Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  The investigators determined that there was little to do about the emails. They assumed that Clinton also had a State Department email account, and that they would soon be receiving documents from that account as well. Maybe, the investigators thought, sometime down the road they could make an issue out of the fact that along with using her government email account she had used a personal one too. It would be a decent political poke in the eye for a potential presidential candidate, they thought. But in the meantime, it would only be a distraction from all the other work they had to do on the investigation, and so the issue was tabled.

  Several months later, a source told me that Gowdy’s committee had received several emails Clinton had sent from a personal account. I thought this was interesting, and planned to run it down, but like the committee investigators, I assumed she had a government email account as well and had used both. I went about my reporting duties without any urgency on the Clinton lead. I traveled to Afghanistan and Kuwait with the secretary of defense and took on an assignment covering a wedding for the New York Times Style section for extra cash. When I did start calling around about Clinton’s emails, the reaction from my sources revealed that I had hit on something highly consequential. On March 2, I broke the story that Clinton had relied exclusively on a personal email account when she was secretary of state.

  For most politicians, the use of a personal email account wouldn’t be a big deal. But the revelation reignited familiar unease about the Clintons among Democrats and fit into the narrative—pushed mercilessly by Clinton’s critics—that she and her husband felt they could play by their own rules without consequence.

  In the Senate, Republicans asked the inspectors general in the national security world to look into whether she’d sent or received any classified information on her personal account. The lead inspector general, a former FBI agent named I. Charles McCullough, found classified material in Clinton’s emails and tried to alert the State Department to the issue. A top State official, Patrick Kennedy, pushed back, and in a move of last resort, McCullough referred the matter to the FBI, which opened an investigation into whether Clinton had mishandled classified information.

  On the Right, the matter ignited a feeding frenzy—many Republicans had been obsessed with investigating the Clintons since before the couple left Little Rock.

  Additionally, a populist strain had been building in the Republican Party, fueled by anti-immigration, anti-free-trade, and isolationist sentiments. And Trump, a New York real estate developer and reality television star who figured he had little chance of getting elected but could run to remain relevant as a public figure, had actually been weighing in on those issues for many years. Unlike the sixteen other candidates running for the Republican nomination, he had a keen instinct for the building populist wave and intuitively exploited it. As a candidate, Trump was unprincipled—vicious and vulgar, with a proclivity to outdo himself that made him a car wreck the country could not stop watching. He was thin-skinned, but somehow impervious to things that would—and did—destroy more normal candidates. He couldn’t take a punch, yet he could survive a beating better than anyone else. Despite making racist and sexist comments that created media firestorms, as well as a steady stream of humiliating disclosures about his personal life and business failures that would have ended the candidacies of traditional politicians, Trump trudged on and won his party’s nomination. Around that time, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who despised Clinton, accelerated a clandestine effort to meddle in the American presidential election, with the objective of undermining Clinton and weakening her before she took office, as she appeared to be skating to an inevitable victory over Trump. Then, twelve days before the election, the FBI director, Comey—who had held an unusual press conference three months earlier to pronounce that the FBI had failed to find enough evidence to prosecute her but had taken the moment to criticize her conduct—publicly announced that the bureau had to examine new evidence about Clinton’s email account. The polls were thrown into disarray, and on Election Day, a total of fewer than eighty thousand votes in three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—swung the Electoral College in Trump’s favor, even though Clinton would win the popular vote by a substantial margin.

  At the age of seventy, as Trump assumed the presidency, he had no interest in changing the behavior that had shaped and defined his public career over four decades as a Manhattan celebrity. In New York, Trump had lied, cheated, and twisted arms, operating in a world dominated by tabloid coverage and among other similarly ethically unbridled businessmen. The worst consequences he had faced in those circles had been bad press, multiple bankruptcies, and hundreds of civil lawsuits. But in Washington, Trump quickly ran up against forces far more powerful: the Justice Department, the FBI, the national media, the laws of the United States, the politics of Capitol Hill, and foreign adversaries. Instead of adapting, he tried to bend the law and reality in ways no president had ever done before, in effect running the federal government just like the private fiefdom he had operated from the twenty-eighth floor of Trump Tower.

  A mere four months into Trump’s presidency, his antipathy for rules and his belligerence toward his opponents caught up with him. After the FBI director had publicly announced that the bureau was investigating whether Trump’s campaign had worked with Russia to sway the election, Trump fired Comey. It was what his New York playbook called for. But in the objective reality of Washington, it seemed as if the president were brazenly shutting down an investigation that he was the subject of, in plain sight, and the move forced Trump’s own political appointees at the Justice Department to appoint Mueller, a former Marine officer and FBI director considered one of the last few public officials trusted by both parties, as a special counsel to take over the investigation. The turn of events cast a suffocating cloud over his presidency just as it began.

  Trump had never faced an adversary like Mueller, who quickly assembled a team of the best prosecutors and FBI agents and analysts in the country. Many of them left high-paying law firm jobs or top Justice Department posts to join the investigation for what they regarded as a once-in-a-career opportunity. In New York, Trump had always been able to bluff and bluster his way through all manner of difficulties, but Mueller and his team had immense powers to examine Trump’s life in ways that had never been done before.

  To anyone paying attention, Trump looked like he was in trouble. But he still didn’t seem to get it. Instead of taking a disciplined approach led by experienced Washington white-collar defense lawyers, as Bill Clinton had done when he was under investigation, Trump had initially put together a hodgepodge legal team of undisciplined lawyers and television pundits. In the same way that he’d used the tabloids in New York, he thought he could use his Twitter account to undercut Mueller. Even as he intuitively sensed the danger Mueller posed to him, he still coped with that danger with bravado and arrogance—the same way he’d managed banks, creditors, civil lawsuits, and divorce lawyers throughout his public life. Trump obsessed about the investigation publicly and privately. He vented to friends on the phone, ranted to aides in the West Wing, and tweeted about the “Highly conflicted Bob Mueller & the 17 Angry Democrats.” At one point, as the investigation seemed to be intensifying, Trump told McGahn that there was nothing to worry about because if it was zeroing in on him, he would simply settle with Mueller. He would settle the case, as if he were negotiating terms in a lawsuit.

  Fast-forward a year later, to the summer of 2018, and Trump was still president, still showing his remarkable ability to survive political maelstroms that would have ended the career of nearly any other public official. But Mueller, his team, and now prosecutors in New York who’d started their own additional investigations looked like they were operating like surgeons, slowly dismantling the world around Trump. Mueller and the prosecutors charged the people closest to the president—his confidants, advisers, campaign officials, and even his national securi
ty adviser and his personal lawyer—with crimes and moreover negotiated with a good number of them to turn on Trump. Armed with that cooperation, Mueller and the prosecutors were moving to build a series of cases against the president.

  Mueller apparently knew a great deal about what had gone on inside the White House as Trump had tried to control, frustrate, and end the Russia investigation. I thought—but was not entirely sure—that one of the main reasons Mueller knew so much was McGahn.

  I had actually met the White House counsel once before—in a similar circumstance, in fact—the previous fall. I’d been leaving work one evening when a colleague of mine alerted me that McGahn was eating dinner at BLT Steak, the semi-fancy restaurant next to our office. It seemed like a good opportunity to meet him, so I persuaded the colleague to sit at the restaurant’s bar with me and try to snag him for a chat. We sat at the bar for about forty-five minutes until he was done eating—with a friend from his hometown, as it turned out. As they walked out the door, we stopped them and chatted for about twenty minutes. McGahn was relaxed and funny—a talker.

  Talkers make promising sources. In the back of my mind ever since, I’d wondered if that encounter could be a precursor to something more. When I wasn’t in a rush, I would frequently poke my head into the restaurant on my way home from work or walk through the dining area to see if McGahn was there. But I never caught him after that first encounter, and despite all my interest in talking to him, I’d never made a real effort to reach out to him beyond that. My calculation was that he was far too busy trying to make sure the administration followed the law to talk to reporters on the phone. Plus, McGahn was a longtime Washington elections lawyer who knew dozens of reporters. If he was going to engage with the media, he was likely going to do it with someone he’d known from before he entered the White House—someone he was already comfortable with.

  There was another factor, too: McGahn was represented by one of the most sought-after lawyers in Washington, William A. Burck. Along with McGahn, Burck represented a dozen other witnesses in the Mueller investigation, including the president’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon; the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Burck no doubt wanted to shield McGahn from Trump and by extension the media. If I called McGahn, he’d likely tell Burck, who would then get irritated with me for trying to engage McGahn directly, and I didn’t really need that.

  But now we were standing on the street in front of the White House, in what could at least be later justified to Burck as a chance encounter. Catching my breath from my three-block sprint, and unsure whether McGahn remembered me, I introduced myself.

  “Mike Schmidt with The New York Times,” I said, extending my hand. “I had to run to catch you.”

  He shook my hand.

  “Did you see who I was eating with?” he asked in a way that made me believe it was someone I’d be interested in.

  I told him that I hadn’t.

  Typically, when I would go to meet someone like McGahn, I’d want to make a plan in advance, or talk it through with an editor or fellow reporter, about how best to direct the conversation. But because I had had no idea I would encounter him, none of that preparation had been done. So I fell back on a lesson I was taught early in my career at the Times from a veteran reporter: When you’re in front of someone who has information, just keep the person talking; you may never get another shot. Plus, by getting out of the way and letting him talk, I could allow myself to think and map out where I wanted to take the conversation.

  As we made small talk about West Wing gossip and stories in the news that day, the first questions that came to my mind cut directly to the heart of the story. How much did you really cooperate with Mueller? Why have you continued to work for Trump? Is the power of your job so great that you’ll endure working for someone whom I know you despise in order to get your political goals accomplished? Are you Mueller’s secret mole in the White House? Those might have been the right questions, but they were far too aggressive and intrusive. Instead, it occurred to me that the safest place to let him go was his greatest accomplishment to date in the White House: his unrelenting drive to stack the courts.

  In some ways, McGahn was the typical Washington insider. He had come to Washington in 1995 after law school and built a practice as a Republican elections lawyer, soon becoming a partner at a top-tier firm. In 2008, George W. Bush nominated McGahn to be the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, the agency created in the wake of Watergate to police money in politics. You might think that someone who was at the top of such an agency would use his power to rain down enforcement. But ideologically, McGahn was almost militantly libertarian, and it was at the FEC that his libertarianism found its full expression. He had come to believe that regulatory agencies had accumulated too much power, and so when he joined the commission, he set out to shut it down. In his five years on the commission, he gutted its ability to enforce election law.

  Bob Bauer, who served as Barack Obama’s White House counsel and a top Democratic elections lawyer, told me that McGahn was the most consequential commissioner in the history of the FEC. “He brought a discipline to the Republican side and a sort of relentlessness, if you will, to that effort that was unparalleled in the history of the commission,” Bauer said.

  Even though he was part of the establishment and made more than $1 million a year in his private sector jobs, he still thought of himself as a blue-collar kid from New Jersey and still had nothing good to say about the “elites.” He had a penchant for the hair bands of the 1980s, played in a 1980s-style rock band, and even hung out with actual rock stars from the 1980s. He often sported long hair that he had to pull behind his ears, even when he was head of the FEC. While leading the agency, he fought openly with the other commissioners, undoing much of its ability to regulate voting and campaign finance. This won him the deep affection of the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell.

  During the primaries, as Trump’s improbable candidacy continued to defy gravity, McGahn became the Trump campaign’s lawyer, making sure he followed campaign finance laws and serving as a bridge between the neophyte candidate and the Republican establishment in Washington. The first time he met his client, Trump asked him how much money he made. When McGahn told him that his going rate was $800 an hour, Trump was impressed, and the deal was done. After Trump won, he had agreed to be White House counsel so that he could transform the federal judiciary for a generation or more. How many times had Trump reminded his adoring supporters that he had given them Neil Gorsuch? And McGahn had also just overseen Trump’s nomination of the D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace the Supreme Court associate justice Anthony M. Kennedy and was preparing for his confirmation hearings.

  I knew McGahn was fond of Kennedy, whose retirement after thirty years on the Court had opened up the spot for Kavanaugh. So I brought up Kennedy, asking him where he’d first come to know him. McGahn said he had met Kennedy at a cocktail party in Washington a couple of years earlier and that they had hit it off. McGahn noted to me that Kennedy always wore a suit, a tie, and a handkerchief in his breast pocket and was a nice combination of classy, charming, and thoughtful. The two had grown so close that McGahn often consulted with Kennedy about different judicial picks, McGahn said.

  For all the stress McGahn was presumably under, he seemed at ease. The suit he was wearing was nicer than what most government employees wear, and his tie was still fully done and neatly positioned in the middle of his spread-collar shirt, which looked as if it had just been pressed. His hair was short.

  “I heard you got a haircut when Kelly came in,” I said.

  There had been a rumor that when John Kelly, a four-star general, had become White House chief of staff a year earlier, McGahn had cut his hair in a show of deference to Kelly’s military style.

  “Not true,” McGahn said.

  He didn’t seem to be in
a rush to stop talking to me, so I wasn’t in a rush to start turning this into some sort of inquisition. I turned the conversation to show that I knew something about his life. The previous Labor Day, I’d been to McGahn’s hometown of Brigantine, New Jersey, a small town on the Jersey shore right outside Atlantic City. Even though you can see the casinos of Atlantic City from there, Brigantine has a small-town feel, with modestly sized houses, many of which are rented throughout the summer to vacationers.

  The McGahn family had lived on a street where everyone basically had the same amount of money. The kids whose fathers were doctors or lawyers had lived in houses that were only slightly bigger than the others, and there was a sense there that everyone was on the same level. McGahn told me he really liked Brigantine because there wasn’t a rigid class system that was ruled by elites.

  “Now, life in Washington—there are elites,” he said.

  I asked what his parents did. He said that his mother was a nurse and his father was a Treasury agent who did IRS investigations and was also, not for nothing, a well-regarded shot. His father would come home from the practice range with the paper target, one hole in dead center. He had fired six times, hitting the same spot each time. The family claim to fame was that his father had once protected Gerald R. Ford on a postpresidential visit to Cape May, New Jersey.

  By now I’d delayed his entrance into the White House for at least half an hour. The sky was a reddish purple, the shade that appears at night when a thunderstorm is about to roll in. My time was short.

  “I’ve probably written more stories about you than anyone else,” I said. “I realize we aren’t perfect. We don’t have badges and guns and the power of subpoena. We don’t bat a thousand. But what percent do you think I’ve gotten right? Have I gotten anything big wrong?”