by Bob Woodward
Several days later Wilbur Ross laid out the reasoning on the importance of trade deficits. Echoing the president, Ross said trade deficits are the lodestar and were a mark of our economic instability and weakness. The president was focused on trade deficits, he reminded everyone, and they ought to be focused on them.
Porter took off his honest-broker cap. “Trade deficits don’t matter,” he said, “at least with individual countries. That’s an absurd way of thinking.” His tone was probably the most disrespect that Porter had ever shown to a cabinet officer. “Trade policy, especially the trade deals that we negotiate, isn’t a primary driver of our trade deficit.” That deficit depends on economic conditions, which country can produce various goods most efficiently and cheaply, the savings rate and the value of the currencies. All protectionist policies are not in our economic interest.
“Well,” Ross shot back, “I’ve made billions of dollars and I’ve worked on Wall Street. I know how these markets work. You don’t understand supply and demand.” If the U.S. puts tariffs on China and they retaliate, we will be able to buy products from other countries.
* * *
In the spring of 2017, Ross negotiated a deal with China for the U.S. to import Chinese chicken and export beef. He called it “a herculean accomplishment.” But there was some serious criticism of the deal. A New York Times headline read, “China Surrenders Little to U.S. in First Round of Trade Talks.”
In a meeting at the White House, the president tore into Ross. “I can’t believe you made this deal. Why didn’t you tell anybody? You didn’t tell me about this. You just went off and did it on your own. And it’s a terrible deal. We got screwed. Wilbur, maybe you used to have it.” As an investment banker representing casino bondholders angry at Trump in 1990, Ross had struck a deal with Trump that acknowledged the value of his famous name and allowed him to avoid bankruptcy.
“I thought you were a killer,” Trump said to the 79-year-old Ross. “When you were on Wall Street, you made some of these deals. But you’re past your prime. You’re not a good negotiator anymore. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve lost it. I don’t trust you. I don’t want you doing any more negotiations.” Bob Lighthizer would handle NAFTA and other trade agreements.
Ross tried to defend the deal—the U.S. would be exporting more beef—but Trump had tuned out.
* * *
The president held a meeting on steel tariffs—one of his obsessions—in the Oval Office on June 8. Gary Cohn, Wilbur Ross, Porter and Secretary of Defense Mattis crowded in seats around the Resolute Desk.
“We’re ready to go,” Ross said. “I want to submit this report.” He was recommending tariff rate quotas especially on China. A high prohibitive tariff would be imposed if China increased its current rate of steel exports to the United States.
Porter cited a number of legal problems. The Commerce Department hadn’t consulted with the Defense Department, as required by law, to determine whether the imports posed a threat to national security.
“Yes, we have,” Ross said. “We’ve done that.”
“I’ve never been consulted on anything related to any of this,” Mattis said.
“That’s all right,” Ross replied. He had talked to the assistant secretary of defense who dealt with these issues. He had some emails documenting this.
“Well,” Mattis said, “you never talked to me.”
Porter jumped in to point out that the law said that the defense secretary had to be consulted, not just someone in the department.
These were the legal bureaucratic niceties that drove Trump crazy. “Wilbur, talk to Jim! Get this sorted out,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of dealing with this. And get it done quickly, because I want to do this.”
Porter saw the issue as an exquisite way to kick the can down the road for several more weeks, if not more. Mattis was helpful in drawing it out, later telling Ross he needed an analysis before he could give his opinion.
Later analysis by the Defense Department for Mattis, however, showed that “U.S military steel usage represents less than one-half percent of the total U.S steel demand” and Defense would be able “to acquire the steel necessary to meet national defense requirements.”
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Trump said he wished he had fired Comey at the beginning of the administration but now he wanted Comey out.
Bannon disagreed and offered this argument to Trump alone in the Oval Office: “Seventy-five percent of the agents do hate Comey. No doubt. The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover. The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history. A weapon to come and get you. They’re going to name a special fucking counsel. You can fire Comey. You can’t fire the FBI. The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.”
Bannon thought Trump did not understand the power of the permanent institutions—the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and the broader military establishment. He also did not understand the sweeping powers of a special counsel who could be appointed to investigate everything a president touched.
“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told McGahn and Priebus, “because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” Comey is a grandstander and out of control.
By early May, Trump felt that Comey was vulnerable because of his recent testimony in the convoluted investigation of Clinton’s private emails. He dictated a letter listing the reasons to fire Comey.
McGahn told him that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was coming in for a meeting. One thing Rosenstein wanted to discuss was Comey, and apparently Rosenstein also wanted to get rid of Comey, McGahn said.
McGahn explained that there was a process here—the deputy attorney general was the person who oversaw the FBI. Let’s hear Rosenstein out. This was a stall tactic that the White House staff was using more and more. Let’s cool this off, let’s talk to Rod and we’ll get back to you with a plan.
Rosenstein told Trump that he thought Comey should be fired. He had no problem writing a memo outlining his reasoning. He brought a three-page memo to the White House. The subject: RESTORING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE FBI. It stated that on July 5, Comey “announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation,” which was Hillary Clinton’s emails, preempting the decision of the prosecutor and offering “derogatory information” by calling Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless.” Then, 11 days before the election, he announced he was reopening the Clinton investigation because he believed it was a question of “speak” or “conceal.” This misstated the issue, Rosenstein said. He quoted five former attorneys general or deputy attorneys general agreeing that Comey had violated the rules.
Done, said the president. He could not have said it better himself. He sent a brief letter to Comey informing him that he was “terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”
The plan to stall the firing had backfired. It had sped up the process. The Rosenstein memo had nothing to do with the decision, Priebus knew. The president already had made up his mind.
Bannon believed, “100 percent,” that the reason for firing Comey was because the FBI was seeking financial records from Jared. It was pure speculation. Ivanka had complained to her father about the FBI.
As the months ground on, Priebus saw that if Trump was planning to or said he was going to fire someone, it did not mean it would happen. One of his favorite sayings became, “Nothing is dead until it’s buried around here.”
It appeared, for the moment, that Comey was at least dead, but he and his story were not buried.
* * *
Trump was watching lots of cable news coverage of his May 9 firing of FBI Director Comey. It was not going well. He had muddied the waters and contradicted himself on May 11 when he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he was going to fire Comey no matter what recommendations he had received from Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Attorney General Sessions. In a long rambling response to Holt,
Trump stated, apparently giving some of his reasoning, “I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
This answer seemed very much at odds with his letter to Comey saying he was being fired because of Rosenstein’s memo severely criticizing Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The evening of Tuesday, May 16, Michael Schmidt of The New York Times published a blockbuster story. Comey had written contemporaneous memos of his conversations with Trump. In an Oval Office meeting February 14, while Comey was still FBI director, he wrote that the president had asked him about the investigation of Flynn and said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Trump hovered around the TV, glued to coverage. On CNN that evening, David Gergen, a voice of experience and reason who had served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton during their impeachment investigations, sounded an alarm.
“I think we’re in impeachment territory,” Gergen said. “What we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”
Porter could see that Trump was about to lose it at the mention of impeachment. The president voiced outrage that Comey seemed to have turned the tables on him.
The next day, Wednesday, May 17, Trump was in the Oval Office when he learned that Rosenstein had appointed Robert Mueller, who had run the FBI for 12 years, of all people, as special counsel to look into Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign.
Trump’s mood deteriorated overnight and the next day, May 18, was the worst. The president erupted into uncontrollable anger, visibly agitated to a degree that no one in his inner circle had witnessed before. It was a harrowing experience. “We barely got by,” Porter said to an associate.
Normally Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk or in his private dining room. But this day he mostly stayed on his feet as he stormed between the two rooms.
The president turned to his lifeline—cable news. He watched a two-hour block of Fox News, and then most of the two-hour-long blocks of MSNBC and CNN that he had TiVo’d.
He raged at the coverage as top aides came in and out—Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, McGahn, Cohn, Hicks and Porter. Why was Mueller picked? Trump asked. “He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump raged. “Of course he’s got an axe to grind with me.”
“Everybody’s trying to get me,” the president said. “It’s unfair. Now everybody’s saying I’m going to be impeached.” What are the powers of a special counsel? he asked.
A special counsel had virtually unlimited power to investigate any possible crime, Porter said. It was Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“Now I have this person,” Trump said bitterly, “who has no accountability who can look into anything, however unrelated it is? They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”
Trump could not focus on much of anything else. Meetings were canceled and parts of the day eventually scrapped.
Porter had never seen Trump so visibly disturbed. He knew Trump was a narcissist who saw everything in terms of its impact on him. But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon’s final days in office—praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls. Trump’s behavior was now in the paranoid territory.
“They’re out to get me,” Trump said. “This is an injustice. This is unfair. How could this have happened? It’s all Jeff Sessions’ fault. This is all politically motivated. Rod Rosenstein doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. He’s a Democrat. He’s from Maryland.”
As he paced the floor, Trump said, “Rosenstein was one of the people who said to fire Comey and wrote me this letter. How could he possibly be supervising this investigation?”
Bob Mueller had all these conflicts that ought to bar him from being special counsel investigating him. “He was a member of one of my golf courses”—Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia—and there was a dispute over fees and Mueller resigned. Mueller’s law firm had previously represented Trump’s son-in-law.
“I’m getting punched,” Trump said. “I have to punch back. In order for it to be a fair fight, I have to be fighting.”
Back and forth most of the day, the president rotated to watch TV in the dining room and then come out to the Oval Office in a frenzy, asking questions and voicing his anger that he had lost control of the investigation.
“I am the president,” Trump said. “I can fire anybody that I want. They can’t be investigating me for firing Comey. And Comey deserved to be fired! Everybody hated him. He was awful.”
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Marc Kasowitz, the seasoned, gray-haired litigator who had represented Trump for decades in divorces and bankruptcies, asked John Dowd, 76, one of the most experienced attorneys in white-collar criminal defense, to his office in New York at 4:00 p.m. on May 25, 2017.
“We need you in Washington to represent the president,” to defend Trump in the Russia investigation being launched by special counsel Robert Mueller, Kasowitz said. Several high-profile attorneys had already turned down the job, citing conflicts or the difficulty in managing Trump. But Dowd, a former prosecutor with a long list of prominent clients, jumped at the chance to round out a 47-year legal career with the highest-profile case in the country.
“Oh my God,” he replied. “That’s incredible. I’d be happy to represent the president.”
“It’s no day at the beach.”
“I think I’ve figured that out,” Dowd said.
Dowd was both good-old-boy figure and hard-nosed investigator. He had been a Marine Corps lawyer in the 1960s and a mob prosecutor as chief of the Justice Department Organized Crime Strike Force in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was special counsel to the commissioner of baseball. He ran several investigations, the most prominent leading to the banning of Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds for betting on baseball games. After that, as a defense attorney, Dowd represented Wall Street and political figures, including Senator John McCain in the Keating Five ethics investigation. He had been a partner in the prominent law firm Akin Gump and was now retired.
Dowd had a conference call with Trump and Kasowitz, and then several conversations with the president. The Mueller investigation, Trump told him, was consuming him and his presidency. He had done nothing wrong. “John, this thing is an enormous burden. It interferes particularly with foreign affairs. It’s embarrassing to be in the middle of a deal and the guy, the premier or the prime minister on the other side says, ‘Hey Donald, are you going to be around?’ It’s like a kick in the nuts.”
Dowd said he would not charge by the hour. He would set a fee. They agreed on $100,000 a month, which was about half his normal rate. Trump instructed him to send the invoice to his office in New York and he would be paid the next day. (He was.)
The president was outraged by the Mueller investigation. He listed his complaints to Dowd.
First, he had been blindsided by Attorney General Sessions’s March 2 decision recusing himself from any investigation of Russian election meddling. He had expected political protection from his attorney general and was now left unprotected.
Second, Trump related how he learned on May 17 that Mueller had been appointed special counsel by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. It was absolutely outrageous. He had been in the Oval Office with Sessions when one of the White House lawyers brought the news. Sessions said, “I didn’t know about this.” He had turned to Sessions, “Well, doesn’t he work for you?” Sessions’s recusal left Rosenstein in charge of any Russia inquiry.
Worse, Trump said, he had interviewed Mueller just the day before to come back as FBI director and he had turned him down. Now Mueller was suddenly in charge. “So two times I’m fucking bushwhacked by the Department of Justice.”
Third, Trump said that a
fter he fired Comey, the former FBI director had gone on a testifying and leaking crusade to state that Trump asked him to drop the Flynn investigation. “I didn’t do anything,” Trump told Dowd. “It’s all bullshit. Comey’s a fucking liar.”
Kasowitz concurred that he and one of his partners had investigated to see if there was anything that connected Trump to the Russian meddling. After a full month their initial conclusion was there was nothing.
The way Trump rattled off the denials suggested to Dowd that his outrage was genuine. Of course, that did not mean he was innocent. In addition to blaming Comey, Trump said he did it to himself by not having strong people and lawyers.
Dowd examined the one-page Rosenstein order appointing Mueller May 17. Not only did it authorize a Russian investigation but it directed Mueller to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the [Russian] investigation.” Dowd had never seen anyone in Justice with such broad authority.
The president expressed his distrust. A lot of Democrats were on Mueller’s team of prosecutors.
Dowd agreed there might be a political motive. “This is a royal fuck job by a bunch of losers,” he told Trump.
Dowd’s theory of defending a client is to be his advocate, and also to be a friend. Trump began calling him at all hours, all days. Despite Trump’s outgoing, in-your-face style, Dowd could see the president was very lonely.
Dowd discussed the known facts with Trump’s legal advisers and reviewed the material for possible vulnerabilities. Based on a preliminary review of the known evidence, he did not see anything to support a charge of collusion with the Russians or obstruction of justice.
Perhaps the most troubling pieces of evidence were former FBI director James Comey’s memo and testimony that Trump had appealed to him to go easy on General Flynn after Flynn’s firing. According to Comey, Trump had said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Comey said he believed Trump was asking him to drop the investigation.
