By Friday, May 12, Rosenstein seemed rocked by the stress of the week. He was scheduled to give short remarks at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s green-glass headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, as part of an annual wreath-laying ceremony in honor of personnel who died trying to investigate drug traffickers. He arrived early. He was a jumble of exhaustion and emotion. And his host was one of Comey’s best friends, Chuck Rosenberg, the agency’s acting director and a standout career prosecutor. Like Rosenstein, Rosenberg had come up through the department and been named a U.S. attorney by President Bush.
Rosenberg ushered the deputy attorney general into a nearby office and closed the door. They spoke privately for a few minutes. Rosenstein had some trepidation at seeing Rosenberg, and tried to explain to him that things were more complicated than they appeared and he was sorry he couldn’t say more. The two men walked out, and Rosenstein delivered the remarks he had prepared. He spoke with reverence for the rule of law—that framework of principles that promised impartiality, accountability, transparency, and basic fairness—which Trump was undermining daily.
* * *
—
McCabe had been pushing Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to safeguard the Russia investigation, but Comey took matters into his own hands. Comey didn’t trust Rosenstein to be independent or aggressive enough in overseeing the probe nor to dig into the president’s efforts to obstruct it. Trump taunted his fired FBI director with a tweet the morning of May 12: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Over that Mother’s Day weekend, Trump’s tweet about “tapes” wormed itself into Comey’s subconscious, and he woke up in the middle of the night on Monday, May 15, and realized he had a weapon he could use: his own version of “tapes.” Comey decided to leak the contemporaneous memo he had written about Trump saying “letting this go” regarding the Flynn investigation, which showed the president trying to interfere with and obstruct a criminal investigation, asking a friend, the Columbia University law professor Dan Richman, to share details of the memo. On May 16, Michael Schmidt of The New York Times published them: “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.”
Rosenstein was dumbfounded. The memo was a critical piece of evidence for investigators, but instead of giving it to the Justice Department, Comey had directed that it be publicized in the press. “Why would Comey do that?” Rosenstein asked McCabe that night. Rosenstein thought to himself, “Why didn’t anyone tell me the FBI director was keeping a book on the president?”
Rosenstein realized Comey’s memo changed the landscape. He rationalized that he would name a special counsel only if he were confident that that man or woman could do a better job leading the Russia investigation than the FBI’s career investigators on the team known as Crossfire Hurricane. It had to be someone who understood national security and cyber warfare, someone with unimpeachable credibility, deft management skills, and absolute discretion. In Rosenstein’s estimation, there was only one person who fit the bill. So he called Robert Mueller.
Five
THE G-MAN COMETH
President Trump was deep into his search for a new FBI director on May 16, 2017, when a stone-faced, central-casting G-man was secretly escorted into the White House. Robert Mueller had the kind of law-and-order credentials and don’t-mess-with-me look that Trump prized: champion athlete, Princeton grad, Marine Corps platoon leader, federal prosecutor, FBI director through the first twelve years of the war on terrorism, chiseled jaw, neatly cropped silver hair, and permanent glower.
A living legend in the law enforcement community, Mueller, seventy-two, was now finally in a kind of semiretirement in private practice at WilmerHale, one of Washington’s most prestigious firms. He made clear to Trump’s advisers that he had no interest in returning to the FBI, which he directed for two years longer than the standard ten years at President Obama’s request, before retiring in 2013. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions had urged him to meet with the president nevertheless.
The plan was simple: Get Mueller to explain the modern FBI to Trump—its evolution from helping put mob bosses in jail to spotting terror cells before they could strike—as well as to emphasize its historically important political independence. Trump advisers figured the president might be drawn to Mueller’s résumé and therefore internalize his points. Maybe then Trump would have a better idea of who should succeed James Comey as FBI director and, importantly, restrain himself from improper interference.
Mueller arrived in the West Wing through a back entrance, so as not to be spotted by the media. He was intimidating. He stepped toward Steve Bannon, who was going over an unrelated task with communications adviser Hope Hicks just outside the Oval Office, and extended his hand to introduce himself. “Hey, Steve, Bob Mueller,” he said.
Mueller made a friendly aside about their shared background in the military. “I can’t believe a member of the senior naval service allowed his daughter to matriculate at West Point,” Mueller told Bannon, who had been an officer in the navy. Bannon was surprised and impressed that Mueller knew where one of his daughters, Maureen, was in college. “Here’s the bad news,” Bannon said. “She actually was recruited by the Naval Academy.”
They both laughed and talked a bit longer, but Bannon couldn’t help feeling distracted, even a little spooked. He thought about how much homework Mueller must have done to study up on a Trump aide he wasn’t even scheduled to meet. “This guy is so fucking good to do the research,” Bannon thought to himself.
The curved door of the Oval Office opened, and Mueller was waved inside to meet Trump. Joining them were Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Don McGahn. Mueller tried to explain that he wasn’t interested in becoming FBI director again, but Trump seemed to be the only person in the room who didn’t catch on to the fact that this wasn’t a real job interview.
There was something else Trump didn’t know. Rosenstein had privately called Mueller the previous week and asked him to consider taking the job of special counsel if Rosenstein decided to appoint one. Rosenstein had told Mueller that he hadn’t yet decided, and Mueller had been courteous but noncommittal, giving Rosenstein neither a yes nor a no.
Normally, aides could count on Trump lighting up in the presence of someone with Mueller’s pedigree, but his body language—crossed arms, a mildly bored expression—revealed he wasn’t taking a shine to the former FBI director. Trump puffed himself up, eager to impress, but Mueller had a taciturn and nonplussed demeanor, the look of a man trying to be polite but biting his tongue. During their session lasting less than an hour, Mueller made no effort to praise the man sitting behind the Resolute Desk.
* * *
—
The next day, May 17, Trump delivered a commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Families and faculty gathered to celebrate a transformative milestone of young lives, but the president vented to the graduates about his personal pain. “No politician in history—and I say this with great surety—has been treated worse or more unfairly,” he said.
Back in Washington that afternoon, Trump had another raft of interviews with FBI director candidates. Vice President Pence, Sessions, Rosenstein, and McGahn, along with a few other aides, were typically present for these sessions. They would brief Trump on each person’s background and confer with him between each interview, to see what he had thought of the candidate who had just come through. Rosenstein took a special interest in the process and was proud to have lassoed top-notch contenders. But after the first interview that afternoon, McGahn noticed that someone was missing.
“Where’s Rod?” McGahn asked.
“I haven’t seen him all day,” replied Jody Hunt, chief of staff to Sessions.
They continued with the next interview, but a few minutes into the session an aide peeked her head into the Oval to tell McGahn he had an important call. The White House counsel ducked out and picked up the line.
“It’s Rod,” the v
oice on the phone said.
McGahn was relieved. “Hey, we’re interviewing FBI directors over here,” he told Rosenstein. “Where are you?”
“I gotta tell you something,” the deputy attorney general said. “I just appointed a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.”
McGahn was surprised. He felt as if a flash from a camera had gone off in his face and closed his eyes.
“What?” McGahn said, trying to get some purchase. “You did what?”
Rosenstein repeated himself.
McGahn inhaled and exhaled slowly, thinking of all this would mean.
“Okay, Rod,” he said, regaining his composure. “Got it. How much time do I have?”
Rosenstein told McGahn he had a few hours. “This won’t be public right away,” he said.
McGahn returned to the Oval and the interview in progress. His brain was working so fast on this new development he barely processed anything the candidate or Trump said. He couldn’t wait for it to end. In the meantime, an aide poked her head in to say there was someone waiting on the line for Sessions. The attorney general stepped out of the room. Rosenstein delivered the same news he had just given McGahn.
Sessions returned to the Oval, his face white as a piece of paper. He sat down in one of the armchairs forming a semicircle in front of the president’s Resolute Desk. He turned sideways to look at McGahn, his gallows expression revealing his fear of what was to come. McGahn cut short the interview, telling Trump and the candidate that their allotted time had come to an end. After the door closed behind the candidate, McGahn said, “I think the attorney general needs to tell you something.”
“What is it, Jeff?” Trump said.
“Well, uh, Mr. President,” Sessions said, lifting a finger up, then pausing and looking down at the floor. “Well, uh, we have a special counsel.” He explained Rosenstein had appointed Mueller.
Trump looked at McGahn, genuinely confused.
“What he’s trying to say is Rod just appointed a special counsel and has picked Bob Mueller to investigate the Russia stuff,” McGahn told him.
“What did you just say?” Trump asked, aghast.
“Jeff, is this true?”
Sessions nodded, looking down to avoid the president’s gaze.
“You’re serious?” Trump asked.
“Serious as a heart attack,” McGahn replied.
There was a palpable pause in the room, unlike anything any of them had experienced from the voluble Trump, who could fill any airtime. The president slumped in his chair and sighed deeply, like someone making room in his lungs to take in more oxygen for a powerful scream.
“Oh, my God,” Trump exclaimed. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked!”
He went on.
“It doesn’t matter what the truth is,” the president said. “They just fuck you up the whole time. They never find anything. They just put a bunch of people who never talked to you through the ringer.”
Then Trump turned his full venom on Sessions.
“It’s your fucking fault,” he said. “You’re weak. This is all your fault.”
Sessions said blaming him was not fair. “If you feel that’s wrong, then I’ll resign,” the attorney general said.
“You know what, Jeff?” Trump said. “You’re fucking right. You should fucking resign!”
Sessions’s eyes welled up. He was holding back tears with everything he had. By this point, McGahn, Pence, and Hunt were watching the president break the attorney general in front of their eyes. The vice president interjected. “Do you mind giving us a minute, gentlemen?” Pence asked, looking at Hunt and McGahn. McGahn told Pence that was a good idea and got up to leave. He and Hunt didn’t need to see this.
Once safely outside the Oval Office, Hunt turned to McGahn, his mouth wide open. “Oh, my Gawd . . .” Hunt said in his southern drawl. The two men could hear the presidential tirade coming from the historic room they had just left. Tearing into Sessions, Trump said, “You were supposed to protect me” but “let me down.”
A few minutes after his private session with Trump and Pence, Sessions emerged from the Oval Office, and McGahn put his arm on his back. “Don’t resign,” McGahn told him. “We need you. This will blow over. I’ll call you tonight. Don’t resign.”
As Sessions headed toward the West Wing exit, McGahn charged down the hallway to Reince Priebus’s office and stuck his head in the door. “I’ve got some bad news,” McGahn said hurriedly, his face red and in a huff. “Sessions just resigned, and we’ve got a special counsel.”
“No!” Priebus said, looking horrified. “Where’s Sessions?”
The chief of staff rushed past McGahn in his doorway and took off in a trot for the Oval, where he saw Pence. “Where’s Jeff?” Priebus asked the vice president. Pence confirmed for him that Sessions had resigned and was leaving the building. Priebus then raced out to the parking lot to try to catch the attorney general before he drove off. Priebus climbed into the backseat of Sessions’s black vehicle and asked him, “What’s going on?”
Humiliated, Sessions said, “He doesn’t want me around. I’m done. I’m tired of this.”
“You can’t resign,” Priebus said. “We cannot have the attorney general, a special counsel, and the FBI director fiasco all at the same time.”
Priebus brought Sessions back up to his office, where he, along with Pence and others, persuaded the attorney general not to resign immediately but rather to take some time to consider his actions.
* * *
—
Trump was genuinely frightened. In Mueller, Trump found a tenacious and unblemished antagonist. Stern, secretive, and straitlaced, Mueller was a registered Republican and in private conversations would espouse the old GOP principle of individual responsibility over government action. But he was perceived as apolitical and above reproach because of his well-regarded service in both the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations.
Mueller’s longtime friend Tom Wilner described the life lessons Mueller learned at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, which were similar to those ingrained in students at other elite prep schools at the time, including at St. Albans School in Washington, Wilner’s alma mater. “You always take the path of the hard right against the easy wrong,” he said. “You never compromise your principles. You do what is right no matter what is the cost. What matters is honesty, integrity, loyalty to your family and to your principles. That’s Bob. I kid because he’s so straight he’s a pain in the ass. He will never cross the line in doing something he thinks is improper or looks partisan. Never. Never. He is just so straight.”
Mueller had spent two decades prosecuting mob bosses, murderous gangsters, and drug lords in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington before becoming FBI director on September 4, 2001, exactly one week before Osama bin Laden’s hijackers orchestrated the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. He then led a wholesale reorganization of the nation’s premier investigative agency to hunt down terrorists around the globe and thwart future plots before they could be executed.
A gruff and often humorless boss, Mueller had high demands for his subordinates at the FBI—and a temper that occasionally flared. He would grill his investigators on every inch of the evidence they had gathered in their cases, often exposing holes in their work. He also had a lifelong habit of getting to work around 6:00 a.m. By the time FBI agents and detectives arrived at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m., they would find yellow sticky notes Mueller had left on their chairs:
“I came by and you weren’t here. Where are you?”
“Come find me when you get in, Bob.”
Yet Mueller, a square-jawed “Joe Friday,” inspired deep loyalty from his colleagues. “I would walk on hot coals for Bob Mueller, that’s how much I admire and respect him,” said Chuck Rosenberg, his former counsel. “And there have been times in my career working for Bob that it felt like I was.”
Frank Figliuzzi, who worked under Mueller as assistant director
for counterintelligence, noted that Louis Freeh, who led the bureau for the eight years prior to Mueller, titled his memoir My FBI. “That title alone is something that Mueller would never say,” Figliuzzi said. “Rather, what he would say is, ‘I am a temporary caretaker of the FBI. It’s not my FBI. It’s the American people’s FBI, and I am supposed to run it for a while.’”
Lisa Monaco, Mueller’s chief of staff, recalled she would never allow the word “I” to appear in drafts of his speeches. “He literally would cross out ‘I’—every time—and replace it with ‘we’ or ‘the FBI and its partners,’” Monaco said. “The theme was, it’s never about him. I started getting out my red pen and taking ‘I’ out so he didn’t have to do it. I just knew no ‘I’ could ever survive first contact with him.”
* * *
—
At the White House the afternoon of Mueller’s appointment, Trump and his staff scrambled to respond. They had only a short time before the Justice Department made its public announcement. Hicks and other aides went back and forth with the president editing a statement. She would type a draft on her computer and print it out in 16-point font; Trump would make changes with a black Sharpie. She would type up the changes, and so on. As Hicks typed one version, a handful of other advisers stood behind her, including Jared Kushner, who put a positive spin on what was transpiring.
“This is great,” Kushner told his colleagues. “We’re not going to have to worry.” Kushner was referring to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation of Russian interference. He assumed that with a special counsel appointed, the Senate probe would be moot.
“You don’t understand how any of this works,” communications director Mike Dubke told Kushner. “These will all go on simultaneously. There is going to be Mueller; there’s going to be investigations in the House, in the Senate. They are coming after you.”
A Very Stable Genius Page 8
