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

by Carol Leonnig

  Barr put his hands on the back of one of the chairs at the dining table.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” he said.

  “Bill, did you say this?” Trump said, his voice sharp and quick.

  “Yeah,” Barr said. “I said it.”

  “How could you say that?” Trump asked.

  Barr replied that his statement was true, and that he was merely answering the reporter’s question.

  “Why didn’t you just not answer the question?” Trump said.

  Then the president, his voice getting higher, switched oddly to speak of himself in the third person.

  “There’s no reason for you to have said this!” he said. “You must hate Trump!”

  OANN’s programming continued to blare. Trump’s voice got ever louder. He started yelling. He was so angry his words came out like spit.

  “Have you fucking seen this?” the president asked, jabbing his index finger in the direction of the screen.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Barr said.

  OANN was covering two of Trump’s favorite allegations: that illegal and late ballots were backdated in Pennsylvania so they could be counted, and that after-hours ballot stuffing had occurred in Georgia.

  “Have you been watching these hearings?” Trump demanded.

  Barr told him no.

  “How can you say that, then?” Trump said. In other words, how could Barr state there had been no widespread fraud if he hadn’t really investigated the claims OANN was reporting?

  “We’ve looked into these things and they’re nonsense,” Barr said.

  “I don’t understand why,” Trump said. “I’ve mentioned a few to you. I don’t get this at all!”

  Trump had papers in front of him purporting to document what he called “the steal.” But he was reacting far more to what he was hearing on the television.

  Barr told Trump they had looked into the truck driver’s claim. “It’s complete nonsense,” he said.

  The same was true with Georgia ballot stuffing. No evidence of that at all.

  Trump asked him about the video showing boxes of ballots coming into a central vote-tallying office in Wayne County, Michigan, after polls had closed.

  “Mr. President, Wayne County has five hundred precincts, and unlike all other counties, the votes are only counted in one place,” Barr said. “Usually they’re counted in the precincts, and in Wayne County the ballots are sent into one place for counting and they’re initially gone through and they’re put in separate piles: Biden, Trump. So you will sometimes see boxes of ballots that are all one candidate because they’re being separated in that way, but the fact that people saw boxes going in, it proves nothing, okay?”

  The president looked taken aback that Barr could explain such details from memory.

  “Those ballots always come in at that time,” Barr said of Wayne County’s historical practices. “Have any of these people who are telling you this is a problem, have they gone back and looked at the previous patterns?”

  Trump switched the topic to another fraud allegation in another state.

  “Mr. President, I’m not up here to say there was no fraud,” Barr said. “There may very well have been fraud. I suspect there was fraud, maybe more than usual. But there’s no evidence of substantial fraud that would change the election, and your problem is you have five weeks. The reason you’re sitting where you are today is because you had five weeks for your lawyers to mount a strategy . . . whereby you can turn around the election.”

  But, Barr said, his lawyers had no coherent strategy or evidence, and they often contradicted their claims from state to state.

  “It’s been a clown show,” he said.

  The president was quiet for a moment, then said, “Maybe.”

  Trump didn’t turn off the hearing on the television. It continued to give him something to look at rather than Barr. Trump shifted to his “greatest hits” of grievances with the attorney general. It was a long album. He berated Barr for not coming through for him with any results from Durham and complained that nothing would come out publicly before January 20. Trump believed, as Meadows did, that Barr’s decision to appoint Durham as a special counsel would only make him more independent and delay the big reveal he had hoped for. He stared blankly as Barr argued this appointment would ensure the Durham probe’s longevity and protect him and his team against being fired by the incoming administration. Trump also reiterated to Barr that the people who he thought had tried to torpedo his presidency should be in jail.

  “What the fuck?” Trump said about the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute senior Obama-era officials.

  Trump was relentless. He demanded to know what Barr had ever investigated and ever gotten to the bottom of.

  Those who worked with Barr described him as a man capable of displaying a wide range of emotions and demeanors in a workplace setting: fuming and dictatorial, calm to the point of appearing robotic, avuncular and generous, viciously funny. At this moment, he was uncharacteristically subdued and even set back on his heels by something he’d never experienced before: Trump directing his fury at him. Normally Barr would go toe-to-toe with Trump when they argued. Earlier that year, when the president brought up an investigation that the Justice Department couldn’t discuss, Barr had cut him off. “I’ve told you!” he had said more than once. “I’m not going to talk to you about that!”

  But that wasn’t Barr at this meeting. He tried to stay calm and deliberate. And Trump wasn’t his normal self either. The president was explosive and crazed. His limbs and torso moved jerkily, as if uncontrolled, and his eyes widened with anger at some of Barr’s responses.

  Meadows sat silently on the opposite side of the dining room, with his arms crossed, a posture that seemed to say, This is DOJ’s problem. Cipollone, who had encouraged Barr to attend this horrific meeting, sat quietly most of the time as well, though at one point interjected to tell the president that Barr’s department had been dutifully investigating the fraud claims. Herschmann stood for the whole meeting and said nothing. Barr eventually told Trump he was just trying to do his job. He said something to the effect that if the president wasn’t happy, he could certainly make a change.

  The attorney general left the White House, nearly three hours after he had entered it. Trump continued to stew, telling Meadows he had every reason to fire Barr, and indeed he should fire him. Barr himself had every reason to bail after this apocalyptic scene.

  Cipollone feared what would happen if either one of them took that step. Other Republicans who had demurred on the topic or failed to talk sense into the president admired Barr for standing up to him over election fraud conspiracies. Lindsey Graham, who had regular dinners with the attorney general, told friends that Barr was “a stud” for refusing to lend credibility to accusations that had no basis in fact.

  A day or two after the meeting with Trump, Cipollone asked Barr to commit to staying on. He hoped to talk down the president. Barr agreed he would stay if the president wanted him to.

  * * *

  —

  In the first week of December, Trump’s blizzard of legal challenges melted into slush. The president’s daily tally of losses was difficult to ignore. On December 3 alone, his campaign suffered three major defeats. The Wisconsin State Supreme Court, on which Republican judges made up the majority, refused to hear its challenge to Biden’s high vote count in heavily Democratic Dane and Milwaukee counties because the Trump campaign had skipped a required procedural step of filing its complaint at a lower court. The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order rejecting a Republican group’s plea to reconsider a lawsuit challenging universal voting by mail. And in Arizona, a Maricopa County judge dismissed the state Republican Party chairwoman’s claim that the state’s vote tally was inaccurate because during the verification process partisan election observers had to stand too far
away to make out the signatures on mail-in ballots.

  The next day, December 4, the Trump campaign was dealt five additional defeats in key states. More than fifty legal challenges brought by Trump’s campaign or his allies had failed or been tossed out of court.

  Team Trump could claim just one partial and ultimately pyrrhic victory. In that case, a Pennsylvania court agreed with the Trump campaign that Pennsylvania secretary of state Kathy Boockvar didn’t have authority to extend the deadline for people to “cure” their votes by providing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots. But the win impacted a small cluster of votes that had been segregated and not yet counted and would not change the outcome in a state Biden had won by tens of thousands of votes.

  Judge after judge across the country had turned Trump’s lawyers and allies down, saying they either had no evidence for their claims or no legal right to the sweeping remedy they sought. But the president believed the Supreme Court ultimately would help him right this wrong. Trump told several allies that he thought the three justices he had nominated—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—owed him for their prestigious lifetime positions, and that Kavanaugh should feel especially grateful. After Christine Blasey Ford alleged Kavanaugh had assaulted her, which he denied, some top Republicans urged the president to withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination. “I was told by many Republican senators, ‘Cut him loose, sir, cut him loose. He’s killing us,’ ” Trump later told us in an interview. But the president stood by Kavanaugh, and that counted for something in Trump’s book.

  On December 8, the Supreme Court gave its first view of the 2020 election disputes. Trump’s allies had made a last-minute and legally flimsy bid to overturn the Pennsylvania results by asking the federal court to wade into a matter the state’s highest court had already decided. The challengers, a group of Republicans led by Congressman Mike Kelly, said the vote count was illegitimate because it was conducted under a 2019 state law that established universal mail voting. Republicans had controlled the legislature when the change was enacted, but the claimants argued the GOP had overstepped its authority. Another irony: Some of the lawmakers challenging the 2019 law to help Trump had publicly urged their own supporters to cast their ballots using the new mail-in procedure. Earlier that day, before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump sought to pressure the justices to help overturn the election results by appealing to their sense of “courage.”

  “Now, let’s see whether or not somebody has the courage, whether it’s a legislator or legislatures, or whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court, or a number of justices of the Supreme Court—let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right,” Trump said at a news conference.

  Mitt Romney could not believe Trump had taken it this far. “Normally in our system you can accuse another party of doing something bad if you begin by finding some evidence that they’ve done something bad,” he said later in an interview. “But his intelligence services were saying the election was not rigged. The FBI was saying it was not rigged. I presume Bill Barr was saying it was not rigged. The secretaries of state of the various states were acknowledging that it was a free and fair election. So on what basis did he have any reason to suggest it was rigged other than wanting the outcome that he wanted?”

  The U.S. Supreme Court said Team Trump didn’t have a case. The justices’ decision was so short it could have been put on a block stamp. “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the order read.

  This did not bode well for subsequent challenges. Also, on December 8, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican, filed a broad and some argued fatally flawed complaint with the Supreme Court. He asked the justices to perform some legal jujitsu: grant one state the legal standing to intervene in the elections of other states. He asked the court to overturn Biden’s vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on the grounds their allegedly flawed elections had violated the rights of Texans.

  Trump called the Paxton case “the Big One.” He and his allies watched closely for news, and it came in short order. On December 11, the court issued an unsigned order that read in part: “The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.” Case dismissed.

  That night, Trump and his aides scurried to decode what the decision meant, and then to explain the loss to the president’s base. Kayleigh McEnany went on Fox to assail what she characterized as the cowardice of the court. Though she had received a law degree from Harvard and should have known better, the White House press secretary falsely alleged that allowing one state to intervene in the elections of another would be a step to “enforce the Constitution.”

  “There’s no way to say it other than they dodged,” McEnany said. “They dodged. They hid behind procedure and they refused to use their authority to enforce the Constitution. . . . This was on standing, dismissed on standing. None of the justices gave a view on the facts of the case.”

  Trump tweeted, “It is a legal disgrace, an embarrassment to the USA!!!” He repeated a false claim by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick that no court has yet judged any of Trump’s legal challenges “on its merit.” The problem was the courts decided most of the cases had no merit and no evidence to consider.

  Early the next morning, Trump added to the confusion by retweeting praise of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and shared part of Sean Hannity’s summary of the ruling: “Justices Alito and Thomas say they would have allowed Texas to proceed with its election lawsuit.”

  Either Trump was intending to obscure how the two conservative justices had ruled or his lawyers had not explained to him the meaning of the Supreme Court’s order. Alito and Thomas made a separate statement in which they did not dissent from their fellow justices. Instead, they simply registered their concern that the court should not automatically block cases like the one Texas brought. But they agreed Trump’s particular case would not have been granted remedy.

  * * *

  —

  On December 8, Mark Milley felt his internal alarm bells going off. He was in his office in the Pentagon and got a report that Kash Patel had been unexpectedly recalled from his trip to Asia with Chris Miller. He heard the military had considered dispatching a gray tail—a military plane—to bring Patel home. That suggested a heck of a lot of urgency. As Milley recounted the moment to aides, he made some calls and learned that Patel had been summoned back to Washington by the White House, but his contacts didn’t know why.

  Milley had never trusted Patel, and had ample reason since the October rescue snafu. But Patel obviously made others uncomfortable, too. Sometimes in meetings with Miller, when Patel left the room, the acting defense secretary would visibly let his shoulders down, as if he could finally speak freely.

  Because the recall involved Patel, and because of the circumstances of that late-night call after the election, Milley was highly suspicious. This came at a moment when there were rampant rumors and media reports with aides speculating that Trump was going to fire Chris Wray or Gina Haspel or both. Milley was close to Haspel so he called her.

  “Gina, what are you hearing?” Milley asked, meaning about Trump firing her.

  Haspel, by dint of decades of intelligence work, rarely showed much emotion.

  “I’m always on the ropes,” she deadpanned, noting that she was constantly at odds with the cabal of people around Trump and this time was no different.

  On December 11, with the rumors circulating, Haspel decided to take the temperature at the White House. That day, after several weeks away, she appeared for the president’s routine briefing. While helping provide some context for the intelligence he was receiving, she took her opportunities to remind Trump of how effective the CIA had been on her watch. What Haspel didn’t kno
w is that Trump was fully ready to install Patel as deputy director at the CIA, replacing Vaughn Bishop temporarily. Then, once Patel was aboard, Trump could fire Haspel, allowing Patel to ascend to acting director of the agency.

  Other administration officials said Meadows had a burr under his saddle about Haspel. The two were not personally close and Meadows would complain to them that Haspel kept him out of the loop on some intelligence matters. He also questioned her loyalty to Trump and indicated he wanted a more politically supportive leader at the CIA who might, for instance, help uncover what he and Trump suspected were political efforts on the part of intelligence officials to harm his campaign in 2016. Enter Patel, whose ace in the hole was his loyalty to Trump, not his résumé. He had worked as a national security prosecutor but had no substantive intelligence background other than serving as a staffer to then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, which is how he had gotten to know Meadows.

  After Trump’s intelligence briefing finished and Haspel left the Oval, the president asked Vice President Pence and Cipollone whether he should remove the CIA director. Pence was usually deferential to Trump on sensitive topics such as personnel and mostly offered his advice in private. “Give us the room,” the vice president would say when he wanted to talk with the president without aides hearing him and risking that details of the conversation might leak to the press. But this time, Pence spoke up strongly in Haspel’s defense, with Cipollone and Keith Kellogg still in the room.