I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  Barr had learned that Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a golfing buddy of Trump’s, wanted to transfer to New York so he could get back to his family there. Barr’s attitude was that he had better seize opportunities when they came along. Clayton was available. It seemed like ideal timing to make a switch. Barr didn’t know of any imminent actions in Southern District cases that critics could argue he was trying to steer or squelch. This could work out elegantly, he thought. He’d offer Berman a job as head of the civil division or as assistant attorney general, and Barr would get in Clayton a prosecutor he could rely on in an important spot. Barr wasn’t bothered a bit by Clayton’s lack of prosecutorial experience; Barr had none himself when he became attorney general the first time.

  On Friday, June 19, when Berman arrived at Barr’s suite at the Pierre, he walked into a small living area just off the bedroom, with two chairs facing each other. There were sandwiches set out on a table. Barr was in a calm, almost placid mood. His voice was monotone. They were in a confined indoor space, but Barr did not wear a mask. Berman removed his own mask, feeling he didn’t have a choice.

  Barr got straight to the point.

  “We want you to take another job,” he said. Barr told Berman he could head the civil rights division.

  As he later confided in others and described to the House Judiciary Committee, Berman was shocked, and immediately thought of how disgracefully Liu had been shoved out the door. He thought to himself: This is not going to happen to the Southern District. He made a point of not raising his voice; he didn’t want to appear rattled. But in a burst, he told Barr he would not resign. Barr warned Berman he would be fired if he didn’t leave on his own accord, and that would look bad on his résumé. He urged Berman to think about it and asked for his cell phone number.

  “I’m going to call you later tonight,” Barr said.

  “I’m always open to a phone call,” Berman said. “But I want your expectations to be realistic. I’m not going to resign.”

  After forty-five minutes, Berman said he had to go, though neither man had touched the sandwiches. Immediately afterward, Berman called his private attorneys and told them what Barr had demanded. Berman explained his legal theory that Barr couldn’t remove him because he had been appointed by a panel of federal judges, after the Trump administration did not put a confirmed nominee in the job. Legally, Berman argued, only the court could remove him, or the president. He hadn’t told Barr this, but he believed it was his protection.

  “I may very well be fired in the next twenty-four hours and I want paper put together to oppose it,” Berman told the lawyers, who got to work on an emergency motion they could file in court if necessary.

  At about 7:20 p.m., Berman realized someone with a 202 area code had called his phone much earlier, and dialed the number. It was Barr. He offered the U.S. attorney what seemed like a shiny bauble.

  “How would you like to be chairman of the SEC?” Barr asked.

  Berman thought, Wow. He really wants me to resign.

  “My position hasn’t changed,” Berman told Barr. “I want to talk to my staff about all this.”

  “Why do you have to talk to them?” Barr asked. “This is about you.”

  “This is about the office,” Berman said.

  “The change is going to be made, Geoff,” Barr said.

  “I need to think about it until Monday,” Berman said. “Give me until Monday.”

  Barr said he’d call Berman on Sunday. But when he hung up, he sensed Berman was secretly playing him—or “grin-fucking” him, as Barr would later describe it to others. Instinctively, Barr began plotting how to beat Berman to the punch.

  Just after 9:00 that night, Berman and his wife, Joanne Schwartz, were about to pull into their driveway in New Jersey, returning home from their day in the city. Berman was driving and Schwartz noticed her phone was beeping and glowing with text messages and emails from friends. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and “What happened?,” they said. What in the world were they talking about? She googled and found Barr had issued a news release announcing that Berman was stepping down from his post as U.S. attorney. The statement also said that Trump planned to nominate Clayton to replace him, and that Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, would immediately step into the job until the Senate confirmed Clayton.

  It had all come to a boil much faster than Berman had expected. And it all confirmed his worst suspicions, the U.S. attorney would tell his deputies that night: Barr wanted someone he could control in the run-up to the election.

  After conferring with his aides, Berman decided to publicly punch back at Barr. He used the precise language of the obstruction of justice statute, to emphasize that Barr’s efforts to remove him should not impede or interfere with ongoing criminal investigations. Sharing drafts back and forth with his staff for the next hour, he released a statement after 11:00 that night.

  “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney,” Berman said. “I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor—and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.”

  Berman knew he would lose his job: you couldn’t call the attorney general a liar and expect to show up for work the next day like everything was normal. But he was going to at least try to stop this hostile takeover of the Southern District. If anyone monkeyed around with the Southern District’s ongoing cases, Berman figured, it would come back to haunt both Barr and Trump.

  The next day, June 20, Barr called Trump and gave him the rundown of what had happened in New York. He told Trump he wanted to remove Berman, but he would now need the president’s authorization.

  “Once I’ve told [Berman] I’m going to do this, I have to carry it out,” Barr told Trump. “I have to follow through.”

  Trump didn’t want his firing of Berman to create a bigger news story, but he understood Barr’s position and agreed. In a stinging letter he publicly released after 3:00 that afternoon, Barr notified Berman and the world that Trump had removed him from his post. Barr also scoffed at the implication that his personnel move threatened the progress of important cases.

  “Your statement also wrongly implies that your continued tenure in the office is necessary to ensure that cases now pending in the Southern District of New York are handled appropriately. This is obviously false,” Barr wrote.

  Berman was out, but Barr had suffered a loss in this public dogfight. His elegant plan to install Clayton came crashing down around him. Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and usually a reliable Trump ally, made clear that Berman’s removal was a surprise to him and said he would follow Senate tradition and give New York’s two senators—both Democrats—veto power over the nomination. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand said Clayton shouldn’t be considered, and that Barr’s removal of Berman needed to be investigated.

  Barr abandoned his original plans to bring in a political loyalist and appointed Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, as the acting U.S. attorney—a victory for career prosecutors in the office and precisely what Berman had requested.

  “The moment Berman started objecting, then the plan should’ve been, ‘Never mind, back off,’ ” said one senior administration official. “But the A.G. pushed ahead with it with disastrous consequences.”

  * * *

  —

  By the start of summer, the doctors guiding the administration’s coronavirus response felt that their updates w
ere falling on deaf ears. Robert Redfield and others realized the number one, the number two, and the number three priorities for the administration were Trump’s reelection campaign. That realization hit home when the White House announced that the president would resume his campaign rallies, starting on June 20 in Tulsa—at an indoor venue, no less, the Bank of Oklahoma Center. Redfield sought out Sean Conley and urged him to dissuade Trump from going.

  “This is not in the president’s interest,” Redfield told the president’s physician. “You’re putting him at risk. You are his doctor and he can campaign just as easily on Zoom in a way that doesn’t put him or others at risk.”

  Conley sounded somewhat defeated. He was up against a president—and a team of advisers—determined to have Trump connect with his voters. He said something similar to what he had told Redfield in the spring about getting Trump to wear a mask. Doctors try to do their best to give good advice, and sometimes the patient still refuses to take it.

  At the president’s insistence, Trump campaign aides pressed ahead with the Tulsa rally. Their top priority was to ensure a capacity crowd of nineteen thousand people in the arena. Brad Parscale, who earlier had warned that people might not show up, wasn’t going to leave anything to chance, so he authorized roughly $1 million in campaign advertising to drum up a crowd.

  The early feedback was positive. Tens of thousands of people signed up for free tickets within hours of the campaign’s June 10 announcement of the rally, and the RSVPs kept flowing in from there, totaling hundreds of thousands. The data showed that roughly 150,000 people who lived within one hundred miles of Tulsa had signed up. In the worst-case scenario, Parscale thought, a small fraction of them would actually show up and the arena still would be packed.

  The RSVPs kept growing and Parscale, eager to please Trump, personally kept the president updated on the attendance estimates. On June 15, the campaign manager announced that one million people had signed up for tickets. The tweet was based on internal data but sent impulsively. Parscale would come to regret it.

  Meanwhile, officials in Oklahoma were worried about the massive gathering. Tulsa Health Department director Bruce Dart warned publicly that the rally could be a superspreader event. “It’s the perfect storm of potential over-the-top disease transmission,” Dart said. “It’s a perfect storm that we can’t afford to have.” He urged Tulsa mayor G. T. Bynum to try to postpone the event to a safer time when coronavirus case counts were lower. But the mayor, a Republican, decided to let Trump’s event go forward, inaccurately claiming that he did not have the power to stop it. Dart found himself a target of hate mail, threats, and invective from across the political spectrum. Trump opponents warned him that there would be “blood on your hands” if he let the event go forward; Trump supporters warned him that they “pay your salary just as much, if not more, than Trump haters.”

  A group of Tulsa residents tried and failed to block the Trump rally, arguing in court that the event would dramatically hike the number of coronavirus cases in the area. But the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the Trump campaign had a right to hold the rally with a set of safety precautions: Event staff had to check the temperatures of rally attendees and then provide masks and hand sanitizer for those who wanted them.

  At the event site, Trump’s advance staff put the finishing touches on the arena and, at Parscale’s direction, built a massive stage outside with a jumbotron for an expected overflow crowd of many thousands to watch Trump’s speech live. Trump dubbed this rally the “Great American Comeback” and banked on it breathing new life into his campaign. A leased plane flew in a host of surrogates, and film crews were also en route to record soaring moments for campaign ads.

  Elsewhere in the country, the Tulsa event seemed an irresponsible spectacle. As Tony Dokoupil asked Senator Jim Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, on CBS This Morning, “Nobody in this country is holding the kind of indoor, large gathering that the president is planning for tomorrow—not megachurches, not sports leagues—so why put public safety at risk for a political rally?”

  Lankford made the argument Trump had been making, which is that thousands of people had been gathering at Black Lives Matter protests, so why can’t they gather at a MAGA rally, too?

  “This is a gathering like protests, like other events, like shopping, like malls that are open,” Lankford told Dokoupil. The senator urged that high-risk individuals take care of themselves and reminded viewers that they could attend a watch party outside the arena or watch on television at home.

  “This is an optional event, not a required event by any means,” Lankford said.

  Tensions were high in Tulsa. The rally had originally been scheduled for June 19 but was changed to June 20 after a backlash for having it on the Juneteenth holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves. Concerned about violence between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter protesters, Tulsa police and the Oklahoma National Guard locked down wide swaths of downtown surrounding the arena. Local news coverage played up the possibility of coronavirus spread as well as violent clashes among pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators. Navigating the security perimeter to enter the arena would be difficult, and the forecast was 84 degrees and humid.

  As was the case for any presidential event, a large coterie of Secret Service agents, campaign advance staff, and other personnel flew to Tulsa a few days ahead of the rally, mapping out every move Trump would make on the ground and planning the security needed to protect him. In addition, campaign aides erected medical tents around the arena, where staff and volunteers would conduct temperature checks and distribute PPE to those who asked, and doctors and nurses would be on standby to address any emergencies.

  On June 20 around noon, hours before the evening rally, under white tents in the shadow of the arena, a group of contract nurses tested campaign staffers, event officials, and other VIPs for possible coronavirus infection. It was a basic safeguard for the indoor rally, considering the proximity of attendees to the president. In just two hours of testing, six people tested positive. One was a senior Secret Service advance agent, and another was a Secret Service officer assigned to screen rallygoers before they entered the stadium. It shouldn’t have been a shock; Secret Service personnel rarely wore masks, even though their work necessitated interacting with strangers. Both had attended a large planning meeting in close quarters with campaign and other event staff the day before the rally. Dozens of other people may have also been infected.

  When the news about the positive tests was first reported that afternoon, the president was livid. Within thirty minutes, campaign staff appeared at the nurses’ tent and interrogated the medical staff. Had any of them discussed the results with reporters? How had this information gotten out? The health-care workers administering the tests were insulted. More curious, however, they were then given a new list of people who needed to be tested. Some staff said the new list appeared much shorter than the original.

  The campaign immediately clamped down on testing to prevent discovering who else might be infected. Word was passed throughout the Trump team that afternoon: remaining staff were not to get tested in Tulsa, but rather to wait until they returned home to headquarters in Arlington. “The president wants this to stop,” a campaign staffer told an Oklahoma VIP who had arrived to get tested.

  The campaign took another step that made it even easier for the virus to spread among Trump supporters. The BOK Center had purchased twelve thousand stickers that said: “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” to block off seats inside the arena and create safe breathing distance between rallygoers. As arena staff affixed these to nearly every other seat, campaign officials directed them to stop and to remove the stickers that were already placed on chairs. Campaign staff also told arena personnel to remove signs telling attendees how to socially distance inside the building.

  Aboard Air Force One on the way to Tulsa, the president received the most enraging news of all: The masses hadn’t tur
ned out. On the plane, Trump brooded over cable television footage of sparse crowds, and when he landed, he called Parscale from the Beast, the president’s armored vehicle.

  “Sir, it’s going to be empty,” Parscale told Trump.

  “Why? What happened?” the president asked.

  “It looks like Beirut in the eighties,” Parscale said.

  “What do you mean?” Trump asked.

  “The army’s here, the SWAT teams are here, the Secret Service has machine guns out, and you have to walk over three miles. People are passing out. It’s hot,” Parscale said. “Sir, this is like walking over fire to watch you, and there’s just not enough of them. I’m shocked that twelve thousand people showed up. Any other rally in any other situation, with all the advertising we did, this rally would’ve had a hundred thousand people there easy.”

  Even that was an overstatement, however. The Tulsa Fire Department later estimated just 6,200 people attended. Virtually nobody was in the outdoor overflow area, where Trump had expected to pay a surprise visit to throngs of supporters who couldn’t make it into the packed arena.

  Trump put on his game face and strode out onto the big stage in the less-than-half-full BOK Center. After a 110-day, coronavirus-induced dry spell, Trump was ready to rumble. He offered no reconciliation or rapprochement over the health, economic, and racial justice crises engulfing the nation he led. The president mocked health experts and recalled, “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down,’ because as more tests were conducted, more infections were discovered. He uttered a racist term, “Kung Flu,” in his list of alternative names for COVID-19. And, referring to the debate over removing Confederate monuments, he cast himself as a protector of “our heritage.”