A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  Bannon shook his head at the notion that Mueller was about to give Trump a clean bill of health.

  On the morning of December 2, Trump was upset that none of his lawyers were speaking up for him in the media and pushing back against speculation that the reason Flynn lied to the FBI might have been to avoid implicating the president. At 12:14 p.m., about twenty-four hours after Flynn’s plea agreement was entered in federal court, Trump took to Twitter to defend himself, as he often did, and in so doing offered a striking new view on Flynn’s criminal acts.

  “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” Trump tweeted. “He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”

  The tweet surprised and frustrated Cobb. This was explicitly what he thought he and Dowd had persuaded Trump not to do. Plus, the substance of the message created a whole new firestorm, indicating that Trump had long known Flynn had lied about his contacts with Kislyak, something the president had never before acknowledged. It covered the cable news stations all Saturday morning, and reporters were barraging the White House press shop for comment on this new development.

  Cobb confronted Dowd about the tweet.

  “Where did that come from?” Cobb asked his colleague. “This is contrary to everything we agreed to.”

  “The old man asked me to,” Dowd said, referring to the president. Dowd later challenged this account, claiming that Cobb had advance notice of the tweet language.

  Dowd then issued a statement asserting that he had drafted the language for Trump’s tweet.

  Meanwhile, Dowd and Sekulow were preparing for a meeting they had scheduled with Mueller in the third week of December. They were hopeful it would lead toward some closure, at least in terms of concluding the president and his campaign had not colluded. The president had been telling friends that the probe would be largely complete within weeks, and when that was reported in The Washington Post, his lawyers felt even greater pressure to somehow bring the investigation to an end.

  On December 6, Bowe flew to Washington to see Dowd. They met at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar two blocks from the White House. Bowe was worried enough by what he was hearing to make a special trip. He wanted to make sure Dowd didn’t agree to a presidential interview as a means of making good on his promise to Trump, in part because there was no guarantee that putting the president in front of Mueller would necessarily end the probe.

  “I’m sure this will be over soon,” Dowd told Bowe. “I’m confident we can get a letter.” Bowe feared Dowd would agree to an interview to try to end the probe; Dowd later said he had no intention of considering an interview.

  “It would just be malpractice, John,” Bowe replied, waving the red flag that he knew lawyers would pay attention to. “And there’s no need. In order to try to get it done quickly, we shouldn’t make a bad mistake.”

  The lawyers were in a bind, with no clean bill of health on the horizon. Meanwhile, Trump continued to deny the conclusive evidence gathered by his own intelligence agencies that Russia waged an assault on American democracy by interfering in the 2016 election in support of his candidacy. Even as he proclaimed total innocence of conspiring with the Russians, Trump still couldn’t bring himself to state definitively that the Russians interfered in the election.

  “What the president has to say is, ‘We know the Russians did it, they know they did it, I know they did it, and we will not rest until we learn everything there is to know about how and do everything possible to prevent it from happening again,’” Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, told Greg Miller of The Washington Post. Trump “has never said anything close to that and will never say anything close to that.”

  As the year came to a close, Trump and his administration did little to hold Russia to account for its illegal actions or to deter future Kremlin attacks and safeguard U.S. elections. The only punishment for Russia came from Congress, which voted in August to impose additional penalties against Moscow despite fierce resistance from Trump. As Trump pursued an alliance with President Vladimir Putin, he never convened a cabinet-level meeting on Russian election interference in 2017.

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  —

  In December, Trump had gathered his generals and top diplomats for a meeting as part of the administration’s ongoing strategy talks about troop deployments in Afghanistan in the Situation Room, a secure meeting room on the ground floor of the West Wing. Trump didn’t like the Situation Room, because he didn’t think it had enough gravitas. It just wasn’t impressive.

  But there Trump was, struggling to come up with a new Afghanistan policy and frustrated that so many U.S. forces were deployed in so many places around the world. The conversation began to tilt in the same direction as it had when Trump met with top military and national security officials in the Pentagon’s Tank back in July.

  “All these countries need to start paying us for the troops we are sending to their countries. We need to be making a profit,” Trump said. “We could turn a profit on this.”

  General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to explain to the president once again, gently, that troops deployed in these regions provided stability there, which helped make America safer. Another officer chimed in that charging other countries for U.S. soldiers would be against the law.

  “But it just wasn’t working,” one former Trump aide recalled. “Nothing worked.”

  After the Tank meeting in July, Tillerson had told his aides that he would never silently tolerate such demeaning talk from Trump about making money off the deployments of U.S. soldiers. Tillerson’s father, at the age of seventeen, had committed to enlist in the navy on his next birthday, wanting so much to serve his country in World War II. His great-uncle was a career officer in the navy as well. Both men had been on his mind, Tillerson told aides, when Trump unleashed his tirade in the Tank and again when he repeated those points in the Situation Room in December.

  “We need to get our money back,” Trump told the room.

  That was it. Tillerson stood up. But when he did so, he turned his back to the president and faced the flag officers and the rest of the aides in the room. He didn’t want a repeat of the scene in the Tank.

  “I’ve never put on a uniform, but I know this,” Tillerson said. “Every person who has put on a uniform, the people in this room, they don’t do it to make a buck. They did it for their country, to protect us. I want everyone to be clear about how much we as a country value their service.”

  Tillerson’s rebuke made Trump angry. He got a little red in the face. But the president decided not to engage Tillerson at that moment. He would wait to take him on another day.

  Later that evening, after 8:00, Tillerson was working in his office at the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, preparing for the next day. The phone rang. It was Dunford. The Joint Chiefs chairman’s voice was unsteady with emotion. Dunford had much earlier joked with Tillerson that in past administrations the secretaries of state and Defense Department leaders wouldn’t be caught dead walking on the same side of the street, for their rivalry was that fierce. But now, as both men served Trump, they were brothers joined against what they saw as disrespect for service members. Dunford thanked Tillerson for standing up for them in the Situation Room.

  “You took the body blows for us,” Dunford said. “Punch after punch. Thank you. I will never forget it.”

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  —

  The fateful meeting between Dowd and Sekulow and Mueller finally came in late December. As Dowd asked what else was needed to wrap up this investigation that was hampering the presidency, Mueller gave them the answer for which they had been warily bracing.

  “Well, we’re going to need to interview the president,” Mueller said.

  Then the special counsel clarified why. Mueller confirmed that he needed a presidential interview to finish a report
he was writing about his investigation of Trump. The special counsel regulations described a report as the method by which Mueller could communicate his findings to the attorney general, but the lawyers had never heard Mueller mention it before.

  Dowd and Sekulow didn’t say no to the interview. They asked more questions.

  “You’ve got to tell us what you want to interview him on,” Dowd said.

  At first, Mueller’s deputies insisted they weren’t going to provide questions, but later they agreed that James Quarles, one of Mueller’s deputies, would relay some basic topics they would ask about. Dowd and Sekulow did not have a problem with the special counsel asking Trump about his connections with Russians or participation in any interference conspiracy during the campaign. They believed he had none. But they were wary of other interview topics, such as questions that would probe what Trump had said to former FBI director James Comey about Flynn. Trump said flatly he didn’t remember saying he had hoped Comey could “let this go” in discussing the investigation of Flynn, as Comey wrote in his contemporaneous notes, but a prosecutor could conclude that Comey had been honest and Trump had not. Those kinds of questions were Perjury Trap 101 for prosecutors.

  The meeting ended without an agreement about an interview. Dowd and Sekulow then briefed Trump on what Mueller and his team had said. The president was excited. He was raring to get in a room with Mueller.

  “Will they agree it’s over?” Trump asked his lawyers. “Do I get my letter now?”

  “Well, they want an interview,” Dowd said.

  Dowd explained how they might negotiate the terms of an interview.

  “Great,” Trump answered. “Let’s do it.”

  Trump had an unyielding faith in his own abilities to persuade Mueller. “The president thought, ‘I can do this. I can get this done,’” one of his advisers recalled.

  What Trump’s lawyers viewed as a legal matter with some political fallout, the president saw as a political event, with a legal component. He felt he was being bludgeoned in the media over all things Russia, persecuted in historic, even biblical proportions. Trump was adamant that the cloud be lifted by any means necessary, even if it meant taking control of the crisis himself.

  “Any other president would have said, ‘Do your thing and come to us when you are done,’” this adviser said. “That was not President Trump. President Trump wanted it done now. . . . You couldn’t give him comfort by saying, ‘We’re going to deal with this the way we normally handle cases.’ He would say, ‘That’s a fucked-up strategy. This isn’t normal.’”

  PART THREE

  Twelve

  SPYGATE

  January 11, 2018, began as a typical weekday morning in the White House. President Trump woke up and flicked on the television. This was a part of the day he loved. Alone in his bedroom, no aides to pester him, Trump manned the remote and surfed among channels on his two large screens. His television system was programmed to record all of the cable news shows so that he could fast-forward and rewind to when anchors and their guests discussed him—which, of course, was most of the time. “Television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed,” Ashley Parker and Robert Costa wrote in The Washington Post. He loved watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN to see how the enemies were describing him, but Fox & Friends, with its sycophantic hosts, was where the president picked up some of his preferred ideas.

  Deep into the first hour of Fox & Friends, on January 11, at 6:46 a.m., Andrew Napolitano came on the air. Napolitano was one of Trump’s favorite Fox analysts, so much so that some of Trump’s advisers had talked seriously about the former New Jersey judge as a possible Supreme Court nominee. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives was expected to vote that day to reauthorize a key part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a move the White House had endorsed. Known as the Section 702 program after its numerical reference in the statute, the measure was essential to U.S. intelligence agencies because it authorized government surveillance on foreigners abroad as a way of catching terrorists before they struck.

  “I’m scratching my head,” Napolitano said. “I don’t understand why Donald Trump is in favor of this.”

  Napolitano said he did not trust the surveillance program and warned, erroneously, that it had likely been used to spy on the Trump campaign and give birth to the Russia investigation. Then, forty-seven minutes later, at 7:33 a.m., a gap in time explained perhaps because Trump had been watching Fox & Friends on a delay, the president announced his opposition to the bill that his own White House had been championing in language that eerily echoed Napolitano’s commentary.

  “House votes on controversial FISA ACT today,” Trump wrote on Twitter, quoting verbatim the headline that had been used on Fox during Napolitano’s appearance. “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by previous administration and others?” Trump’s tweet was only thirty-nine words long, but it instantly sparked mayhem at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Key officials tore up their schedules for the morning to try to fix the mess created by the president.

  Trump was confused. He conflated, as Napolitano had, Section 702 with the broader FISA law, which governs a vast assortment of surveillance practices. Trump and his allies were angered by FISA warrants, signed and approved three times by three judges, that had been issued to surveil the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. But Section 702 was a separate and valuable classified program that could primarily target foreigners overseas, when they were suspected of plotting to kill Americans or of helping to support terror cells. The program allowed intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on these foreign citizens, though it could also pick up incidental communications with Americans who were in touch with those targets. Section 702 had been a backbone of the FBI’s post-9/11 efforts to both spot these plots in the making and provide critical pieces of intelligence in the President’s Daily Brief.

  John Kelly intervened to reiterate the program’s importance to the president. He asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to give Trump a thirty-minute primer on the difference between surveilling Americans with a judge-approved warrant and spying on foreigners. Kelly and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, then huddled with lawmakers on Capitol Hill who were in a state of disbelief over the president’s out-of-left-field tweet, trying to calm them down and round up votes.

  Tom Bossert, the White House’s homeland security and cybersecurity adviser, was traveling that morning but received an emergency call from the White House asking him to draft a cleanup tweet that the president could send immediately to reverse his position on renewing Section 702. Meanwhile, lawmakers were speaking out against Trump’s position with opprobrium for his clear lack of knowledge.

  “This is irresponsible, untrue, and frankly it endangers our national security,” the Democratic senator Mark Warner tweeted. “FISA is something the President should have known about long before he turned on Fox this morning.”

  The White House’s task to shore up votes for renewing Section 702 was further compounded by the opposition to it from two Republican lawmakers who were close to the president. Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian-minded Republican, called Trump the morning of January 11 to raise concerns that surveilling foreign targets could capture information on U.S. citizens. Paul said he would filibuster the bill if it reached the Senate because of his privacy concerns. Congressman Mark Meadows, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus and was one of Trump’s most faithful defenders, also called the president that morning to reiterate his opposition to the program because of concerns about civil liberties.

  When a CNN reporter caught up with Kelly in the halls of Congress to ask if Trump’s behavior made legislating more difficult, the chief of staff said, “It’s not more difficult. It’s a juggling act.” Meanwhile, Kelly hurried to clean up the mess, arranging for FBI director Christopher Wray and Directo
r of National Intelligence Dan Coats to explain to Trump how the Section 702 program worked and its value in keeping Americans safe. Throughout the tutorial, Trump never acknowledged making a mistake, never expressed any regret about wasting his staff’s time and imperiling his administration’s own legislative agenda.

  “He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official.

  Trump finally tweeted a correction at 9:14 a.m., using language recommended by Bossert, as a reply to his original tweet, as if he were merely continuing the same thought.

  “With that being said,” Trump’s message read, “I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”

  The tweet was as much an explanation of the policy for Trump himself as for anybody else. House Republicans were meeting at that very moment, alarmed by Trump’s initial tweet, and their anxiety did not subside until Trump’s second tweet registered. Later that day, the House voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the foreign surveillance program, 256 to 164, and the Senate immediately took up debate on the measure. Crisis averted. Yet the president’s misstep continued to reverberate.

  At her afternoon briefing on January 11, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders struggled to explain Trump’s tweets, insisting there was no discrepancy, and said any confusion over the president’s position on the policy was with the media. “The president fully supports the 702 and was happy to see that it passed the House today,” she said. “We don’t see any contradiction or confusion in that.”

  When the NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson asked about Trump’s contradictions, Sanders snapped. “I think that the premise of your question is completely ridiculous and shows the lack of knowledge that you have on this process.”