Mueller did not allow outsiders into his sanctum or to be a part of his team’s deliberations, even if there were other stakeholders. To the Justice Department officials on the other side of the door, this was patronizing. Zebley and Quarles in particular were protective of their boss. When talking to Justice Department officials, they referred to him as “Mr. Mueller.” For instance, they would say, “You don’t need to talk to Mr. Mueller.”
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In May, the problem of Kushner’s lack of permanent security clearance resurfaced in the White House. Sometimes Trump would badger Kelly to “just fix it,” with Kushner or Ivanka standing by. Other times Trump would ask Kelly why it was taking so long and if he could do something.
“Look, help ’em out here,” Trump once told Kelly. “They want the clearance. They’re embarrassed. Why can’t [they] have it?”
The chief of staff, accustomed to the military’s fastidious care with granting clearances, would explain the importance of following an untainted process. But soon after his talks with the president, Kushner or Ivanka would visit Kelly in his office to follow up, with questions about lifting the obstacles. One day, Trump gave what Kelly considered an order: “I want you to give it to them.” Kelly refused, saying it was improper and politically stupid. He was mindful of the career people who considered the granting of clearances a religion and who would have reason to rat out an abuse.
“No, I won’t,” Kelly said. “It’s not ethical. This will come back and bite us.”
Still, Kelly gave Trump some advice about how he could get what he wanted. As president, he was the final authority on access to classified material. He could legally decide on his own to grant Kushner a permanent clearance. The conversation went back and forth as Trump tried to get Kelly to do it instead, and the chief of staff held firm. In the end, Trump did what he promised the media he would not do: he bypassed the typical process to grant Kushner permission to see the country’s most carefully guarded secrets. Kelly wrote a memo to his file, in shades of Comey’s own moves to document his interactions with Trump. The chief of staff then alerted the White House security office, which granted Kushner the privilege he had been denied for months.
The dispute arose anew when the details of Kelly’s memo came out nine months later, as well as the fact that McGahn had also documented the president’s decision in his own memo. Ivanka and Kushner would insist to associates that Kushner’s clearance was obtained through a standard process managed by career professionals. As corroborating evidence, they pointed to Carl Kline, former director of the White House’s Personnel Security Office, who testified to Congress in 2019 that he had granted clearances on his own authority and not under orders from anybody in the White House. However, one of Kline’s subordinates, Tricia Newbold, told Congress that Kline frequently dismissed risks in security applications and overruled security specialists to grant the clearances.
Ivanka would later tell ABC News, “There were anonymous leaks about there being issues, but the president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance, zero.” And Kushner would later claim to associates that Kelly had assured him he got his clearance through the normal process. But very little had been normal about it.
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At the Justice Department, Rosenstein and FBI director Chris Wray were at wit’s end with the cadre of House Republicans who had been secretly promising Trump they had evidence of a huge cover-up in the Russia probe. Without first consulting the FBI, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had sent a letter to the White House that included highly sensitive intelligence that was not properly marked. Both the intelligence chiefs and the FBI officials were concerned that he had made an inappropriate disclosure. If this was how Nunes was going to handle things, Rosenstein and Wray figured they wouldn’t turn over any more information.
Nunes and some of his House GOP colleagues believed the FBI and DOJ had horribly abused their power. Though Nunes had chosen not to read the actual documents himself—he had Congressman Trey Gowdy read them instead—he believed that the two agencies had misled the secret federal court to get approval to spy on Trump’s campaign adviser Carter Page. Investigators had omitted the political motivations of a person providing some of the information, Christopher Steele.
Rosenstein, meanwhile, was growing exasperated by the aggression and gamesmanship of Nunes, who he believed was clearly overstepping his oversight authority. On May 4, Rosenstein marked Law Day in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, by delivering a speech about the separation of powers and the “incredibly complex” interplay among the three branches of government. “Congressional oversight is important,” he said. “Congress must be able to hold hearings, conduct inquiries, and require reports so that it knows the laws are being faithfully executed and the money it appropriates is being properly spent. But oversight is not intended to eliminate the line between executive branch authority and legislative branch authority.”
What Rosenstein did not say is that congressional oversight into his own actions was endangering his family. On May 8, a whirlwind day of travel that took the deputy attorney general from Washington to Philadelphia back to Washington and on to New York, he received notification from the U.S. Marshals Service about a death threat against his wife, Lisa. The marshals deemed it sufficiently credible to require protection for Rosenstein’s family. Suddenly Lisa and their daughters were being driven around in an SUV with a 24-7 security detail.
Around noon on May 10, Stephen Boyd, Rosenstein’s deputy for congressional relations, arranged a meeting for the principals to clear the air in the Justice Department’s sixth-floor Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Attending were Sue Gordon, the deputy director of national intelligence, along with Rosenstein, Wray, O’Callaghan, Boyd, Nunes, Gowdy, and FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Rosenstein and Wray explained their fear about turning over any information that might be compromised and said their reluctance had nothing to do with hiding any funny business.
“The FBI, DOJ are all run by Republican political appointees who were not here during the Clinton investigation. Nobody here has a motive to conceal anything. We are not your enemy,” Rosenstein said. “We have a duty to protect classified information.”
At first, Nunes denied writing any letter to the White House with sensitive intelligence. Then one of Rosenstein’s deputies showed him the letter with his signature. Nunes said nothing. The Justice Department team members found that puzzling. They wondered if Nunes’s staff had written it and not told him. For a short portion of the meeting, the conversation turned testy. In three decades of public service, Rosenstein had rarely raised his voice in a meeting, and he had almost never yelled. This was one of the exceptions. Things had gotten personal. Nunes and his Republican colleagues had been rattling their sabers on social media and in Fox News appearances accusing Rosenstein’s Justice Department of trying to hold back evidence proving the department’s corrupt investigative tactics.
“You’ve got to stop this,” Rosenstein told Nunes. “This is ridiculous. You’re ginning up all these ludicrous conspiracy theories. You’re accusing me of being part of some vast left-wing conspiracy. I’m a lifelong Republican. My wife is a Republican. She’s getting death threats from these nuts.”
Rosenstein also knew Nunes was raising money among conservative voters by claiming donations could help expose the secrets Rosenstein was trying to keep hidden from the public. Rosenstein’s mother, who lived in Florida, about as far away as one could get from Nunes’s central California congressional district, had received some of the congressman’s fund-raising letters.
“You’re making money off this,” an angry Rosenstein bellowed, leaning over the conference table and looking at Nunes and Gowdy. “We’re suffering the consequences of your fund-raising. My wife is getting death threats based on what you’re doing.”
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One day in late May 2018, Rush Atkinson, one of the youngest members of the team and considered a phenom for his diligence and stamina, hollered to Rhee, “You gotta come over here, Jeannie!” Atkinson had been reviewing the attempted intrusions by the Russian GRU’s Unit 26165 and had found an amazing coincidence—one he knew couldn’t be a coincidence. It showed exactly what the Russian hackers had been up to on July 27, 2016, within just five hours of Trump’s making his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” comment at a news conference in Florida, saying he hoped they could find Hillary Clinton’s missing thirty thousand emails. In that bizarre moment, Trump had actively encouraged a foreign government to illegally hack his political opponent. Just days earlier, WikiLeaks had published nearly twenty thousand documents that appeared to have been stolen from Democratic National Committee servers, and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia was the thief, in a hit ordered by Putin himself.
At the time the press was reporting Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment, it was dinnertime in Moscow. Most Russian government offices were closed. But, as Atkinson discovered more than a year later, some Russian military intelligence operators in Unit 26165 were busy late that July night sending outbound pushes to Clinton’s private domain and sending malicious links targeting fifteen email accounts on her server. This was a stunning find, one that U.S. intelligence agencies had not tracked earlier. The digital pushes did not show that Trump or anyone in his campaign had committed a crime, but they established that Russians were doing his bidding in real time, literally working the graveyard shift at his request from half a world away.
PART FOUR
Seventeen
HAND GRENADE DIPLOMACY
On June 9, 2018, President Trump was at his second day of meetings at the Group of Seven summit, hosted in Quebec by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. This was an annual gathering of leaders from seven of the world’s industrial powers: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It had been an unusually acrimonious summit. European allies, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Emmanuel Macron, and British prime minister Theresa May, were pressing Trump to sign a joint statement committing to “a rules-based international order.” The president had resisted, believing his counterparts were ganging up on him, before eventually relenting. Then Trump put his hand in his suit pocket, took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table in front of Merkel, and said, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,” according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group.
Traditionally, the G7 has been a forum for the United States and its allies to express common democratic principles and fortify economic partnerships and aspirations. In the recent past, the annual summits had amounted to carefully scripted shows of unity against authoritarian adversaries, including Russia, which had been a member (it was then the Group of Eight) until it was kicked out in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea. But over two days in Quebec, Trump effectively blew up the G7. He abruptly withdrew the U.S. endorsement of a joint declaration of unity, which his own representatives had already agreed to, and upbraided Trudeau on Twitter as “very dishonest & weak” because the prime minister objected to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other nations. Then he stormed out of Quebec.
Just before departing Canada, Trump threatened a trade war with any country, including allies. “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing, and that ends,” he said. Trump’s complaint in Quebec drove to the core of his campaign pitch to the “forgotten men and women” of America: that he would forcefully put U.S. interests first, by renegotiating trade deals to restrict foreign imports and increase U.S. exports. But according to many economists, blocking foreign imports would have been counterproductive and actually harmful to the U.S. economy.
Trump headed directly to Singapore, the island nation in the Pacific, where history awaited him. He was set to meet Kim Jong Un for the first-ever face-to-face talks between an American president and a North Korean leader. On the way, one of Trump’s top advisers revealed that the tantrum the president threw in Quebec might have been about more than just trade disagreements. “POTUS is not gonna let a Canadian prime minister push him around,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said June 10 on CNN. “He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea, nor should he.”
“So this was about North Korea?” anchor Jake Tapper asked.
“Of course it was in large part,” Kudlow responded.
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The president envisioned the historic disarmament summit as the ultimate Donald J. Trump production. He thought meeting with Kim might even earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump had long ago started imagining the pageantry. Earlier in the year, when he and Kim were first cooking up plans to meet, the White House Communications Agency had manufactured red, white, and blue challenge coins embossed with Trump’s silver visage facing off against Kim. Just before leaving for Singapore on June 9, Trump announced that he would be able to determine whether a denuclearization deal was attainable “within the first minute” of meeting Kim. How? “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do,” he boasted to reporters.
One longtime Trump adviser summed up the president’s mind-set about the North Korea talks: “He looks at it like he looks at everything, which is, this is another guy who is the mouse that roared, who’s tied his tail to China, to whom Donald Trump could be the messiah. Why? Because in Donald J. Trump’s mind, he thinks that he, the president, has the ability to figure out a way to give [Kim] what he wants and to get what he wants. It’s just another deal to him.”
The president, this adviser added, had thought to himself, “Am I intellectually as smart as Jimmy Carter? No, but I don’t need to be. Do I have the vast reservoir of political cachet that the Bushes have? No, but I don’t need that. What do I have? I can go one-on-one playing tennis. I don’t need to play chess. I don’t need long-range, strategic diplomacy.”
On June 10, when Trump arrived in Singapore, approximately thirty-six hours ahead of his meeting with Kim, it was so humid that visitors’ shirts stuck to their backs the minute they stepped outdoors. About five hours earlier, Kim had landed aboard a Boeing 747 borrowed from the Chinese government. Trump was restless. He never liked life outside the bubble of his daily life—his bed, his televisions, his steaks and burgers. The antsy president told his aides to move up the start of the summit, scheduled for June 12, to June 11. He wanted to see Kim right away. “We’re here now,” Trump told them. “Why can’t we just do it?”
After weeks of careful diplomatic negotiations by the U.S. and North Korean governments to choreograph the summit, Trump caused a flurry of commotion. His aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Kelly, and Bolton, pleaded against changing the schedule. They told him he needed the extra day to prepare for his talks with Kim. Plus, on June 11, Trump was slated to meet with the prime minister of Singapore, a perfunctory visit that if canceled would insult the host government. Then press secretary Sarah Sanders made the argument that proved persuasive: if he moved the summit up to June 11, a Monday, then it would air live on Sunday night in the United States, because Singapore is twelve hours ahead of Washington. “Sir, you’re doing a historic meeting and you don’t want it on pri
me time?” Sanders asked Trump. Of course, he did.
When Trump first met Kim at the lush Capella hotel on the resort island of Sentosa, he shook the dictator’s hand for thirteen seconds, patted him on the back, and led him down a rich red carpet. Kim was a pariah, arguably the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and committed to nuclear armament. But Trump threw Kim a party, showering him with respect and declaring himself honored to be in his presence. The summit was carefully staged to put both leaders on equal footing, which normalized the authoritarian Kim. The spectacle was so jarring that even Kim acknowledged the oddity. He was overheard telling Trump, through an interpreter, “Many people will think of this as a form of fantasy . . . a science fiction movie.”
Trump’s nearly nine-hour day with Kim epitomized the president’s reality-show diplomacy. The summit was short on substance but heavy on superlatives. Trump called Kim “very talented,” “very smart,” and a “very good negotiator.” He said the North Korean people were “very gifted” and their country’s future “very, very bright.” And he claimed personal credit for staving off a North Korean nuclear attack on Seoul, the South Korean capital, which is just thirty-five miles from the border and home to about ten million people. “This is really an honor for me to be doing this, because I think, you know, potentially, you could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people,” Trump said.
A Very Stable Genius Page 28
