Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Harding, Luke

  For Comey, it was another busy week. That Thursday he was due to return to Capitol Hill. Another public session was scheduled before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the meantime, he took a plane to Florida—a secure one, fitted out with communications equipment that gave him instant access to the president. His next stop was California and a diversity forum for FBI agents.

  Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, and before he had made his speech to FBI employees, Comey caught sight of a TV screen. There was urgent breaking news. It reported that President Trump had fired the director of the FBI. That was him. Comey assumed this was some kind of prank—an in-house joke arranged by his security detail or others on his personal staff.

  It wasn’t. The news was real. Comey was out—fired and terminated in brutal fashion. The president might have broken the news in person. Instead he had chosen to strike while Comey was away from station. The director was unable to clear his desk, say farewell to his staff, or take away personal documents.

  Comey stepped into a side office at the bureau’s LA office. There he confirmed he had indeed been fired. At this point the White House hadn’t informed him of anything directly. Soon afterward, Trump’s longtime personal bodyguard, Keith Schiller—an ex-cop and now part of White House security—hand-delivered a letter from the president to FBI headquarters. It came in a manila envelope.

  The date was Tuesday, May 9. The letter—on White House paper—began, “Dear Director Comey.” It said Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had recommended his dismissal. Trump had accepted their recommendation, and “you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”

  The next paragraph was strikingly odd. It began with a subclause. It said: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

  It went on: “It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.” Then Trump’s hedgehog-like signature.

  The letter revealed what was foremost in Trump’s mind: Russia. The investigation it referred to was Comey’s expanding probe into Kremlin collusion. According to Trump, Comey had exonerated him three times. Or at least that was what the president claimed.

  The attached letters from Sessions and Rosenstein, however, said something completely different: that Trump had fired Comey because of his mishandling of the Clinton email affair. Sessions’s letter was vague. It said that the FBI chief had strayed from the Justice Department’s “rules and principles.” Sessions said that as attorney general he was committed to a “high level of…integrity.”

  This last claim was somewhat hilarious. At his January confirmation hearing Sessions was asked if he’d been in contact with anyone from the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. Sessions’s answer under oath: no. It later emerged that he had met Kislyak at least twice, in the summer and early fall of 2016; like Flynn and Page he had been afflicted with sudden memory loss over his dealings with the ambassador. Sessions survived Democratic calls to resign for lying but was forced to recuse himself from all things Russia.

  It was left to Rosenstein to explain. His letter said Comey had been wrong to announce in July 2016 that he was closing down the Clinton investigation—in effect, usurping the role of the attorney general. Comey was also wrong to tell the media he was reopening the probe—a “textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.” Since Comey wouldn’t admit his mistakes, he couldn’t be expected to fix them, Rosenstein wrote.

  Officially, then, Trump fired Comey because he disapproved of the way Clinton had been treated. This explanation was so lacking in credibility as to be entirely, woefully ridiculous. Why had the president waited until May 9 to act? Where had his sudden compassion for Clinton come from? Wasn’t it more likely that the president had already decided to fire Comey and had merely asked Sessions to come up with a legal excuse?

  According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, Trump had spent the previous weekend stewing at his New Jersey golf resort. He had watched the Sunday talk shows and concluded that there was “something wrong” with Comey. Trump had believed for a while he had to get rid of the FBI director and was “strongly inclined” to do so after Comey’s latest appearance before Congress.

  What had especially irked Trump was Comey’s statement that he felt “mildly nauseous” at the possibility that his late intervention in the email affair might have cost Clinton the election. Trump seemed tortured by the idea that he wasn’t the legitimate president. This insecurity had clearly gnawed at him. Here, as he saw it, was Comey questioning his role in history, diminishing his victory, pandering to his enemies.

  Trump reportedly shared his thoughts with a small group of advisers—Pence, McGahn, Kushner, Schiller. They agreed that Comey should be made to walk. Bannon, the chief strategist, argued it might be better to delay and was concerned about backlash. Overall, the White House seemed sincerely to hold the view that Democrats would welcome Comey’s humiliation, having complained about him previously.

  Trump’s decision was reckless and impulsive. The president could, of course, do this: the move was constitutional. It would turn out to be spectacularly self-defeating.

  It flowed from a profound suspicion within the administration toward Washington and its federal agencies. As Mike Hayden put it to me, the Trump team had “this incredible distrust, almost contempt,” for the outgoing government they were replacing. They believed that the intelligence community served Obama. This was wrong; it didn’t. But the perception stuck. The intelligence family was “fairly indifferent to who the president is,” Hayden said, adding: “We got off on a very bad foot.” And “Trump the human being” made everything worse.

  For the president, the optics of Comey’s firing would prove disastrous. Those who had been skeptical about claims of collusion were now beginning to wonder if there was perhaps something there after all. The public articulation of why he’d been fired didn’t pass the smell test.

  Meanwhile, FBI employees were an unhappy and bewildered lot. Former agent Bobby Chacon called it “a punch in the stomach to agents.” It was, he told The Guardian, a disrespectful and outrageous act that had besmirched the FBI’s reputation. Others predicted it would have a “chilling effect” on the ongoing Russia investigation. One said: “The rule of law has to prevail, not the rule of whim.”

  The night of May 9, Press Secretary Sean Spicer emerged from the West Wing. Spicer gave an interview to Fox in one of the tents erected along the White House driveway. About a dozen reporters lurked nearby, including The Guardian’s David Smith. They were puzzled when Spicer disappeared for a few minutes. Eventually he emerged from a pathway lined with bushes. He agreed to take some questions but asked for TV cameras to be turned off.

  The Post reported this strange event, which ended with Spicer giving an informal press conference in deep gloom. The White House objected to the Post’s characterization of Spicer’s location. The paper—whose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto had never seemed more appropriate—agreed to make a correction. It said that Spicer hadn’t hidden in the bushes but among them. Normally corrections are a matter of mild embarrassment. This one had been done with glee.

  According to Spicer’s official version, Rosenstein had reached his decision independently, with Trump acting swiftly upon it. There was no cover-up. Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, told reporters: “This has nothing to do with Russia” and said Comey had simply lost the confidence of everybody—his subordinates, Congress, and of course the president. Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said of the Russia story: “Frankly, it’s kind of getting absurd. There’s nothing there.”

  Even by the dysfunctional standards of the White House, thes
e events were surreal. As the comedian John Oliver pointed out, what was happening at dazzling speed resembled not so much Watergate 2 as Stupid Watergate. It was a pastiche version of the original 1970s scandal, replayed by clownish dimwits and brainless plotters. Stupid Watergate was happening more quickly than the original version, even if the ending—impeachment?—seemed uncertain.

  Those who lived through the Nixon era likened Comey’s firing to the Saturday Night Massacre. This was when Nixon called on his senior Justice Department officials to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate burglary. Two officials—Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus—refused. They resigned. The next one down, Solicitor General Robert Bork, agreed to the president’s wishes.

  This time around there was no pushback. Sessions and Rosenstein caved to Trump’s demands. Since Comey was fired on a Tuesday, the episode became known as the Tuesday Night Massacre. Rosenstein’s behavior, in particular, disappointed many. Philip Allen Lacovara, the senior surviving member of the Watergate special prosecutor’s office, asked Rosenstein to explain why he’d been so malleable. The deputy attorney general had put his “generally applauded credibility into a blind trust,” Lacovara wrote.

  —

  Trump had been in power for a little over one hundred days. During that period his less attractive qualities had been on painful display. One of these was Trump’s astonishing lack of loyalty to his own subordinates and team. He was quite prepared to throw his own White House staff under the bus, to trash their reputations and burn their political capital if it suited his temporary need or impulse. Meanwhile, he demanded absolute fealty from them.

  With Washington reeling from the Comey affair, Trump gave an interview to NBC News’s Lester Holt. This was the moment, surely, for the president to say that he had nothing to do with Comey’s dismissal. And that he had merely heeded the advice of the Department of Justice, a slave to protocol.

  Instead, he said this:

  “What I did is I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not…”

  HOLT: You had made the decision before they came into your office.

  TRUMP: I—I was going to fire Comey. I—there’s no good time to do it, by the way.

  HOLT: Because in your letter, you said…

  TRUMP: They—they were…

  HOLT:…I—I accepted—accepted their recommendations.

  TRUMP: Yeah, well, they also…

  HOLT: So, you had already made the decision.

  TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.

  Then:

  “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself—I said, ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election they should have won.’”

  Trump was confirming he’d decided to fire Comey before he reached out to his legal officials. Oh, and “the Russia thing” was foremost in his mind at the time. Trump said he’d asked Comey if he personally was under FBI investigation. The director’s answer was no, he wasn’t, Trump said.

  If the president was now telling the truth about Comey’s dismissal, that meant his press team had spent the previous forty-eight hours misleading the American public. Of Comey, Trump said: “He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that. Everybody knows that.”

  It was a stunning admission, made more incredible by Trump’s next set of White House guests. The day after Comey was out, two Russian visitors made their way to the Oval Office. One had leathery features, a rasping voice (a lot of cigarettes here), and a sarcastic manner, deployed over a period of many years in the service of the Russian state. The other was a slightly jollier-looking figure—a rotund person with a pale face, double chin, and white hair. These were Moscow’s two top diplomats: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

  Obama administration officials who had dealt with Kislyak viewed him with grudging respect. Times, however, had changed. Kislyak was the man whose connections with Trump’s team were not just embarrassing but a subject of criminal inquiry. Flynn, Sessions, Page, Kushner—all had met him and all had concealed these meetings afterward. Now the ambassador was talking to the president.

  No American press was allowed in to record the meeting. Lavrov, however, had brought a photographer who worked for the state news agency Tass. In Soviet times, journalists for Tass were typically KGB or GRU officers. The photographer took equipment into the Oval Office. What, exactly? The photos show Trump warmly shaking Lavrov’s hand. Another reveals him patting Lavrov on the shoulder. Trump and Kislyak posed together. The president grins.

  Trump seemed happy, relaxed, among friends. His manner here was in contrast to the one he had deployed with traditional U.S. allies—a glum, handshakeless encounter in March with Germany’s Angela Merkel, for example.

  The conversation with the Russians, leaked to the Times a few days later, was also comradely. And astonishing. “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told Lavrov. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not under investigation.” Trump joked that he was the only person who hadn’t met Kislyak. He said the Russia story was fake and added that Americans wanted his government to have a healthy relationship with Moscow.

  There were foreign policy discussions. Trump reportedly said that he wasn’t personally concerned by the fighting in Ukraine, but asked if the Russians might help solve the conflict there. There was talk of Syria.

  It was at this point that Trump revealed details of a highly classified intelligence briefing he had been given. It concerned an ISIS plot. The intelligence wasn’t actually Trump’s to share. It had come from Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the region. Trump told the Russians the name of the Syrian city from where the information came. Seemingly, the Israelis had a double agent deep inside ISIS. Though there was no confirmation, the agent appeared to have supplied details of an attempt to smuggle explosives onto a plane using laptop computers.

  Now the Russians knew about this source. Probably Bashar al-Assad—Syria’s president and Russia’s close ally—would soon learn of it, too. It was an astonishing breach. One former intelligence officer said that it wasn’t sharing the information per se that was significant: it was the relaying of material obtained from a partner. “You don’t even reveal the color of a carpet without consulting the ally first,” the officer told me. Another called it “fucking unbelievable.” Alarmed White House officials notified the CIA.

  Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Flynn’s replacement as national security adviser, defended the president’s blunder. McMaster said no secrets were given away. Trump, meanwhile, tweeted that as president he had “an absolute right” to share classified material on terrorism with anybody he liked. Russia agreed. The story was the latest manifestation of fake news, the foreign ministry said.

  Trump had called for Clinton to be jailed for her use of a private email server. Now he had leaked “code word” information to the Russians, a classification beyond top secret. Since he’d done it, that was okay—or so Trump seemed to be suggesting. Even Republicans were dismayed by the president’s lack of discipline.

  There were two ways of explaining it. Neither was good. Either the conspiracy sketched out in the Steele dossier was true, or the president was an idiot—or, if not a complete idiot, at least someone unfamiliar with the ways of Washington and therefore unaware of what he was doing. These two explanations were not incompatible, but Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and a Trump loyalist, chose to go with the second one. In the coming months, Ryan would argue that the president was new to the job, a well-meaning neophyte who couldn’t be held accountable for his errant behavior.

  The Lavrov-Kislyak episode had an epilogue. After the meeting, the American media had been expecting to see Trump with his Russian guests. Instead, they found the president
sitting next to a well-known ninety-three-year-old man—a shrunken individual, still alert, owlish, with penetrating brown eyes. This was Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was Nixon’s secretary of state. His surprise presence seemed at first like a cosmic joke: one of the central figures from the Watergate era was literally back.

  Kissinger was part of the United States’ political and cultural fabric. John Ehrlichman—Nixon’s counsel and assistant—served a year and a half in prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy. His novel The Company is a fictional account of the period. In it, Kissinger appears as Carl Tessler. Ehrlichman describes Tessler as a “physical anomaly,” with a large head, a broadening girth, and “small almost dainty” hands and feet. Tessler/Kissinger was a geopolitician. He had a “brilliant mind.” He thought of himself as “a sort of universal Man of the Age in foreign affairs.” Tessler kept himself under “rigid self-control,” rarely revealing the “hidden man” beneath.

  Traditionally, U.S. presidents sought out Kissinger’s advice. Obama had notably failed to do so, something that clearly rankled the elder statesman. Kissinger hadn’t endorsed Trump. And yet here he was, back at the center of events, with the world’s most powerful man, and meeting the Russians as in Cold War times. Kissinger had described the Watergate scandal as a “domestic passion play.” Now he sat next to another scandal-engulfed White House incumbent.

  Reporters asked the president why he’d fired Director Comey.

  “Because he wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump said to the cameras.

  Kissinger, it appeared, was back in the Oval Office in the role of intermediary. He wasn’t just a throwback to the 1970s. He was frequently in contact with the Kremlin. Kissinger had long-standing good relations with Russia’s president and was treated as a VIP whenever he dropped in to Moscow. This happened quite frequently, with Kissinger visiting in 2016. Like Trump, Kissinger had said favorable things about Putin. He had compared him to a character from Dostoyevsky and said Putin possessed an “inward connection” to Russian history.