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

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Despite all of Trump’s public bluster about Mueller, it had not yet been reported that he tried to fire him, or that Mueller was investigating it. Of course, it made sense. But like many features of the Trump presidency, it was unprecedented. Trump’s public and private behavior had not been curbed by the investigation. Appeals from staff and lawyers to be more careful might as well have been in a foreign language. He had not been chastened. If anything, his behavior had grown only more erratic and angry. He had fired Comey the previous May. He had spent much of July trying to get Sessions to resign. Mueller was the next logical target. The way the president tried to do it also appeared to fit a pattern: Trump seemed afraid to take any action for himself and sought to use someone else—in this case McGahn—to do the deed.

  It was also significant because it showed that Mueller’s team had at the same time both tightened its focus and opened its aperture even wider, investigating actions the president had taken after Mueller had been appointed. An investigation that had started with a focus on the Comey firing had now become an ongoing inquiry into actions the president was taking to thwart the same investigation into him and his campaign. It also showed how Trump sought to use his power as the head of the executive branch to fire someone for reasons that his own lawyers believed were frivolous. Unlike other presidents, who fired heads of departments and agencies, Trump sought to reach down into the Justice Department and oust a particular prosecutor whose chief mission involved investigating him, his family, and his closest associates. Removing Mueller would send the unmistakable message to everyone else in the Justice Department: Investigate the president at your peril.

  When we arrived at our destination, I got off the train and scribbled down everything I could remember from our conversation. And then I called my colleague Maggie Haberman.

  “He tried to fire Mueller,” I said.

  I didn’t have to say anything else.

  ★ ★ ★

  JANUARY 25, 2018

  ONE YEAR, TWO MONTHS, AND TWENTY-FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT

  NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU—At 8:14 p.m. on Thursday, January 25, six weeks after McGahn first told Mueller’s investigators about the firing attempt, our story went up on the Times website under the headline “Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit.”

  Trump was a man whose only measure of success or failure had always been his media coverage. By that measure, January 2018 had been a bruising and bountiful month. In the first week of the year, leaks from the first tell-all to be written about Trump’s presidency began to seep into the news cycle—with cable news networks covering every scintillating excerpt from Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff as breaking news. It painted a damning picture of a chaotic White House run by an out-of-control president. Instead of ignoring it, Trump brought more attention to it by tweeting about it and threatening to sue one of the book’s main sources—his now former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

  In the second week of January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had paid off a porn actress to cover up an affair prior to the election—in probable violation of federal law. In discussions after the story appeared that involved McGahn and other senior aides, Trump lied to them, saying he knew nothing about the payments. Around that time, The Washington Post reported that Trump complained to aides privately that the United States accepted immigrants from “shithole countries.”

  Any one of those three crises—a tell-all, a campaign finance allegation tied to a porn star, or slurs by the president against other countries—would throw any White House off. But the news that the president had tried to fire Mueller was a next-level crisis, creating not only a media firestorm but also a legal threat from the special counsel’s office, demonstrating that prosecutors had fresh evidence he had obstructed justice and were closely monitoring his conduct in office. He could see that Mueller’s team was taking direct aim at him and was using one of the people closest to him to do it.

  The White House’s response to the story was a clinic in chaos—a near-perfect demonstration of how the Trump administration worked, or didn’t work.

  Without a plan, Trump, his lawyers, his aides, and Fox News started blindly counterpunching whatever and whomever they could. All of this meant that Burck and McGahn had to gird for the incoming, because Trump was on the loose. McGahn knew that he would be forced to fend off the president while also staying in Mueller’s good graces.

  Fox News went to work to undermine the story. Forty-five minutes after it posted, Sean Hannity’s show started, and he immediately went on the attack.

  “At this hour, The New York Times is trying to distract you,” Hannity said. “They have a story that Trump wanted Mueller fired sometime last June, and our sources, I’ve checked in with many of them, they are not confirming that tonight. And the president’s attorney dismissed the story and says, no, no comment, we are not going there. How many times has The New York Times, and others, gotten it wrong?”

  But by the final segment of the show, Hannity changed his tune.

  “So we have sources tonight just confirming to Ed Henry that, yeah, maybe Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict. Does he not have the right to raise those questions? You know we’ll deal with this tomorrow night.”

  Then he finished his show with “a shocking video of the day.” He played footage of a police chase in Arizona that ended with a red SUV flying through an intersection and striking an oncoming car head-on.

  The president was traveling home from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and Air Force One turned into a traveling rapid-response operation above the Atlantic Ocean, with Trump berating his lawyers over the phone and berating the aides with him. In response to Trump’s rage, Dowd called Burck and told him that the president wanted McGahn to put out a statement refuting the story. Fat chance, Burck told Dowd.

  Burck called McGahn. The two discussed Trump’s demand, quickly agreeing they could not put out a statement contradicting what he had told Mueller. McGahn felt confident by that point in the investigation that he faced no legal exposure for his role advising the president. He wasn’t about to jeopardize that by listening to the president now. Such a statement would be a lie, it would undermine McGahn’s credibility with Mueller’s team, and it would severely weaken an obstruction investigation against the president.

  McGahn and Burck had few good options to satisfy Trump, and as with Comey almost exactly one year earlier, who had found himself dealing with an enraged president who was making requests that he could not accommodate, they sought to do something around the edges that could buy them some time and space. One of their few options was undermining the accuracy of the story. Maybe if Trump saw reports that called the story inaccurate, he would back off. McGahn and Burck believed the story gave the strong impression that McGahn had threatened to resign directly to Trump. Nowhere in the story had Maggie and I written that. Rather, we had written that after McGahn received the president’s order to fire Mueller, he had “refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead.” There might be an opening to confuse the story and mollify Trump.

  McGahn called Robert Costa, a well-respected political reporter at the Post. McGahn had known Costa from his time representing Republican House and Senate members in the years before Trump ran for president. On background, speaking as “a person familiar with the episode,” McGahn told Costa that he never told Trump directly that he planned to resign. The Post reported that, and McGahn crossed his fingers that the ploy would calm Trump down.

  For a time, Trump’s angst about the story dissipated. In the days that followed, as the story received less attention in the media, there is little evidence Trump did anything more than occasionally complain about it to aides. It would take more media coverage of the story to resurrect it as an issue for the pre
sident.

  A week after the story broke, NBC’s Meet the Press booked Reince Priebus to appear on that Sunday’s show. Trump had fired Priebus in July, just six days after Priebus slow-walked an order by the president to get Sessions to resign. Unlike others, Priebus had been struggling to find his place in Washington in his post–White House life. He returned to his old firm as a private lawyer, marketing himself as a Trump insider who could help companies navigate Washington and the administration, Trump’s humiliation of him notwithstanding. He remained loyal to Trump, hoped the president might give him another job, and worried about what the president thought and said about him.

  In the lead-up to the appearance, Priebus had several conversations with Burck about what to say on the show regarding the investigation. Burck had by then established some general ground rules in an effort to keep his clients out of trouble. Priebus must refrain from having conversations with Trump about Mueller and stay away from any questions the press may ask about the investigation. But Priebus felt conflicted about what to do on Meet the Press. Trump, of course, would be watching, and Priebus would almost certainly be asked about the attempt to fire Mueller.

  “I gotta say something, and I didn’t know that was happening,” Priebus told Burck, referring to Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller.

  Burck failed to understand why he had to say anything and wanted to protect Priebus from himself and stop him from going anywhere near discussing the investigation publicly.

  Burck could tell from his interactions with Mueller’s team that they were closely watching everything Trump tweeted and said publicly and everything that witnesses were saying in the media. Mueller’s team already had questions about whether Priebus had been forthcoming about what he knew regarding Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador during the campaign. And now they would likely want to pin Priebus down on what he knew about specific events—like the Mueller firing—and any daylight between his public statements and what he told investigators could set off new problems. By that point in the investigation, Mueller’s office had charged four Americans—Trump’s former campaign chairman and deputy campaign chairman, a campaign foreign policy adviser, and the president’s first national security adviser. Two of the four had pleaded guilty to only one charge: making false statements to investigators. Ringing up Priebus for lying would add another notch to the prosecutors’ belts and help make the case that Trump’s administration, like his campaign, was run through with corrupt liars.

  “Why are you going to get in the middle of this thing?” Burck said. “You ‘didn’t know’ doesn’t change whether the story is true. All you can say is ‘I don’t know,’ and the president isn’t going to like that. Just say you can’t talk about it.”

  Priebus knew “I can’t talk about it” would not sit well with Trump. Unknown to Burck, Priebus had just received a call from Trump, who was at Mar-a-Lago. Priebus told the president that he planned to appear on Meet the Press. The president told him that the story about the attempt to fire Mueller was bullshit and that he never told McGahn to have Mueller dismissed.

  In the time between that call and the interview, Priebus decided to completely defy his lawyer and ignore his advice. He would instead do his best to help the president.

  “Of all the things that we went through in the West Wing, I never felt that the president was going to fire the special counsel,” Priebus said on the air.

  “I think it was very clear by the president’s own words that he was concerned about the conflicts of interest that he felt that the special counsel had,” Priebus added later in the interview. “And he made that very clear. Perhaps someone interpreted that to mean something else. But I know the difference between ‘fire that person, why isn’t that person gone,’ to what I read in that New York Times piece. So when I read that, I’m just telling you I didn’t feel that when I was there.”

  In a sense, Priebus might have been truthful, because McGahn never told him exactly why he planned to resign. But in other parts of the interview, Priebus was less truthful, saying that he never thought there was “some sort of collusion or some kind of obstruction situation going on in the West Wing.”

  That statement directly contradicted what he had told Mueller’s investigators weeks earlier when he said that he himself had been prepared to resign the previous July when Trump asked him to force Sessions to resign so that he could install a more useful attorney general who could curtail the Russia investigation.

  The Sunday of the Meet the Press appearance, Trump saw the show, called his former chief of staff to say he had done a great job, and repeated that he “never said any of those things about” firing Mueller.

  Burck, who was in Minneapolis with his wife for that evening’s Super Bowl between the Patriots and the Eagles, flew into a rage when he saw the transcript from Meet the Press. Just after Trump called Priebus, Burck called him, too. What the fuck are you doing? he screamed into the phone. Life with these White House clients was a nonstop crisis.

  Mueller’s team would of course have seen Priebus’s performance on Meet the Press. And so to head off a potential problem, Burck called the special counsel’s office on Monday to say that Priebus had made a mistake in what he said on television and stood by what he had told investigators. To Burck, the prosecutors did not seem too worked up by what Priebus had said, but in the weeks that followed, they would schedule another interview with Priebus to investigate whether Trump had tampered with their witness.

  Burck had more immediate and bigger problems, though, because Trump was still on the loose.

  The Meet the Press interview intensified public interest in stories about the firing attempt, putting it front of mind for Trump again. He renewed his complaints about it to aides, telling the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, it was “bullshit” and saying that McGahn had leaked the story to the Times to make himself look good.

  Trump thought something drastic had to be done to repair the damage the story had done to him. He told Porter he wanted McGahn to create a written record that said the president never told him to fire Mueller. The president wanted McGahn to document a lie. Porter, a lawyer, was conflicted. He found it hard to believe Trump had so explicitly told McGahn to fire Mueller the previous June, but at the same time realized the problems with the president leaning on a key witness. Porter told Trump he thought an issue like this should be dealt with by the West Wing’s communications office. But Trump was insistent: McGahn needed to create an internal White House letter “for our records” to give the president something more concrete than a statement to the media to refute the story. The president then unleashed on McGahn, telling Porter that McGahn was a “lying bastard.”

  Then the president upped the ante even more.

  “If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him,” Trump said.

  For Trump, this lie was becoming the condition for McGahn to keep his job.

  In some ways, Trump’s decision to lean on Porter made sense. He served as the staff secretary, spent much of the day with Trump, and had a relationship with McGahn. But the move appeared more sinister. Trump knew that McGahn knew that if he fired him, Porter would be a favorite to replace him. Porter had started dating Hope Hicks several months earlier. The two were spending time with Jared and Ivanka, who deeply distrusted McGahn for, among other things, raising questions about whether their business dealings violated federal ethics laws. Jared and Ivanka wanted Porter to become the White House counsel, and Dina Powell, a deputy national security adviser and ally of Jared and Ivanka’s, had spoken with Porter about taking the position the previous month. But in targeting Porter to pressure McGahn, Trump had once again found one of the most vulnerable people around him to do something that he was afraid of doing himself.

  For reasons that had nothing to do with Mueller or McGahn, Porter was in the midst of his own scandal. Four days earlier, the Daily Mail
reported that Hicks and he were dating and published photographs of them kissing in the back of a taxi. The tabloid attention led to reporters poking around his personal life, discovering that he had also been accused of physically abusing both of his ex-wives.

  Porter, walking up to the line of helping Trump tamper with a witness, went to McGahn and told him what the president wanted him to do. McGahn shrugged off the request, saying the story was true. Porter then told McGahn that Trump said he might fire him if he refused to write the letter. “He’s full of shit,” McGahn said. For someone who had become famous on television for firing people, the president feared actually firing people, and he knew that the consequences for ousting McGahn could be catastrophic. But McGahn had again grown so frustrated working for Trump that a sort of fatalism had set in; if he was fired, his misery would be over.

  “The fucking guy can’t fire me, but maybe he will, fine,” McGahn said. “So if he wants to fire me, fire me.”

  McGahn had been confiding in real time with Burck. He wanted a sounding board for how to navigate Trump, and he wanted someone to help him document what had occurred so that he could protect himself. Burck could see the pressure building on McGahn from Trump, and he decided he had to reach out to Quarles and Goldstein. Throughout the investigation, Burck always wanted to be the first in the door to tell the prosecutors about anything unexpected or potentially complicated that could come up with his clients. By being the first to tell the prosecutors, he could keep up the goodwill. But tactically, it also might soften the blow in case something went sideways and would likely keep the prosecutors from overreacting. And if the prosecutors first knew the version of events from Burck, it would be harder for accusations to come up later that McGahn had done something to help the president break the law. Burck believed this marked one of those occasions. In a telephone call, he told Mueller’s team about how Trump had reacted to the story.