“I’m just one person in the system,” Esper said.
Esper moved through his out-box, signing some documents and finalizing a few action items that had been waiting, including the paperwork to promote two women generals, Laura Richardson of the army and Jacqueline Van Ovost of the air force, to prestigious four-star commands. It was a move Esper and Milley had delayed out of fear that Trump might derail their promotions because they were women; they assumed Biden would approve them.
Some on Esper’s team talked about planning a clap out, where officers and staff line the hallways to applaud the departing secretary in a show of support. But an eerie fear took hold. Aides pointed out to Esper that Johnny McEntee, the White House personnel director, had helped install a few hard-core Trump loyalists in the Defense Department who had been complaining the place needed a purge. They feared that these Trump allies would take the names of people who clapped Esper out the door—an enemies list. Esper pulled the plug on a clap out. “Let it go,” he said. It was a wonderful tradition, but for Esper it wasn’t worth the risk of people worrying about their next promotion. Esper’s concerns about protecting his staff weren’t exaggerated. When James Anderson resigned the next day as acting undersecretary of defense for policy, the White House asked for a list of political appointees who had participated in his clap out. Esper walked through his suite of offices saying goodbye to people, shaking hands and giving hugs. He thanked each staffer for his or her service. Then he left, walking out the door within an hour and a half.
“It’s going to be okay,” Milley told the staff. He had been at the Pentagon when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by President George W. Bush after the 2006 midterm elections, and was there to greet his successor, Bob Gates. With Esper out, Milley had the task of getting on the phone with several anxious military leaders across the world—the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Chinese. All of them suffered from varying levels of the jitters about Trump. Was the situation in the White House stable? Milley’s mission was to calm everyone down.
Robert O’Brien called Milley a little before 2:00 p.m. to say that Chris Miller would be there very soon and would be joined by Kash Patel. “They’ll be at the Pentagon shortly to take over,” O’Brien reported. Milley knew Miller a little through the army, and Miller had recently begun work as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. But Milley didn’t know Patel, who was in his late thirties and set to become Miller’s chief of staff.
At 2:15, Miller arrived. His first moments on the grounds were not reassuring. He tripped coming up the stairs.
Milley walked through some baseline information about the country’s current security status. They reviewed continuity of government, key information about nuclear weapons, and hot spots around the world. Miller stressed that there would be no immediate change in policies.
“Just continue what we’ve been doing, chairman,” Miller told Milley.
At 2:30, Milley gathered with the joint chiefs of the army, navy, and air force in the chairman’s conference room, known as the Tank, to relay the new acting secretary’s message. Steady as she goes. There would be no changes to the national defense strategy.
From the moment he left the meeting at 3:30, and continuing virtually nonstop until the evening, Milley’s phone rang repeatedly with concerned callers. Lawmakers, commanders, retired generals, national security officials—all of them were worried about what Esper’s firing portended and what Trump might be planning. They wanted to hear that Milley understood this was a fragile time and to hear him assure them he would hold down the fort.
Adam Smith, the Democratic congressman from Washington State and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told Milley, “Risk just went up.” In a public statement, Smith said it was “hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition.”
Mac Thornberry, the Republican congressman from Texas and the committee’s ranking member, who ever since the Lafayette Square incident had been concerned about Trump using the military for political purposes, called to say he was worried about “steadiness” at the Defense Department and wanted to know if Milley thought everything would be okay.
Nancy Pelosi didn’t mince words. The House Speaker already had made clear to Milley that she believed Trump was unstable. “We are all trusting you,” she told him. “Remember your oath.”
Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Milley this was unsettling news. “This is very erratic,” said Reed, a regular caller on Milley’s cell phone. “I don’t know Miller. We’re in a high-risk period.”
Just a few minutes before 5:00, O’Brien called Milley again. “Miller is a good guy. He’s Special Forces,” O’Brien said, alluding to Miller’s experience in the Special Operations intelligence unit. “He’s a good guy with a good heart. But this is an immense job. Please help him. He’s going to need it.”
This was the equivalent of warning Milley that Miller might be in over his head, and not exactly comforting. Nor was what came next. Esper’s senior military assistant, Lieutenant General Bryan Fenton, called with worrisome news.
“I overheard Ezra Cohen say, ‘We have to take Milley out,’ ” Fenton told Milley.
“Oh great,” Milley said.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick was one of three Trump loyalists who had been installed in senior roles at the Pentagon on November 10. Cohen-Watnick, thirty-four, who would later go by the name Ezra Cohen, denied saying anything negative about Milley. He had been named acting under secretary of defense for intelligence, which gave him control of the military’s intelligence and counterintelligence operations. At the start of the administration, he had been hired onto the NSC by Michael Flynn and was controversial for both his hawkish ideology and his bureaucratic knife-fighting, as well as for being accused of sharing intelligence reports with his former boss, Congressman Devin Nunes, which Cohen-Watnick had denied. CIA officials complained about working with him. After just seven months on the job, he was pushed out by Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster. The national security adviser had tried unsuccessfully to remove Cohen-Watnick earlier that year, but later got important backup from Kelly, who had just begun as chief of staff and had received his own warnings about the aide from intel officials. Cohen-Watnick later served as national security adviser to then attorney general Jeff Sessions and then in a pair of Pentagon jobs that did not require Senate confirmation.
As part of a broader shakeup, Tony Tata, sixty-one, was tapped to perform the duties of the under secretary for policy—even though his nomination for that position had previously crumbled when not enough Senate Republicans would support it. Now he was performing the job without Senate confirmation. A retired army brigadier general, Tata had been a frequent guest on Fox News and promoted conspiracy theories, including falsely claiming that President Obama was Muslim and a “terrorist leader,” and that the CIA had sought to assassinate Trump.
Late in the evening of November 10, Milley received a call from an old friend. The friend was very concerned about the right-wing acolytes who had just been elevated and enjoyed special access to Trump, warning they were part of a larger cabal willing to cross every line to hold power.
“What they’re trying to do here is overturn the government,” Milley’s friend told him, according to the account Milley shared with aides. “This is all real, man. You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff. Let me give you some background.”
The friend began by describing Michael Ledeen, someone about whom Milley knew very little. Ledeen had deep connections to Flynn, Cohen-Watnick, Patel, Steve Bannon, and Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater USA, which had changed its name to Academi. He fashioned himself as an expert on information operations and was a neoconservative who had studied Italian far-right leader Be
nito Mussolini and the rise of fascism. Ledeen had long espoused that Iran was the epicenter of evil and needed to be destroyed. His wife, Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Senate staffer, served as a den mother of sorts for neocon planning sessions at Bannon’s home behind the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill, where Patel and Cohen-Watnick were frequent guests. The friend reminded Milley of Bannon’s mantra: Burn down the institutions. Milley was shaken. Was there actually a coup plan afoot? He reached out to McMaster for his read.
“What the fuck am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.
“You’re dealing with some of the weirdest shit ever,” McMaster said. He described the forces animating Trump’s political base as a convergence of trouble: extremists who wanted to overturn the U.S. government, followers of the QAnon conspiracy, evangelical Christians, tea party conservatives, and even white supremacists.
Milley felt he had to be on guard for what might come. If someone really wanted to take over the country, he reasoned, they would need the so-called power ministries—the Defense Department, the FBI, and the CIA. Now that some movement acolytes had a toehold in the Pentagon, he would have to watch them closely. But what if more were installed at the FBI and CIA? Milley confided this worry to his closest deputies, though he acknowledged that it sounded slightly crazy.
“They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” he told them. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
But the president’s refusal to concede combined with the installation of Trump loyalists at the top echelons of the Defense Department only made the Pentagon brass more worried about what bizarre order might come down next. They feared some of the president’s whisperers, inexperienced and emboldened, might convince him to take rash military action—such as launching a missile strike, withdrawing U.S. forces precipitously from Afghanistan, or even deploying troops in some way related to the election dispute. Strategists by training, Milley and the Joint Chiefs for the army, navy, air force, and Marines began informally planning how they could block a presidential order to use the military in a way they considered illegal, or dangerous and ill-advised.
By design, the U.S. military was run by civilians, but by law, all orders had to be communicated to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs before they were implemented. Milley knew he had a duty to give the president his military advice, and now he considered how to use that special role to block something impulsive and potentially disastrous.
For the Joint Chiefs, the biggest worry was the revival of one of Trump’s hobbyhorses: pulling troops out of Afghanistan, what he had called the “loser” war. A long line of advisers—Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, Mike Pompeo, and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson among them—had repeatedly discouraged this idea from the first time Trump brought it up in 2017. American intelligence units in the region needed military support to keep up their work. The United States had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and vehicles on the ground that would have to be methodically removed, or else they could be confiscated by the Taliban and make enemy forces that much better equipped to terrorize civilians and attack the Afghan government. Even if Trump decided to dramatically reduce forces in the region, his generals and top advisers warned him that pulling out of Afghanistan wasn’t as simple as putting a bunch of soldiers on a bus and heading out. Withdrawal had to be executed carefully and in stages, protecting each flank and helping the Afghan government remain stable.
Many of Trump’s advisers believed they had put this idea to rest. But near the end of Trump’s term, some in the White House were urging him to pull out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, to deliver on a campaign promise he made to end the “endless” wars before his term was up. Pentagon leaders worried about a Saigon situation, with a chaotic last-minute exit and desperate people rushing to a rooftop to catch the last helicopter out.
The Joint Chiefs began preparing for the possibility. If the president ordered a military action they considered a disaster in the making, Milley would insist on speaking to the president before passing on the order, so he could advise against it. Under this plan, if the president rejected Milley’s counsel, the chairman would resign to signal his objections. Then, with Milley out of the picture, the Joint Chiefs could demand in turn to give the president their military advice. This would buy time. In informal conversations, they discussed what would happen if they, too, got the brush-off from Trump. They considered falling on their swords, one by one, like a set of dominos. They concluded they might rather serially resign than execute the order. It was a kind of Saturday Night Massacre in reverse, an informal blockade they would keep in their back pockets if it ever came to that.
At the same time, McEntee sent word to political appointees in the White House and federal agencies that if he heard of anyone looking for another job he or she would be fired. Appointees knew the president had lost and they would be out of a job come January, but McEntee wanted them to act as if Trump would stay in office for a second term. If the press caught wind that Trump appointees were looking to jump ship, the jig would be up.
Some senior officials thought McEntee’s decree was delusional and damaging to staffers who relied on a steady paycheck to make rent or care for their families. Farah gathered her communications staff and told them not to be afraid to send around their résumés.
“I’m telling you we have so much to be proud of, but you guys need to be thinking about the future,” Farah told them. “I’m here to support you in every way. You need to think about having jobs lined up by January twentieth, and I’m here to help.”
* * *
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On November 9, Pfizer announced that its coronavirus vaccine developed in partnership with the German firm BioNTech was more than 90 percent effective in its clinical trials. The vaccine trial still would require a few more weeks of data analysis, peer review, and ultimately a decision about emergency use authorization by the FDA before the drug could be jabbed into people’s arms. But this was a landmark moment in the race to end the pandemic.
Trump celebrated the news with a tweet at 7:31 a.m.: “STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!”
But Trump interpreted the events through the prism of what they meant for him. This triumph of science was, in Trump’s mind, a plot to hurt him. The president called Stephen Hahn later that day to accuse the FDA commissioner of conspiring with Pfizer executives to delay the announcement until after the election to deprive him of a “win” before voters cast their ballots. Trump had long nursed this paranoia that the drug companies were going to try to screw him out of his rightful victory in delivering a vaccine to the American people. Hahn told Trump that was categorically false. There was no conspiracy. Hahn said that Pfizer’s chief executive had assured him that the company’s decision was determined entirely by the timing of the clinical trials.
“Mr. President, they made a scientific decision,” Hahn told Trump.
But at 7:43 p.m., Trump tweeted again about the Pfizer news: “The @US_FDA and the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election, so instead it came out five days later—As I’ve said all along!”
* * *
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As Trump continued to allege widespread election fraud, Bill Barr decided it was time to pay him a visit. On November 9, the attorney general had issued a directive instructing U.S. attorneys to review all credible allegations of substantive fraud. They weren’t supposed to worry about what Barr had called “onesies or twosies” that wouldn’t make any difference in a state’s overall vote count, but rather to zero in on allegations of more substantial fraud. Barr was committed to uncovering fraud if it existed but was increasingly concerned that the president’s attacks on the vote undermined America’s democracy.
Barr hadn’t spoken with Trump since mid-October, so as he arrived in the
Oval Office that next month to meet with the president, he tried a flattering icebreaker.
“Mr. President, the effort you put in in those last weeks was historic. What a great effort it was,” Barr said, according to the account he shared with confidants.
Trump accepted that he’d done a great job on the campaign trail but started in with the fraud. Meadows and Pat Cipollone were in the room, too.
“The election was stolen,” Trump told Barr. “I assume you’re out there looking at this stuff.”
Trump asked Barr about an episode he had been hearing about a lot. Trump had watched parts of a video showing vote counting in Milwaukee on election night, and he complained that it showed truckloads of votes appearing all at once at 3:00 a.m. The president said he had been winning Wisconsin until this flood of suspect votes. “Look at that, they all come in at this time,” Trump said. The fact is that voting districts in Wisconsin were required to report absentee ballots all at once. Milwaukee election officials finished counting the city’s absentee ballots around 3:00. The video the president cited as “evidence” came from Milwaukee officials livestreaming the recording of those ballots.
As Trump ticked through a list of other “evidence” of fraud, Barr told him, “We’re looking into that, Mr. President.” He said FBI agents and attorneys were reviewing allegations and he reminded Trump about his directive to investigate fraud. He said the Justice Department was looking at “any specific credible allegations that would have a substantial impact” on the results.
Trump looked skeptical.
“Well, I don’t know, there are people saying the Justice Department isn’t doing enough,” Trump said, his arms folded.
Cipollone tried to assure the president that wasn’t true.
“They’re doing their job, Mr. President,” the White House counsel said. “Let them do their job.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 40
