A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  But Kelly did not embrace the family. He made clear he expected Ivanka and Kushner to act as regular staffers and abide by his rules, including that they first seek his approval before discussing any policy or political matters with the president. Privately, Kelly told Mattis and other administration officials that he thought Ivanka and Kushner were “idiots” and needed to leave the White House because “we’ve just got to run this country.” Naturally, the kids came to resent Kelly, believing he and his enforcers, chief among them Nielsen, were trying to erode their influence and access, which in the Priebus era had largely been unfettered.

  “They’re trying to fuck me,” Kushner told confidants.

  Kelly was nearly killing himself in the job. He woke up most mornings at 4:00, and his Secret Service detail waited outside his home in Manassas, Virginia, to drive him to work. On the roughly forty-five-minute drive—there was no traffic at that predawn hour—Kelly read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Fox News and Breitbart websites, and Axios. He learned early in the job that the president’s addiction to press accounts of himself was so strong that Kelly’s daily tasks and discussions inevitably would be determined by the news cycle.

  Once he got to the White House, CIA officials went over the latest intelligence with him for the President’s Daily Brief. Until Trump came down from the residence, usually between 11:00 a.m. and noon—a remarkably late start time for a commander in chief—Kelly did normal staff work. But the moment the president arrived in the Oval Office, all normalcy flew out the window, and Kelly stayed glued to his side. Once Trump went back to the residence, around 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, Kelly snuck in a couple more hours of work. On many days he slept only four or five hours.

  Famously blunt, Kelly routinely commiserated with other staffers about the difficulties of working for Trump. “He can’t make up his mind,” the chief of staff once told aides. “He says one thing and does another thing. Look what I have to deal with.”

  Still, Kelly was considered a stabilizing force on Capitol Hill, where veteran lawmakers had been watching Trump’s presidency aghast. They saw Kelly, Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as essential guardrails for an erratic president. Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, gave voice to this sentiment on October 4, when he told reporters, “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos, and I support them very much.”

  Corker’s willingness to say what he believed about Trump made him a rare breed among Republican lawmakers, and his “separate our country from chaos” quote immediately made the rounds on cable television, drawing notice from the nation’s viewer in chief. Concerned about the president’s agitation, Kelly called Corker that afternoon.

  “Bob, what in the hell happened today?” he asked.

  Corker explained that he simply responded truthfully to a question he was asked by a reporter. “If you want me to quit complimenting you, I will,” Corker said. Kelly laughed. Trump got more spun up the more the Corker quote was replayed on television, and on October 8 the president attacked Corker on Twitter. Trump stated falsely that Corker had “begged” him for his endorsement and that after the president said “NO,” the senator decided not to run for reelection. In fact, Trump had told Corker several times he would endorse him and earlier that week had called, asking the senator to reconsider his decision and seek another term. Corker responded about an hour later with a tweet of his own: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

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  As Kelly and others were trying to help steer Trump away from dangerous impulses, Mueller and his team were trying to excavate every detail of the Russian cyberattack on the 2016 election. These investigators were combing through tens of thousands of Democratic emails the Russian government had stolen, on orders from Vladimir Putin, to damage Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. This required old-fashioned detective work, like tracing the footprints of a burglar but through the dark digital trails traveled by shadowy spies and hackers. The team compared which of the Democratic National Committee emails were held—in identical form—in the computer troves of WikiLeaks.

  The team, led by the former federal prosecutor Jeannie Rhee and her tireless partner Rush Atkinson, informally called the search “Hack-n-Dump,” though they would later settle on the catchier name “Matchy Matchy.” This was serious work, however. They charted “the hack” to establish the computer theft, pulled off by the GRU’s secret political dirty tricks division, Unit 26165. The elite team of computer scientists, based in offices in central Moscow, was formed in the cold war as a critical signals decrypting office for the Soviet military and had recently been described on a Russian website as “able to decipher any code within three minutes and re-encrypt it without breaking away from writing a doctoral dissertation on quantum physics.” The unit’s officers had created “buffer” servers between their own operation and the Democratic servers to store what they stole and based them in Arizona, an apparent effort to throw people off their trail.

  Tracking “the dump” was in some ways far more important to establishing proof of criminal interference in the election. Another GRU division, Unit 74455, pushed out the material after creating two phony personas: the website DCLeaks, which hosted the hacked goodies, and the social media figure Guccifer 2.0, who pretended to be an individual hacker and tried to communicate with journalists and other key influencers. Tracing the hackers’ theft was like chasing a house burglar.

  “It’s like, the house was robbed, some jewelry was taken,” said one person familiar with the work. “The bracelet that was taken is now in this pawnshop on the corner. We found the same bracelet. We’ve got a match!”

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  On October 30, Trump woke before dawn, clicked on the television, and burrowed in to await the bombshell he expected that morning. It was a Monday, the day before Halloween, and all weekend there was rampant media speculation that Mueller was preparing his first indictments. After being given a heads-up from the Justice Department about the imminent indictments from Mueller, Trump watched live footage of Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, both onetime confidants of the president, turning themselves in to the FBI. They were being charged with tax fraud, hiding millions of dollars in income, and deceiving the federal government about their secret lobbying work for pro-Russian leaders in Ukraine. Trump was pleased and relieved that the charges against Manafort and Gates were focused primarily on activities that began before his campaign. At 10:28 a.m., he tweeted, “There is NO COLLUSION!”

  Within minutes, the media discovered a link between the Trump campaign and Russia. Prosecutors unsealed court documents showing that three weeks earlier Trump’s campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about having received advance warning from a Russian intelligence operative that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump grew angry, and in the corridors of the White House that day the mood was one of weariness and fear of the unknown. Staffers were in freak-out mode. The president had detested Gates but genuinely felt bad for Manafort, believing prosecutors were charging him with long-ago crimes as a means of ensnaring Trump.

  “It’s a shame,” Trump told McGahn not long after the charges were brought. “It had nothing to do with the campaign. It was all this stuff before he met me.”

  Most of all, Trump was furious that the charges created so much bad publicity for himself, a sort of guilt by association. The president urged his lawyers to point out publicly that the charges had no connection to him or his campaign.

  “Why don’t the papers report that?” Trump groused. “This was when he worked for President Reagan!” He added, “I barely knew him. I need you to tell the press that.”

  Trump’s advisers had seen him fal
l into this pit before. He couldn’t sit still and ride out the storm. He always wanted to be on offense. Cobb had to explain to him that the White House should never say anything about Manafort.

  “Nothing Manafort’s charged with involves the White House and it’s very defensive,” Cobb said. “It suggests some anxiety about Manafort.”

  Trump often raised his voice at other aides but not to Cobb. He seemed to respect Cobb’s calm, matter-of-fact tone. He slumped in his chair and complied with his lawyer’s advice. Cobb reminded Trump and his political advisers that Manafort’s lawyers had already addressed the media from the federal courthouse steps and made clear Manafort had no unflattering information about Trump to share with prosecutors.

  “You should just let that be the record rather than muddying the record,” Cobb told him.

  That was welcome news to Trump. But unbeknownst to the president, Mueller was working to secure another cooperating witness. The special counsel’s team would next move in to talk to Trump’s former national security adviser.

  Eleven

  WINGING IT

  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson worked to advance the U.S. relationship with India throughout the first year of the Trump administration. The South Asian republic, the world’s most populous democracy and one of its fastest-growing economies, was a natural ally to the United States. Tillerson felt strongly that America needed to fortify its alliances and block rivals, chief among them China, from taking advantage of any gaps or friction between the United States and its strategic partners. To that end, he believed that if the United States strengthened its transpacific alliance with India, Japan, and Australia, with open trade and shipping routes, it could keep China at bay.

  In October 2017, Tillerson telegraphed the administration’s hopes for the region and India in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and then jetted to New Delhi to discuss the alliance in person with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tillerson was immediately impressed by Modi. The prime minister was a serious person, an experienced deal maker who was motivated by the prospects of a strategic partnership with the United States. Modi was candid with Tillerson about his challenges. He was operating in a tough neighborhood. On one border was Pakistan, India’s greatest threat, and on another was China, which had been trying to partner with Pakistan. To the north was Afghanistan, which was ravaged by war, highly unstable, and vulnerable to Russia and other countries. As he considered allies for India, Modi had options. He was inclined to deal with the United States, but if things ever went sour, Russia was knocking on his door.

  The second week of November, President Trump took his first trip to Asia, a five-country, ten-day journey that concluded in the Philippines, where he attended a global summit of leaders. On November 13, Trump sat down with Modi in Manila on the sidelines of the summit. Tillerson had high hopes for the meeting—even though, back at the White House, Trump was known to have affected an Indian accent to imitate Modi, a sign of disrespect for the prime minister.

  As with most of his foreign leader meetings, Trump had been briefed but didn’t appear to have retained the material and instead tried to wing it. He took a hard right turn into a nitpicky complaint about trade imbalances. Modi tried to refocus on the threats India faced from Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan. His mention of Afghanistan led Trump off into a lengthy tangent about how stupid it had been for the United States to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan for so many years. When Modi mentioned his concern about China’s ambitions and aggression in the region, Trump revealed a stunning ignorance about geography.

  “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border,” Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India.

  Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise. Aides noticed him giving a sidelong glance at Tillerson, who accompanied Trump as part of the U.S. delegation. The Indian prime minister considered Tillerson among the best-versed Americans on the region’s security challenges, and together they had been plotting a new partnership. Tillerson’s eyes flashed open wide at Trump’s comment, but he quickly put his hand to his brow, appearing to the Indian delegation to attempt not to offend the president as well as to signal to Modi that he knew this statement was nuts.

  Trump did not appear to notice their silent exchange. He just kept rolling, droning on about unrelated topics. Modi tried to keep the conversation on an elevated plane, hoping to follow the path Tillerson had laid out for them in the previous weeks to work together to protect India and fend off China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But each time Modi tried to get Trump to engage on the substance of U.S.-India relations, the American president veered off on another non sequitur about trade deficits and the endless war in Afghanistan. Those who witnessed the meeting that day in Manila were disheartened. Modi’s expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation.

  “I think he left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner,’” one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, “the Indians took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

  The meeting with Modi was a major setback not only for U.S.-India relations but also for the administration’s hopes of checkmating China in the region. The meeting came at a time when Tillerson’s influence with Trump was growing simply because the president had tired of others in his orbit. In preparation for the Asia trip, John Kelly asked Tillerson if he could add another duty to his already-full portfolio: Could he give Trump his national security briefings on the road?

  This request was odd. Briefing the president was normally the responsibility of the national security adviser. Tillerson asked Kelly why.

  “He doesn’t want to see McMaster,” Kelly responded.

  The signs of Trump’s fraying patience for H. R. McMaster had been painfully obvious throughout the fall. McMaster’s loyal staff hated to admit it, but they knew this relationship was no longer working.

  A military intellectual and policy maestro, McMaster was widely respected in Washington’s foreign policy establishment and on Capitol Hill, but he did not easily fit into Trump’s orbit. This much was evident right away. In his first town-hall meeting of the National Security Council staff after being appointed in February 2017, McMaster emphasized that as a nonpartisan army officer he did not vote. He wanted the professional staff to know that he valued their input, but his admonition about voting unwittingly sent a message to Trump, who demanded political loyalty from everyone in his administration.

  McMaster lived by paperwork and process. He believed his duty was to give the president information so that he could make the best decisions, and then to help carry out the commander in chief’s will. But his briefings to Trump were academic and detail-oriented, and the two men’s stylistic differences inspired epic clashes.

  McMaster had difficulty holding the president’s attention. Trump, meanwhile, would get annoyed with what he considered McMaster’s lecturing style. The president felt his national security adviser was always determined to try to “teach me something.” Indeed, Trump constantly shifted and grumbled when staff were trying to bring him up to speed on a topic, immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn’t sufficient if he needed experts. As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: “I don’t want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else.”

  McMaster came across as a tank commander in his bearing and didn’t seem able to change gears to the far more politically cautious mode of White House hedging and dodging. He had a barking kind of voice, which had reliably conveyed strength and directness in his previous world. But it proved to be a pitch Trump disliked instantly, as if it were a piercing dog whistle.

  Some mornings, Trump would come down to the Oval Office and see the President’s Daily Brief on his schedule, followed by a meeting with the national security adviser, and complain. “I’m not fucking doing that,” he told aides. “I’m not talking with McMaster
for an hour. Are you kidding me?” Instead, the president would step into his private dining room, turn on the television, and summon National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, or commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to come over and keep him company.

  In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump’s feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.

  McMaster felt it was his duty to speak truth to his commander, to notify the president of critically important issues, and even to highlight bad news and the cons of a particular strategy Trump was considering. That’s how McMaster had always spoken to his wartime commanders when he was reporting from the battlefield: “Things have gone to hell, sir. Here’s how bad it is.” But Trump’s intelligence briefers downplayed or withheld new developments regarding Russia’s election interference or cyber intrusions, so as not to agitate the commander in chief. When they left a key piece of information out of the verbal President’s Daily Brief, McMaster would later raise it directly with Trump, only to become a punching bag for the president when he inevitably blew up. The routine frustrated McMaster.

  Part of McMaster’s process entailed providing Trump with written briefing documents on each big decision, with detailed descriptions of the risks and possible rewards. He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn’t reading any of the briefing books, or even the concise three-page version. Staff secretary Rob Porter would synthesize the memos in a one-page cover letter, written in prose the president might find easier to digest. As one of Trump’s confidants said, “I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half page.” But McMaster understandably resented the fact that Trump was reading Porter’s version of CliffsNotes. Porter and Reince Priebus suggested an alternative approach: McMaster could deliver verbal briefings to Trump. Nothing in writing.