“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost

by Michael C. Bender

  Seated in Schwartz’s house with half-finished glasses of red wine in front of them, Herschmann—who had taken on the Hunter portfolio during impeachment—and Passantino spent the next several hours telling a hair-raising tale of high-stakes international deal-making and influence-peddling in places like Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, and Oman. Toward the end, Bobulinski called in to the meeting, and we talked on speakerphone.

  The scenes they described were something out of an international thriller.

  There was Hunter, texting from a Ukrainian oligarch’s yacht that had been anchored along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea during the Monaco Grand Prix. Emails outlined how the unlikely quintet of business partners—including two Bidens, a former Clinton administration official, the retired Oman station chief for British intelligence, and, of course, Bobulinski—consecrated their partnership with a round of handshakes in Bucharest, Romania. A Chinese billionaire named Ye Jianming, who, like the younger Biden, was a Gen-Xer with family connections and an appetite for risk, went missing in Beijing just as he was supposed to provide the new company its initial $5 million investment.

  To an extraordinary new degree, the documents detailed Hunter’s involvement at a stratospheric level of Chinese politics and business. He shopped for apartments in New York with Zang Jian Jun, the former executive director of CEFC China, one of the world’s largest energy companies. Emails and texts referred to Hunter’s previously unreported deals with Chinese investors in Kazakhstan and Oman. He and his uncle pulled strings to enroll Ye’s daughter at The Spence School, a private, all-girls K–12 school in New York with a famously long wait list of applicants.

  Those details, along with drafts of corporate documents, offered rare visibility into the creation of a closely held, multinational investment venture driven by a pair of ambitious risk-takers. One was the grandson of a former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officer and long rumored to be a princeling of the People’s Liberation Army. The other, an American who had spent much of his adult life drafting behind the last name of his famous father and wrestling with the demons from the middle name he went by, the one he shared with his mother. Neilia Hunter Biden and his baby sister were killed in a 1972 car accident that the two-year-old Hunter survived. The tale of Hunter’s pursuits in China was intriguing and offered a glimpse into the embryonic stages of high-stakes deal-making between business executives from the world’s two largest economic powers. But that wasn’t the story they were pitching. These conservative operatives wanted a tale showing that Joe Biden himself knew more about his son’s dealings than he let on and was taking a cut of the action.

  Their best evidence was a document drafted by James Gilliar, a former MI6 officer, that suggested a 10 percent cut of the business should be held by Hunter for “the big guy.” It was clear after reading all the messages that Gilliar was referring to Joe Biden, who had long denied any knowledge of Hunter’s international deals. It was intriguing. But it wasn’t proof that Biden was lying. The document hadn’t come from either Hunter or his uncle, nor was there any mention of “the big guy” in the final agreement. That document was worth a question to the Biden campaign, but their denial was easy to predict.

  Hunter’s messages to the investment group showed how he repeatedly asserted his importance to the group and referred to the family legacy he was putting on the line. But that reflected more on him, not his father. Hunter argued with his business partners for terms that would allow him to withdraw cash from the new company in one text exchange.

  “My chairman gave an emphatic no,” Hunter wrote.

  Another partner, Rob Walker, then texted Bobulinski to explain that Hunter often referred to Joe Biden as his “chairman.” Interesting, yes. But far from a smoking gun.

  Bobulinski then recalled a dinner with Joe Biden at the Beverly Hilton that left him with the clear impression the former vice president was aware of the deal. But Bobulinski couldn’t recall anything specific, other than Joe Biden asking about his family and thanking him for his military service. Bobulinski had been told by the other family member involved in the deal—Joe’s brother, James Biden—not to talk business during dinner. Bobulinski believed that was proof—but of what, it was never clear.

  After hearing all of this, my first instinct was that Bobulinski was probably a legitimate businessman who wasn’t lying. And if he and his records checked out, then I could pitch a Hunter-in-China story. I told my hosts that it could take weeks to vet the documents, report the story, and then put it through the Journal’s rigorous editing process. I warned them that if it was a hit on Joe Biden they were looking for, these documents didn’t show that. If they disagreed, they should pitch it to another news outlet.

  To my surprise, they agreed. My newspaper’s rigorous editing process was exactly what they wanted.

  My sources wanted the imprimatur of the Journal on any story about Hunter Biden’s dealings. For the past two years, mainstream media outlets, including the Journal, had found little more than innuendo when it came to Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s pursuits. My informants feared that providing these documents to a friendly publication like Breitbart News or the New York Post would only create the same doubts about the story’s legitimacy.

  We finished the meeting with a passionate discussion that the documents and conversations would remain off the record unless the Journal decided to pursue and publish a story. I was wary of the deal, fearful they would publicly blame me if we agreed to pursue a story and then, for any number of legitimate reasons, instead decided not to proceed. My one stipulation was that these men also had to agree to the same off-the-record deal—and that it would be null and void if anyone in the room talked about our meeting or the fact that the Journal was looking into this story. I knew the Journal would want to do its own reporting and fact-checking before deciding what sort of story, if any, it had. And I didn’t want to be constrained by an off-the-record agreement if anyone in Trump World found out about the meeting and tried to use it against me.

  Everyone unequivocally agreed.

  But those professional niceties would all blow up in a matter of days.

  I brought the tip back to the paper’s editors and made them the same pitch I had promised Bobulinski’s crew. I advised that the reporting was unlikely to result in a quick, direct hit on Joe Biden. And if we were interested in a story on Hunter’s dealings in China, that tale might be better suited for our reporters who had already been focused on that issue. By Monday, the editors had tapped James Areddy, who had written extensively on U.S.-China business, including Hunter’s previous pursuits; and Andy Duehren, who had reported on the recent Senate Homeland Security Committee report and was pursuing some loose ends in that investigation.

  But two days later, well after 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday, my cell phone buzzed with a call from Steve Bannon. Darth Bannon. The nation’s arsonist in chief. The Great Manipulator, according to an iconic Time magazine cover early in the administration.

  Of course I answered.

  “Steve!”

  “What the fuck are you up to?” he responded, dispensing with any salutations or small talk. His voice was aggressive but also a little shaky. He was clearly under pressure.

  “Your name is being bandied about by some crazy guy at the White House who says you’re leading a thirty-man team at the Wall Street Journal, and you have some massive article about Hunter that’s going to be on the front page on Monday,” Bannon continued.

  “Goddamn it,” I responded.

  While I had been receiving Biden family business records from one of Trump’s White House attorneys and another lawyer working with Trump’s campaign, there was an almost identical operation underway from the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Bannon. Giuliani and Bannon were pushing many of the same documents—and as it turned out, all the records on Hunter’s entire laptop—to the New York Post, which, like the Journal, happened to be another newspaper asset of News Corp.

  When the Post publi
shed its story on October 14, both sides were stunned to find out about the other.

  “That was a bit of a surprise, even though Rudy had been working on it for a month,” one senior campaign official said.

  Two parallel, covert operations within the same campaign revealed in tragic detail how little coordination existed within Trump World. Top White House aides were barely talking to the campaign. Campaign officials ignored the Republican National Committee. The president seemed to be talking to everyone and agreeing with each side along the way. It was chaos as an operating principle. Trump encouraged rivalries all around him, and this was the result. Bannon had so many enemies in the White House, there was no way he was making sure they were aware of what he was up to. Rudy thought the campaign’s attorneys were fools. Stepien, who had told friends that running the campaign was like trying to land a plane without wings, now described it as an aircraft with its engines on fire.

  The competing Hunter psyops teams also reflected a broader rift in the conservative world about weaponizing the media to win elections. It was an argument happening inside Trump World, inside the conservative wing of the House Republicans, and in other corners of conservatism across the country: how much to talk to just their own voters versus how much to try to win over a more even-minded middle.

  For Schwartz and Passantino, another headline about Hunter in the conservative press was another drop in the bucket at a time when Trump needed a game-changer. They didn’t care if the Journal wrote the exact story they wanted—and to be clear, sources never dictate the stories we write. They wanted the Journal’s trustworthy brand to signal there was something here worth reading and hoped it would force the rest of the media ecosphere to pay attention.

  Bannon, meanwhile, believed in pumping as much electricity as possible into the conservative base to activate an army of talk-radio-listening zealots who would walk through a brick wall on Election Day to vote for the president. The former chairman of Breitbart News, Bannon had never considered pitching the Hunter story to the Journal; he knew he could never get the story he wanted there.

  He almost couldn’t convince the Post.

  The first whispers of Hunter’s laptop came in late 2019, during the impeachment hearing in the House. In the hearing’s anteroom, Republican lawmakers and their aides passed around an email written in a bizarre font from someone claiming that Hunter’s laptop had been left at a repair shop in Delaware. The FBI confiscated the computer, but the shop owner had copied the hard drive, according to the email. The most visible pro-Trump Republicans during impeachment—John Ratcliffe, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, and others breathlessly defending Trump on Fox News and the conservative One America News Network—were already receiving hundreds of wild-eyed emails from viewers every day who were seeing secret messages in their Cheerios. The Hunter laptop email raised eyebrows, but that was it. It was dismissed as an outlandish idea and given little thought.

  “No one was excited about it,” said one aide who was part of those discussions.

  The story went like this: In April 2019, a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden walked into a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware—the Biden family hometown—with three laptops, all with various degrees of liquid damage. The store owner, J. P. Mac Isaac, was never sure it was, in fact, Hunter Biden: Mac Isaac was legally blind. But the person who identified himself as Hunter told Mac Isaac which was the most critical laptop out of the set. And after assessing all three machines, Mac Isaac determined that the most important MacBook was the one that required the most attention. The person filled out a work order, left, and never returned to pick up the machine.

  When Hunter Biden’s name emerged a few months later as part of Trump’s impeachment inquiry, Mac Isaac turned to his father, Steve Mac Isaac, a former Air Force colonel who was living in retirement in New Mexico. Mac Isaac consulted with his friends from the Air Force and eventually notified the FBI about the laptop. According to the Mac Isaac timeline, the FBI showed up at the computer store in December 2019 and confiscated the computer. But J. P. Mac Isaac had made a backup copy just in case he needed it. And when the laptop never surfaced during the impeachment proceedings, the Mac Isaac bunch grew concerned that perhaps the FBI had kept it from the president.

  “J.P. fears for his life,” Dennis Haugh, a 1973 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, told congressional staffers in June.

  They emailed Republicans again in the summer of 2020, and again the email was flagged by Republican aides, but lawmakers only shook their heads.

  But this time they also emailed Giuliani, who had sharpened the president’s focus on Hunter’s foreign dealings in the first place.

  Giuliani, whom Trump once referred to as “probably the greatest crime fighter over the last fifty years,” only happened upon the laptop by chance, according to Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello. A longtime friend of Giuliani’s, Costello was hired in November 2019 to represent Giuliani amid congressional investigations into his friend’s business dealings and interactions in Ukraine, which led to Trump’s impeachment. In August 2020—on a whim, as Costello described it to me—he asked Giuliani’s assistant to keep an eye out for any strange political tips coming into the email boxes for Giuliani’s various companies. Costello had a couple of dozen emails within a few days, including one from J. P. Mac Isaac.

  Costello said he received a copy of the files and contacted Fox News, which declined the story. Giuliani then brought in Bannon, who took it to the Daily Mail. They passed, too, but promised to be the first to match whatever outlet broke the news. The New York Post showed some interest, but it took two weeks to convince them, infuriating Costello in the process.

  “We went to a lot of places,” Costello told me. “Everybody was afraid to touch it.”

  A Post reporter visited Costello’s home on October 4, spending the day going through all the documents. When the newspaper agreed to write a story, Giuliani handed over a copy of the drive on October 11, two days after I had met with Passantino and Schwartz and spoke on the phone with Bobulinski.

  On October 14, the New York Post splashed a screaming headline across the front page: BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS.

  Giuliani and Bannon thought they’d scored.

  But the story about Hunter’s water-damaged MacBook not only failed to catch on with the mainstream press, the world’s biggest social media companies actively warned readers that the details hadn’t been verified and limited the article’s distribution on their platforms. The New York Post’s mishandling of the story—the reporters hadn’t reached out to the Biden campaign for comment on some of the most salacious aspects—allowed Democrats to play the victim card, including Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who said it was all part of a years-long disinformation campaign from the Kremlin.

  On Monday, October 12, a post-Covid Trump returned to the trail. He would hold at least one of his signature political rallies on twenty-one of the final twenty-two days of the campaign.

  From the stage, Trump immediately developed a new bit. He portrayed himself as possessed with a sort of pandemic superpower: He’d battled the disease and beat back coronavirus—and now he was immune!

  “I feel so powerful,” Trump told thousands of people at Orlando Sanford International Airport.

  Trump had his health, yes. But the campaign was falling apart as the president continued to make the race about himself instead of Biden. At each rally, he’d air out all the problems plaguing his campaign, drawing attention to the white suburban women fleeing his side and the scores of seniors scared off by his refusal to take the pandemic seriously. Instead of working to win these voters back, Trump played the role of political prognosticator, verbalizing his worst nightmare about the abject embarrassment that would overwhelm him if he lost to Biden.

  Trump would never let on how sick he’d become from coronavirus.

  “I didn’t love it,” was as much as he’d concede.

  Instead, he continued
to minimize the pandemic from the rally stage.

  “It’s going to peter out,” he said at a North Carolina campaign rally on October 15, just a day before the number of Covid cases in the United States topped 8 million.

  He was infuriated to find out that the nation’s most prominent newspapers had refused to travel with him on Air Force One for most of that first week because the president, and his staff, continued flagrantly flouting safety protocols and shunned face masks, even amid the ongoing outbreak inside the White House.

  Trump was so frustrated by his team’s handling of his coronavirus diagnosis that he started pestering advisers and donors about what they thought about Stepien and Jason Miller. Top Republicans were petrified that Trump was considering firing his campaign manager and communications strategist in the race’s final days.

  With that mindset, Trump awoke in his Las Vegas hotel on Monday, October 19—just fifteen days before the election—and decided to deliver an impromptu pep talk to his team. But the actual intent was to push his message into the media. He told Stepien to make sure the call-in number was leaked to the press.