A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  Dubke then looked at Hicks. She had proven herself loyal to Trump as his campaign press secretary and traveling companion and was savvy beyond her twenty-eight years, especially when it came to spinning Trump’s failings and managing his moods. But Hicks was new to Washington, and Dubke feared she might be naive about some of its ways, especially when it came to investigations. Given her close relationship with the president, she was bound to be called as a witness. Dubke thought she needed to hire a lawyer. Little did he know, she already had one.

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  George Conway, a credentialed and well-respected conservative lawyer, cried tears of joy when Trump was sworn in as president. The lifelong Republican, who had labored to expose Bill and Hillary Clinton’s misconduct in the 1990s, felt a rush of relief when Hillary’s march to the White House was thwarted. And he felt a special swell of pride for his wife, Kellyanne. She received—and, in George’s estimation, deserved—a lot of credit for guiding Trump to victory. She tried to hone his populist message to appeal to a broad group of voters, including the working-class union members peeling away from Democrats and well-heeled, establishment Republicans more than mildly suspicious of Trump. She was his spin warrior, sparring with news anchors at all hours of the day to seemingly wash away Trump’s troubles.

  At a black-tie gala the night before the inauguration, Trump profusely thanked Conway for more than holding her own with his adversaries. He called “my Kellyanne” up to the stage for a bow. “She gets on [television] and she does destroy them,” Trump said. “Thank you, baby, thank you.”

  As Trump scouted for smart loyalists to fill hundreds of government positions, his lieutenants asked if Kellyanne’s husband, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School, would consider running the civil division of the Justice Department. George Conway had initially hoped to be named solicitor general but said yes. He was honored. But as chaos engulfed nearly every move the Trump White House made in its first months, Conway grew worried about his decision, then reluctant. He realized he was dawdling on filling out the personal financial disclosures that were required before he could be formally nominated. In late April, Rachel Brand, a friend from the Federalist Society and then in line for a top job at the Justice Department, asked Conway why he had not yet turned his papers in; Conway assured her he was working on it.

  Then came May 9. Trump fired Comey. The next day, Conway was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room in New Jersey, reading The Washington Post on his iPad. The story at the top of the website was titled “Inside Trump’s Anger and Impatience” and, citing thirty sources in Trump’s orbit, reported that Trump had been brooding about Comey’s loyalty and the Russia investigation, contrary to the White House’s claim that Trump fired Comey because of Rosenstein’s memo about his handling of the Clinton probe. Conway felt his mouth falling open wider with each line of the story.

  “Oh no,” Conway thought. “No, no, no.”

  Assuming the story was true, he figured, Trump was patently seeking to obstruct a Justice Department investigation that revolved around him and his campaign. “If that’s why he did it, this is going to be a disaster,” Conway thought. That night, May 10, Conway ferried one of his daughters to an elementary school auditorium in Englewood, New Jersey, and took a seat in the back to watch her flute recital. As his daughter and her classmates tuned their instruments, Conway could barely concentrate. He tried to figure out how he could delicately back out of the job he had told Sessions he would take in his Justice Department. He alerted his wife by text that he was having serious doubts. Kellyanne was displeased.

  Over the coming days, George stewed about what to do, almost to the boiling point. On the afternoon of May 17, as he was walking across Madison Avenue heading back to his office, Conway used a few free minutes to call Brand. A smart lawyer and highly regarded among conservatives, Brand was Trump’s nominee to be associate attorney general and was awaiting her confirmation vote in the Senate.

  “Hey, Rachel, can we talk off the record for a minute?” Conway began.

  She assured him that she would be a sounding board for whatever he needed to talk through.

  “I’m really concerned about how this administration is operating,” Conway said. “I’m not sure I can go through with it.”

  Conway was half expecting Brand, a no-drama midwesterner, to buck him up. He figured she would tell him everything he read about the White House was worse than the reality and that it was important he serve his country and his party. Instead, the typically stoic Brand sighed, indicating she, too, had at least some momentary reservations.

  “I know how you feel. I heard [the Senate] just held my cloture vote,” Brand said. She explained her mixed feelings. “I love DOJ. What an honor. But this is going to be nuts.”

  It was a sunny afternoon in New York, and Conway left the office a little early to head home to New Jersey. He drove north on the Henry Hudson Parkway, and as he turned the car in to the cloverleaf curve to get onto the George Washington Bridge, he heard CBS News radio break in with a bulletin: Rosenstein had appointed a special counsel to take over the Russia investigation.

  Conway thought to himself, “This will never work.” How could he serve in the senior ranks of the Justice Department when his wife’s boss was going to be at war with that same department? In the time it took to cross the bridge, he had made up his mind. He would not join the Trump administration. Within a few days, George called Kellyanne. George agreed to let his wife help shape his explanation to preserve her relationship with Trump—as long as it was factual.

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  At the same time, another Justice Department figure was preparing an exit. After being torn to shreds by Trump, Sessions huddled in his office with his advisers to draft a resignation letter. He was angry about how the president had treated him. The next morning, May 18, he hand delivered a signed copy to Trump. “Pursuant to our conversation of yesterday, and at your request, I hereby offer my resignation,” the letter read. Trump put it in his pocket and asked Sessions whether he wanted to continue serving. Sessions told him he wanted to stay, and Trump agreed that he would remain as attorney general. They shook hands, but Sessions did not take the letter back.

  Leaving the signed resignation letter with Trump was a mistake. When Sessions told Priebus about the letter, the White House chief of staff said, “Jeff, hang on a second. The DOJ has to be independent of the president. Do you understand what you just did? You basically gave the president a shock collar and put it right around your neck. You can’t do that. We’ve got to get the letter back.”

  All day, Trump was in a defiant mood, beginning with a 6:39 a.m. Twitter post in which he made a baseless allegation against Democrats. “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel [sic] appointed!” the president wrote, adding in a second tweet that the Russia investigation was “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

  Trump continued his claim of victimhood in an afternoon news conference where, standing beside Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, he insisted, “There is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can only speak for myself and the Russians. Zero.”

  Around this time, Trump told Chris Christie, “Can you believe fucking Rosenstein? He appoints Mueller. Why couldn’t he just handle it himself? There’s nothing here. I didn’t do anything.”

  Christie warned Trump about how a special counsel probe could spiral and create new dangers. “Your problem is that this thing will expand and grow because they’re going to find other crimes,” he said. “You give a prosecutor and an FBI agent enough time, they’ll find a crime. That’s what I used to do for a living. They’ll find it.”

  On May 19, Trump departed for his maiden foreign trip, a nine-day, five-city tour that would take him from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican to NATO Headquarters and to Italy for a global leaders summit. The st
akes were high, especially for a temperamental president whose knowledge of foreign affairs was relatively scant. But, consumed as he was by the Mueller development, Trump was entirely unprepared. As the president and his team took off from Joint Base Andrews for the twelve-plus hour flight to Riyadh, The New York Times reported for the first time what Trump had told the top Russian diplomats during their May 10 Oval Office meeting: Comey was “a real nut job,” and by firing him, he had relieved the “great pressure because of Russia.”

  Trump lit up. Although the Times story bore no direct connection to the special counsel, Trump read it as a signal that he was now at war with his own Justice Department and that mysterious leakers inside the government were trying to help investigators. The president sat in the forward cabin of the plane grousing. Aides strode in and out to try to calm him down. They tried to shift his focus to his meetings in Saudi Arabia and the landmark speech he was planning to deliver before dozens of Arab leaders. There was much preparation left to do, but Trump’s furor did not subside. He stayed awake for the red-eye flight across the Atlantic.

  “This is a witch hunt!” Trump screamed. “There shouldn’t be a special counsel!”

  “How did they get this?” Trump said of the Times. Then he illogically complained they had gotten some details wrong, when he knew they had not. “This is made-up. There’s no sources.”

  The next day came another blockbuster story that further stoked Trump’s rage and paranoia. The Washington Post reported on May 20 that the Russia investigation had identified a senior White House adviser, who would later be identified as Kushner, as “a significant person of interest,” the first sign that the probe had reached the top echelons of Trump’s administration.

  On the ground in Riyadh, Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, a massive, lavish palace of a hotel that to mark the occasion lit its facade in the evenings with a huge image of Trump’s portrait. In the president’s suite, the television was set to CNN International—which, like CNN’s domestic channel, was heavy with coverage of Trump. He simmered with anger as he watched with some of his advisers. Despite the distractions, however, Trump managed to make it through his first few days abroad as president without incident. In fact, his speech imploring the Muslim world to confront “Islamic extremism” and eliminate “fanatical violence” was well received. Miraculously, he refrained from tweeting about the Russia investigation, even as he nursed his feelings of persecution with every cable television panel he watched.

  On May 22, Trump carried on with the next stop on his trip, meetings in Jerusalem and Bethlehem with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, without his top two advisers, Bannon and Priebus, who had caught a ride to Washington on the government jet of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and returned to the White House. They had a president to protect from the fast-expanding investigation. They had a war room to build.

  PART TWO

  Six

  SUITING UP FOR BATTLE

  Landing in Tel Aviv on May 22, 2017, Trump strode down a red carpet to the triumphal sound of a military band and vowed to bring peace to the Middle East. He toured Jerusalem’s Old City, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to honor Christians and placing a prayer in the Western Wall, where he put his palm on the ancient stones while wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jews. Over dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump sketched the broad outlines of a peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians and declared newfound resolve to confront Iran. The hastily rehearsed words coming out of his mouth all day were about the unending conflict in the Middle East, but Trump’s mind was focused on the mushrooming special counsel investigation into his campaign.

  Trump’s aides knew he needed to hire a seasoned member of the white-collar defense bar with experience in both law and political combat. The trouble was that most of the pros did not want to represent him. Trump’s search for representation became a haphazard and painful obstacle course made more difficult by the competing loyalties, false promises, and backstabbing within his team. Trump was insecure about his worth as a client and feared personal exposure, which both infected his work as president and drove him to want to thwart the investigation. The most powerful man in the world could not get a lawyer.

  On May 22, Trump placed a call from the Middle East to Marc Kasowitz, asking him to officially saddle up as his lawyer. Kasowitz had long been the president’s dragon slayer, the attorney who for years had represented Trump in his business and personal matters, including a series of bankruptcies and the fight to keep his divorce records sealed. Aggressive and wily, Kasowitz had championed tough cases for Trump and won. He also had represented two of Trump’s children, Ivanka and Donald junior, against accusations of fraud. Trump trusted the street fighter and wanted him in his corner right away, although he would still need to recruit lawyers with a specialized set of skills navigating Washington crises, which the New York–based Kasowitz lacked.

  Kasowitz agreed, but he soon faced a mutiny from some of his law partners. The white-haired, sixty-four-year-old litigator had built an intensely profitable firm and wooed major Wall Street players and corporations by pledging to outwork stodgier white-shoe firms. He was a rainmaker, but his firm—Kasowitz Benson Torres—had already been singed by its association with Trump during the 2016 campaign. After Kasowitz threatened The New York Times for reporting on sexual assault allegations against then-candidate Trump, some of the firm’s bigger corporate clients, including those with women as key in-house lawyers, complained. Several of the firm’s liberal-leaning partners were personally aghast when Trump won the presidency, but they recognized the possible financial upside to being “of counsel” to the president.

  That optimism of those lawyers ended dramatically after May 17, when Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate election interference and any links or coordination between Trump or his campaign associates and a hostile foreign power. The partners were mindful that their share of hefty yearly profits depended on Kasowitz’s prodigious talents as a rainmaker, yet they feared the firm’s bottom line could take a hit if Kasowitz took on a highly public role defending Trump in the Mueller probe. The anxiety was compounded by the fact that Kasowitz, a commercial lawyer, lacked the legal chops for a white-collar, major-league Washington scandal. But Kasowitz had something almost no one else did, not even some of the most senior people in the White House: Trump’s trust.

  Kasowitz imagined assembling a “dream team” to shield the president. He and one of his partners, Mike Bowe, the fifty-year-old son of a fireman with conservative leanings whose hard-charging gut instincts Kasowitz trusted, set out to recruit an experienced scandal lawyer. The first few outreaches to top legal talent ended in rejection. But one offered to help for free: John Dowd. On May 18, Bowe was in his New York office near Times Square when he got an email from Dowd.

  “Happy to help DJT quietly behind the curtain. . . . I am not sure he needs counsel but it would not hurt to keep an eye on it and independently advise him. I know Bobby Mueller,” wrote Dowd, who attached a New York Times article reporting that Trump’s advisers were urging him to hire a D.C.-based attorney.

  Bowe told Dowd he’d think about it and talk it over with his partner. The early reaction of seasoned pros to Kasowitz’s outreach foreshadowed the difficulty to come. Kasowitz called Brendan Sullivan, the crème de la crème of the white-collar criminal defense bar; he offered to help make recommendations but told Kasowitz he couldn’t take Trump on as a client. On May 23, news broke that Trump had retained Kasowitz. The next day, Dowd wrote again to Bowe: “Great news. Happy to help pro bono anytime.”

  Dowd, seventy-six, was a legal legend whose best years had been two decades prior. A former marine, he had served in the JAG Corps and become a captain in the Vietnam era. He joined the Justice Department, where in the 1970s he led the strike force on organized crime, taking on hired hit men and mobsters. Bowe and Dowd had formed a friendship consulting with each other on some cases representing marines whom they felt were ge
tting the shaft from their command. The two lawyers liked each other and had much in common, both macho Irishmen and dogged fighters for their clients.

  Bowe figured Dowd could play a supporting role on Trump’s legal team. Dowd knew well the inner workings of the Justice Department and also had a lot of contacts in Washington. On May 25, he emailed Bowe yet again to say he was on his way to New York on the Acela for an event that evening at the Intrepid Museum on the Hudson River and offered to meet up. Bowe told him to swing by at 4:00 p.m. and he would introduce him to Kasowitz. The three men met briefly in Kasowitz’s office. “Good to meet you, John,” Kasowitz said as they parted, saying he thought there might be a place for him on the team. “Mike will let you know.”

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  That Memorial Day weekend, shortly after 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 28, the president fired off a tweetstorm ranting about news coverage of his troubles. He was particularly incensed at a May 26 Washington Post story, still dominating the headlines, claiming his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had suggested a back channel to the Russians during the campaign. The story had spawned media commentary about whether Kushner had committed treason, making the president’s son-in-law radioactive and feeling as if he were the victim of a lynch mob. Trump decried leaks from inside his own White House as “fabricated lies” and posited that journalists “made up” sources, adding, “#FakeNews is the enemy!” Trump wanted fighters defending him on television and devising legal methods to derail the investigation, but so far only Kasowitz and Bowe were on board.

  Trump summoned two trusted hands to pay him a visit: Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie, his former campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, respectively. Both men were political brawlers, the kind of operative Trump most admired, and Bossie was well versed in navigating Washington scandals, having worked as a senior Republican House investigator during the Clinton presidency, leading congressional probes into Whitewater and other matters.