Trump, who was traveling that day to give a speech aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, called McGahn. The president was furious. He was so angry that those in the room with McGahn could hear Trump yelling on the phone. Despite the president’s indifference to the ways of Washington, he routinely showed McGahn the ability to cut directly to the nut of a problem. Trump recognized the issue with the stories about Sessions. During the attorney general’s confirmation hearing two months earlier, Sessions said under oath that he hadn’t spoken to any Russians during the campaign. Now, in the wake of the Post story, paranoid Democrats and much of the media were looking at the new headlines as evidence that Russian agents were running the country. There were calls from the Left for Sessions to recuse himself from overseeing the FBI investigation into the campaign’s ties to Russia. How, Democrats asked, could Sessions oversee an investigation into conduct that he had participated in?
The story came with an added factor that infuriated Trump: It overshadowed some of the only decent headlines he had received since becoming president. Two days earlier, he had given a relatively well-reviewed first address to a joint session of Congress. The reactions were so positive that even a liberal commentator on CNN, Van Jones, said that Trump “became President of the United States in that moment, period.”
Sessions had now washed away those stories.
The prospect of someone who might not be completely loyal to Trump overseeing the Russia investigation set Trump off. McGahn had never seen the president that angry. The anger seemed so potent that McGahn was baffled. In the midst of his fit, Trump told McGahn that he needed to stop Sessions from recusing himself. It was an outlandish request, because it cut to the heart of the actual issue of recusal. Only someone with Trump’s disdain for norms and the law would be able to ask such a thing. Trump’s campaign was under investigation. He was now demanding that one of his closest political allies remain in charge of that investigation—an investigation that could be an existential threat to his presidency.
But that is where McGahn found himself. He tried to appease the president and called Sessions, exposing himself to potential criminality for the first time as Trump’s lawyer.
Where Trump was bellicose, McGahn was tactful. Instead of the president’s sledgehammer argument that he needed someone loyal to him to oversee the investigation, McGahn made the nuanced suggestion that Sessions put off the recusal until there was an actual decision he needed to make in the Russia investigation. McGahn reasoned that despite the political pressure, the simple act of recusal wouldn’t make the problems with his testimony go away.
McGahn spent the rest of the day working the phones in his office, talking to Sessions again, Sessions’s chief of staff, Sessions’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. As much as Trump’s anger focused McGahn’s attention, it completely rattled Priebus, who spent the entire day going up and down the stairs to McGahn’s office to ask him whether he had fixed the problem yet.
What Sessions failed to tell McGahn was that weeks earlier he had already made the decision to recuse himself from all matters related to the 2016 campaign but had dragged his heels to formalize it. Now—thanks to The Washington Post—the decision had to be made public. That afternoon, in a nationally televised press conference, Sessions announced his recusal. The announcement caught Trump by surprise. Afterward, McGahn told the lawyers in his office to ensure that no White House officials contact Sessions about the investigation, and he further ensured that that move would be memorialized, telling his chief of staff, Annie Donaldson, who jotted it down in her legal pad, “There should be no comms….No contact with Sessions.” McGahn, like his uncle, was taking yet another move to back up his work. He would now have contemporaneous notes to show what he had told his client.
★ ★ ★
MARCH 3, 2017
SEVENTY-FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
OVAL OFFICE—McGahn was learning on the job the rhythms of Trump’s anger and how much of it was driven by media coverage. The Sessions recusal only set off more headlines about Russia. The following day, Trump called a meeting in the Oval Office with all of the West Wing senior staff.
The meeting quickly turned into a screaming match.
Trump, infuriated that his original travel ban had been blocked by the courts, put much of the blame on McGahn.
“This is bullshit,” Trump yelled. “I don’t want a fucking watered-down version.”
“I don’t have a lawyer!” he screamed at McGahn. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn, of course, had been Trump’s longtime New York lawyer who had been dead for decades but was still considered among the more unethical lawyers in American history.
The president said he needed someone like Cohn, a winner and a fixer—unrestrained by morals, rules, or shame. Someone who got things done the way you get things done in New York. Despite everything that had gone on the previous day, Trump once again told McGahn to talk to Sessions about, now, “unrecusing.”
McGahn, showing an increasing willingness to push back at the president, said no, explaining the decision had already been made.
From there, in front of more than a dozen aides, Trump openly revealed his remarkable, and cynical, perspective of how the Justice Department operated and his expansive view of how he believed he should be able to use the department to protect himself and go after his enemies. He said he needed an attorney general like Obama had in Eric Holder, or John F. Kennedy had in Robert F. Kennedy.
“You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” Trump said.
Trump then leveled what to him was as brutal an insult as could be delivered. He said Sessions was weak. Bannon, also in the meeting, pushed back on Trump, reminding the president that the recusal should not be a surprise, because they had discussed before he was sworn in that the attorney general would not—under Justice Department rules—be able to oversee investigations related to the election.
The showdown in the Oval Office became so animated that a CNN cameraman who was posted out on the South Lawn as the media waited for Trump to get on Marine One to begin his trip to Mar-a-Lago captured an image of Bannon yelling. Trump was so angry that he kicked Priebus and Bannon off the flight to Florida, stranding them at the White House as he left in a rage.
Within hours, stories laying out what had happened in the Oval Office were leaked to the press. The stories all highlighted Trump’s explosive anger, and several accounts identified Priebus as a central target of the president. Priebus had become White House chief of staff by having a well-honed instinct for self-preservation and would spend the next several hours calling reporters to insist that the president’s ire had been directed at McGahn. Priebus’s decision to focus on how he was portrayed in the media said a lot about how the young Trump administration functioned. The administration faced court fights over the president’s travel ban. There were thousands of open positions in the executive branch to fill. Accusations of Russian collusion swirled. Yet there was the chief of staff, spinning himself out of a mess. It was an impressive level of dysfunction for an administration not yet two months old.
★ ★ ★
MARCH 4, 2017
SEVENTY-FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
MAR-A-LAGO, PALM BEACH, FLORIDA—The Sessions recusal sent Trump spiraling. The morning after the Oval Office blowup, Trump put out a series of tweets claiming that Obama and the FBI had illegally wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign.
For McGahn, the tweets fit a familiar pattern with Trump: An issue (like Sessions and recusal) would enrage him, and a series of tweets afterward would be connected to that rage, even as they often made the situation worse.
But there was another big issue that McGahn had to deal with. The courts had stepp
ed in to rule that the original travel ban—which McGahn’s office had, under pressure, approved—was illegal. Since then, a revised ban had been produced, but Trump was refusing to sign it.
In the hopes of persuading the president, McGahn, Sessions, and other aides flew down to Mar-a-Lago to get Trump to sign the revised travel ban. That evening, they dined with Trump over steaks at Mar-a-Lago to make their case about why he needed to sign it. Trump said he did not want to water it down, even though it had been deemed illegal. Even amid the arguing, despite Trump being so irate a day earlier, at dinner that night at Mar-a-Lago, he was jovial—a reminder of how Trump had been during the campaign.
Still, on the subject of recusal, Trump had kept up his efforts to pressure Sessions. When McGahn wasn’t looking, he confronted Sessions at Mar-a-Lago directly that evening, telling him to unrecuse himself. The president again brought up Holder and Kennedy. Sessions believed that Trump was afraid that without him overseeing the investigation, it could balloon and undermine his presidency.
Meanwhile, amid all the turmoil, Trump’s top strategist thought that there was some news coming out that would help the administration. That weekend, as the White House sought to play up the notion that the intelligence community had run amok, Bannon told others that something damaging would be made public that Monday about the Deep State. Bannon said that you would know it when you saw it.
That Tuesday—a day later than Bannon said the surprise would arrive—WikiLeaks published its first trove of stolen CIA documents, part of a larger tranche that it called Vault 7. Within the thousands of pages of secret documents were several road maps for how the agency could use flaws in software to break into various internet-connected devices like cell phones, computers, and televisions. It was one of the largest-ever leaks of CIA documents, and prosecutors later described its damage to the CIA’s intelligence-gathering efforts as “catastrophic.”
The top strategist to the president of the United States seemed to have prior knowledge that Julian Assange’s operation, notorious for obtaining and dumping highly sensitive government documents onto the internet, would be exposing the intelligence-gathering methods of the agencies of the American government. This was extraordinary, not least for the fact that Assange himself was still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, evading extradition to the United States to face charges for his role in publishing stolen documents from the Iraq War in the Chelsea Manning case.
In the month leading up to the dump, WikiLeaks had repeatedly teased an upcoming release of documents. But the group said nothing about its timing, raising the question, how did Bannon know when the materials were going to come out? Whatever Bannon knew, one of the people closest to the president was giddy that secrets from the American intelligence community were about to be made public. Those types of disclosures almost always damaged the United States’ ability to collect intelligence and protect the country. No matter—Bannon saw it as a way to advance Trump’s narrative.
The following day, as McGahn headed back to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, things got worse.
The FBI, McGahn learned, wanted emails from the government entity that had overseen the transition. The bureau was looking for evidence in the messages related to Flynn’s foreign contacts. This showed that the investigation of Flynn was alive and well and contradicted Flynn’s contention shortly before he was fired that the bureau had closed the investigation. For McGahn it was a bastardized way for the executive branch to function.
If there was wrongdoing to investigate, so be it. But at the least the White House counsel should be notified and kept abreast of what was going on and what documents investigators wanted to see. This was a backdoor way, McGahn thought, for the FBI to rummage through their communications—communications that White House lawyers felt were privileged.
That Sunday night, I broke a story that said, in response to Trump’s tweets, senior Justice Department officials had denied a request by Comey to put out a statement saying that the tweets were false. The decision had angered Comey and his deputies, who believed that Trump’s disinformation needed to be knocked down. The story panicked Sessions and his chief of staff, Jody Hunt, who were already convinced that Sessions could be fired at any time. In the days that followed, Sessions had the United States attorney in Connecticut, John Durham, open a leak investigation into Comey. The handling of the investigation in the weeks that followed unnerved career officials in the deputy attorney general’s office. In a highly unusual move, Sessions’s office—not the deputy attorney general’s office, which runs the day-to-day operations of the department—would oversee the investigations. The Trump administration was less than two months old and the attorney general was already investigating the FBI director.
★ ★ ★
MARCH 15, 2017
SIXTY-THREE DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
A CLASSIFIED BRIEFING ROOM, CAPITOL HILL—In the days and weeks after Trump’s meeting with Comey in the Oval Office on February 14, Comey and his aides debated what to do. The president of the United States had asked him to end an investigation, not based on the facts of the matter, but because Flynn was a “good guy.” And, of course, there is no such thing as a casual request from a president. Obstruction of justice is a criminal offense. When the president intervenes directly in an investigation, is that obstruction of justice? Most people generally assume that people obstruct justice in secret and are careful to conceal their crime. If there was confusion at the bureau over what to make of this, it was because of the brazenness of the president’s behavior: He unabashedly asked the country’s top law enforcement officer, during an ongoing investigation, to look the other way. “Let it go,” he had said. But Comey was afraid to open an investigation into Trump, especially when he had no allies at the Justice Department. He was sick of being the lone ranger and needed an ally. But help was on the way.
Trump had nominated a longtime federal prosecutor from Baltimore named Rod J. Rosenstein to run the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department and be the deputy attorney general. Rosenstein had a reputation as a rule-of-law investigator who avoided partisanship. Before this promotion, he had been the longest-tenured U.S. attorney in the country, having first been appointed to his position in 2005 by President Bush and then remaining in that post throughout the entire Obama administration. Rosenstein’s longevity bothered Comey a bit, because he wondered what types of concessions he had made to be such a “survivor” under both Republicans and Democrats in the Justice Department. Rosenstein probably would not have been Comey’s first choice for the position, but considering Comey’s view of Trump’s inability to recruit “good people,” Rosenstein represented a substantial improvement from the norm. Comey thought that Rosenstein might provide cover as he confronted a president who probably did not like him, and a president with little understanding that law enforcement and politics don’t mix.
“As soon as Rod gets here, we’re going to be okay,” Comey told Patrice. “Rod knows the system. He’s been an AUSA, he knows the FBI’s role, and so we are so much better off with someone like that than a politician who doesn’t understand. Rod will protect us, Rod will wall us off, Rod will be the buffer.”
But there was a problem with Rosenstein’s nomination. The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was overseeing his confirmation, refused to hold a vote on Rosenstein’s nomination until Comey briefed the committee on the details of the Russia investigation. The Justice Department told Comey to do the briefing, believing it was his only way to get Rosenstein on board. In March Comey privately briefed the committee leadership as well as the “Gang of Eight” from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the Trump associates who were under investigation.
Although Comey’s briefings were supposed to be classified, the media quickly found out about the briefing and reported that it had happened, but due to the sensitive informatio
n that Comey had shared with the members, the stories contained few details. Trump saw media speculation about what the meeting could have been about and began to agitate for McGahn to figure out what Comey was up to.
Trump wanted to know as much as possible and was fixated on whether he was personally under investigation. McGahn took the president’s direction and tried to use some of his old contacts to gain visibility on the investigations that were becoming something of an obsession for the president. McGahn was irritated; Comey, remember, was an employee of the executive branch, and here he was telling members of Congress about the investigation and keeping the White House in the dark. Neither the president nor his White House counsel believed it should work that way.
McGahn had been around Washington for two decades and had represented hundreds of Republican members of Congress, so he had relationships with dozens of powerful operators. That Thursday, McGahn called one of them: Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had been in the Gang of Eight briefing. Lawmakers and their allies and friends often shared gossip. But what occurred on the call was highly unusual. The information that Burr had received in the briefing had been classified, but Burr didn’t hesitate to share it all with McGahn. He secretly told McGahn that there were five Trump associates who were under investigation, including Flynn, Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone. A U.S. senator had just informed the White House of the people in the president’s orbit who were under investigation by the FBI.
★ ★ ★
MARCH 20, 2017
FIFTY-EIGHT DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
OVAL OFFICE—As part of his efforts to appease Congress and move along the Rosenstein nomination, Comey also testified publicly before the House Intelligence Committee, revealing that the FBI was investigating ties between the Trump camp and Russia. That disclosure and his refusal to say whether Trump was under investigation set off the president all over again. Trump had already thought that Comey was acting almost like his own branch of government and had made too many of his own headlines while leaking to the media. The testimony triggered extensive coverage that certainly made it seem like the president was under investigation.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 19
