A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  “I beg of you, don’t let McMaster do this,” Cutz told Kelly. “I’m resigning.”

  But Kelly shook his head emphatically.

  “No, no,” Kelly said. “You’re great. Just keep doing what you’re doing. What are you talking about?”

  Cutz blinked. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Trump was insisting that McMaster fire the leakers. Hannity had fingered McMaster’s deputies as the guilty parties. The president’s alt-right fans on the internet were openly accusing Cutz by name, even though an early internal investigation ruled out both him and Bajraktari because neither ever had access to the document. And still, here was Kelly, standing in front of Cutz and insisting that both he and the president wanted him to stay.

  At the same time or shortly after, Trump called McMaster, summoning him to the phone and away from his meetings with foreign leaders. Trump was terse. He said something to the effect of “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. I understand,” McMaster said. “How quickly do you want me to go?”

  “Friday,” Trump replied, meaning the next day.

  McMaster suggested a more structured handoff, perhaps over a two-week period, so that he could share briefing materials with his successor. Trump said that would be fine. But he wanted to announce the change immediately. McMaster quickly called his core team of NSC advisers to gather for a conference call. He wanted them to hear the news from him before Trump tweeted it. When they all hung up, McMaster’s two top deputies, the ones accused of the leak, sent Kelly an email informing him they were tendering their resignations, effective when McMaster left his office.

  It took only a few minutes for Trump to announce his own news. The tweet posted at 6:26 p.m.: “I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.”

  McMaster did not go quietly, however. During the two-week handoff period, he delivered a stinging rebuke of Trump’s Russia policy. On April 3, in a dinner speech at the Atlantic Council, McMaster denounced Russia’s aggression around the world and said the United States was falling short in confronting it.

  “Russia has used old and new forms of aggression to undermine our open societies and the foundations of international peace and stability,” McMaster said. “For too long some nations have looked the other way in the face of these threats. Russia brazenly and implausibly denies its actions. And we have failed to impose sufficient costs.”

  Earlier that same day, Trump said during a news conference with the leaders of the Baltic States that he was hopeful of forging an alliance with Putin. “Ideally we want to be able to get along with Russia,” the president said.

  McMaster made clear he saw little virtue in getting along with Russia. “Would you rather be part of a small club of autocrats that might rotate their meetings between Moscow, Tehran, Damascus, Havana, Caracas, and Pyongyang, or would you rather be a club of free peoples who respect sovereignty, individual rights, and the rule of law?” he told the Atlantic Council. “I think our club is better.”

  The audience burst into applause. The Atlantic Council’s president, Frederick Kempe, congratulated McMaster “for that ringing voice of clarity.” This was the last time McMaster spoke publicly as a member of the Trump administration.

  * * *

  —

  The tumult on Trump’s legal team mirrored the chaos in his White House—a virtual Tilt-A-Whirl, with the president pressing the buttons like a carnival-ride operator. Joe diGenova, the lawyer Trump had announced he was hiring based on his Fox News appearances, lasted less than one week. On March 23, Trump met with diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing. The couple, both seasoned lawyers with solid track records, came as a package, but Trump told aides he was less impressed with them than he had expected. He explicitly ruled out Toensing speaking for him on television, complaining that she showed up in the Oval Office wearing a flowing bohemian-style wrap and fingerless gloves. DiGenova, meanwhile, wore an ill-fitting suit. Trump envisioned “killers” as his lawyers, and diGenova and Toensing simply did not have “the look.”

  Trump found a face-saving way to back out of hiring diGenova and Toensing without directly offending them. The couple had responsibly flagged for the president a potential conflict of interest that he would need to be aware of if they represented him. They also represented Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for Trump’s legal team who was a potential witness in the probe into the president’s possible obstruction of justice. For diGenova and Toensing to continue, Trump would have to be aware of the Corallo conflict and agree it did not concern him. Jay Sekulow announced March 25 that diGenova and Toensing would no longer be joining the legal team.

  Sekulow had been expecting to eventually downsize his own role in the Trump legal battle, and though an avid fan of the president, he never planned to lead his legal defense team. But after a week of turmoil, Sekulow, a rock music fan, adopted a Zen attitude and a gallows humor to try to roll with the punches. “Welcome to the Hotel California,” Sekulow said in a joking reference to the Eagles hit when a colleague asked him what the turnover meant for him. “You can check out anytime you want. But you can never leave.”

  Sixteen

  A CHILLING RAID

  On April 5, 2018, when Michael Cohen visited Miami Beach, a delegation representing a Qatari sovereign investment fund greeted him at the Four Seasons as a dignitary. They bowed at Cohen’s feet. The dazzling treatment of Cohen impressed one of his clients, the Tennessee billionaire Franklin Haney, who had hired the longtime Trump lawyer and fixer as a consultant to help him win the Qatari government’s financial backing for a nuclear project that could make Haney even richer.

  “He was treated like royalty with the Qataris because he was the president’s lawyer,” Haney told his hometown paper, the Daily Memphian. “They treated him like we had went to dinner with a prince and all that sort of stuff.”

  Haney was among more than half a dozen wealthy business executives who paid Cohen generous consulting fees, wagering that his influence with Trump would translate into profits for them and their companies. Cohen spent the night aboard Haney’s $35 million yacht moored at a Miami Beach harbor before flying back to Manhattan the next day.

  Also on April 5, Trump traveled to West Virginia and was asked by reporters aboard Air Force One about payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star who claimed Cohen gave her $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump.

  “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” asked Catherine Lucey of the Associated Press.

  “No,” Trump said.

  “Then why did Michael Cohen make [the payment], if there was no truth to her allegations?” Lucey asked.

  “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” Trump replied. “Michael’s my attorney, and you’ll have to ask Michael.”

  Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post tried another question: “Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?”

  “No,” Trump said. “I don’t know.”

  On April 9, four days later, federal law enforcement officers used search warrants to get some ironclad answers to that question. It was a crisp spring Monday morning in Manhattan, just thirty-two degrees outside, the sun rising in a clear sky, when a team of FBI agents showed up at the Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue. At about 7:30 a.m., they knocked on the door of the room where Cohen and his wife, Laura, had been staying. This was their temporary home while repairmen were fixing damage from a water leak at their Manhattan apartment.

  The federal agents in blue windbreakers were polite but firm. They told Cohen they would need to search the premises and asked him to hand over his phones, as well as any laptops or other electronic devices in his possession. Simultaneously, agents showed up at his apartment as well as his office, cordoning off the are
as to collect computers, servers, and boxes of files, including tax returns and other financial records. They had to break into the front door of Cohen’s office; nobody was there at that hour to let them in. The morning raid was extraordinary. Cohen was not merely Trump’s attorney. He was his virtual vault—the keeper of his secrets and executor of his wishes, from business deals to personal affairs. “This search warrant is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch,” remarked Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney.

  The three criminal statutes listed near the top of the warrant they presented were a confusing blur to Cohen. But within hours Trump’s trusted fixer would understand that they conveyed a double-barrel threat. The sections of the U.S. criminal codes typed on the legal document showed that FBI agents, overseen by the famously aggressive prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, had significant evidence to suspect that Cohen had engaged in three kinds of federal crimes: bank fraud, mail fraud, and campaign finance violations.

  The investigation put Cohen in significant legal peril because prosecutors would dig into whether he had lied to banks to get millions of dollars in loans for his taxi business. The probe was also well on its way to exposing the conspiracy to pay off Trump’s mistress at a crucial stage of the 2016 campaign to help him win the White House. This was something much bigger.

  Cohen’s lawyer Steve Ryan was up early that Monday morning and already at the offices of his Washington law firm. Ryan had been working closely with Cohen to represent him in his handling of testimony to congressional committees regarding his Russian contacts as part of the various election interference probes.

  His firm’s headquarters were mostly white and sun filled and had sweeping views of the U.S. Capitol and Union Station just blocks away. But at that moment, Ryan was in the basement gym for his regular 8:00 a.m. session with his trainer. He had told his staff he would appreciate their not interrupting this small bit of personal time he had carved out of his deadline-crushed work schedule. So he was surprised when his assistant walked into the gym a few minutes after he had begun his workout.

  “You have to come upstairs,” she said.

  “Why?” Ryan asked. “What is it?”

  “They’re doing a search warrant on Michael,” she said. “It’s on live TV. He called you.”

  Ryan blinked. He rushed to the locker room to quickly get cleaned up and headed upstairs to his corner office. Once he got to his desk, he couldn’t reach Cohen. The FBI had seized his phone.

  Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers Michael Bowe and Jay Sekulow and some of their associates were meeting at Sekulow’s D.C. offices. They were preparing for a meeting that very afternoon with Robert Mueller and his lieutenants, the first one since John Dowd had summarily quit as the president’s lead counsel. Sekulow’s cell phone rang, and he turned his head away from the conference table to take the call. In his year representing Trump, darting from one drama to the next, Sekulow had proven himself a pretty calm cookie. So his stunned reaction to the caller got everyone’s attention.

  “What?” Sekulow said in a loud voice.

  Everyone went silent and turned their heads toward the lawyer. When he hung up, Sekulow appeared shell-shocked.

  “That was Ryan,” Sekulow announced. “The FBI is raiding Michael’s office.”

  Ryan told Sekulow what he knew at that hour, which was only the basics about the raid of the three locations, including that agents had to bust open the door of Cohen’s law office in Rockefeller Center because no one was there. Later, Trump would get the details slightly wrong when he said agents “broke into” Cohen’s office, when they had a proper court-approved warrant to search the premises.

  Over the next hour, Ryan would learn worrisome new details about the purpose of the multipronged raid. He called the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan asking to speak to the prosecutor in charge of the Cohen matter and got the gist of the warrant. Ryan immediately realized the magnitude: investigators had opened a new front in their investigation of the president.

  The warrant specified that Cohen turn over all of his communications with Trump going back several years, as well as records related to payments Cohen negotiated with two women who had claimed extramarital affairs with Trump—Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. Because Cohen had counted himself as Trump’s personal lawyer for most of that time, their communications would normally be sacred and protected by attorney-client privilege. But that protection was useless if prosecutors could show the communications were part of a criminal scheme, which was likely the case for Cohen’s hush-money payments to porn stars and models on Trump’s behalf.

  To Ryan, this moment felt like a replay of a previous standoff he had had with the special counsel’s office. In November 2017, some lawyers on Mueller’s team told Ryan they wanted Cohen to allow them to review all communications Cohen had had with Trump and other officials from the Trump Organization over the previous ten years. Ryan refused, calling it a ridiculously unfair fishing expedition into every aspect of Cohen’s life. He claimed Mueller’s team did not have the justification to pry so deeply.

  “We’ll subpoena you then,” Jeannie Rhee, one of Mueller’s prosecutors, threatened Ryan.

  Ryan, indignant, told her to go ahead and try.

  “You’re going to lose,” Ryan told her. “I grew up in this courthouse. I’ll go out on the sidewalk and say this is what the special counsel wants: a dragnet surrounding every guy he’s ever known and everything he’s ever done in his whole life.”

  Rhee never sought the subpoena. Ryan figured the Mueller team realized their odds were bad. But now, five months later, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had obviously found something rotten in Cohen’s handling of his taxi business and something about payments he made to women. Ryan saw those bad facts as effectively a crowbar to get what Rhee had wanted in the first place: all of Cohen’s communications with Trump.

  The morning of April 9, once Ryan reached an assistant U.S. attorney in New York on the phone, he identified himself as Cohen’s lawyer but spared the typical pleasantries.

  “I want my documents back,” Ryan told the prosecutor. “You have privileged documents, and I don’t want you to read them. I’m going to fight what you’re doing.”

  * * *

  —

  Trump was at the White House when he learned of the raid, in calls from Sekulow and also Ty Cobb and John Kelly, who had received a heads-up from the Justice Department. When confronted with new developments in the Russia investigation, Trump typically ranted and raved, seeming as if he had steam coming out of his ears. The president asked Cobb about a dozen questions. He wanted to know if anything like this had ever happened before in history. Had any president ever had his own lawyer become a target of an investigation? He wanted to know the exhaustive background on this type of event. Wasn’t this unheard of and likely illegal? What was required before prosecutors could legally seize a lawyer’s records? When could you obtain records from a public official’s lawyer? Were there any restrictions? Cobb explained that when he was a prosecutor he had sought lawyers’ records dozens of times, and usually when he could argue those records contained evidence implicating the lawyers in a criminal scheme.

  Trump was more than mad. But he had more questions. Who specifically would approve such a search warrant? How high did the prosecutors need to go in the Justice Department? Cobb replied that he felt certain Rod Rosenstein would have had to sign off on a raid of this nature. Trump vented to advisers about Rosenstein and complained that nobody at the Justice Department was working to adequately rein in these prosecutors and control the scope of their inquiry.

  Trump also asked Cobb what he should do now to shield these records from the prying eyes of prosecutors. That wasn’t really Cobb’s job, as a special adviser to the president on the Russia probe. This battery of questions, combined with Trump’s visible discomfort, created awkwardness for Cobb. The president needed to be talking to his personal lawyer, someone to
vent to who was inviolable. Cobb worked for the White House and did not represent Trump personally; therefore, his interactions with the president were not protected by attorney-client privilege.

  With Dowd out of the picture, that “Trump whisperer” was Sekulow. Cobb called him. “You really need to get over here because this isn’t a White House event,” he told Sekulow. “This is a personal thing.”

  The morning of the Cohen raid, Sekulow called Mueller’s office and asked what in the world was going on. Did Mueller’s team have any role in this raid? Sekulow was told that this was a matter the Southern District was handling independently. Neither Trump nor his lawyers believed Mueller’s team. They were convinced the Cohen investigation was a backdoor way by the special counsel to get to the president.

  The Trump attorneys did not know whose word they could trust. They were wary of everyone, worried that Cohen might have engaged in sloppy, secretive plots that could come back to bite the president. The president’s lawyers canceled a meeting scheduled for that day with Mueller. Trump’s and Cohen’s lawyers believed the Cohen investigation was orchestrated as a means of pressuring Cohen to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation and to push him to reveal his private conversations with Trump during the campaign.

  One indication was that the two lead prosecutors on the Cohen case—Thomas McKay and Nicolas Roos—were from the New York office’s public corruption unit and focused on public officials engaged in conspiracy or fraud against the government. Another indication that the Manhattan prosecutors were investigating the president was the search warrant specifying communications between Cohen and Trump. The prosecutors would later argue to a federal judge that many of the records should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because very little of what Cohen did for Trump was practice law.

  “It’s all agony, because it’s amateur hour,” one Trump adviser said at the time. “It’s this death by a thousand cuts and they’re going to die. Mueller has got everybody rolling on everybody. The president himself was not involved in collusion. But all of this stuff underneath us is going to bring us down.”