A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  Their relationship was so close that in 2013—the same year Putin snubbed Trump by declining his invitation to attend the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow—Putin personally invited Tillerson to a celebratory event in Sochi to show off Russia’s progress in redeveloping the resort city for the upcoming Winter Olympic Games. During that summer trip, Putin brought Tillerson aboard his yacht for a private lunch. Whisked to the dock by Putin’s Mercedes, Tillerson stepped aboard the boat and noticed his aides were left on land when Putin’s crew tossed the lines overboard and pushed off. Black gunboats flanked the yacht as they took a short jaunt out into deeper waters of the Black Sea. As they dined alfresco, Putin confided to Tillerson that he detested Obama. He argued that Obama had lied to him about claims he wanted to partner with Russia and seemed unable to make a clear decision.

  “I’ve given up on your president,” Putin told Tillerson. “I’ll wait for your next president and see if I can get along with him.”

  Tillerson got along with Putin but also had his number. Once he became secretary of state four years later, he tried to use his extensive experience with Putin wisely to tutor Trump. He explained Putin’s deep desire to restore Russian greatness and credibility, or at least give it the sheen of a country to be feared, in part by forging a partnership with a world power such as the United States. He stressed that Putin would always look to save face with his citizenry. And he said Putin’s hidden default move was picking at his enemies’ scabs.

  “The only thing Putin understands is truth and power,” Tillerson explained to Trump. “He will lean in as far as he can until he fears defeat. The last thing he wants is a defeat with his own people.”

  Tillerson emphasized the most important trait he thought Trump should know: Putin’s moves might seem slick and quick, but he was playing a long game, always thinking several moves ahead, years in the distance. He impressed upon Trump the fact that Putin sought to destabilize Western alliances and remake the post–World War II power structure to weaken America’s global influence. Putin, Tillerson told Trump, “wakes up every morning asking, ‘Where is America having problems? Let’s go there now and make it worse.’” He explained that Putin’s government was nimble and sparked brush fires around the world to which the United States was slow to respond.

  By helping Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Putin was creating a toehold for Russia in the Middle East. In North Korea, Putin was hoping to befriend Kim Jong Un and keep the United States from consolidating power in the Asia Pacific. And Putin annexed Crimea in eastern Ukraine, dead set on proving that Mother Russia was the rightful ruler of the land and showing resolve on a matter of nationalistic pride.

  Before Trump’s meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Tillerson visited Moscow in April 2017 to lay the groundwork, sitting with the Russian president in the same Kremlin conference room where they had met when Tillerson worked for Exxon. As he entered Putin’s bastion, Tillerson pointed first to his head, “Different hat,” he said, then to his chest. “Same man.”

  “Da,” Putin said, smiling and nodding at the gesture.

  They discussed contentious issues, not the least of which was the Kremlin’s aid to the Assad regime, which was using Russian firepower to slaughter civilians. Tillerson also delivered a message that the United States would resist Russian aggression in Ukraine. Upon his return to Washington, Tillerson counseled Trump that the key to working with Putin was steady discipline.

  “With Putin, you have to stay on it every day,” Tillerson explained. “He’ll wait to see the pressure ease and then seize his opportunity.”

  Trump listened to Tillerson, but to those watching, he seemed absentminded. He did not ask questions or try to keep the conversation going. He had only one direct comment. He rejected the notion that Putin would try to take advantage of the United States.

  “I don’t really think that’s what Putin is up to,” Trump said.

  Trump’s confidence about how to handle Putin changed dramatically after their face-to-face meeting July 7 in Hamburg. Trump believed he was the expert on Russia now. He owned the relationship. Tillerson’s years of negotiating with Putin and studying his moves on the chessboard were suddenly irrelevant.

  “I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin,” Trump told Tillerson. “That’s all I need to know. . . . I’ve sized it all up. I’ve got it.”

  Tillerson’s moral code and experience climbing the corporate ladder taught him to respect America’s commander in chief. In this moment, he had to deploy every diplomatic skill he had acquired to tell his boss to be careful, reminding him that Putin had a history of taking advantage if he saw an opening. Putin was a master manipulator, a former KGB agent trained to find the soft spots of his foes and to exploit them. But Trump waved him off.

  “I know more about this than you do,” Trump said.

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  On July 7, while Trump was focused in Germany on making a friend out of Putin, his lawyers back in the United States were bracing for a public relations catastrophe, the biggest since Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. Over the previous few weeks, lawyers representing the president, his company, his campaign, and some of his family members had been reviewing tranches of campaign and transition-period emails in preparation for turning over the records to the Senate and House intelligence committees, which were investigating Russian interference.

  The lawyers had discovered correspondence suggesting Russians had a special pipeline into the campaign and that some people around Trump knew the Kremlin was trying to help his candidacy. They thought these exchanges were horrifying and certain to show Trump had lied, but did not necessarily pose a legal problem.

  “Anybody with half a brain realized it’s politically explosive even if legally irrelevant,” recalled one of the lawyers reviewing the material. “It’s just awful stuff.”

  The emails revealed that Donald Trump Jr. excitedly and naively set up a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. In the exchanges, Rob Goldstone, a British talent promoter who was helping broker the meeting, relayed that the Russians were offering “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

  “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump junior wrote in one of the emails to Goldstone.

  Jared Kushner attended the meeting on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, at Trump junior’s invitation, as did then– campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

  The lawyers all knew that as soon as they provided the records to Congress, Democrats would release the most damaging details. After months of Trump’s claiming “no collusion,” here was the first known meeting between top Trump campaign officials, his own family, and a Russian national. This had the makings of a full-blown crisis.

  Trump lawyers Marc Kasowitz and Mike Bowe had alerted the president to the existence of the emails on June 21 but explained they likely would not become known outside their circle of lawyers until the fall, when they had to be produced to congressional committees investigating Russian meddling in the election.

  Hope Hicks also was working to help contain the fallout, but the president rejected his communications director’s advice. As she later told the special counsel, Hicks met in the White House residence in late June with Trump, Kushner, and Ivanka. Kushner tried to show his father-in-law the emails that Congress would soon have, but the president shut the conversation down and said he did not want to know about it. Then, on June 29, Hicks spoke privately with Trump to convey her concern about the political firestorm the emails would unleash. He told her he did not think they would leak so long as only one lawyer handled them. Later that day, in a second meeting that was attended by Kushner and Ivanka, Hicks told Trump that the emails were “really bad”
and the news story would be “massive” when it broke. Hicks suggested Trump junior proactively disclose the existence of the emails and summarize their content in an attempt to soften the blow, but Trump reiterated that he did not want to know the details and insisted he did not believe the emails would leak to the press.

  Around the same time, the lawyers for Trump, his campaign, and his family members plotted different ways to get in front of the story. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, urged that one of them should leak the story to a friendly news outlet first, just before turning over the material, to shape the story in a way that put all their clients in the best light. Considered one of the very best Washington scandal attorneys, Lowell believed the meeting with the Russian lawyer was embarrassing and showed the Trump team’s naïveté, but he did not think it amounted to a conspiracy to collude with Russians. Lowell was elated one day when, combing through the evidence, he found emails showing Kushner arrived late to the meeting and tried to leave early.

  As Lowell saw it, Trump junior, Kushner, and Manafort took a meeting with some goofy folks, including Veselnitskaya, that they shouldn’t have, but no deals were struck and nothing came of it. Kushner had repeatedly joked that the Democrats’ claim that Trump or his advisers might have colluded with Russians was ridiculous because the campaign was so disorganized “we couldn’t even collude with ourselves.”

  Lowell wanted Trump junior to shoulder the responsibility for setting up the meeting and “own” the story. “Everyone knew Abbe wanted Don junior to tell it,” said one insider familiar with the plan. “The lawyers knew it. We had all talked about it,” another said.

  Lowell pushed the other lawyers to get on board with a plan to leak the story to a responsible organization, such as The New York Times or The Washington Post, around the time they turned over the records. Trump junior’s newly hired lawyer, Alan Futerfas, respected Lowell and saw some wisdom in this idea. But Futerfas, hired just a week before, was still learning the facts of the meeting and wasn’t comfortable going public until he knew what exactly had happened. Another lawyer who was privy to some of the information, however, was executing a plan of his own.

  Reginald “Reg” Brown represented Manafort in the ongoing congressional investigations of Russian interference in the election, and that May he had provided several congressional committees with answers to their questions for his client. In written letters, Brown reported that Manafort didn’t recall any one-on-one meetings with Russians during the campaign. However, by June, Brown had been alerted by other lawyers with access to Kushner’s campaign emails that Manafort had attended the mystery meeting and had given Congress inaccurate information. Brown didn’t want his client to be accused of lying to Congress and also saw an opportunity to show that his client was transparent and open. A veteran of congressional investigations, he didn’t want this revelation to come out and let his guy be tagged with trying to conceal something. Brown conferred with Lowell and got his sign-off to notify various committees of Manafort’s attending a meeting with a Russian. Brown’s notice to the committees—which he conveyed by phone on about June 30, just before Congress left for the July 4 recess—volunteered that Manafort attended the meeting at the invitation of Donald Trump Jr. He made no mention of Kushner’s attending.

  Neither the Trump Organization nor Trump junior knew how quickly the world was about to come crashing down on their heads. Word of Brown’s notification to Congress soon reached The New York Times, where on July 7 reporters called White House officials and Trump family lawyers saying the paper planned to write about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with a Russian lawyer. Trump was four thousand miles away from his lawyers in Washington and New York, and his aides scrambled to buy more time. Hicks proposed a conference call with the Times reporters the next morning. But the morning of July 8 came and went with no call from the White House. And by this time, Trump and his entourage had boarded Air Force One in Hamburg to fly home to Washington. The Times reporters had put together a list of questions and emailed them to White House aides, who discussed them on the plane. They immediately realized they had a crisis on their hands.

  The lawyers had been dreading this looming public relations nightmare but did not expect it to burst wide open this soon and were caught flat-footed. The president’s own lawyers, Marc Kasowitz and Mike Bowe, hadn’t yet fully briefed Trump on the digital trail. They had been working with a friendly conservative outlet, Circa, which also knew a little bit about a meeting with Russians. Bowe and communications strategist Mark Corallo hoped to cast the story in a very different light than Lowell had envisioned. They told the Circa reporter that the Russian lawyer had ties to a Democratic opposition research firm and appeared to be trying to set up the Trump campaign to look stupid. But they hadn’t been able to settle on a media plan with the other lawyers by that Saturday.

  Lowell, Kushner’s attorney, was playing tennis when he was dragged off the court by an urgent call. The Times was about to publish details of the Trump Tower meeting. This was the very story Lowell had persuaded the broader legal team to carefully shape and communicate on their own terms, but now the dam was about to break and none of them had control.

  When the Times inquired about the Trump Tower meeting, the person with the most firsthand knowledge of it, Trump junior, could not easily be reached. An avid outdoorsman, the president’s namesake son, then thirty-nine, was on a fishing boat on a lake in upstate New York. He had spotty cell service, and people struggled to reach him, but Hicks got to Trump junior with a series of texts.

  Trump junior had already carefully reviewed the emails with his lawyer the previous week, primarily to prepare a press strategy, because the emails would likely have to be released to Congress. Trump junior had explained that although he had been eager to take the meeting with Veselnitskaya and hoped to learn something incriminating about Clinton, he came to consider the meeting a dud. He remembered being mildly annoyed that Veselnitskaya offered no actual evidence linking Clinton to a scandal. Instead, the brunette lawyer spent most of the meeting talking about a proposed deal: the Russian government would lift a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children if the U.S. government revoked a law sanctioning prominent Russian billionaires. This was a personal priority of Putin’s, and Veselnitskaya had for years lobbied against the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on a so-called black list of accused human rights abusers. As Trump junior later recalled, it was a “wasted 20 minutes.” He and his lawyers had crafted a few versions of statements for him to explain the meeting when the time came, and Trump junior’s preference was a detailed account: a page-long description of how he came to hold the meeting and everything that happened.

  Kushner, too, had reviewed his emails and texts with his lawyer before the Times call. He had remembered the meeting with Veselnitskaya as being fairly odd and unimportant. When Trump junior had gone fishing, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were traveling home from Germany with the president and conferred with Hicks and Kushner’s communications aide Josh Raffel to strategize about Kushner’s response to the inquiry.

  Those in Germany knew the disclosure of the meeting carried political and potentially legal peril and quickly agreed on a strategy. Trump junior would release a statement to the Times to contain the fallout. His account would be truthful—including the fact, which they considered helpful, that Veselnitskaya’s offer of damaging information on Clinton never materialized—so it could not be repudiated later if the full details emerged or, as the family’s lawyers knew would eventually happen, copies of the emails surfaced.

  “It’s all going to come out eventually,” Futerfas told some of those discussing what to do. He advocated for Trump junior’s position: don’t try to hide that the Russians had offered unflattering information about Clinton.

  A statement was drafted in Trump junior’s name stating, truthfully, that he was asked by an acquaintance to meet “with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.”

&nbs
p; * * *

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  Once Trump boarded Air Force One, however, the president changed course. Retrofitted for presidential travel, the military’s iconic Boeing 747 is segmented by cabins. The president’s personal cabin is at the front of the fuselage, near the nose, and separate cabins flow back from there, with passengers assigned to seats in descending order of seniority: top advisers, then other staff, then Secret Service agents, then guests such as friends or members of Congress, and finally, in the rear, a traveling pool of thirteen journalists. For the first few hours of the flight, Trump worked furiously in the front cabin with Hicks to strategize about the brewing story about the Kremlin lawyer. Other aides, including White House press secretary Sean Spicer and his deputy, Sarah Sanders, were seated in the main staff cabin, feeling excluded from the action up front.

  By nature a micromanager, Trump sought to minimize what he considered a public relations disaster—for his son, but primarily for himself. As was often the case with Trump, he didn’t know all the details, and yet he also knew what he planned to say wasn’t entirely true. He was just trying to wrest control of that day’s headline and survive.

  “You all think that he has some master strategy, but really he’s just trying to get past the crisis of that moment,” said one top adviser. “He thought to himself, ‘Those emails aren’t going to see the light of day until the fall,’ and we’re talking about this story right now. That was an eternity to him.”

  So Trump took charge to cover up the truth. Hicks sent Trump junior a series of text messages from the plane explaining that the president was proposing a different tack. They would emphasize that the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about Russian adoption policy and say nothing about the campaign. In conferring with Kushner and Hicks, Trump insisted that the statement not touch upon his campaign but rather focus on the obscure policy connections between the ban on Russian adoptions and the U.S. Magnitsky Act. Trump junior conveyed his irritation that his father was crafting a statement that sidestepped the Clinton element, a glaring and problematic omission.