherwise – is give the President a pass. ‘If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,’ the Mueller report states. ‘Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgement.’
Mueller also made clear that he found many of the President’s answers ‘inadequate’. That begs a second difficult question for Mueller: if that was the case, having read the answers, why didn’t the Special Counsel subpoena the
President to appear before them? It would have been a high stakes roll of the dice, and the President might have resisted, thus setting up a constitutional showdown. But he chose to accept what he had been served up by the President.
The argument that Trump’s legal team have made is to ask how there could be an obstruction of justice case when there was no original sin. In other words, because the Mueller report found that there was no crime of conspiracy or cooperation committed by the Trump campaign in its dealings with the Russians, how can you then find that the President obstructed an inquiry that was into something where no crime had been committed? There is a longstanding policy in the Department of Justice that you can’t indict a sitting president. But Bill Barr the new Attorney General has a rather different outlook. He has a maximalist interpretation of presidential privilege. In other words, if the President is using his constitutional powers in the course of his duties, he can’t commit obstruction. When Donald Trump said during the presidential campaign that he could go and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it, you sense that it might well be true.
Mr Barr claimed that the ‘White House cooperated fully’ with Mr Mueller, even though Mr Trump declined to meet with the Special Counsel’s team, sought to have Mr Mueller fired and allowed – even encouraged – his administration to make repeatedly inaccurate public statements about the investigation.
The President in the days after the report was published claimed he had been exonerated. His tone was one of vindication mixed with vindictiveness. I am free, but I am going to get those SoBs who tried to set me up. He also reluctantly acknowledged that Mueller had behaved honourably. But with publication and the saturation media coverage that followed, so his mood darkened. There is a very fine line for Donald Trump between being a victor and a victim. He could sometimes feel both simultaneously. His pinned tweet on the day after publication was a Game of Thrones meme with the words ‘Game Over’. But in his mind it clearly wasn’t. He reverted to attacking Robert Mueller – as a rogue investigator who was compromised and a Trump hater. What is certainly true is that the Mueller report is not a clean bill of health. Far from it. The more you read, the more damning is the portrayal of Donald Trump as a stranger to the truth – the impression given is that the President seems to spread falsehoods as a first resort. And asks others to do the same, or to double down on the lies that have already been told.
At the end of May 2019, Mueller would eventually break his silence. He caught the White House by surprise by appearing before the lectern at the Department of Justice to make a statement. He would take no questions; he warned Congress that even if he was called to testify he wouldn’t go beyond what was in his report. But then he said one or two things that stood out. He said that charging the President had never been an option because DoJ guidelines forbade it. And then this one sentence: ‘If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.’ The implication of that could not have been clearer. Did Robert Mueller think he had exonerated Donald Trump, as the President had claimed? Not a bit of it.
I was really struck by some polling that came out a couple of weeks after the Mueller report appeared. It was one poll, and the numbers might change, and I haven’t gone into the details of the fieldwork or the sample size, or margins of error – but it seemed to tell a wider truth about America, the state of public opinion, the norm-shattering nature of this presidency, and how Americans were adjusting to it. The research done for the Washington Post and ABC found that 56 per cent of Americans were opposed to moves to impeach President Trump. A clear majority. While 58 per cent were absolutely clear in their view that the President had lied to the public. Only a third of Americans in this survey thought he had told the truth. To summarise – we know he’s a liar, but let’s not do anything about it.
Two years into his presidency, Donald Trump is being treated differently than anyone who has ever held the post. It is hard to think any of his predecessors could have survived some of the lacerating conclusions of this report. He feels himself to be the most persecuted president there has ever been – yet no one has ever been given the latitude that he has. The reason his acolytes say he is exonerated, and in the clear, is that there was no determination that he had broken the law. Is that the height at which the bar is now set? So long as any behaviour falls short of criminal, it’s OK? It seems a far cry from America’s first President, George Washington, when he was at Mount Vernon setting out his seventeen rules for decency and civility to be expected of the post-holder.
The Trump haters had hoped the Mueller report would be the smoking gun that would finish him off. The kill shot from a sniper’s rifle. It is not that. It has left a Democratic leadership fearful that if it moves to impeach him it will ultimately fail and just rally Republicans, and make Donald Trump even more popular. The US economy has been growing impressively, stock markets are booming and unemployment is at a record low. On trade, on immigration, on military spending the President is staying true to the pledges he made to the American people. Taxes have been cut. And for all the calamities and the division, living standards are rising, as is consumer confidence.
The President is still on the high wire, sometimes leaning precipitously to one side, then tilting horribly to the other. In politics there is no safety net to break the fall. There are wide-eyed gasps of oohs and aahs from the audience, some thrilled by the show, some covering their faces in horror. But with each precarious step that he takes out on the trapeze without coming crashing to the ground, so his confidence grows and self-belief surges that he is not going to be knocked off course. Not now. Not in 2020.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the the location in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
JS indicates Jon Sopel.
ABC News 112, 120, 152, 163, 169, 231, 246, 305
abortion 16, 22, 155, 213, 218, 233
Access Hollywood 43–5, 159–60
Acosta, Alex 77
Acosta, Jim 141–3
Adams, John Quincy 3, 114, 209, 222
Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) 62, 88, 154
Afghanistan 53–4, 57, 106, 138, 230, 248, 266
Agnew, Spiro 119
Air Force One xxiii, 51, 101, 140, 161, 164, 165, 167, 177, 180, 191, 202, 236–72
Air Force Two 242
al Assad, Bashar 263
Al Qaeda 230, 248
‘alternative facts’ 113, 135
Amazon (online retailer) 122
‘America First’ rhetoric 104, 247, 251
American Civil War (1861–5) 71, 72, 222
AMI 122–3
Anderson, Jack 121
Apprentice, The 14, 43–4, 102, 127
Arthur, Chester 212
Ayers, Nick 67, 68
Baker, Peter 124
Bannon, Steve 14, 16, 17, 27, 44, 45, 46–7, 51, 52–3, 56, 288, 302
Barkley, Alben 223–4
Barnum, P.T. 24, 129
Baron, Marty 143
Barr, William 273, 274, 275, 276, 303–4
Bates, Edward 72
BBC vii, viii, xxiii, 12, 85, 110, 113–14, 125, 131, 238–9, 300
Beast, the (President’s armoured Cadillac) 1–2, 196, 241
Bentsen, Lloyd 227–8
Bezos, Jeff 121–3
Biden, Joe 138, 218
Blair, Cherie 145
Blair, Tony 144–5, 237, 248
Boeing 156, 241, 242, 247
Bolton, John 59, 175, 278
Bornstein, Harold N 185–8, 194, 198
Brady, James S. 110
Brennan, John 275
Brexit xi, xii–xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 95, 237, 249
Briefing Room, The, White House xxiii, 28, 109–43, 192, 194, 196, 265 see also
press/media
Brown vs Board of Education (1954) 219–20
Brown, Gordon 237
Brunson, Pastor Andrew 10
Brzezinski, Mika 139
Bush, Barbara 154
Bush, Billy 43–4
Bush, George H.W. 58, 131, 146, 147, 149, 161, 195–6, 227
Bush, George W. 5, 40, 43, 58, 68, 74, 110, 147, 149, 161, 177, 182, 189, 190, 196, 198, 210, 228–9, 230, 244, 245, 246, 248
Cabinet Room, The, White House xxiii, 71–108
Cameron, David xviii, 237
Capital Gazette 133
Capitol building, Washington D.C. 111, 113, 169, 245
‘caravan’, migrant (moving from Central America to U.S.) (2017–18) 137–8
Card, Andy 40
Caro, Robert 224
Carson, Ben 80, 90–1
Carson, Candy 90
Carter, Jimmy 225–6, 256
‘catch and kill’ media tactic 123, 168–9
Chao, Elaine 79
Charlottesville protests (2017) 57
Chase, Salmon P. 72
Cheney, Dick 58, 182, 210, 228, 229–32
Chief of Staff, The Office of the xviii, 2, 7, 13, 15, 26, 38–70, 80–1, 102, 177, 192, 200, 201, 229, 246, 261, 294, 299, 301 see also individual Chief of Staff name
China 27, 233, 268
Christie, Chris xxiii, 20–1, 67–8, 174, 214, 215–16, 217–18, 278; Let Me Finish 295–6
Christie, Ron viii, 218
Churchill, Winston 3, 242, 272
CIA 17, 20, 34, 79, 80, 98, 101, 111, 226, 254, 270, 275, 280
civil rights 152–3, 219
Clapper, James 280
Clean Power Plan 83–4
Cleaver, Maggie 145
climate change 77, 83, 91, 98
Clinton, Bill 4, 40, 45, 138, 144–5, 146–7, 148–9, 162, 182, 207, 221, 256