Trump faulted the Mueller investigation and other Russia probes for sowing discord in America. He wrote in one of his Twitter messages, “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”
Trump spent much of his weekend watching cable news and venting to friends that the Russia investigation was dominating the news cycle. He had dinner Saturday night with the talk-show host Geraldo Rivera before retreating to his private quarters and firing off the first in his series of controversial tweets. Trump was especially irritated with McMaster, who was in Germany addressing the annual Munich Security Conference. He said in his speech there that evidence of Russian interference in the U.S. election was “incontrovertible.”
Trump, who firmly believed any acknowledgment of Russia’s crimes took away from the validity of his own election victory, upbraided the national security adviser on Twitter: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”
The pressures remained when Trump returned to the White House. On February 21, he invited Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, whom he regarded almost as a son, to the Oval Office. Kelly and Lewandowski had an especially acrimonious relationship. Earlier that month, for instance, Lewandowski had criticized Kelly on television for his handling of the Porter scandal. Much like Trump, Lewandowski was crude, combative, and cocky. During the campaign, he was charged with misdemeanor battery for grabbing the arm of a reporter. Kelly thought Lewandowski was nothing but trouble, a Trump sycophant and palace infighter who revved up the president’s riskier instincts and profited off their relationship with a lucrative consulting business. Just a couple months earlier, Kelly and Lewandowski had clashed in front of the president and other advisers during a meeting about political strategy. Lewandowski delivered a fatalistic outlook on the 2018 midterm elections: “You’re going to get fucking crushed. You guys don’t have your shit together.” He proceeded to fault Kelly, as well as White House political director Bill Stepien, for deficiencies in the political operation and congressional outreach. He argued that the staff was not being strategic enough in using the powers of incumbency to build a foundation for the midterms, now less than one year away.
In the February 21 meeting, Trump and Lewandowski had spent about fifteen or twenty minutes alone, catching up and talking politics, when the president called for Kelly to join them. The conversation was acrimonious and interrupted by an urgent phone call for Trump. Kelly and Lewandowski stepped out of the Oval Office to leave Trump to take the call. As they stood just outside the Oval, Kelly and Lewandowski argued. Kelly told other people to “throw him out of my fucking house.”
That’s when the shouting match began, with Lewandowski standing close to Kelly’s face. They were so loud their voices could be heard in the front lobby of the West Wing, where an aide rushed to shut a door to try to muffle the noise.
“This isn’t your house,” Lewandowski yelled back at Kelly. “This is the people’s house. Fuck you. I don’t work for you.”
The two men argued so loudly their faces turned red. Kelly grabbed Lewandowski by his collar and tried to push him against a wall. The chief of staff was a Secret Service protectee, so agents rushed in to ensure he would be safe.
“If you put your hands on me, you’ll spend the rest of your career in Siberia,” Lewandowski told one of the agents. “I don’t work here. I’m a friend of the president. Do not touch me.”
The two men quickly cooled down and agreed to a truce. But before going their separate ways, Lewandowski told Kelly, “The day you are walking off the campus is the day I will walk back on because I’m not leaving, ever.”
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On February 27, Kelly spelled out the administration’s new security clearance policy in more detail. All those operating on an interim top secret clearance or the more specialized TS/SCI clearance for a year or more would have their access downgraded to secret. That was a far lower level of access, one that literally millions of government employees had in their jobs and would normally hamper a senior White House adviser’s ability to do his or her work. Kelly’s policy effectively downgraded Kushner’s clearance, a severe limitation on the Trump family member’s access to intelligence and other classified information.
Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA. Agency officials had been wary of allowing Kushner to see highly sensitive information about sources and methods, based on his pattern of talking to foreign leaders in the Middle East—including Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince—without State Department diplomats or other government experts guiding him.
The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner. Some of these foreign leaders described Kushner as naive and easily pushed; others said his financial debts and search for refinancing for an underwater Manhattan skyscraper were one route that made him vulnerable to pressure.
Immediately after Kelly’s order, national security staff at the White House got new standing orders for how to deal with Kushner. They could no longer provide particularly sensitive intelligence products to him and tailored his reports to ensure he had necessary information on subjects on which he worked. Kushner and Ivanka Trump wanted Kelly to restore his clearance, telling him this was a problem. When they couldn’t move him, Ivanka lobbied her father, complaining at least twice to the president that Kelly was taking away her access as well. She said that she and Kushner would be marginalized and unable to do their jobs without higher-level clearances and pleaded with him to fix it. When Kelly soon learned what Ivanka was telling Trump, he became incensed—because it wasn’t true. Ivanka had joined the White House staff in April 2017, meaning she had had an interim security clearance for less than one year and therefore was not affected by the new policy.
“Ivanka lied to her father’s face, saying her security clearance had been downgraded as well,” a White House adviser recalled. “She told her father that Kelly had taken her clearance. It was a complete lie.”
Publicly, Trump had sought to distance himself from the security clearances dilemma. When reporters asked him about Kushner’s access earlier in February, the president said, “I will let General Kelly make that decision, and he’s going to do what’s right for the country. And I have no doubt that he will make the right decision.”
Privately, however, Trump intervened and applied pressure on Kelly. He asked his chief of staff, wasn’t there a way to get the kids permanent top secret clearances? Trump never gave a direct order, but left a strong suggestion that Kelly should prioritize this problem and fix it for him.
“I wish we could make this go away. This is a problem,” Trump told Kelly, stressing that this was making him and his family look bad.
Kushner and Ivanka disputed to associates that they had sought to apply improper pressure, and Kushner later denied publicly that he had ever talked about his clearance status with the president. “I have not discussed it with him,” Kushner told Axios.
But others in the administration felt unrelenting pressure from Kushner and Ivanka. The president’s daughter tried to prod McGahn to intervene, something she later denied to associates, but when the White House counsel didn’t deliver what she wanted, Ivanka whispered to her father and to other White House aides that McGahn was a “leaker” and not to be trusted. “Leaker” was about the worst
red-flag name you could give someone in the presence of the bull named Donald Trump.
There was no love lost between McGahn and Ivanka. The lawyer was already highly wary of the first daughter, and they had had a number of run-ins the year prior. But the security clearances issue ultimately ruined Kelly’s relationship with the kids. He was furious that Ivanka was using her standing as first daughter to cajole her father to intervene on an issue of national security importance. Kelly would never trust her or Kushner again.
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A pair of departures threatened to wreak more havoc on the White House. On February 28, Hope Hicks, the communications director who had become the president’s de facto therapist and could be counted upon to manage his moods and talk him out of hazardous ideas, announced that she would soon depart. The timing of her exit seemed significant; a day earlier, she had spent more than eight hours testifying before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its Russia investigation and admitted to telling white lies on behalf of the president. But her departure had been in the works for several weeks and had nothing to do with the various probes. After more than three tumultuous years at Trump’s beck and call, Hicks was burned out and eager for a fresh start outside Trump’s orbit. Months later, she would settle far away in Los Angeles as an executive at New Fox, the Murdoch family media empire.
A week later, Gary Cohn resigned as National Economic Council director amid a fierce internal clash over trade policies. A former president of Goldman Sachs, Cohn had served as a free-market counterweight to Trump’s protectionist impulses and as an interlocutor with the business community. When the president decided to proceed with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which threatened to touch off a global trade war, Cohn called it quits.
The departures of Cohn, Hicks, and Porter represented an inflection point in the presidency. Some of Trump’s stabilizers, the advisers who urged caution and found consensus, were gone. The result was an air of anxiety and volatility in the White House. The president confided to friends that he was uncertain about whom around him he could trust. And he seethed about perceived betrayals, such as a photo obtained by Axios that made the rounds on cable television showing Rosenstein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Solicitor General Noel Francisco having dinner together on February 28. The scene was interpreted as an act of solidarity by the Justice Department’s top two officials after Trump had again attacked Sessions on Twitter.
Observers registered a new level of alarm. “This is an unprecedented position of chaos,” Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general, said at the time. “I think the president is starting to wobble in the emotional stability and this is not going to end well.”
Kelly did not cloak his disdain for some parts of his White House job when he visited his former workplace on March 1. At an event celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly told department employees that he missed working with them “every day” and lamented his abbreviated, six-month tenure as homeland security secretary.
“The last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the greatest honors of my life, being secretary of homeland security,” Kelly said. “But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.”
Fourteen
ONE-MAN FIRING SQUAD
By March 2018, Robert Mueller’s intentions were still completely unknown to those in the president’s orbit. Trump aired his state of mind hourly, while Mueller was an enigma. He did no media interviews and made no public appearances. His team of prosecutors and investigators were just as tight-lipped, and the office’s spokesman neither confirmed nor denied media reports about the state of the investigation.
Meanwhile, the White House had sent Mueller reams of emails and other documents, Ty Cobb and John Dowd having convinced Trump that full cooperation would be their best strategy. The president’s aides and advisers were told they had an obligation to be witnesses and answer questions from the special counsel. By the end of February, Mueller’s office had interviewed just about everyone in the White House who might have relevant information to share, including Don McGahn, Hope Hicks, and Avi Berkowitz, the twenty-nine-year-old assistant to Jared Kushner, although sit-downs continued well into the spring.
For some Trump aides, the interview experience was terrifying. Their lawyers instructed them not to talk to colleagues—and certainly not to the president—about the investigation, so they did not quite know what to expect. They were covertly whisked away to a conference room in a windowless government building and seated facing half a dozen or more special counsel prosecutors and FBI agents. Others, including an FBI body language expert, sometimes lurked around the edges of the room, observing.
The questioners were thorough and incredibly well prepared, asking the same questions several different ways to elicit revelatory answers. As one witness recalled, “They don’t ask any question they don’t know the answer for.” The inquiries often lasted for many hours and sometimes for multiple days. The witnesses were afraid both of oversharing, for fear of eventually facing the president’s wrath, and of slipping into a lie, for fear of becoming the next Michael Flynn.
Mueller’s deputies led most of the questioning, but Mueller would come in and out of the room, looming silently over the sessions with his rigid bearing. A second witness described Mueller’s stare as downright frightening: “He comes in and puts those dead eyes on you like a fucking shark. . . . Shark eyes. Dead eyes. Big, old, dead eyes.”
Steve Bannon felt ready for his first of several sessions with the Mueller team. He had spent the previous month doing murder boards—practice sessions in which the lawyers interrogated Bannon so he could rehearse answers—with his lawyer, William Burck, and a team of associates. Bannon had studied the events prosecutors were most likely to probe and had reviewed copies of his correspondence. But when he showed up the morning of the interview, he had a bout of stage fright. He peeked into the conference room and saw about twenty-five people—prosecutors, FBI agents, and other investigators. He thought Mueller was about to flip the tables on him and for a moment feared he might not make it out a free man. He pulled Burck aside.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Bannon asked his lawyer. “There’s murderers’ row in there.”
Burck also represented Reince Priebus and McGahn, and Bannon asked him whether such a large showing from Mueller’s team was standard.
“How many did Reince have?” Bannon said.
“Reince had about five,” Burck said. Then he offered an explanation to his concerned client: “Everybody wants to tell their grandkids they were here when Darth Vader was deposed.”
The two men laughed and Bannon calmed down. When they entered the room, Mueller walked up to greet the star witness. He again brought up Bannon’s daughter Maureen, just as he had when they first met outside the Oval Office in May 2017.
“I really think Maureen is going to be really happy with the decision she made being back up at West Point,” Mueller told Bannon. Maureen had only recently opted to return to the academy, and Bannon couldn’t fathom how Mueller knew. Mueller said he had heard the news from a friend.
Later, Bannon told Burck, “He did that just to say, ‘You’re one of us. Besides all your bullshit, you’re actually a naval officer and your daughter is a West Point grad. Remember that.’”
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Mueller had set his sights on a much more important witness: the president himself. On March 5, Trump’s lawyers met with the special counsel for the first time since Dowd had summarily canceled the tentative interview with Trump scheduled for January 27.
Sitting with Mueller and Quarles, and accompanied by his co-counsel Jay Sekulow, Dowd once again laid out his legal theory for why the president did not need to answer the special counsel’s questions. Dowd said Trump had broad executive power to lawfully take the precise actions Mueller’s team was scrutinizing. He again cited the ruling in the Mike Espy case, which establi
shed that prosecutors needed to show they couldn’t get critical and necessary information in any other way before demanding an interview with the president.
The interview wasn’t going to happen, Dowd declared. “You’ve got no right,” he said.
For a moment, no one said anything. Silence. Then Mueller piped up.
“Well, John, we could subpoena him,” Mueller said.
This was a subtle threat and in one sense the most basic statement any prosecutor could make to a defense lawyer. But it was the first time Mueller had used the S-word this directly with Trump’s lawyers, and it made Dowd rear back. He told Mueller that subpoenaing the president to appear before a grand jury would be highly aggressive, thrusting them into a pitched battle in federal courts that could take many months to be resolved. Surely this would go to the Supremes. And while Dowd was confident Trump’s side would prevail, he thought privately that a subpoena battle would be awful. It would keep the cloud over Trump’s presidency indefinitely, the exact opposite of what his client wanted.
Dowd hit the conference table with his hand. “Good, go ahead. I can’t wait to get you before a federal judge and have you explain why you need this information when you have no evidence [of a crime] and you have all the answers.”
He snapped at Mueller: “This isn’t some game. You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”
Mueller sat poker-faced, listening, then reiterated the team needed an interview with the president to “square our corners.” His deputies amplified that the president’s answers were essential to the investigation. Courts had not previously ruled on the legality of issuing a presidential subpoena for testimony. Although independent counsel Kenneth Starr subpoenaed President Clinton for grand jury testimony in 1998, it was never tested in court, because Starr withdrew it once the president agreed voluntarily to sit for an interview. Paul Rosenzweig, who worked on Starr’s investigation as a senior counsel, explained to The Washington Post that judges are generally inclined to accommodate presidents so that they can focus on their sworn duties, such as managing world affairs, but also are loath to protect them from investigations because “no man is above the law, and if it’s a lawful investigation, then he must respond.”
A Very Stable Genius Page 23
