As the lawyers for Trump, his family members, and his business began poring over Trump campaign records in mid-June, they were finding no evidence that linked the president to any coordination or collaboration with Russians. But they did find issues with Kushner. The presidential son-in-law had failed to disclose all of his meetings with foreign officials, and specifically Russians, in his required government forms. He had had more than a hundred in-person meetings or phone calls with representatives of more than twenty countries, many of them between Trump’s election and inauguration. A failure to include every foreign contact the first time that a senior White House official applied for a security clearance was serious and might nix someone’s chances at a job, but it could be excused if there were mitigating circumstances. A failure to fully correct the mistake by disclosing all additional contacts a second time, as was the case with Kushner, would likely disqualify an official from public service in normal circumstances.
Kushner retained a renowned white-collar defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, to represent him. Lowell had defended many high-profile clients, including Senators Robert Menendez, on charges of public corruption, and John Edwards, on charges of campaign finance fraud, and had been chief counsel to the House Democrats during impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Although Lowell was a Democrat, he had just the kind of résumé Trump would have liked leading his own legal defense.
On June 13, Bowe, Dowd, Sekulow, and Corallo gathered at the Washington offices of Kasowitz’s firm just two blocks from the White House to discuss the kids. Sekulow broached the subject the team was wrestling over: “Should Jared and Ivanka be in the White House?” Some of the lawyers were wary of staking out a position. They wanted to maintain their standing with the president, and they figured that whatever they advised Trump to do about the kids, he would share with Kushner and Ivanka, and then they would be “roadkill,” as one of the advisers put it.
Still, in the confines of Kasowitz’s law office, they were frank with one another about the challenges created by the presidential family members. Corallo said he worried that Kushner could make other staffers witnesses in the investigation and that he would not be able to assert privilege to protect conversations he had with them. Corallo also argued that Kushner’s security clearance problems alone made it impossible for him to remain a true adviser in the White House. “The politics are really bad,” he said. Bowe said the legal team should at least prepare for the possibility that their departure might be necessary. And Sekulow agreed they needed to be ready to discuss the pros and cons with Trump. “Prepare some talking points if it comes to pass that we need to recommend it,” Sekulow said. But Dowd defended Kushner and Ivanka, stressing that Trump relied on them and the lawyers shouldn’t get involved.
“We’re not going to get between family,” Dowd said.
Seven
IMPEDING JUSTICE
Monday, June 12, was a day of ritual, which masked the president’s agita. Trump convened his first full cabinet meeting, a now infamous session in which U.S. government officials took turns pledging fealty to their master. “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people,” Reince Priebus crowed. But no one was loyal to anyone in the orbit of Donald Trump.
The groveling of Priebus and others did little to distract Trump from his aspiration to end the special counsel investigation. Priebus and Steve Bannon met that same Monday with Christopher Ruddy, telling him the president had seriously been considering abruptly firing Robert Mueller. That evening, Ruddy said in an appearance on the PBS NewsHour that Trump was weighing whether to terminate the special counsel, a revelation that transfixed Washington.
Trump was motivated by his conviction, fueled partially by the analysis of his lawyers, that Mueller had conflicts of interest. Mueller was rapidly building his team, hiring experienced litigators from top firms and hard-charging federal prosecutors. By mid-June, he had hired thirteen lawyers. The team included Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former FBI chief of staff; James Quarles, a former Watergate assistant special prosecutor; Jeannie Rhee, a former prosecutor and partner with Mueller at WilmerHale; Michael Dreeben, a deputy solicitor general known as one of the country’s foremost legal thinkers; and Andrew Weissmann, a famed Enron prosecutor and a former chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section. Many additional lawyers were itching to be a part of this historic investigation, and Mueller was preparing to hire some of them.
Trump’s lawyers closely studied the backgrounds of Mueller’s hires and saw a pattern. Though Mueller was registered as a Republican and appointed FBI director by Bush, many of the lawyers joining his team were Democrats, and some had given money to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Trump’s lawyers also thought there was a decent legal argument that Mueller was conflicted out of being special counsel because he had met with Trump the day before his appointment for what the president claimed was a job interview. Mueller could have learned Trump’s thinking about the probe and whether Trump implied he required loyalty in his next FBI director. Either way, he could be a witness who had an improper window into the mind of the investigation’s key subject.
Marc Kasowitz and Mike Bowe shared this information with Trump during a meeting with his legal team, and he was elated. A one-two punch, he thought. The special counsel’s team was politically biased, and Mueller himself could be disqualified from leading the probe. The president became particularly enamored with the idea that Mueller was conflicted because the two men had what he called a “business dispute.” Mueller once belonged to Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia and sought to recoup some of his membership fees when he moved. Trump’s lawyers tried to get their client to realize this was not a strong case of a conflict of interest, but the president could not be persuaded. He wouldn’t stop mentioning the business dispute as a fatal flaw in Mueller’s appointment.
Testifying June 13 before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who officially oversaw the special counsel probe, tried to assuage fears building in Washington that Trump intended to terminate Mueller. “I’m not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders,” Rosenstein said. He added, “Special Counsel Mueller may be fired only for good cause.” Rosenstein’s remarks were intended to affirm the Justice Department would uphold the rule of law, irrespective of any impulsive decree by the president. But they did not persuade Trump to drop the issue.
About 7:00 p.m. the next day, June 14, The Washington Post reported that Mueller had expanded his Russia probe to include an examination of whether Trump had attempted to obstruct justice. Trump himself was now under investigation, which was precisely what he had spent the spring pressuring his FBI director and intelligence agency heads to publicly deny. The administration was stuck in an unremitting season of investigations and the president was enraged. Around this time, he called Chris Christie.
“Should I fire Mueller?” Trump asked the New Jersey governor.
“Mr. President, if you fire Mueller, you’re going to be impeached,” Christie replied. “Sure as day follows night, you will be impeached.”
“Do you really believe that?” Trump asked.
“I absolutely believe that,” Christie said, arguing that even Republicans in Congress could vote to impeach him for terminating the special counsel. “If there’s anybody who’s encouraging you to fire Mueller and somehow that will end your problems, it will only compound your problems. Don’t do it.”
Around 10:00 p.m. on June 14, Trump called Don McGahn on his cell phone. He was steaming hot and wanted to find out if the investigation really was trained on him—and, if so, how could this have happened? He told the White House counsel to talk with Rosenstein and push the deputy attorney general. He had to remove Mueller because of what the president believed were conflicts of interest.
“You gotta do th
is,” Trump told McGahn. “You gotta call Rod.”
McGahn was more than a little annoyed by Trump’s obsession with Mueller’s conflicts, which he considered silly and of little merit. He again told the president that the conflicts case was not very strong and that his personal lawyers should be raising the issue, not the White House counsel. But on a night when every cable news channel was fixated on the news that Trump was a subject of a criminal investigation, the president was not thinking rationally and would not take no for an answer.
“I’ll see what I can do,” McGahn said, giving his boss a noncommittal answer to get him off the phone. McGahn hung up, shaking his head at the president’s unreasonable demands.
The next day, June 15, should have been a moment of celebration for both Trump and McGahn. The Supreme Court associate justice Neil Gorsuch’s investiture ceremony was at 2:00 p.m. that Thursday. Installing a conservative on the court was the first major achievement of Trump’s presidency, a key campaign promise fulfilled, and Gorsuch’s smooth nomination had largely been orchestrated by McGahn.
But Trump rose early and began venting his anger at the obstruction probe on Twitter. For weeks, his lawyers and aides had tried to wean Trump off Twitter, fearful that his comments could create greater legal exposure for him. Kasowitz would plead with Trump, “Enough of the tweeting. You’ve got to stop talking about the case. Enough. Just let us do our jobs.” But they eventually resigned themselves to merely managing his missives.
“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice,” Trump tweeted.
“You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history—led by some very bad and conflicted people!” he wrote in a second tweet.
McGahn later told associates that he contemplated skipping the ceremony altogether because the testy talk with Trump over the phone the night before had so deflated him. But he attended, figuring the investiture was history and he would be mad at himself if he didn’t witness it. The leaders of all three branches of government came together for the solemn ceremony and congratulated McGahn as the proud father.
That weekend, Trump made his first visit to Camp David, the famed presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. He seemed to be in good spirits as he boarded Marine One for the twenty-minute helicopter flight there, and McGahn assumed Trump had put his reckless Mueller plan behind him. But on the morning of Saturday, June 17, Trump called McGahn on his cell phone again. It was Father’s Day weekend, and McGahn had slept in and was at home getting ready for a full day of family events planned for his son’s birthday.
“Call Rod,” Trump told McGahn. “Tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel.”
McGahn put a hand to his forehead. This idea wasn’t dead after all.
“Mueller has to go,” Trump continued. “Call me back when you do it.”
This was an inflection point. As McGahn would later tell confidants, it was “Comey II: The Sequel.” He did not want to participate in another obstructive episode. He had no intention of actually calling Rosenstein, out of fear Rosenstein would also consider it a directive and that it might trigger him to take some drastic and irreversible step. But McGahn also did not want to fight Trump on his idea. Instead, he just replied methodically, “Yeah, boss,” and “Okay.” He was worn down, so tired of Trump’s bullshit. He just wanted to get off the phone and think through the choice he now faced.
McGahn drove from his home in a gated community near Mount Vernon to the White House and began to collect his things. He felt he had to quit. He figured the next time Trump called to confirm that his orders were being carried out, he would tell him he was resigning. McGahn told his chief of staff, Annie Donaldson, he was submitting a letter of resignation but didn’t tell her the details of why. He was specifically trying to shield her from exposure to this obstruction of justice, so he told her only that Trump demanded he contact the Justice Department to do something McGahn did not want to do.
McGahn later called Priebus. “I’m done,” he told the chief of staff. “I’ve packed up my car. There’s nothing in my office. I packed up all my things. I’m done.”
“What are you talking about?” Priebus asked. “Why are you done? What happened?”
“I’m tired of the president asking me to do crazy shit,” McGahn said, declining to elaborate further.
“You’re not resigning,” Priebus told him. “You can’t resign. You’re going to relax for today and we’re going to talk tomorrow, but you’re not resigning. You can’t do that to the staff. You cannot instantly resign from your position at a time when we need you.”
McGahn then spoke with Bannon, who tried to talk him out of resigning by underscoring how valuable he was to the president by taking stands like the one he was taking now.
“It’s already Saturday night,” Bannon told McGahn. “You can’t do anything now.”
Trump did not call back that night, so the urgency McGahn had felt that afternoon passed as the night wore on. McGahn reluctantly agreed to stay on but told Bannon things had to change.
“We gotta get a real lawyer in here because I can’t keep being put in the middle of this shit,” McGahn said. “This is all fucked-up.”
Trump would later claim that he never asked McGahn to help him “fire” Mueller, which technically was true. He hadn’t used the word “fire.” But it was clear to McGahn what Trump wanted him to do.
* * *
—
On Friday, June 16, as Trump was preoccupied with trying to remove Mueller, his lawyers had their first meeting with the special counsel. This was the meeting Trump had been pushing them to have since he had officially hired Kasowitz in May. In Mueller’s temporary offices near Union Station, Kasowitz, Bowe, and Dowd introduced themselves. Accompanying Mueller were Quarles and Zebley. The Trump team soon broached the elephant in the room: the news reports that Mueller was now investigating the president himself.
“You know, Bob, I don’t know if you are investigating the president,” Dowd said. “Maybe you’re doing a preliminary inquiry. But we have several views about why you can’t have a president obstructing justice.”
Bowe walked through the law, point by point, that gave the president broad constitutional powers to fire any appointee and take action on investigations. Mueller listened carefully. His stone-faced expression never changed. The lawyers said they had two more concerns, about Comey’s credibility as a witness and the conflicts they felt Mueller had in serving as special counsel. They asked if the prosecutors would like their legal arguments spelled out in memo form. Polite but revealing nothing, Mueller said, “We’re happy to take any presentation you have.”
Dowd said a lengthy investigation could hurt Trump.
“We’ve got a president who’s got to govern. We’ll get you whatever you need. In exchange, I want a decision. We’ll move it, you move it.” Mueller replied, “You know me, John. I don’t let any grass grow under my feet.”
Mueller had been in the job only a month at this point and made clear to Trump’s lawyers that his team had a lot of work to do. The week before, Mueller’s deputies had interviewed Andrew Goldstein, who would become a key investigator into whether the president obstructed justice. In the days just before and after their meeting with Trump’s lawyers, Mueller’s team held strategy sessions about getting a legal agreement with Cypriot authorities to obtain evidence they might be able to seize inside a storage locker belonging to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.
While Trump’s legal team presented a united front with Mueller, some were suspicious about a mysterious enemy slinging arrows their way, targeting those who had raised concerns about Jared Kushner. On June 19, Corallo alerted his bosses, Kasowitz and Bowe, that he had been contacted by The New York Times that day for comment on a story about tweets he sent in 2016 criticizing Trump’s candidacy and disparaging Ivanka Trump and Kushner by
suggesting their hiring raised doubts about Trump’s commitment to “draining the swamp.” Corallo had actually flagged the tweets to Trump senior advisers before his hiring on the legal team and found it odd and unsettling they were being reported as news.
The next day, June 20, a client contacted a lawyer at the Kasowitz firm to alert him that a ProPublica reporter had been asking him about allegations that Kasowitz had been absent from the firm for lengthy periods in the recent past. ProPublica had received a humiliating trove of secrets, which had been known to only a tiny handful of firm insiders, including allegations that Kasowitz struggled with alcohol abuse. Kasowitz assumed someone inside his firm had betrayed him, but he did not know who.
On June 21, Kasowitz and Bowe briefed Trump on several pressing topics, which others would learn included their review of possibly problematic campaign emails they might have to turn over to Congress, and highlights of their first meeting with Mueller on June 16, a subject Trump was eager to hear about. The two lawyers told the president they had conveyed his message, that the probe created a cloud over the president and was unfair. They reported Dowd’s request that this not drag on, and Mueller’s assurances he would “not let any grass grow under my feet.”
Not long after, the president said, “I gotta meet this guy Dowd.”
In mid-June, Kasowitz and Bowe still believed they could recruit someone else as lead attorney, with Dowd playing a supporting role. But they didn’t have one yet. Bowe agreed to bring Dowd over one afternoon for a late lunch with the president. Bowe liked and respected Dowd but also never expected to put him in charge of representing the president. For his meeting with the president, Dowd entered the president’s offices seeming to be in awe. Inside were Trump, Bowe, Corallo, and Jay Sekulow. The men exchanged some pleasantries and took seats in the dining room to enjoy steak, fries, and Diet Coke, one of Trump’s frequent lunch menus. The president asked Dowd, “So, do you have a relationship with this guy, Mueller?”
A Very Stable Genius Page 11
