Obama- An Oral History
Page 38
DAN SHAPIRO
[The UN vote] was definitely not, as the prime minister alleged, a US-planned and -initiated and -advocated event. It was something we knew we might have to deal with. We had to make the call when we saw it, and the president did that.
CODY KEENAN
I don’t have a whole lot about what was going on behind the scenes with Russia stuff. Hillary people blamed us for not speaking up about it during the campaign, but my thinking there was, if Barack Obama got involved and started saying during the campaign that Russia’s trying to swing the election, that suddenly would make it very political.
JONATHAN FINER
There was a consensus among almost everybody that this was an incredibly serious thing that needed to be investigated by both law enforcement and intelligence professionals so that we could determine exactly what had happened and remove as much doubt as possible as to who was responsible or what had taken place.
TERRY SZUPLAT
They actively meddled in our election in an attempt to influence the outcome. This was not an ally. This was an adversary. I didn’t think NATO’s expansion east caused this. I didn’t think anything that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama did caused this. This was all rooted in a fundamentally different worldview that Putin and those around him have had.
JONATHAN FINER
What had happened was so egregious and so unprecedented—at least in terms of the fact we were entering a new age of cyber-espionage used for political purposes—that we could not just let this pass. So what we ended up doing was a series of statements as we developed a clearer understanding of what had happened, that laid out publicly, in October and then again in January, what we knew.
CODY KEENAN
Had we spoken out during the election it would have just hardened people’s stances. The voters on the right would have said, He’s making all this up, the fix is in, it’s bullshit, and he was always averse to politicizing foreign policy. And you know, there had been a lot of those discussions, but that had to be a hard decision to make.
JONATHAN FINER
In October, seventeen intelligence agencies came together to say that Russia had done this, but did not really wade into the question of why or with what intent, and then in January, a similar declaration that the intent was actually to help one candidate, Mr. Trump, and at the expense of the other, Secretary Clinton. We also expelled dozens of Russian officials who were under diplomatic cover but who we believed were related to the intelligence activity. We imposed sanctions on Russian intelligence entities and closed two Russian diplomatic facilities that we thought were used, to some extent, for intelligence purposes: one in Maryland and one in New York State.
TERRY SZUPLAT
Vladimir Putin and those around him saw their interests threatened by the United States, or they perceived them to be threatened, and they perceived that their path toward status and influence regionally and around the world was to oppose and challenge the United States, and to create a buffer of weak or pro-Russian countries around their periphery.
JONATHAN FINER
People argued that we should have gone further. That maybe the president himself should have spoken to this; that maybe we should have called for the establishment of some independent commission, but this was an incredibly complicated issue at an incredibly complicated time and that was the way we chose to handle it.
JOSH LIPSKY
Obviously, you look back and see things could have been done differently. I think most decisions that were made, at the time, made sense. It didn’t mean the right decisions were made, but I understood the logic behind them.
JEN PSAKI
But the last couple of days, there was a realization. We were cleaning out our offices. Most of our staff had left by the last week, and the president was, I thought, pretty tired and wistful about leaving. We didn’t spend a ton of time talking about that. We just all kind of tried to enjoy the moments we were there.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
Think about any moment in your life. High school, college, a graduation-type moment where you were saying bye to a set of people who had helped you grow, who had worked side by side with you, that you cared about deeply. High school for most people is four years. College for most people is four years. For a lot of us, this was ten years, this general cast of friends and colleagues. The emotion heightened just by duration, by time, and then by the scale and scope of what we did together, and then it’s further heightened because we’re all disappointed in the election outcome. I remember, those couple days, feeling really grateful for the people, a deep amount of affection for the people I was saying goodbye to.
DAVID CUSACK
On the nineteenth, I actually had pneumonia, but we made sure we wanted to transfer the building and everything over to the next administration the same way that Bush 43 did to us. My team spent the night going through each office space making sure nothing was damaged or broken, because by that point we had off-boarded about 430 out of the 450 employees. And so they went around—obviously they had drinks in hand—and made sure everything was copacetic.
PETE SOUZA
The rest of my staff was already gone. The way they off-boarded people, you did it over the last two weeks. I was the only one left in my office.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
Valerie and I did, like, four laps around the grounds on the nineteenth. And I don’t remember if it was the nineteenth or the eighteenth, but I had just come from some goodbye and was rushing from the second floor of the West Wing and was cutting through the lobby. I was going to the East Wing for something, or maybe I was going to the Roosevelt Room, I forget. But I ran into Lieutenant General Flynn. You know, it just made real the transition that was about to happen.
JOSH LIPSKY
The night of the nineteenth, I remember walking to the Metro with my box of stuff and there was a sea of people in MAGA hats coming towards us because they were going to the Mall. There was a concert at the Lincoln the night of the nineteenth, and it was such a strange scene. This was the physical manifestation of the transition of power.
KORI SCHULMAN
For the inauguration, people said how you wouldn’t be able to walk or take a cab—that there’d be no way you’d get to the White House complex, which, in both cases, turned out to be utterly false. We were down to a real skeleton crew, and I was the only person left on my team. So I was there superlate on the nineteenth and came back on the twentieth when it was still dark. I was paranoid about not being able to get onto the complex or into the building, which, again, was no problem.
JOSH LIPSKY
They told us we didn’t need to go into work, so I just stayed home and watched.
DAVID CUSACK
Most of my team slept overnight in their offices—either on the couches or on couch cushions—and I walked in at like seven o’clock in the morning. They were just getting up, so I had gone and bought them donuts and orange juice. They were brewing coffee. So from there, it was like seven to nine or so finishing all the work. A little bit after nine, I went up to the Navy steps so that I could watch Trump arrive from the church to the tea. So I watched that, and then walked over to the West Wing to do a sweep through each floor, to make sure everything was copacetic, and then I sat down in the Roosevelt Room where Anita [Breckenridge] was and Ben [Rhodes] and some of the other folks, because the bus for Andrews was leaving at eleven thirty.
KORI SCHULMAN
The few people there on January 20 had to turn over whatever remaining pieces of technology they had in the Roosevelt Room. And so I went into the Roosevelt Room, and there were the two doors—there’s obviously the one from the hallway to the West Wing lobby and then the one that the president would use from the Oval, and that door was propped open. And through the door, you could just see them, with the couch on its side, changing over the Oval. That’s a visual I’ll never be able to unsee.
DAVID CUSACK
They all left right around eleven thirty to get on the bu
ses to [Joint Base Andrews], and so I was the last remaining Obama staffer. I went into the Outer Oval and sat at Brian Mosteller’s desk for about twenty minutes or so, and it was pretty mellow . . . and at 11:54 a.m., four people walked in. One was an [Office of Administration] person. The other three were Trumpers. I stood up and said, “We’re still president for five more minutes. Please leave.” And the OA person looked at me, and I was like, “I’m serious.” So he turned around and brought them back out. I know that might sound petty, but we were still president until 11:59 a.m. So I went and sat back down at Brian’s desk, and exactly at 11:59 I stood up and walked out to the colonnade.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
I don’t remember seeing Marine One take off.
PETE SOUZA
I planted myself on a bench seat right across from him. I wanted to make sure that I was on that helicopter. I couldn’t make that picture unless I was on the helicopter.
President Obama aboard Marine One. January 20, 2017. Pete Souza, White House
PETE SOUZA
If you go back in history with the last five presidents, everyone had a similar picture. But every picture was of the Capitol, and so I did not have a conversation with the pilot. I just assumed that they would circle the Capitol, and for whatever reason, they didn’t. Then I still kind of took pictures of him and Michelle, and the pilot finally flew over the White House. It came into view through the window, and then I got my shot. But I never even thought about trying to get a picture of him looking at the White House. In my mind I was thinking about a picture of him looking at the Capitol. That’s what I had seen by previous White House photographers with previous presidents.
DAVID CUSACK
When I left, I crossed West Exec. I took a photo, like a selfie, because right over my shoulder were all the new Trump employees taking a group photo outside the West Wing, and the time stamp was exactly noon. And that was a really long walk home.
PETE SOUZA
For the most part he kept his emotions pretty in check. Whatever he was feeling would be conjecture on my part. Certainly any president, after eight years of enormous responsibility and hard work, would look forward to, Okay, I did what I did. I did what I could. And now it’s time to turn it over to somebody else. I think that’s what he’d say.
* * *
190 One month before his successor was to take the oath of office, President Obama cited a 1953 law to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in more than one hundred million acres of US Arctic waters, which allowed “the president of the United States . . . from time to time [to] withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf.” The statute included no provision for rescinding the order, meaning any attempt by a subsequent administration to reverse it could be stymied by court challenges for years.
191 The Congressional Review Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, allows Congress sixty legislative days to review and overrule any regulation issued by government agencies by a simple majority.
192 A common rule-making procedure for proposed regulations, which are posted and open to comment by the public for input.
193 On December 23, 2016, the United Nations Security Council presented Resolution 2334, which asserted “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.” Fourteen members voted for “condemning all measures aimed at altering . . . the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.”
“Expressing grave concern,” the resolution went on, “that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously [imperiling] the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines.” No nations voted against the resolution. The US abstained from the vote.
194 “Regrettably, some seem to believe that the US friendship means the US must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles—even after urging again and again that the policy must change. Friends need to tell each other the hard truths, and friendships require mutual respect . . .
“They fail to recognize that this friend, the United States of America, that has done more to support Israel than any other country, this friend that has blocked countless efforts to delegitimize Israel, cannot be true to our own values—or even the stated democratic values of Israel—and we cannot properly defend and protect Israel if we allow a viable two-state solution to be destroyed before our own eyes. And that’s the bottom line. The vote in the United Nations was about preserving the two-state solution. That’s what we were standing up for. Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living side by side in peace and security with its neighbors . . .
“The truth is that trends on the ground—violence, terrorism, incitement, settlement expansion, and the seemingly endless occupation—they are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality that most people do not actually want.” —Secretary Kerry, in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the Department of State, December 28, 2016.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The interviews for this oral history were conducted and recorded in person or by phone from May 2016 to October 2017. A handful of quotes came via email follow-ups, and, in some cases, merged with previous transcripts (ellipses noted).
I personally transcribed every audio file save one brief call. (Nothing personal, Reggie Love—I just didn’t find that masochistic impulse to do them all myself until after I sent your interview to an online service.) I have also taken the liberty of inserting bracketed text for accuracy and editing quotes for the sake of brevity and clarity, while mindful not to alter the substance of the transcript. The most common instances include grammar usage (except where colloquial use better serves the flow); verb tenses; gratuitous usage of adjectives/adverbs (“really,” “very,” “kinda,” “sorta”); expletive constructions (“there are,” “here are,” “there is”); clichés (“at the end of the day”); and, for lack of a better term, verbal tics (“I mean,” “um,” “ah”—again, except where it’s occasionally useful to signal reluctance or clearly distinguish a statement as opinion or speculation—e.g., “I think”).
A few interview subjects requested that I overhaul their transcripts if I came across excessive verbiage or their prattling on. Ellipses are used throughout to indicate breaks in transcripts—i.e., fusing sentences in conversation that were not spoken one immediately after the other—and all quotes are applied within the context of their respective conversational threads. So you won’t find a White House aide saying, “This is why Republicans are bad!” in a passage about health-care legislation if the interviewee said it with regard to, say, blocking judicial nominations or birtherism.
Lastly, this oral history was unauthorized. Dozens of participants had already spoken to me over a span of several months before I connected with and received cooperation from the Obama White House, the Obama Foundation, and the postpresidency Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, to my editors: David Blum, who took a chance on this project before I had cultivated a single source in Obamaworld, I’m not sure where I’d be today if it had not been for your faith in me; and Laura Van der Veer, for your patience with my neuroses and your steady hand throughout. To my accomplices and colleagues: Meredith Jacobson, for copyediting your guts out; Drew Salisbury, for pitching in on footnotes; Sarah Rackoff, for help on all the financial stuff; Tosten Burks and Jay Ruttenberg, for the extra sets of eyes on those chapter intros; Roni Greenwood, your fact-checking kept me on my toes; and for the generosity of the staff at Tavern on Jane in Manhattan, where I spent hours poring over the MS with red pens, and for the compassion from friends at 68 Jay Street Bar in Brooklyn, where I convalesced too often.
And to the hundreds of DC alums who answered my calls and emails, on and off the record: thanks again for making the time.
APPENDIX
Parentheses indicate years served up to January 20, 2017.
EXEC
UTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Office of the Chief of Staff
White House Chief of Staff
Rahm Emanuel (2009–2010)
Bill Daley (2011–2012)
Jack Lew (2012–2013)
Denis McDonough (2013–2017)
White House Deputy Chief of Staff
Jim Messina (2009–2011)
Mona Sutphen (2009–2011)
Nancy-Ann DeParle (2011–2013)
Alyssa Mastromonaco (2011–2014)
Mark B. Childress (2012–2014)
Rob Nabors (2013–2015)
Anita Breckenridge (2014–2017)
Kristie Canegallo (2014–2017)
Counselor to the President
Pete Rouse (2011–2014)
John Podesta (2014–2015)
Senior Advisor to the President
Valerie Jarrett (2009–2017)
Pete Rouse (2009–2010)
David Axelrod (2009–2011)
David Plouffe (2011–2013)
Dan Pfeiffer (2013–2015)
Brian Deese (2015–2017)
Shailagh Murray (2015–2017)
Office of the National Security Advisor
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
James L. Jones (2009–2010)
Tom Donilon (2010–2013)
Susan Rice (2013–2017)
Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications (2009–2017)
Tom Donilon (2009–2010)
Denis McDonough (2010–2013)
Tony Blinken (2013–2015)
Avril Haines (2015–2017)
Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism