Rosenstein was just two weeks into the job, and he was oblivious to the nightmare he was walking into at the White House. He didn’t realize McGahn expected him to help slow walk the president’s decision or caution Trump on the politics of firing Comey; he heard only McGahn insisting they had to stop Trump from sending the “terrible” termination letter he had crafted with Miller, because it mentioned Comey’s public handling of the Russia case as one of his fireable offenses. At that moment, Rosenstein had ample reason to recommend removing Comey. He had once considered Comey a personal hero, but after the FBI director twice discussed the Clinton email case in public, his credibility was irrevocably damaged in Rosenstein’s mind. Rosenstein also had been briefed about an internal probe that would likely cite Comey’s actions as violating department policy.
During the lunch, Rosenstein got his first clue that something was seriously wrong in the White House. Priebus knocked on McGahn’s door at least two or three separate times to check in, and each time looked more frantic. Where was the letter? the chief of staff demanded to know. “The president wants to get this done,” Priebus said. Amid the fearful rush, there was no orderly planning for who might replace the man they were going to fire.
Some time after 5:00 p.m., Sessions and Rosenstein met with Trump in the Oval Office. This was Rosenstein’s first official meeting with the president, and the experience was disquieting. For the first twenty minutes or so, Trump did all the talking, gesticulating and rat-a-tat-tatting his grievances with Comey: the Clinton investigation; the political bias of his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and his wife’s campaign in Virginia; and, most of all, Comey’s slippery May 3 testimony on Capitol Hill. The president even imitated Comey’s sanctimonious manner, explaining that he had watched him testify for hours on TV and said he planned to fire him pronto.
“How do we do it?” Trump asked.
Uttam Dhillon, a deputy White House counsel, suggested they let him resign. Rosenstein chimed in to say that Comey would never resign. Then Trump called for his assistant to bring in his draft termination letter and showed it to Sessions and Rosenstein, asking them what they thought. As Rosenstein tried to read it, Trump kept talking and peppering him with questions. Rosenstein finished reading and said he agreed with some of it but not all. “For one thing, the first sentence is about Russia,” he said. Why did Trump have to get into that at all?
“Oh, it’s very important to put that in there. I don’t want anyone to think it’s about Russia,” Trump said, prompting confused looks in the room. Trump’s point was that Comey had told him he wasn’t a subject of the Russia probe; therefore, he couldn’t be trying to fire Comey to stop an investigation of himself.
Trump then directed Rosenstein to write a memo to Sessions outlining his case for firing Comey and told Sessions to write a letter with his recommendation. It was around 6:00 p.m. Trump said he wanted both on his desk at 8:00 the next morning.
Rosenstein returned to his office at the Justice Department and huddled with a few staffers to begin writing. They ordered in pizza, with Rosenstein’s still unpacked boxes stacked around the room, and the deputy attorney general stayed until about 3:00 a.m. to finish his draft. Although Trump asked Rosenstein to include in the memo “the Russia stuff,” meaning Comey’s refusal to state publicly that the president was not under investigation, Rosenstein was adamant that it contain only his own views of why Comey should be terminated. He wanted to be able to defend the memo should he ever have to. So he stuck to his own complaint about Comey’s violation of department standards and his public discussion of evidence in the Clinton investigation. “The FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice,” Rosenstein wrote.
After perfecting his prose, Rosenstein delivered the memo to the White House on May 9, several hours after his 8:00 a.m. deadline. He naively expected it would likely go into a West Wing file folder to document the president’s decision process. Instead, the Rosenstein memo became Trump’s golden ticket. The president liked Rosenstein’s critique of Comey and agreed with McGahn to adjust the language of his termination letter, though he still insisted they mention that Comey had told him he wasn’t under investigation in the Russia probe. Still, Trump would lean on Rosenstein’s memo as a key justification for firing the FBI director.
That afternoon, as Trump prepared to set his plan in motion, Priebus came into the Oval Office with a final piece of advice. He spoke loudly. “I want everyone to hear what I’m going to say,” the chief of staff said. “There’s a right way to do this and there’s a wrong way to do this. This is the wrong way to do this. The right way is you bring someone in and you sit down and talk. . . . This is not the right way to go about business.” But Priebus was unpersuasive. Trump had no interest in slowing down, and certainly not in giving Comey a gentleman’s goodbye.
The staffers the president was counting on to spin the firing to the public were still in the dark. At about 4:00 p.m., press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Mike Dubke were called into the Oval Office. They had no idea why. Dubke hurried in, although it took a while to track down Spicer, who was out on the South Lawn mingling with military families at an ice cream social. Trump handed Dubke a piece of paper and said, “What do you think of this?” It was his letter firing Comey. It took a minute for Dubke to process what was happening, and then he said, “You can’t just put this out in a press release. You actually have to deliver this to him, and there’s some protocol we have to follow here.”
“Fine,” Trump said. “Keith, come in here.”
Keith Schiller was single-mindedly loyal to Trump. The physically imposing former New York Police Department counter-narcotics officer had been Trump’s personal bodyguard and director of security for nearly two decades. He would do just about anything for Trump, from punching protesters he considered a threat to forcibly removing journalists to fetching his Big Macs from McDonald’s. At the White House, Schiller was director of Oval Office operations and worked out of a closet-sized office within earshot of the Resolute Desk. Now Trump believed he was honoring his trusted lieutenant with a momentous mission.
“Keith, would you like to fire the head of the FBI?” Trump asked.
“Yes, sir, I would,” Schiller said.
“All right, Keith, you’re going to take this over,” the president said, handing over a big manila envelope that Trump wanted him to use as the delivery package.
Trump was so excited about memorializing this moment in history that he asked the official White House photographer, Shealah Craighead, to come into the Oval to take pictures. Schiller set off to personally deliver the envelope to FBI headquarters, and only then did the White House realize that Comey was traveling on business in Los Angeles. Amid all the hubbub, nobody checked on the FBI director’s whereabouts.
Trump then notified congressional leaders but was surprised when Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer was not supportive. “I thought you’d be on board with this,” Trump told him. “You wanted him gone. Why isn’t this good?”
Spicer and Dubke scrambled to put together a press rollout plan in a matter of minutes. News of Comey’s firing broke at about 5:48 p.m., and bedlam broke out. In the months to come, such firings would feel commonplace. But at this moment Rosenstein was floored. It had never occurred to him that Comey would be executed in so haphazard a way.
Trump, meanwhile, sat in front of the television watching the news coverage and grew angry as the night wore on that his aides weren’t on camera defending him. He was getting crushed rather than cheered. The trouble was, his spokespeople were still hurrying to come up with reasons for Comey’s firing and to settle on their talking points. Exasperated, Trump called Chris Christie.
“What the hell is going on? I’m getting my ass kicked on this,” Trump told his friend.
“You’ve created a shit storm,” Christie told him. “And what about the worst staff work ever? You didn’t fucking know the gu
y was in Los Angeles? You sent Keith Schiller with a letter for a guy who was twenty-nine hundred miles away?”
“I know, I know, fucking incompetence,” Trump said. “Drives me crazy.”
Christie asked Trump why he fired Comey, and the president told him it was because Rosenstein had written a memo outlining the reasons why.
“I’ve got your solution,” Christie said. “Get Rosenstein out on TV now. If this is Rosenstein’s memo, have fucking Rosenstein go out and do it.”
“That’s brilliant. I’m going to call Rod right now and get him out on TV,” the president said, signing off with Christie in a hurry.
Sarah Isgur Flores, the Justice Department’s communications chief, received a call from the White House passing along Trump’s instructions for Rosenstein. “They need you to hold a press conference and say the Comey firing is your idea,” Flores told Rosenstein.
“I can’t do that,” Rosenstein said. “I can’t lie.”
Soon thereafter, Spicer, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway did a round of television interviews from Pebble Beach, the area along the West Wing driveway from which network correspondents did live shots with the illuminated White House in the background. The Trump aides tried to distance the president from the decision and push the false claim that the idea to fire Comey came from Rosenstein. They insisted this firing wasn’t about Russia and that it was a Justice Department recommendation, but they were out of the loop—so much so that both Spicer and Conway stumbled when trying to say the deputy attorney general’s name, pronouncing it both Rosensteen and Rozenstine.
On CNN, Anderson Cooper argued to Conway that it was illogical that Trump, now in his fourth month in office, all of a sudden, after all those “lock her up” chants at his rallies, decided Comey had been unfairly harsh to Clinton in the emails case. “That makes no sense,” Cooper said testily.
“It does make sense,” Conway insisted.
Watching from home in New Jersey wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt, Christie realized that if Conway was on air struggling to explain the decision, Rosenstein couldn’t be persuaded to go on TV. A few minutes later, Christie’s phone rang. It was Conway. Whispering because she was now in the president’s private dining room, Conway told him that CNN was airing a live special at 11:00 p.m. and the president wanted Christie to go on to defend him. Christie was floored.
“You tell the president I’ll go on right after Rosenstein—right after him,” he told Conway.
“I think you’d better tell him,” she replied, handing the phone to Trump.
“You won’t do this for me?” the president asked Christie.
“No, that’s incorrect, sir,” he replied. “I will do it for you right after Rod. I want to hear Rod say on national television that he gave you this memo and that because of this memo you fired Comey. As soon as Rod says that, then I know the words of the hymnal and I can sing from the hymnal.”
There would be no Rosenstein TV appearance. At the Justice Department, he was in his office that night growing red-faced at having been used for cover. Rosenstein called McGahn to relay a warning: He would resign if the White House persisted with its “fake story” that his memo was the pretext for Trump’s firing Comey. “I’m not going to be able to stay here if the whole administration is telling a fake story about me,” he told McGahn.
Rosenstein, fifty-two, one of the George W. Bush appointees who had been trained in the Justice Department rather than elevated for his partisan loyalty, had an unblemished reputation as a scrupulous and methodical U.S. attorney in Maryland. The straitlaced Rosenstein resembled a modern-day Jimmy Stewart, reminding his staff to “always stay humble and kind.” But now, on his fourteenth day on the job, some would say Rosenstein more closely resembled Tom Hagen, the Corleone crime family’s lawyer and consigliere from The Godfather, played in the films by Robert Duvall. He worried his career might be reduced to ashes by a destructive president.
Among his many peers at the Justice Department, there was deep concern that Rosenstein had crossed a dangerous line. “There were only two possible interpretations you could take from what he did,” one department veteran said. “Either he knowingly helped the president fire the FBI director to try to rid himself of this investigation, or Rod was an unwitting tool who got used by the president. Both of them were terrible.”
* * *
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On May 10, a sense of panic took hold at the FBI headquarters, the hulking Soviet-style J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and at the Justice Department headquarters across the street. Many wondered if the Russia probe was now in peril. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, a close ally of Comey’s, overnight became the bureau’s acting director, but he and his colleagues expected he could be removed. “This was a tumultuous time to say the least. It was one, frankly, crazy thing after another,” FBI counsel Jim Baker later recalled in congressional testimony. “The Director being fired because the President doesn’t like the fact that we’re investigating Russia was pretty crazy to my mind.”
The FBI had secretly been considering opening an investigation on Trump for obstructing the Russia probe ever since Comey had returned from a private February 14 meeting with the president in which he referenced the Michael Flynn investigation and said he hoped Comey could “see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Comey had resisted ruling it out in public; he knew one day he might be under investigation. Now some felt Trump’s firing of Comey gave the FBI an urgent reason to investigate. “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” the FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote in a text message to the FBI lawyer Lisa Page, a view supported by McCabe.
Also on May 10, in the middle of the tumult following Comey’s firing, Sessions, Rosenstein, and McCabe ended up in the same room, at a farewell party for Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for the national security division. She was leaving because she feared the Trump administration’s recklessness and detested Sessions, someone she considered a xenophobic misogynist with little respect for the law. Unexpectedly, Rosenstein asked if he could join the list of people making remarks about the Justice Department lifer. He spoke of McCord’s impeccable reputation for putting her duty to the public above politics. In praising her, he tried to remind people who he was and what he valued at a time when many had palpable doubts.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike were expressing serious concerns, with some comparing Trump’s firing of Comey to President Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. “This is nothing less than Nixonian,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “No one should accept President Trump’s absurd justification that he is now concerned that FBI director Comey treated Secretary Clinton unfairly.”
On May 10, Vice President Pence traveled to the Capitol, and reporters shouted out questions about whether Trump was trying to stop the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the election. “Let me be clear with you, that was not what this is about,” Pence said. The vice president knew more than he was sharing, however. He had been in the Oval Office meeting where Trump explained his plan.
That same day, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov happened to be in town. Trump invited Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak into the Oval Office for a meet and greet. With the Comey story dominating the news, the White House blocked the press pool from observing the session with the Russians. But a photographer with the Russian state-run news agency TASS accompanied the Russian contingent and snapped pictures of the jovial, relaxed U.S. president grinning and shaking hands with the Kremlin envoys, images the Russian Foreign Ministry almost immediately posted on Twitter. Trump boasted to the Russians, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then the president told them what he considered
the most important fact everyone doing business with him should know: “I’m not under investigation.”
On May 11, frustrated that his press team had failed to stem the tide of bad headlines, Trump decided he would be his own spokesman. The president sat down with the NBC anchor Lester Holt and told him that he had been going to fire Comey regardless of Rosenstein’s recommendation. He also acknowledged that the Russia investigation influenced his decision. “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 that they should have won,’” Trump told Holt.
On May 11, Rosenstein called together the Justice Department’s senior officials overseeing counterintelligence, national security, and criminal cases for a private strategy session. There was rampant speculation in the media that Trump fired Comey in order to torpedo the FBI’s Russia investigation, but Rosenstein told them to keep at it and to leave no stone unturned. “In my capacity as acting attorney general of the United States, I’m instructing you that you should follow every available lead, and if there’s any wrongdoing, you should uncover it,” he said.
Rosenstein asked those assembled if they believed the Justice Department was capable of continuing to run the Russia investigation or if they thought he should consider appointing a special counsel, as McCabe had been urging. Rosenstein seemed inclined to let the Justice Department continue to run the show. Some officials in the room who felt they did need a special counsel later dubbed it Rosenstein’s “CYA meeting,” or cover your ass, figuring he wanted to later be able to say he asked all his top officials and they agreed.
A Very Stable Genius Page 7
