“Of course I would take it,” Evanina said. “Who wouldn’t?”
With that, Evanina was shuttled over to Kushner’s office for what ended up being a fairly substantive, albeit brief, fifteen-minute meeting. Grenell had pushed Kushner to meet Evanina, boasting about his law enforcement bona fides, though Kushner was not of the mind to fire Wray. Sitting across from Evanina, Kushner had one last question before they parted: “Who put you in the job you’re in now?”
Evanina answered: “President Obama.”
Kushner stared at him for a minute. Evanina explained that technically former director of national intelligence James Clapper had hired him, but they worked under Obama. They said their goodbyes.
Evanina then was taken to the Oval to chat with Trump, where the president asked him mostly about his family, their roots in Pennsylvania coal country, and his work as an FBI agent in New Jersey. He asked whether Evanina had ever appeared before his sister, Maryanne Trump Berry, a now-retired federal judge. Then he asked about Evanina’s sister, who was an FBI agent. Trump wondered: Did she like Comey? At one point, Evanina mentioned the patron saint of New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen, in passing. Trump was displeased to hear this name. But the two parted genially, with the president telling Evanina: “Keep up the good work! And keep Navarro in line.”
Evanina left the White House feeling that this wasn’t a normal job interview. He was completely unaware that he’d been paired with Patel as a possible replacement team. But he did discover the president was pretty normal and personable in a one-on-one conversation.
“He’s not the guy you see on TV,” Evanina later told a confidant. “He’s not the guy the IC is all worked up about.”
Evanina concluded nothing would ever come of it. He never heard another word about being director.
The same day, Barr went to the White House for what he expected would be a standard meeting with Meadows. But Trump had been on the warpath against Wray all week. Into this cauldron walked Barr and his chief of staff, Will Levi. An assistant told them their meeting that day would be in the Roosevelt Room. Barr remarked that was strange but waited with Levi in the empty room. Within a few moments, Johnny McEntee strode in with Evanina. Barr got an uncomfortable look on his face and glanced at Levi, then excused himself and walked out of the room. Evanina and Levi continued to make small talk.
There was a reason Barr fled the room. McEntee was Trump’s loyalist and enemy hunter, the director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel with a personal mandate from the president to get rid of the “Never Trumpers” suspected of working at various agencies and to install “more of my guys,” as Trump put it. If he was squiring a new person through the White House, it suggested someone else was about to get fired.
McEntee had followed a highly unusual path to becoming a senior White House adviser. A former University of Connecticut quarterback, McEntee was a low-level Fox News employee in 2015 when he had emailed the Trump campaign several times hoping to get a job interview, but got no response. He finally broke through when he suggested that the campaign needed someone to help answer emails. McEntee was hired, and his prep-school-boy good looks and Trump fandom fueled a steady rise, becoming the candidate’s personal assistant, known as a “body man.” McEntee continued that role in the White House, catering to the president’s needs and carrying his overcoat and boxes of papers. He was trusted by Trump and his family, including Kushner and Ivanka Trump, because of his loyalty and discretion.
“Loyalty is everything to the president,” a former senior White House official said. “Johnny certainly seemed like a loyal guy. Always there, carrying bags and jackets. I saw a ‘yes’ man. No original thought.”
McEntee lost his job in March 2018. He had been carrying the president’s top-secret briefing materials but did not yet have a permanent security clearance. Investigators warned then White House chief of staff John Kelly that McEntee appeared to have won hundreds of thousands of dollars in online gambling over a few years, but they saw no evidence he had reported the winnings on his tax returns. Kelly confronted McEntee and told him he was sorry, but he couldn’t stay in the White House. Disappointed, McEntee headed to a job at the Trump campaign, where he waited out Kelly’s tenure and eventually got rehired by Trump in February 2020.
After McEntee had greeted Barr and Levi, Barr marched over to Meadows’s office and asked what the hell was going on. He asked, was Trump appointing Evanina as FBI director and putting in Patel as deputy director? Meadows looked a little surprised.
Meadows and Barr then walked upstairs to Pat Cipollone’s office. Cipollone and Meadows explained that the president had called in O’Brien and Grenell to talk about replacing Wray and his deputy, Bowdich. There had been some “spitballing” with the president about candidates. The president seemed to like the idea of Evanina and Patel.
“Not over my dead body,” Barr said, according to the account he gave other senior officials.
The attorney general told Meadows he didn’t have anything personally against Evanina, though he very much preferred Wray. He was deeply concerned, however, about Patel. Barr warned that if they removed Wray, they would have to have someone so eminently qualified and with such stature that there could be no credible objection. And they could not install a nonagent as deputy director.
Barr threw himself on top of the grenade, and he won the day. Trump did not remove either Wray or Bowdich as planned.
The next morning, Trump did an hour-long call-in interview on Fox & Friends. He praised Barr as “a man of unbelievable credibility and courage” for his handling of the Flynn matter, and said “he’s going to go down in the history of our country.”
Wray’s fate was less clear in Trump’s rambling remarks. First, he suggested he wasn’t going to fire Wray. “I learned a lot from Richard Nixon,” Trump said. “Don’t fire people.”
Then Trump intimated there were surprise developments on the horizon. He called Wray’s performance in reviewing the FBI’s work on the Russia investigation “disappointing.” He added, “Let’s see what happens with him. Look, the jury’s still out.”
* * *
—
There was another tension point in Barr’s relationship with Trump around this time: the lack of any public sign of progress in John Durham’s probe of the origins of the FBI investigation. In May, Trump started making noise again about Durham’s work and claimed the prosecutor was likely to indict Obama and Biden. On May 10, which was Mother’s Day, Trump showered social media with an extraordinary 126 tweets or retweets—including one labeling these alleged crimes against his presidency “OBAMAGATE.”
Barr tried to shut off that talk by telling reporters that neither Obama nor Biden was under investigation. But Trump was peeved at the attorney general for undercutting him and brought it up to Barr sometime later.
“You didn’t indict Comey . . . none of these things have panned out,” Trump said, raising old grievances about enemies who got away. “And Obama and Biden—you said they weren’t being investigated.”
“They’re not,” Barr said. He told Trump that claiming otherwise was counterproductive. “The more you talk about it, the more you’re pulling the rug out from under John Durham.”
He continued: “This is just going to discredit Durham’s work. There’s a lot of people working, doing serious work on this stuff and you’re just going to [get them] discredited by suggesting that this is going after Obama. We’re not going after Obama.”
As the weeks went on, Trump would keep pecking curiously, asking Barr about Durham’s investigation. The president and his Republican allies in Congress were hoping Durham would publish a bombshell report revealing seamy details of investigative abuses by the Obama administration and the intelligence community—and, if they were lucky, nail a few scalps to the wall.
The president would grow antsy into the summer, usually peppering Meadows with q
uestions, and then Meadows would call Barr for some kind of timeline on new developments. Barr would tell Meadows he was hopeful they would have some news that summer. Privately, the attorney general had reason to believe another government official was going to be prosecuted, but it wasn’t one of the big fishes Trump was looking to catch.
Trump had told Barr that not indicting Comey, Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and other officials hurt his image. “It makes us look weak,” the president would say.
Barr always tried to manage expectations. “Mr. President, whether or not John Durham indicts somebody is not going to affect this election outcome,” he had told the president. What would affect the election, Barr told Trump, was the president staying on message and consistently highlighting his accomplishments.
* * *
—
On May 13, Karl Rove, the former strategist for President George W. Bush’s campaigns, visited the White House. A few days earlier, Rove had received two successive calls from Trump advisers sounding him out on the president’s latest theory: Biden was such a weak candidate that President Obama and his allies would soon orchestrate a coup, replacing him as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who was riding a surge in popularity thanks to his nationally televised coronavirus briefings. That wasn’t all. Trump thought former first lady Michelle Obama would join the ticket as Cuomo’s vice-presidential running mate. Rove thought to himself, This is completely insane. But in Trump’s mind, it was plausible if not bound to happen.
Trump asked Rove to fly to Washington to prepare a strategy to run against a possible Cuomo-Obama ticket. When Rove walked into the Oval Office, there were at least a dozen people in the room, including Meadows and Brad Parscale.
“Karl, Karl, thank you for coming,” Trump said, welcoming his guest. Turning to his advisers, the president joked, “Karl’s been so good to me the last year. Not so much before, but he’s been good now.”
Trump rolled out his theory. He sized up Cuomo: “He’d be tough. So tough. I’d beat him, but he’d be tough.”
Then he took stock of Obama: “You know, Michelle, she could be his running mate. I’d beat them, but that’d be tough.”
Rove, trying to be polite, said, “This is not going to happen. This is not real.” He added, “Michelle Obama wants nothing to do with politics. She was unhappy with politics, she suffered through politics so her husband could be president, but she is not Hillary Clinton. She does not want to occupy the office. She wants to enjoy the life that she’s now having.”
Trump then told the group he thought they should hold off on attacking Biden for the time being because he did not want to weaken the presumptive Democratic nominee and give the Obama forces in the party reason to boot him from the ticket.
Rove was gobsmacked by what he was hearing.
“Mr. President, that’s wrong,” Rove said. “If you began now, today, to say we want to launch a full-throated attack on Biden, it would take you ’til June to get it together. So you start June first. You have five months. You have four months until people [start to] vote. In 2012, Barack Obama gave a speech on April first attacking Mitt Romney by name, depicting him as a heartless plutocrat. That was April. Six weeks ago. We attacked John Kerry in February of 2004. We then had a grand total of eight months and Obama had a grand total of seven months—and you’d have only five months to make the case.
“You’re running out of time,” Rove added. “You’ve chewed up a lot of the clock that other [incumbents] have used to their advantage.”
The meeting lasted about two hours. By the end, Trump was persuaded that a Cuomo-Obama ticket was probably not going to materialize.
* * *
—
May 15 was a perfect Washington spring day: 84 degrees, relatively low humidity, a slight breeze, and only passing clouds. The ideal setting for a major announcement in the Rose Garden: Operation Warp Speed.
Operation Warp Speed was the Trump administration’s version of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government–led effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The public-private partnership was designed to help seed, fund, and fuel the rapid development of vaccines, as well as therapeutic treatments and other diagnostic tools, and then distribute them quickly to the public. The priority was creating a vaccine by the end of the year—an exceptionally ambitious deadline that the president hounded his advisers to strive to keep. Of course, Trump wanted to beat that deadline and announce a vaccine—a “cure,” as he put it—before voters went to the polls in November.
The Warp Speed name was derived from Star Trek’s imaginary USS Enterprise’s ability to travel at a speed faster than light. The Trump administration needed an emergency response, and though the government did not make vaccines, they could speed up the approval for such drugs. Most importantly, the government could provide the pharmaceutical industry a multibillion-dollar carrot, promising to buy tens of millions of doses of the future vaccines, which encouraged companies to ramp up work by guaranteeing future sales. The government also could use the Defense Production Act to get companies to produce critical ingredients and transform their manufacturing facilities to help ramp up vaccine production.
To Redfield, Operation Warp Speed had a great chance of success because it had three critical features of the Manhattan Project. First, the president set a clear goal of developing a vaccine by the end of the year and never let up. Second, there were powerful players in critical roles. The Oppenheimer, a scientist beyond compare, was Moncef Slaoui, a researcher who had developed five vaccines as chairman of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline. And the General Groves, a logistics commander who could push manufacturing capability, was General Gustave Perna, a four-star who led the army’s Materiel Command. Finally, the operation could not rely on one promising vaccine, but had to invest in multiple vaccine candidates, which would increase the chances for success.
It took some convincing from a number of advisers for Trump to agree to make massive early investments in developing vaccines. There was no guarantee of success. Kushner told him, “Look, I really believe this is smart. I know there’s a chance we’ll lose twelve billion dollars, but if it hits, this will be the best investment you’ll make. . . . And if it doesn’t work, I think we’ll be glad we tried.”
“Let’s do it,” Trump said. “Give it a shot.”
Trump rolled out the new program with great fanfare. He had task-force members Pence, Slaoui, and Perna join him at the announcement event. As the principals gathered in the Oval Office before heading out to the Rose Garden, they all were wearing masks, other than Trump.
“We’re not going to go out there and have our masks on,” Trump told them. “I don’t think the masks are a good look.”
Fauci chimed in. “With all due respect, Mr. President, I am not going out there without a mask. I’ve been telling people to wear masks, and when I go out there, I’m going to keep my mask on.”
“Okay,” Trump said. Then he turned to the handful of military officers in uniform and said, “You guys keep your masks off. I don’t think it’s going to be good for us being out there with masks on.”
The officers followed their commander in chief’s orders. Fauci, Birx, and Collins were among the only officials wearing masks.
As Operation Warp Speed got under way, an unlikely hero emerged. Several of the doctors advising the president believed Kushner was a force for good when it came to vaccines and tried to steer the president in a helpful direction. When he entered a meeting, Kushner listened for a while as the group debated why something wouldn’t work, and then asked the critical question: What do we need to make it work?
“I just found him as a problem solver,” an Operation Warp Speed adviser recalled. “When Jared Kushner was involved, he would grab hold of the discussion in a decisive way, so we started to more systematically get the plan of action to s
olve the problem.”
Five days after the rollout, Azar thought he had succeeded in delivering a golden egg to his impatient king. After reading a late February report that found a new experimental Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was highly effective in blocking transmission of the virus, Azar and his department began reaching out to the British company’s leadership. On May 20, the U.S. government brokered a $1.2 billion deal to purchase three hundred million of the first one billion doses the company planned to produce.
From his kitchen at home, Azar called Kushner. “Jared, we got it,” he said. “We got AstraZeneca! Three hundred million doses!”
Kushner said that sounded great, but asked Azar to hold on. He was at the White House late that night with the president. Kushner put Trump on the phone.
“Mr. President, we just got the first deal with AstraZeneca,” Azar said. “It’s the first one ever. It’s incredible.”
Azar explained how sensitive it was.
“It’s going to be announced at four o’clock tomorrow,” he said. “You can’t talk about it. It will be released when the British stock market opens.”
“What?” Trump asked. “It’s a British company?”
“They are the first one with a vaccine, Mr. President,” Azar said.
Trump sounded deflated. “I’m going to get killed,” he said. “Oh, this is terrible news. Boris Johnson is going to have a field day with this.”
Azar wasn’t sure what to say about the British prime minister.
“Why aren’t we doing this with an American company?” Trump asked.
“This is the first one that is available,” Azar explained.
“I don’t want any press on this,” Trump said. “Don’t do any press on this. Let’s wait.”
Azar was stunned. He’d been angry and frustrated before in this job, many times. But in this moment, he was flat-out depressed. He had imagined the president would thank him. Instead, Trump had acted as if Azar had failed him.
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 16
