A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  “My counsel to him is . . . release it in an appropriate forum and let the public decide,” Gowdy told Burnett.

  Trump ordered Kelly to call Jeff Sessions or Rosenstein to make sure the Justice Department stopped blocking the memo’s release. He promised his chief of staff that this was not the end of the story. He would show them who was in power.

  “If they won’t release it,” Trump said, “I will.”

  Trump soon boarded Marine One en route to Joint Base Andrews and took off for Davos. But even in the snowcapped Swiss Alps, where he had journeyed ostensibly to promote America’s economic interests, the president remained obsessed with thwarting the investigator who infuriated and vexed him every day: Mueller.

  * * *

  —

  In late January, when Trump returned to Washington, he resolved to ensure the secret Nunes memo would be released. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which Nunes chaired, voted on January 29 to declassify the memo, giving the president five days to review the document and raise any objections.

  The White House immediately heard serious reservations from throughout the intelligence community. Wray, Coats, and Rosenstein all argued with Kelly against the memo’s release, saying it could set a dangerous precedent by exposing classified information and revealing sources and methods of U.S. intelligence gathering. Furthermore, they said, the document was an inaccurate depiction of the bureau’s investigative methods.

  The worries of intelligence and law enforcement officials mattered little to Trump, however. He was determined to grasp onto anything, even a partisan memo, to bolster his claim that the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt.”

  “He believed it really was going to be the panacea he hoped for,” one adviser recalled.

  White House aides were adamant that the president appear to follow a fair and deliberative process in reviewing the declassification decision, but Trump was caught on tape revealing his mind-set the night of January 30, when he delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. When a Republican lawmaker asked him to “release the memo,” Trump said, “Don’t worry, 100 percent,” and waved his hand affirmatively.

  By week’s end, Trump got his wish and declassified the Nunes memo. “It’s a disgrace what’s happening in our country,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on February 2. “A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves, and much worse than that.”

  The decision brought recriminations from congressional Democrats, who warned that any firings at the Justice Department would trigger a constitutional crisis. But the memo did not have Trump’s intended effect. Its central claim was that the warrant application to spy on Page relied on the Democrat-funded Steele dossier and that the Justice Department and senior FBI officials concealed this partisan bias from the judges reviewing the warrant application. Nunes’s memo argued there was an anti-Trump conspiracy in hiding this pro-Clinton detail from the judges, and that Rosenstein lacked objectivity because he, too, had approved one of those dubious warrants.

  Republicans ultimately had to concede, with the release of the memo’s black-and-white text, that the government had in fact revealed the role of Trump’s political opponents in funding the research. Rosenstein stayed on the job, and the Mueller investigation continued apace. At the FBI, Wray’s response to the memo’s release was remarkable. He issued a video and written statement to employees in which he took indirect aim at the president’s tactics and urged agents to stay focused on their missions for the country.

  “The American people read the papers, and they hear lots of talk on cable TV and social media. But they see and experience the actual work you do—keeping communities safe and our nation secure, often dealing with sensitive matters and making decisions under difficult circumstances,” Wray said. “And that work will always matter more. Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure.”

  Thirteen

  BREAKDOWN

  Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, had a title that belied his power and influence. He controlled the flow of paper to the president; managed the policy process, including mediating the often unruly internal debates over trade; and spent many hours a day at Trump’s side, internalizing his preferences and shaping the direction of his presidency. He was Chief of Staff John Kelly’s reliable partner.

  In a White House staff notable for its renegades and misfits, Porter, forty, cut a singular figure. He was high achieving, smooth, and charismatic. He earned undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and then climbed the ranks on Capitol Hill to become, by only his midthirties, chief of staff to senior Republican Senator Orrin Hatch. Friends and former colleagues of Porter’s told The New York Times’ Katie Rogers, “He was articulate enough to be secretary of state. Intelligent enough to be a Supreme Court justice. Driven enough to be president.”

  But on February 6, 2018, the British tabloid the Daily Mail reported accusations of domestic abuse against him by both of his ex-wives. Porter denied abusing the women and claimed a “coordinated smear campaign.” Kelly and other senior officials had adopted a bunker mentality in a White House constantly under siege. At first, they were defensive of Porter and viewed scrutiny from journalists as “gotcha” questions.

  Kelly’s initial statement on the matter, which he largely dictated to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders as she typed it on her computer, called Porter “a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him.” But on February 7, The Intercept posted photographs of one of the women, Colbie Holderness, with a black eye. Kelly then issued a second statement saying he was “shocked” by the allegations and that “there is no place for domestic violence in our society.” Porter announced that day he would resign.

  When Porter began as staff secretary in January 2017, he had been granted an interim clearance so that he could handle classified materials, often passing them directly to the president for his review or signature. But troubling allegations emerged in his background investigation. FBI agents interviewed his ex-wives as part of their standard investigation for his security clearance, and in July 2017 the bureau flagged the White House that they found derogatory information.

  The specifics of who did what and when throughout the Porter saga remain murky and vary based on each person’s account, but there was consensus among many staffers about one thing: Kelly misrepresented his own actions. At a February 9 senior staff meeting, after he had issued two divergent public statements about Porter, Kelly said that he had taken action to remove Porter within forty minutes of learning that abuse allegations were credible. But many staffers said Kelly’s claim of swift action was dishonest, and it contradicted the public record.

  “We were like, ‘What are you saying?’” one White House adviser recalled. “He was blatantly lying. No you did not.”

  Sanders and her deputies, who were tasked with accounting for the administration’s actions to a restive news media, were exasperated. Sanders was a willing warrior for Trump, at times sacrificing her own credibility in service to a president who obfuscated and lied for sport, but one day during the Porter scandal she lost it. She had had enough with the incomplete and misleading information she had been provided by her colleagues.

  Standing in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s West Wing office, Sanders lit into Don McGahn, a shouting match so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it. She told him she would not continue to speak publicly on behalf of the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation. Sanders quickly received the clarity she sought. The dispute was resolved and Sanders briefed reporters, but tensions between the press office and McGahn and Kelly persisted. “You couldn’t get a straight answer from John Kelly,” one aide recalled. “Either he was dishonest or an old man who can’t remember things.”

  As Kelly refashioned his explanations for how he handled the Porter matter, he was consulting regularly
with Trump. They both liked Porter a great deal and were disappointed to see him leave the White House. “We absolutely wish him well,” Trump told reporters on February 9. The president continued, saying that Porter, “as you probably know, says he’s innocent, and I think you have to remember that.”

  On the night of February 9 and the morning of February 10, Trump and Kelly spoke at length about the scandal. Trump complained that lots of women make things up about men for their own benefit. “He’s a good guy,” Kelly told Trump of Porter. Maybe, Trump said, Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter? The president urged his chief of staff to have the White House trumpet this injustice and explain why it was so unfair to accuse or judge a man without all the facts. The parallels between Porter and the president were obvious. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault and harassment, and he denied each claim—although he was infamously recorded in 2005 bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals against their will.

  In addition, the Porter case coincided with the burgeoning Stormy Daniels scandal, which had been flaring since January when The Wall Street Journal first reported hush-money payments to the porn star. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had been paid $130,000 in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign by Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006, during his first year of marriage to Melania.

  The morning of February 10, Trump decided he wanted to speak out again about Porter. At 10:30 a.m., he tweeted his view to the world: “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. . . . There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

  The Porter scandal put a harsh spotlight on the process for obtaining security clearances. Dozens of White House officials worked under interim clearances of varying levels, having access to some of the nation’s most sensitive material while their FBI background investigations were pending. But only one of these officials mattered to the press corps—and ultimately to Trump—and that was Jared Kushner. The presidential son-in-law held a broad range of responsibilities that necessitated access to classified information, and he enjoyed regular access to the “holiest of holies” in the CIA trove of intelligence. Typically, senior officials did not stay on interim clearances for more than three months; Kushner by now had had his for thirteen months.

  Amid the media scrutiny of the Porter case, Trump had directed McGahn to find out the status of the FBI investigation into Kushner’s background. On February 9, McGahn received a call on a secure phone line from Rod Rosenstein. The deputy attorney general delivered some bad news. He didn’t go into details but said there were continuing problems with Kushner’s obtaining a high-level security clearance, and to expect further delay. Rosenstein said additional investigation was required.

  As Mark Corallo had foreshadowed in May 2017, there was no way someone who failed multiple times to disclose all of his or her foreign contacts would receive the highest-level security clearance through a normal process. And Kushner, who had an unusually complex history of financial transactions and business dealings with foreigners, was no exception.

  Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff and commerce secretary under Presidents Obama and Clinton, respectively, said the right course was for Kushner to follow the same rules as every other senior government official, regardless of his lineage. “A family member with no experience at anything other than real estate, no real profile other than a family-run business with a shady past, given incredibly complicated tasks was a joke,” Daley said. “People elect a president knowing so much about them, good or bad, but no one knows Jared Kushner in the game he is playing. The fact that he made so many blunders, starting with the back-channel talks with Russians, should have told one how in over his head he was.”

  Kelly had been concerned with Kushner’s high level of access without a permanent clearance and was under pressure in the wake of the Porter scandal to overhaul the process for all White House clearances. On February 16, the chief of staff announced that he would be enforcing rigorous new rules that would prevent some officials with interim clearances from accessing top secret information. An aide briefed on Kelly’s thinking told The Washington Post that the chief of staff knew his policy put a “bull’s eye” on Kushner but that the rules were designed for national security and could not be ignored.

  “The events of the last ten days have focused immense attention on a clearance process that has been in place for multiple administrations,” Kelly wrote in a memo outlining the new policy. “We should—and in the future, must—do better.”

  The credibility that made Kelly such an asset in Trump’s White House, which he had earned on the battlefield, was now tainted by his work in the Porter saga. Kelly’s friends said the portrait of him in service to Trump bore little resemblance to the leader they had come to know. “This is a man who, across the Corps for 40 years, was considered to be the exemplar of moral principle and integrity,” John R. Allen, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, said amid the Porter scandal. “He was a selfless servant in every possible way—a lot of personal courage, moral courage to do the right thing. His values were very powerfully formed, and it’s just difficult for me to find in my memory of my service with him a flaw.”

  The problems for Kelly had been building. He came under sharp criticism in October 2017 for leveraging his standing as a Gold Star father who lost a son at war to help contain a political crisis over Trump’s botched calls to the families of fallen soldiers and for falsely attacking the Democratic congresswoman Frederica Wilson. After the Florida Democrat criticized Trump’s call to one soldier’s widow, Kelly called the congresswoman an “empty barrel” and alleged that she wrongly claimed responsibility for a new FBI field office in Miami. When the Sun Sentinel released video showing she had made no such claim, Kelly said he would “absolutely not” apologize.

  Then, in January, Kelly got crosswise with Trump when he said in a Fox News Channel interview that Trump’s views on immigration had evolved because he wasn’t “fully informed” when he first proposed a border wall during the campaign. “Campaign to governing are two different things, and this president has been very, very flexible in terms of what is within the realm of the possible,” Kelly told Fox’s Bret Baier. He added, “There’s been an evolutionary process that this president has gone through.”

  Cable television’s viewer in chief was not pleased. “Based on what you said, I’m totally misinformed and don’t know what I’m talking about!” Trump thundered to Kelly after the interview aired. “You said I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about!”

  “That’s not what I said,” Kelly told the president, explaining that Trump’s position on the wall had indeed evolved since he initially took office and envisioned a forty-foot concrete barrier stretching across every mile of the border, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.

  “No,” Trump shot back. “That is what you said.”

  Both easily combustible, Trump and Kelly were used to recurring and escalating clashes. Some of them would conclude with Kelly’s threatening to quit. “I’m out of here,” the chief of staff would say, though he was merely venting his anger.

  Trump was upset that the Porter story had dominated the news for several days straight and that week he began quietly calling friends to complain about Kelly and crowdsource possible replacements. After this moment, Kelly stopped lurking around the Oval Office as often or listening in on as many of the president’s calls. Trump stopped consulting him on some key personnel decisions. And Kelly lost the trust and support of some on the staff.

  “When you lose that power, when you lose the ability to really direct the White House staff as you need to in order to support the president, you’ve essentially lost the abil
ity to do the job. You can stick around. I guess you can let the president decide when he is or isn’t going to use you. But what happens is you become a virtual White House intern, being told where to go and what to do,” Leon Panetta, a Democratic former White House chief of staff, defense secretary, and CIA director, said later in the spring.

  “I think it won’t take long before John says, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” Panetta added. “If you’re true to yourself, you know that it’s reached a point where you have to make the decision about who you are and what history’s going to say about it.”

  * * *

  —

  On Friday, February 16, Rosenstein announced a sweeping indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies with an extensive criminal scheme to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The thirty-seven-page indictment laid bare in exhaustive detail an ambitious Russian campaign of internet trolls and propaganda to trick Americans into supporting Trump. Rosenstein accused the Russian suspects of conducting what he termed “information warfare against the United States.” While this indictment did not charge anyone from Trump’s campaign, it dealt a fatal blow to one of the president’s favorite talking points, that Russian interference was a hoax created by Democrats as an excuse for losing an election they should have won.

  That weekend in Florida, Trump lashed out about the Russia probe in a defiant and profane tweetstorm that was exceptional even by his own standards, beginning after 11:00 p.m. Saturday, February 17, and ending around noon Sunday, February 18. He accused Democrats of enabling a foreign adversary to interfere in the election. He attacked the FBI for missing signals of the school shooting in nearby Parkland, Florida. He undermined his own national security adviser, H. R. McMaster. And he lit into some of his favorite targets: the media, Congressman Adam Schiff, and Hillary Clinton.