by Luke Harding
Additionally, Kissinger was a foreign policy realist. He believed—as did Putin and, seemingly, Trump as well—that deal-making rather than values should shape international relations. As the Russian opposition leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov put it to me, Kissinger would like nothing better than to come out of retirement and broker a historic U.S.-Russian concord. It would be his last service to diplomacy. The two states (together with, presumably, China) could divide the world between them into sovereign spheres. There could be a new Grand Bargain.
The “Russia thing,” however, meant that rapprochement with Moscow was politically impossible. At least for now. Meanwhile, for a president keen to dispel rumors of collaboration, the meeting was deeply unfortunate.
The Times put the photo of Trump and Lavrov on its front page. At the bottom of the photo taken inside the White House was a credit. It said: “Russian Foreign Ministry.”
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The day after his firing James Comey was at his home in Virginia. Photographers caught a glimpse of him in his driveway, wearing a white cap. It had been a bruising twenty-four hours. Comey’s feelings at the time can only be guessed at—shock, righteous anger, a feeling that his collision with Trump was surely inevitable?
The situation, though, wasn’t as grim as it seemed. The former FBI director had two things in his favor. One was his religious faith. The other was more tangible: a series of memos Comey had written setting down all his dealings with the president.
Certainly, his Christian belief was significant. In a profile, The Guardian’s Julian Borger described Comey as “a rare species in American politics, a public intellectual with a complicated personal history.” Comey had been born in Yonkers, New York, to an Irish Catholic, Democratic family. He had studied at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
There, Comey had turned away from his upbringing and embraced various kinds of evangelism. He wrote his thesis on how the evangelist teacher Jerry Falwell somehow embodied the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was America’s greatest mid-twentieth-century theologian. His work Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, published in 1932, is a classic of Christian thinking.
Niebuhr’s view of the world was pessimistic. He described himself as a member of a “disillusioned generation” and wrote from an age of war, totalitarianism, racial injustice, and economic depression. Individuals were capable of virtuous acts, he thought, but groups and nations struggled to transcend their collective egoism. This makes social conflict inevitable.
Niebuhr was brutally honest about human failings. American contemporary culture was “still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason,” he wrote. He didn’t see much room for goodness in politics. Instead he identified “greed, the will-to-power and other forms of self-assertion” at the level of group politics.
Comey’s interest in Niebuhr remained constant, even as his church affiliation drifted from evangelicalism to Methodism. According to the magazine Gizmodo, Comey set up a personal Twitter account in Niebuhr’s name. In party terms, Comey was of the political right and a movement Republican. Until Trump came along, this socially conservative faction dominated the Republican Party.
One imagines that Niebuhr wouldn’t have been surprised by Trump or his unscrupulous brand of personal politics. (Instead, you can envisage the great religious intellectual saying: “I told you so.”) The spectacle about to grip Washington in summer 2017 was certainly Niebuhrian. Here, after all, was an upright individual—a moral man—speaking truth to selfish power. Or in this case to a dishonest presidency.
Comey wasn’t merely relying on providence or divine destiny to get him through his battle with the White House. He was relying on notes. These were his records typed up in the immediate aftermath of his interactions with Trump. There were nine of them—three face-to-face meetings and six telephone calls. They took place between January, when Trump was not yet president, and April. All these encounters were fraught, it would emerge.
Trump had underestimated Comey—by how much would soon become clear. The fired FBI chief perfectly understood how Washington politics and bureaucracy interacted. The president didn’t. Comey knew that D.C. was, as The New Yorker put it, a lawyer’s town built on protocols and rules. His memos were an attempt to protect his own reputation and that of the FBI from subsequent smears. The goal was to proof his version of events from Trump’s untruths.
“He [Comey] understands the system. He’s played his cards perfectly at every turn,” one seasoned Washington insider told me. The person added: “Trump has not got a clue. He has immense power as president. But he doesn’t understand the operational issues and makes mistake after mistake after mistake.”
Two days after Comey’s firing, The New York Times published an account of a dinner Comey had with Trump on January 27. The venue was the White House. There were no other guests. According to the paper, the conversation began politely, with talk of the election and inauguration crowds. Then Trump turned to Comey and asked him, in effect, to pledge his loyalty. Comey declined, the report said.
The White House dismissed the story, with Trump telling NBC News the question of loyalty had never come up. The president’s strategy must have confirmed what Comey had suspected: that Trump would simply lie about their conversations.
Trump followed this up with a threat and tweeted:
James Comey better hope there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
The tweet had the opposite effect to what Trump might have wished. As Comey would explain, a couple of days later he woke up in the middle of the night. There was now a distinct possibility that the White House had secretly bugged his conversation with the president. This was good rather than bad: any tape would confirm his version. In the meantime, Comey needed to get out what had actually been said to the “public square,” as he put it.
Comey turned to an old friend, Daniel Richman. Richman was a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Columbia University’s law school. Richman had defended Comey when he’d come under fire in previous months—calling Comey’s role at the FBI “apolitical and independent.”
Comey instructed Richman: “Make sure this gets out.” The professor contacted a reporter at the Times, Michael Schmidt. Richman offered details from another explosive Comey memo. It chronicled a meeting at the Oval Office on February 14, 2017. That was a day after Flynn had resigned for lying to Vice President Pence.
According to the memo, Trump had singled out Comey after the meeting. Trump then told him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
Trump added: “He [Flynn] is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
There would be much future discussion of hope. Was this, as some Republican leaders suggested, an aspiration? Or was it a direct order from the commander in chief? Comey’s reported reply to Trump was noncommittal. Comey said: “I agree he [Flynn] is a good guy.”
The FBI was investigating Flynn for various misdemeanors. None of them were trivial. They included alleged perjury committed by Flynn during his FBI interview. Comey was deeply concerned by Trump’s comments. As Comey saw it, the president was asking him to shut down a criminal investigation. That amounted to obstruction of justice. It undermined the FBI’s role as an independent investigative body.
What happened next was up to the Justice Department. With Sessions recused, it fell to the number two, Rosenstein, to respond to the Times revelations. Democrats had been demanding that Rosenstein appoint a special counsel to oversee the Trump-Russia investigation. They argued that he—or she—would be independent of the White House and the Justice Department.
The answer from Republicans had been: there’s no need. Now there was a shift, with some expressing misgivings at Comey’s firing. Rosenstein’s dilemma was clear. If he agreed to a special counsel, this might redeem his reputation. But it would also attract the president’s ir
e—and perhaps ultimately lead to Rosenstein’s firing, too.
In an open letter to Rosenstein, the Times said that the deputy attorney general could safeguard democracy. He was uniquely placed to restore “Americans’ confidence in their government.” “We sympathize; that’s a lot of pressure,” the editorial board said. It said that Trump had “exploited the integrity” Rosenstein had earned during three decades of public service in the same careless way Trump liked to spend other people’s money.
Rosenstein went for the “noble” and “heroic” Times option. He announced that it was “in the public interest” to appoint a special prosecutor. That didn’t mean, he said, that he had determined a crime had taken place. Rosenstein signed his order without consulting Trump; it was left to White House counsel Don McGahn to carry the bad news to the Oval Office.
The president said he was innocent. According to several accounts, Trump was unusually noncombative. In a statement he again insisted there’d been no collusion between his campaign and “any foreign entity.”
The episode illustrated Trump’s capacity for self-sabotage. By firing Comey to “take the pressure off,” he had made the crisis worse and hastened the appointment of a determined outside investigator. The special counsel was Robert Mueller. Mueller had spent twelve years as FBI director under the Bush and Obama administrations, 2001 to 2013—the longest tenure of anyone in the job since J. Edgar Hoover. Comey had succeeded him. The two were allies.
Mueller had a reputation for tenacity. Hayden—Mueller’s former opposite at the NSA and CIA—described him to me as “a straight arrow.” “I’m trying to think of a good word for Bob. Formal, straitlaced, friendly, but governed by principle,” Hayden said. Democrats and Republicans agreed. As did Comey, who would hail Mueller as “one of this country’s great great pros” and a “dogged, tough person.”
Hayden predicted that Mueller would be scrupulously fair in performing his duties. He was skeptical that Mueller would find Trump guilty of obstruction, the first article of impeachment drawn up against Nixon. “Which doesn’t mean we don’t have a really serious problem. I actually think the congressional investigations might be more important,” Hayden suggested.
Thus far, Comey had got the better of Trump. He had out-intrigued and out-leaked the president, skillfully releasing information into the public domain that triggered Mueller’s appointment. Comey had not yet given a complete version of events. That was coming: the Senate Intelligence Committee invited Comey to testify, this time in his capacity as a private citizen.
Would this actually happen? There was speculation that Trump might argue executive privilege, saying his conversations with Comey were classified. In theory, Justice might seek an injunction. But the White House had a problem here. During Watergate the courts established that privilege couldn’t be used to cover up unlawful conduct by the executive branch.
Additionally, Trump’s nonstop tweets about Comey meant that executive privilege on the grounds of confidentiality was pretty meaningless. Or as one Washington lawyer put it to me: “He [Trump] does these things that are unbelievably fucking stupid all the time.”
By June, Washington was in a frenzy. There was a low but distinct rumble in the air: the sound of impeachment. This din was growing louder. There was discussion—in bars, cafés, and public squares—of whether Trump would complete his first term. And talk of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. This statute allows for the removal of a president on the grounds of incapacity. Impeachment is slow and uncertain; might the vague Twenty-fifth Amendment be swifter?
Comey’s upcoming testimony would be key. If his account of the Flynn conversation held up, then Trump was—or could be—in the frame for obstruction of justice. Republicans on the Hill were in no mood to dethrone their president: he was, after all, still the best hope of getting their tax-cutting legislative agenda through. But as Senator McCain observed, the situation was beginning to look like Watergate “in size and scale.”
Comey had prepared well. On the eve of his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he released a statement, on the record, and drawn up for a nonclassified hearing. It set out in calm tones his four-month-long interactions “with President-Elect and President Trump.”
The document was a masterpiece of storytelling. It was lucid and spare. There were flashes of reportorial color. Best of all, it was authentic—a real-time account of what had transpired behind closed doors. Overall, one gets the impression of a master bureaucrat attempting to do the right thing—and of a wayward individual who happens to be president of the United States.
Comey’s encounters with Trump, we learned, had been awkward from the start. The first was on January 6, 2017. The venue was a conference room in Trump Tower. U.S. intelligence chiefs, including Comey, gave a briefing to the president-elect and his national security team on Russian interference.
The other agency chiefs exited and Comey stayed behind. He briefed the new president “on some personally sensitive aspects” of the information assembled during the assessment. That was the Steele dossier. The U.S. intelligence community had decided to inform Trump for two reasons, Comey wrote, even though the Steele material was thus far “salacious and unverified.”
One, it believed the media were about to leak the dossier, and publication was imminent. Two, it felt that by forewarning Trump it could “blunt” any effort to compromise him. The task fell to Comey by pre-agreement: Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, asked him to do the briefing alone because “the material implicated the FBI’s counterintelligence responsibilities.” And to “minimize” any embarrassment to Trump.
Trump, it seems, didn’t take the news well. His “reaction” isn’t recorded. But it was such that Comey felt he had to assure Trump that he wasn’t under suspicion.
Comey writes:
I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-to-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward.
Comey didn’t “memorialize” his earlier discussions with President Obama. But this was a very different kind of president. That much became obvious during their second encounter on January 27, a week after Trump’s inauguration. Comey said Trump called him at lunchtime and invited him to dinner at 6:30 p.m. that evening. As Comey later explained, he had to cancel a date with his wife.
Comey assumed that there would be other guests. But, he wrote, when he arrived at the White House “it turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room.” Two navy stewards waited on Comey and Trump, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.
Trump began by asking Comey if he wanted to stay on as FBI director. Comey wrote that he found the question “strange” since Trump had twice previously told him that he hoped Comey would remain in the post. Comey said he’d already told Trump he intended to serve out his ten-year term. The president then said that “lots of people” wanted his job and he would understand if Comey decided to “walk away.”
Comey’s language here is neutral. But it’s clear that the FBI director was horrified and appalled by Trump’s blatant methods. Comey writes:
My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant that the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.
Comey’s forebodings turned out to be correct. He told the president that he wasn’t “reliable” in the political sense but could always be counted on to tell the truth. This, he added, was in Trump’s best interests as president. To which Trump replied: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
It was a paralyzing moment. “I did
n’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence,” Comey reports.
Trump returned to this theme toward the end of the dinner. The bargain, as set out by Trump, was a classically transactional one: if Comey wanted to keep his job he had to serve Trump personally rather than his own institution. Trump repeated his demand: “I need loyalty.” Comey replied: “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump then said: “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.”
Comey agreed to this but said he had done so to terminate a “very awkward conversation.” “My explanations had made clear what he should expect,” Comey wrote.
There were further excruciating details. Trump delivered his “I hope you can let this go” speech after deliberately cornering Comey in the Oval Office and sending everyone else out, including Kushner and Sessions. There were whining phone calls. During one, on March 30, the president likened the Russia thing to “the cloud.” He denied being involved with Russia, or Russian hookers, and told Comey he’d always assumed he “was being recorded in Russia.”
Twelve days later Trump called again. He urged Comey to “get out” the fact that he, the president, wasn’t personally under investigation. Comey refused. To do so, the FBI chief said, “would create a duty to correct” the record, should the situation change.
Comey’s seven-page document was a stunning piece of contemporary history. It had everything—a time line, detail, facts—except, perhaps, tone. Trump’s final remarks to Comey on April 11 seem almost sorrowful, though it’s hard to be sure. The president said: “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing, you know.”
Comey writes:
I did not reply or ask him what he meant by “that thing.” I said only that the way to handle it was to have the White House Counsel call the Acting Deputy Attorney General. He said that was what he would do and the call ended.
