Because the president and his aides were on a plane an ocean away, there was little chance for a thoughtful, strategic conference call with all the parties. Hicks continued to confer with Trump junior over text, while Trump junior discussed options with his lawyers, Futerfas and the Trump Organization’s general counsel, Alan Garten. Lowell was conferring with Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Other White House aides were messaging with Garten. The president was adamant, however. In the front cabin of Air Force One, Hicks took Trump’s dictation, typing up a draft she kept trying to perfect.
At the last minute, Trump junior urged Hicks to add one final word, to state that they “primarily” discussed adoptions at the meeting.
“I think that’s right too but boss man worried it invites a lot of questions,” Hicks texted Trump junior.
“If I don’t have it in there it appears as though I’m lying later when they inevitably leak something,” Trump junior replied.
A little bit after 1:30 p.m., Garten emailed the Times with a statement attributed to Trump junior, never conveying that the president himself had drafted it.
“It was a short introductory meeting,” the statement read. “I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up. I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
Trump junior, Lowell, Futerfas, and Garten were stymied. They all knew what was contained in the full email exchange, and they knew it would eventually come back not just to bite Trump junior but to ensnare Trump himself. However, none of them could overrule the president from afar. By the time Trump’s personal lawyers weighed in, it was too late. After Garten issued the statement to the Times, he forwarded copies to other lawyers for the president and his advisers. Bowe had been trying to reach Futerfas since Friday; he wanted to get a statement from Trump junior for the Circa story. Futerfas had put him off, saying he’d call at 1:00 p.m. He didn’t. At nearly 2:00 p.m., Bowe was driving to LaGuardia Airport to pick up his wife and got the email reporting the statement that had been sent to the Times at about 1:30 p.m. He pulled over and read the statement with fury. He had crafted a press strategy that would contain a fuller explanation of the meeting, and now Trump junior had issued an entirely different account. He got back on the road and dialed Futerfas on his cell.
“Alan, what the fuck is going on?” Bowe bellowed. “Our client is the fucking president of the United States. Why the fuck didn’t you contact me?”
Futerfas tried to keep calm amid the string of expletives. “I didn’t have a lot of control on this one, Mike,” he said.
“We had a plan!” Bowe yelled back. “You totally screwed up the plan. You didn’t call me back. What the fuck?”
Bowe explained in more detail the plan he, Kasowitz, the lawyer Jay Sekulow, and Mark Corallo had set in motion a day earlier with Circa to neutralize the embarrassing Trump Tower meeting emails. As Bowe talked, he was racing along the highway in Queens, a section of road he had driven probably a hundred times. Only this time, he was so angry he missed his exit for the airport.
Futerfas was frustrated, too. He didn’t like being in this spot any more than Bowe. He had studied the Trump Tower meeting extensively in the previous week and actually now knew more about it than almost anyone. He had debriefed some of the lesser-known people who had attended, including Goldstone, the British publicist who had encouraged Trump junior to take the meeting in the first place.
Futerfas snorted at Bowe’s strategy, which he figured no good journalist would believe. “You were planning a story on my client?” Futerfas asked Bowe. “When were you going to tell me this?”
“You never fucking called me back,” Bowe said.
Futerfas said he was instructed not to call the president’s lawyers. Bowe demanded to know who told him that. Futerfas said he wasn’t going to say. Bowe was left to wonder. He picked up his wife, took her to City Island for a waterfront lunch, and tried to calm down. Bowe called Kasowitz to let him know about the shit their client had stepped in without the assistance of counsel. Kasowitz called Trump on his secure phone on Air Force One. Just before 3:00 p.m., the president consulted with his own attorney for the first time. The Times already had the misleading statement, and there was little the president’s lawyer could do except listen to his client explain his strategy. Trump’s version of events was now as good as written in stone. The Times published its story later that afternoon. Kasowitz got Trump’s approval for a statement he would issue to Circa, alleging the meeting appeared to be an effort to entrap the Trump campaign, but that story line would immediately be overshadowed by the Times report of Trump family members meeting with Russians who wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.
Lowell read the story online with dismay. The statement issued from Air Force One was highly misleading at best. There was only one silver lining. The story zeroed in on the role of Trump junior, not on the failure once again of Kushner to disclose all of his foreign contacts. Lowell reached Kushner by phone on Air Force One at close to 6:00 p.m. and urged his client to deflect future questions about the meeting to Trump junior’s team.
“Let’s let this one fall to Don junior,” Lowell told Kushner. “It’s Don junior’s meeting to tell.”
At roughly 8:00 p.m., Air Force One touched down at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington. Trump’s family members and advisers departed the aircraft exhausted and anxious. They knew the damage was done. The problem they scrambled to contain would only grow bigger. That night, Corallo was at the Masonic temple in Alexandria, Virginia, watching a fireworks show, when he received a call on his cell phone from an angry Hicks.
As Corallo recalled the conversation, Hicks asked him, “What are you guys doing? Who the hell is Circa?”
Corallo said he told Hicks the plan to provide information to Circa was approved by Trump’s attorneys and he assumed they ran it by the president himself.
“I had it handled with The New York Times,” Corallo said Hicks told him. “Now it’s this blowup.”
“You had it handled?” Corallo said he responded. “You work for the White House. You work for the president. You’re a federal employee. Since when do you handle this stuff?” He added, “You just made yourself a witness in a federal investigation, young lady. Way to go.”
Hicks knew she would be a witness regardless, considering her proximity to the president.
* * *
—
The next day, July 9, tensions were still running high. Corallo got a call from the White House. Trump and Hicks were on the other line. Accusations flew back and forth, according to Corallo’s account of the conversation.
“Who authorized the statement to go out in my name?” Trump asked.
Corallo explained that the statement provided to Circa was not under Trump’s name but rather in Corallo’s name on behalf of the president’s legal team.
“You guys made this a big story,” Trump said.
“Mr. President, this was going to be a big story no matter what,” Corallo replied. He added, “We really can’t have this conversation without the attorneys. This is not a privileged conversation. You really need to have your attorneys on the line. Talk to them.”
Hicks then told Corallo, “You guys really screwed this up. We had this all planned out. It was going to go away.”
“The meeting was about adoption,” Trump said, defending the statement he had dictated for his son.
Corallo felt a lump in his throat. He resented that Hicks was seeming to berate him in front of Trump, and he thought she was displaying a level of foolishness and arrogance that suggested she was not up to the job if she couldn’t see the danger of providing a partial account. Hicks, meanwhile, was exasperated from several stressful days urging transparency an
d truthfulness in managing the crisis despite the president’s insistence otherwise. And she believed the statement to Circa represented an egregious lapse in judgment. Rather than containing the fire, Hicks believed, Corallo and Kasowitz had poured gasoline on it. Corallo reiterated that it was unwise for them to continue the conversation without lawyers on the line, and everyone hung up.
At the same time, reporters from every news organization were pressing their sources to learn what prompted the June 2016 meeting. For the Trump team, the pressure to provide answers was intense. By midday on July 9, several reporters were hearing from their sources that the original purpose of the meeting was not Russian adoptions but an offer of incriminating information about Clinton. The Times had enough sources diming out Trump junior that Garten and Futerfas agreed it was best for their client to lay out the truthful account that they had unsuccessfully argued for the day before. So Trump junior issued a statement to the Times explaining that he had met with Veselnitskaya at the request of a mutual acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father had hosted in Moscow.
“After pleasantries were exchanged,” Trump junior said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
Trump junior went on to say that Veselnitskaya redirected the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Trump junior’s statement said.
Revoking the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a little-known law, was actually one of Putin’s biggest priorities. The U.S. legislation had infuriated Putin because it froze the assets and limited the travel of a circle of powerful Russian businessmen he relied upon as extensions of his own power. In retaliation, Putin had halted American adoptions of Russian children. Whenever Putin raised the issue of Russian adoptions, it was really code for his jihad to revoke the meddlesome U.S. sanctions. But when Veselnitskaya raised the “adoptions” code word with Trump junior at Trump Tower in June 2016, it sailed right over his head.
Inside the West Wing, tempers flared as aides realized the magnitude of the cover-up. The story only got worse. The morning of July 11, the White House learned the Times now had a copy of Trump junior’s original email exchange with Goldstone proposing the meeting with Veselnitskaya, just as Hicks had warned the president would happen. Trump junior was normally a cool customer, but now his emotions were running high, alternating between fury at the media and misery. He and his father had faced three straight days of withering news coverage because of a meeting he agreed to take and were now about to take another hit for the fourth day in a row. Reporters and lawyers would later joke that the way the president and his aides mishandled the Trump Tower story could be the case study of a graduate seminar on how not to manage crisis communications. After long existing in the shadow of his superstar younger sister whom their father openly favored, Trump junior had enjoyed playing a valued role in the campaign, but revelations about the Trump Tower meeting made him a liability to his dad.
Trump junior and his lawyers, all in New York, agreed to hurriedly get on a conference call with the president, who was in his private chambers in the White House residence, and several other lawyers and aides. It was a quick conversation. The son had to explain to Trump the bombshell about to hit about the embarrassing emails. The president listened intently, interrupting once in a while with a groan. “I’m really sorry about this, Dad,” Trump junior said.
Trump made clear he wasn’t happy, but did not acknowledge that he had caused much of the problem himself by dictating the misleading statement. “It’s a fucking mess,” Trump said. “It’s interfering with my agenda. This is screwing up what I’m trying to do.”
Then the president, his son, and their advisers debated whether to release all the emails or only a portion. Trump junior and his lawyers recommended all of them.
“The rest of them are going to leak anyway,” Trump junior said. Trump agreed.
“Fuck it,” the president declared. “Publish them all.”
After he hung up, at a little after 10:00 a.m., Trump tweeted a defense of his son for the world to see: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”
Trump junior, meanwhile, uploaded images of all sixteen emails among him and Goldstone, Kushner, and Manafort about the June 2016 meeting with Veselnitskaya. At 11:00 a.m., Trump junior published them on Twitter. He had scooped the Times.
Trump was furious about the mess that had transpired over the past four days. At a White House meeting with some advisers, according to Corallo, Trump tore into Corallo again, now blaming him for leaking details of the emails to the Times, which Corallo denied.
“Are you one of these Never Trumpers?” the president asked his legal communications adviser.
“Mr. President, I voted for you. I supported you,” Corallo replied. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything you do, but I serve at your pleasure. You can dismiss me at any point.”
Corallo was crushed. Somehow, he had become the fall guy. He was looking for an out, and he found one a week later. On July 19, Trump ripped into Attorney General Jeff Sessions, questioned the loyalty of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and disparaged Mueller’s probe during an interview with Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the Times. The interview was a turning point in how Corallo viewed Trump. He considered Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller honest public servants who did not deserve to be trashed. Trump had made his job untenable. Corallo called Bowe.
“I’m done,” he said.
“Yeah,” Bowe replied. “I totally get it.”
Corallo resigned from the legal team without so much as a presidential tweet thanking him for his service.
* * *
—
Behind the scenes, a quiet internal Justice Department investigation about the handling of the Clinton email investigation was learning about some soap-opera-style impropriety between a pair of FBI officials, a discovery that would forever tarnish the Mueller probe. Though the two officials’ extramarital affair and careless texts long predated Mueller’s appointment, their seeming political bias against Trump while launching an investigation of his campaign was used to smear the entire probe. On July 27, Inspector General Michael Horowitz convened a group of senior Justice and FBI officials to alert them to the texts he had uncovered between the senior counterintelligence supervisor Peter Strzok and the FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Their exchanges had made it appear that some in the FBI hoped to stop Trump from becoming president. Strzok was then working on Mueller’s team; the FBI immediately yanked him off based on the embarrassing texts.
Trump didn’t yet know the full details about the exchanges, but he and his allies in Congress were already bashing Mueller’s team as politically tainted Democrats trying to undermine his presidency. Outside the secure conference room at the Justice Department command center where the inspector general had briefed everyone on the texts, Rosenstein pulled Mueller aside in the hallway to apologize. He felt badly that a national hero was getting assailed by the president and lawmakers whose idea of public service was appearing on television and tweeting. He knew the texts, when they came out, would only make Mueller’s job harder.
“I’m really sorry I got you into this,” Rosenstein said.
Mueller waved it off. “I would’ve really regretted it if I hadn’t agreed to do it,” he said.
Nine
SHOCKING THE CONSCIENCE
There is no more sacred military space than room 2E924 of the Pentagon. A windowless and secure vault of a conference room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff m
eet regularly to wrestle with classified matters, its more common name is “the Tank.” It got its name from the Joint Chiefs’ original meeting location during World War II, in the basement of a federal building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, where attendees had to walk through an austere arched portal with exposed wires that gave the impression of entering a tank. Unlike the command centers conjured in Hollywood thrillers, the Tank at the Pentagon resembles a small corporate boardroom, with midcentury stylings including a gleaming golden oak table and leather swivel armchairs. The room, saturated by history, also is known as the Gold Room for its thick carpeting and ornate drapery.
Uniformed officers think of the Tank a bit like a church. Inside its walls, flag officers observe a reverence and decorum for the wrenching decisions that have been made here. To sit at its table is a great honor. The room is controlled by four-star generals, not the president’s civilian appointees, and it is a safe space for them to speak candidly without intrusions from the political dramas of the day. The Tank is reserved for serious discussions of military tactics. Here is where matters of war and peace are determined, where the Joint Chiefs decide to send young men and women to their deaths.
Hanging prominently on one of the walls, along with the American flag and the banners of the military branches, was The Peacemakers, a painting that depicted a historic meeting of a president and his three service chiefs: an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President Abraham Lincoln, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. One hundred fifty-two years after Lincoln hatched plans to preserve the Union, President Trump’s advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to preserve the world order. The July 20, 2017, meeting in the Tank has been documented numerous times, most memorably by Bob Woodward in Fear, but subsequent reporting reveals a more complete picture of the moment and the chilling effect Trump’s comments and hostility had on the nation’s military and national security leadership.
A Very Stable Genius Page 14
