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

by Carol Leonnig

  “We’re friends. What are you doing?” an angry Giuliani asked Christie.

  “Rudy, this is ridiculous,” Christie replied. “You need to stop.”

  Giuliani admonished Christie and said he would be embarrassed once he saw all the evidence the Trump team had compiled that proved the election had been rigged.

  Christie thought Giuliani was bluffing. He said, “What are you waiting for, man? If there’s all this evidence, what are you waiting for? Christmas? Don’t wait. Time to put it out there.”

  This set off Giuliani, who lit into Christie and screamed nonsense into the phone.

  “Believe me,” Christie said. “I don’t like to call the legal team ‘a national embarrassment’ on television. But it is. You’re hanging out with Sidney Powell. Are you kidding me? She’s fucking nuts. What’s wrong with you? You were U.S. attorney. You were the mayor. You were one of the true national leadership heroes in the last half of the twentieth century. What are you doing?”

  “Fuck legacy,” Giuliani replied. “Legacy is what happens when you’re in the ground. I’m fighting for today.”

  “Well, if you want us to fight with you, arm us with facts,” Christie said. “Let me tell you something. When I was U.S. attorney and you were U.S. attorney, if an [assistant U.S. attorney] came to us with this crock of bullshit, we would have kicked them out of our offices. So act like you’re U.S. attorney again, not like you’re a lawyer for Donald Trump.”

  “Stop complaining and shooting off your mouth on TV,” Giuliani replied. “Join the legal team and make a difference.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Christie said. “No, thank you. I’ll pass.”

  The two men ended the call on bitter terms. The friendship between Christie and Giuliani apparently was a casualty of Trump’s quest to retain power. Giuliani, through a spokesman, disputed that this conversation ever happened.

  * * *

  —

  Typically, as soon as an apparent winner is projected in a presidential election, the mammoth undertaking of setting up a new government begins. The president-elect’s transition team is provided access to federal agencies, money to pay salaries, and government office space, computer systems, and email addresses. In addition, the labyrinthine process of security clearances and financial disclosures for appointees begins, and those who already have clearances can start receiving intelligence briefings. This taxpayer-funded operation ensures a peaceful transition of power—and, in the modern age of global terrorism, helps safeguard the country at the moment of handover when the government is especially vulnerable.

  This did not happen in 2020. After Biden was declared president-elect on November 7, his transition team was set to begin work on Monday, November 9. But the Trump administration refused to formally authorize the transition. This is normally a perfunctory acknowledgment made by the General Services Administration, but the GSA’s Trump-appointed administrator, Emily Murphy, would not sign a letter of ascertainment recognizing that Biden was the presumptive president-elect. Murphy’s defiance—in alignment with Trump’s refusal to concede to Biden and Meadows’s insistence that the election was still being contested—created the first transition delay in modern history, other than in 2000 due to George W. Bush and Al Gore’s genuine contest in the Florida recount.

  As the days ticked by in November, Murphy’s refusal to recognize Biden’s victory became a critical chokepoint for the incoming president and raised national security concerns. Analysts had concluded that the delay in Bush’s transition may have contributed to the government’s lack of preparedness for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

  Governors were worried that the incoming Democratic administration would have a late start getting a handle on the pandemic response and delay or botch the vaccine rollout in states. Larry Hogan, who chaired the National Governors Association, and several other governors complained privately that Trump was continuing to contest an election he clearly had lost. But more than Trump’s ego was at stake. American lives were on the line. The governors were angry. Hogan conveyed their collective worries to Pence.

  “I’m very concerned about the transition,” Hogan told the vice president. “Biden has to get up to speed on the coronavirus stuff.”

  “I know. I know,” Pence said. “Look, I can assure you we are going to work together with them. There is going to be a peaceful transition. We are going to make sure they’re up to speed and everybody is going to have a smooth handoff. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it,” Hogan said. “It sounds like the Biden people are telling us nobody is talking to them and it sounds like the president is still saying it’s nonsense.”

  Pence’s efforts to calm the waters did not work.

  On November 23, after withholding ascertainment for just over two weeks, Murphy finally buckled. Nothing had changed in the election results. Biden was no more certain the president-elect now than he had been on November 7. Murphy had lamented to close confidants, including Mick Mulvaney, that this was uncharted territory. She had argued privately that she needed for Republicans in Congress to give her some political cover to make this uncomfortable decision, yet many of them were parroting the president’s election fraud claims. But the public pressure on Murphy to allow the transition to proceed grew so intense that she relented and did her duty. She wrote a highly personal letter to Biden notifying him of the complications she faced in making her decision.

  “To be clear, I did not receive any direction to delay my determination,” Murphy wrote. “I did, however, receive threats online, by phone, and by mail directed at my safety, my family, my staff, and even my pets in an effort to coerce me into making this determination prematurely. Even in the face of thousands of threats, I always remained committed to upholding the law.”

  It was not clear—and Murphy didn’t say—which events helped the situation mature to the point that she could ascertain who was likely to be the future president. But the day she concluded Biden was the president-elect, more than one hundred national security officials in previous Republican administrations released a letter insisting that the delay in authorizing the transition was weakening the country in the event of a terror attack and putting lives at risk.

  Although Murphy had denied that Trump influenced her decision, he asserted that he was the one who gave Murphy the thumbs-up for the transition to begin. He tweeted that although he was still fighting the election results in court, “in the best interest of our country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”

  Trump was dealing that same week with a transition of his own inside the West Wing. Hope Hicks was receding from her perch as counselor to the president, and now Alyssa Farah had decided to call it quits. Around Thanksgiving, she told Meadows that she wanted to step down as communications director.

  “My heart’s not in it,” Farah told Meadows. “I don’t believe in this endeavor. I believe Biden won. We need to give a graceful exit and acknowledge that Biden won.”

  “I know, I know,” Meadows replied. “We’re going to get the president there.”

  Meadows asked Farah to stay on awhile longer, and she agreed to give it at least a few more days. But Meadows couldn’t get the president to acknowledge the reality that he had lost. There wasn’t any indication that he had even tried. On December 3, Farah submitted her resignation letter. The next day, she was gone.

  Nineteen

  Cries of Injustice

  As November wound to a close, Bill Barr prepared his team for the inevitable. President Trump was never going to concede, and nor was he, as Barr had hoped, going to tone down his claims of a stolen election. The attorney general warned his deputies to prepare for the president to come hard at the Justice Department. Barr and his top deputies would gather in his office at the end of their day to
talk over glasses of scotch or Irish whiskey. Barr spooled out his belief that the Democrats often governed as if the more than 74 million Americans who voted for Trump didn’t exist, ignoring their values and dismissing them as troglodytes, while Trump had frittered away his chance to win reelection by refusing to reach out beyond his base. The result was a country as divided as it had ever been in his lifetime. And now, as Barr saw it, Trump had brought the country to a dangerous juncture by undercutting confidence in the election rather than honorably accepting defeat.

  After Barr issued his November 9 memo instructing prosecutors to investigate credible allegations of voter fraud, every example had been either baseless or too small to be relevant to the outcome. Barr told his senior deputies that at some point someone was going to have to say that the emperor has no clothes. The question was when.

  Other leading Republicans harbored similar concerns. Mitch McConnell feared Trump’s false fraud claims were taking hold in some communities and destabilizing the country. The Senate majority leader also saw a short-term political danger: Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election system in Georgia could suppress Republican turnout in the Senate runoff elections scheduled for January 5. The balance of power in the Senate was on the line. If Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler prevailed, Republicans would retain their majority, and McConnell his power. If their Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock won, then the Senate’s partisan split would be fifty-fifty, and Democrats would have the majority because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris could break any ties in their favor.

  At the urging of their senior advisers, Barr and McConnell started talking in mid-November about Trump’s insistence on alleging a stolen election. They agreed the results weren’t going to be turned around and that Republicans had to accept having lost the White House. Both valued the same principle of democracy, as summed up by one senior Justice official: “You lose. You leave.” Barr and McConnell discussed who might get through to Trump and convince him to give up the ghost. One person familiar with their conversations described McConnell asking Barr something to the effect of, “Do you agree with this, Bill? And if not, what can you do about it?”

  They agreed it would be too dangerous for McConnell to try to confront Trump. That could backfire and end up harming the Georgia senators. On the other hand, Barr wasn’t running for anything; he had the freedom to speak his mind and possibly make a difference. On top of that, Barr had his own reasons to talk some sense into the president. He had thought Johnny McEntee’s prohibition on Trump staffers applying for other jobs was despicable, as it put them at risk of not having income for weeks or months after their current paychecks stopped. The attorney general felt a building pressure to put an end to this pretense about a second term.

  But while Barr was debating what to do about the president, Trump was rather rapidly souring on him for failing to reveal massive fraud in several states where the president’s allies claimed there had been malfeasance. Everything Trump raised fell flat with Barr. Trump had excitedly told him about a video about a water main break allegedly faked to drive witnesses out of an arena in Fulton County, Georgia, where votes were being counted. As the conspiracy theory went, Georgia election workers then pulled eighteen thousand ballots out of suitcases and stuffed ballot boxes with fake votes for Biden, with no election observers present. Barr told Trump he didn’t buy it. The “suitcases” were actually the standard boxes that Fulton County used to transport ballots to the central vote tallying center. A water main break had happened hours earlier, state officials said, and had nothing to do with the tallying process the county has followed for years.

  Trump also pointed to a Postal Service truck driver who had come forward to report that a supervisor in Erie, Pennsylvania, had instructed staff to improperly backdate ballots that arrived too late for the election. But Barr had reason to discount that as well. That driver had quickly recanted his story in an interview with investigators. Still, Trump continued to push this conspiracy as well as others.

  “Sometimes he would show mental awareness that some of this stuff must be bullshit,” recalled one senior presidential adviser. But then, like clockwork, Trump would retweet the claims to his followers.

  A top former law enforcement official, characterizing the string of allegations Trump and his allies promoted, said, “None of them required extreme investigation. Most of them could be easily disproved.”

  Although these and other anecdotes of alleged fraud were debunked, Trump complained to aides that Barr had gone soft. To Barr’s mind, the president had fallen prey to lightweight acolytes who wanted to prove their loyalty and build their own importance by feeding him fraud allegations. These claims circulated online, but with a few calls, prosecutors found they were easily proven false or impossible.

  On November 29, Trump registered his anger at Barr in a venting session with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

  “You would think if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at,” Trump said in the Fox interview. “Where are they? I’ve not seen anything.

  “This is total fraud,” Trump added. “And how the FBI and Department of Justice—I don’t know—maybe they’re involved, but how people are getting away with this stuff—it’s unbelievable.”

  Trump then aired the long litany of complaints he had privately raised with Barr, including about John Durham’s investigation going nowhere.

  “I ask, are they looking at it? Everyone says, ‘Yes, they’re looking at it,’ ” Trump told Bartiromo. “Look, where are they with Comey, McCabe, and all these other people?”

  Trump wanted to see James Comey and Andrew McCabe locked up.

  “Where are they with all of this stuff?” Trump asked. “And what happened to Durham? Where’s Durham?”

  There it is, Barr told his top advisers after watching Trump’s interview. Now he had his answer to the question of when he should try to put an end to this madness. Barr had always believed in taking opportunities when they presented themselves, and Trump had given him an opening by maligning the Justice Department. Barr found a way to weigh in publicly, even though he was aiming to influence the vaunted audience of one. On December 1, Barr met for a lunch interview with Michael Balsamo, the Associated Press reporter who covered the Justice Department. Barr talked with Balsamo about several things, but Balsamo had his scoop after Barr answered a few questions about election integrity. Barr told him that the Justice Department had run to ground each credible claim that had been raised so far and that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

  That was the money line. Their lunch soon ended, and Balsamo filed his story. This was not some small, off-the-cuff remark at a curbside when a reporter tossed out a question at an official. It was big. The attorney general had deliberately pulled the rug out from under the president.

  In an attempt to soothe the sting of this for the president, Barr’s office also alerted Balsamo to another scoop he could land first: that the attorney general would be notifying Congress that same day that he had named Durham a special counsel back in October. This was designed to solidify Durham’s appointment in the new administration so he could not be fired before finishing his investigation. To Barr and his team, announcing Durham’s appointment had a secondary value. They expected the mainstream media would focus on the lack of evidence of fraud but gave some red meat to more conservative news outlets, which they figured would focus on Durham’s ability to do his work without any fear.

  Barr headed to the White House that afternoon, where he had a previously scheduled 3:00 meeting with Mark Meadows, which Pat Cipollone joined. By then, the AP story, headlined disputing trump, barr says no widespread election fraud, rocketed onto news sites and the cable news shows that were playing on many White House television screens. Minutes into the meeting, Meadows learne
d of the Durham appointment and was supremely unhappy.

  Surprisingly to Barr, Meadows hated both news developments that day. Cipollone, who had known for a few weeks that Barr was weighing whether to say something publicly about the election results, expressed surprise that Barr had gone so far in definitively knocking down any evidence of game-changing fraud. Meadows warned Barr that the president was going to be livid. Meadows also complained the Durham appointment was just a polite way of signaling he had a special independence and that nothing would come out before the end of Trump’s term. Seeming to acknowledge the election outcome, Meadows said that “Biden will just fire him” when he got into office and the public would never learn about what he believed were the FBI’s attempts to kneecap Trump’s presidency. Then Meadows laid out a new plan: He would fire Durham, so the Trump White House could get whatever material he had gathered to date and release it. Barr bluffed.

  “You can’t do that,” Barr said. “Only I can do that.”

  At the end of the meeting with Meadows, Barr conferred with Cipollone upstairs in the White House counsel’s office. Word had spread that Barr was in the building and Cipollone got a call. “The president wants to see you,” Cipollone told Barr. Barr had a dinner scheduled with Mike Pompeo that evening, so had good reason to bow out, but Cipollone urged him to come see the president; it might be good to speak face-to-face, he said. Barr said he felt his message already had been delivered, so what was the point? Cipollone said it might be better to deal with this right away, and Barr ultimately agreed.

  Cipollone and Barr found Trump watching television in his private dining room with Meadows. Eric Herschmann joined them. Trump had the channel tuned to OANN, which had an even more pro-Trump slant than Fox and was airing a hearing about one of the election results the Trump campaign was still disputing. Trump had the remote control in his hand, and it wasn’t clear if the hearing was live or recorded. Everything about the president telegraphed that he was in a barely contained rage. His face was reddish, his mouth was pursed tight. He was far from his usual gregarious self. As the attorney general entered, the president seemed physically unable to look at him. Trump’s legs and fingers were twitching, drumming on the floor and the table erratically.