Gathered in the pews was a collection of global elites: the previous three presidents and every major-party nominee for the past two decades; military generals; intelligence chiefs; senators and representatives; foreign ambassadors and other world leaders. The lone man out was Trump, who spent the day golfing at his Virginia course because the McCain family made clear he would not be welcome at the service. His isolation was underscored by the chumminess inside the cathedral, where Hillary Clinton sat shoulder to shoulder with Dick Cheney and at one point George W. Bush snuck candies to Michelle Obama.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended at the invitation of Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain’s, and rubbed elbows with the very people who so disdained the president. Kelly and Jim Mattis had special roles in the proceedings. The White House chief of staff and defense secretary escorted McCain’s widow, Cindy, into the cathedral and were seated prominently in camera view. And as he watched clips of them on television, Trump grew furious, telling other advisers that he felt Kelly and Mattis had betrayed him by sidling up to the McCain family.
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On September 5, Trump become irate when The New York Times published an extraordinary editorial. The title was “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” and the author was anonymous, identified by the Times only as a “senior official.” The column was without precedent, and it was published a day after the first revelations surfaced from Bob Woodward’s Fear, also a scalding portrait of the president. The anonymous editorial writer described Trump as “impetuous” and accused him of acting “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” The official also alleged that there had been “early whispers” among members of Trump’s cabinet about invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him from office but that they decided to instead work within the government to contain him. It amounted to a portrait painted from within of what Senator Bob Corker had called the “adult day care center.”
Administration aides were so alarmed by the column—and by the president’s resulting fury—that some texted each other the phrase “The sleeper cells have awoken.” One recently departed White House official likened it to the opening sequence in When a Stranger Calls, a 1979 psychological thriller: “It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house.”
Trump considered figuring out the identity of Anonymous one of the government’s most pressing priorities. Beginning just after dawn on September 6, press statements forcefully denying that they were the author rolled in one by one from more than two dozen cabinet members and other top administration officials. They read as public declarations of absolute loyalty to Trump. On September 7, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate the author of the “resistance” op-ed. He spoke freely to reporters that day about his fresh paranoia regarding whom in his midst he could trust. “What I do now is I look around the room,” he said. “I say, ‘Hey, if I don’t know somebody . . .’”
White House staff began going through records to see who had outstanding copies of foreign leader calls with the president, as well as other sensitive documents. A White House official made a request to Mattis’s assistant: Why hadn’t the defense secretary’s office returned some of the copies of readouts of the president’s calls with foreign leaders? The White House needed them returned ASAP. This was a normal housecleaning request, but some officials at the Pentagon felt the timing conveyed an undeniable message: we’re watching you.
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In early September 2018, Trump’s lawyers finally reached a conclusion with Mueller over his request for a presidential interview. Trump’s lawyers had argued to prosecutors all summer why they didn’t believe it was necessary to provide the president’s responses to their questions and tried to appear open to a possible compromise for him to provide limited answers. The discussion took the form of a volley of emails and memos between Trump’s lawyer Jane Raskin and her old law firm friend James Quarles.
Some of the correspondence was rudimentary. The Trump lawyers wanted to know what criminal statutes Mueller’s team was investigating as possible crimes and why this would require answers from the president. Raskin’s shorthand version was something to the effect of “You have told us our client is the subject of the investigation and you won’t even tell us what you are looking at.” It took roughly three weeks to get an answer to that question. Quarles responded that the statutes governed the criminal acts of hacking, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the very general crimes of wire fraud and mail fraud. Trump’s lawyers shrugged. That’s it? That’s useless, they said to each other. They were certain the president hadn’t engaged in any of those crimes.
Mueller’s team would be silent for long stretches, especially later in the summer. At one point, Quarles told the Trump lawyers that it was important to ask about the president’s view of events surrounding his pursuit of the Trump Tower Moscow project, as well as his role in describing Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who was expected to provide damaging information on Clinton. Raskin and her colleagues had a shared reaction: “What conceivably is criminal about that? Why do you want to ask about that?” The president’s team also argued that prosecutors were not entitled to question Trump on decisions he made as president because anything prosecutors needed to know from Trump’s time in office could be obtained from the thousands of documents and dozens of witnesses the White House had helped provide.
In early August, Raskin summed up the team’s views on this and made what the team considered their closing argument: the Mueller team had failed to make a compelling case for an interview. The line went dead. The Trump team got no response throughout the remainder of the month. The silence was mildly nerve-racking. Trump’s lawyers suspected these lulls were caused by a third party: the Department of Justice, specifically Rod Rosenstein, who was supervising Mueller’s work. It felt to Trump’s counselors that the special counsel’s office was checking with the boss about how strenuously it could threaten the president or what it could claim before it did so. Trump’s lawyers figured Rosenstein had been recommending an incremental approach.
“It was like when Princess Diana said there are three people in this marriage,” one Trump adviser recalled, a reference to the late Princess of Wales’s infamous quip about her husband, Prince Charles, and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. “The Mueller folks felt they were fighting a battle on two sides—against us and against DOJ. My sense is, DOJ was telling them to do certain things.”
Raskin and her husband, Martin, went on a long-scheduled vacation over Labor Day weekend to Flathead Lake, a breathtaking part of Montana just south of Glacier National Park. On the first full day of their trip, a family celebration, Jane Raskin was on the main drag in quiet Missoula when she got a call on her cell phone from Quarles. He was providing her with a heads-up that he was sending a new letter to the Trump team.
The Raskins braced for bad news. But as they read the letter together the first week of September, they quickly realized everything had broken Trump’s way. Mueller had effectively capitulated. The special counsel would accept written answers from the president, for now, on a limited set of questions. Trump’s lawyers were ecstatic. The nuclear missile they had always feared Mueller was just a few keystrokes away from launching—a subpoena—would never come.
“Everything was about the grand jury subpoena,” a member of Trump’s legal team said. “Until it became obvious there wasn’t going to be one. We had won.”
Nineteen
SCARE-A-THON
Labor Day marked the unofficial kickoff for the campaign sprint to the November midterm elections. The Democrats were trying to reclaim majorities in the House and perhaps even the Senate. Trump was not on the ballot, but the elections were a referendum on his presidency. For Trump, the very survival of his presidency was at stake. He and his advisers feared that if Democrats
seized control of the House, they could bring impeachment charges against the president.
The night of September 6, Trump took the stage at the MetraPark arena in Billings, Montana, which was home to a marquee Senate race, and declared, “There is no place like a Trump rally.” Trump defended himself against “all these losers that say horrible things,” including against those questioning his mental fitness. “I stand up here giving speeches for an hour and a half, many times without notes, and they say, ‘He’s lost it.’ And yet we have twenty-five thousand people showing up to speeches,” the president said. He then extolled his political conquests—“I beat seventeen great Republicans!” “I beat the Bush dynasty!” “I beat Crooked Hillary!”—and lamented that media commentators still ask, “Is he competent?”
Then Trump told his cheering supporters the real reason the Democrats had to be thwarted in November: “They like to use the impeach word. ‘Impeach Trump.’ . . . But I say, ‘How do you impeach somebody that’s doing a great job that hasn’t done anything wrong? Our economy is good. How do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it?’” By the time he finished speaking, the president had made thirty-eight false statements, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
Throughout the fall campaign season, Trump spoke regularly by phone, sometimes twice a day, with a handful of Republican loyalists in Congress, including Mark Meadows, the North Carolina representative who led the Freedom Caucus. Among all the Republicans in Washington, Meadows was one of those whose advice the president truly valued and sought out most consistently. Meadows provided Trump with regular updates on the so-called investigation of the investigators—the Republican quest to find wrongdoing in the FBI’s handling of its initial investigation, Crossfire Hurricane.
Trump’s displeasure with Jeff Sessions had simmered for more than a year now. In his fall conversations with Meadows, Trump periodically expressed interest in firing the attorney general. Meadows urged patience, as did other voices in Trump’s ear. You can fire Sessions, he told the president, but just wait until after the midterms, when Trump would have the backing he needed from most if not all congressional Republicans. Meadows and his colleagues on Capitol Hill agreed that the president had every right to have an attorney general he trusted, but firing Sessions before the election risked sparking a political backlash that could hurt the GOP’s prospects. If Trump acted like an authoritarian, there was a danger that voters might take it out on Republican candidates, Meadows warned. Trump complained about feeling boxed in, but he agreed to give Meadows his word.
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On September 21, Sessions was in his home state of Alabama touring Auburn University to spotlight scientific research to combat the opioid epidemic. As Auburn’s president, Steven Leath, showed him around campus, Sarah Isgur Flores’s phone was melting down. The Justice Department communications chief was trying furiously to stop the New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt from publishing what seemed like an explosive scoop: Rod Rosenstein, in his first disorienting weeks as deputy attorney general and in the immediate aftermath of James Comey’s firing, had suggested to other Justice Department and FBI officials that he secretly record Trump and had discussed recruiting cabinet members to remove him from office for being unfit by invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment. If true, it would have been a huge departure from any normal investigative protocol. The supervisor of a high-profile investigation—especially a special counsel probe—would not normally jump into the investigative work or assume a secret undercover role. The Times reporters were confident in their reporting. Isgur Flores argued it was preposterous and also feared the report would unfairly spur Trump to fire Rosenstein.
“You’re going to cause a constitutional crisis,” Isgur Flores yelled into the phone at one of the Times reporters. “Go fuck yourself!”
Sessions and Leath were listening to Isgur Flores’s end of the conversation. “She’s spirited,” Sessions told Leath in his thick drawl.
Later that day, a Friday, the Times published the story. It landed like a bomb. Rosenstein disputed the account, calling it “inaccurate and factually incorrect.” He added, “Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.” But the damage was done. Rosenstein assumed he would be fired. A scramble was under way to protect the Russia investigation and ensure stability at the Justice Department. Those practice drills Sessions, Rosenstein, and their deputies had gone over so many times in their heads were suddenly real.
Sessions continued his trip in Alabama, but Isgur Flores rushed to catch a commercial flight back to Washington to help Rosenstein navigate the storm. Ed O’Callaghan, who had been traveling overseas, cut his vacation short and returned home right away. On Saturday, the president called Kelly with instructions: fire Rosenstein this weekend. Kelly argued against basing a decision on a New York Times article alone. The chief of staff had doubts about the story and at least wanted to hear from Rosenstein. “We gotta let him come in and talk to him,” Kelly told the president. Trump, Kelly, Rosenstein, and Don McGahn traded calls over the weekend. The president vented his anger. McGahn mostly focused on how this could interfere with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Rosenstein was trying to convince Kelly he should keep his job.
Kelly had found himself in this difficult place more than once with a high-level government appointee. As the president would fume and rail about an appointee and threaten at varying decibels that he was going to give him or her the boot, Kelly would see the writing on the wall and try to ease the public servant out gently. “Go,” Kelly would tell someone who had gotten on Trump’s bad side. “It’s not going to get any better.”
Kelly tried this with Rosenstein. But the deputy attorney general didn’t want to leave and argued over the weekend that the Times reporting was misleading and, in his estimation, bore the fingerprints of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Aides at the Justice Department and at the White House nevertheless prepared for the deputy attorney general’s ouster. Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s chief of staff who was close to the White House and had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the administration, told Isgur Flores, “Rod will be gone. I’ll be DAG. The president told me this.” When Rosenstein caught wind of the Whitaker plan, he worried it might appear to outsiders like an effort by the president to interfere with the Mueller probe.
On Monday morning, September 24, Rosenstein showed up at his Justice Department office knowing it might be his last day there. Isgur Flores popped into Noel Francisco’s office and said, “Today might be the day. Hope you’re ready to go.” Francisco, the solicitor general, was slated to take over control of the Mueller investigation should Rosenstein exit.
Rosenstein was still upset about the Times story and angry about the rumors that he was being pushed out immediately and replaced by Whitaker. But he also had a strange calm after the harried weekend: he now assumed he’d lose his job and was solely focused on making sure he had a dignified exit. He didn’t want to be tweet-shamed out of his office. Rosenstein had adopted a gallows humor over the months of attacks from Trump’s GOP allies, who often predicted his demise and were proven wrong. In Rosenstein’s tight circle, there was a running joke in the office about his nine lives: “Die another day.”
Isgur Flores got inquiries from reporters that morning about Rosenstein’s resignation. She assumed the tips were coming from the White House, and she took the queries as a sign that Rosenstein’s hours were numbered. Then Axios reported that Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” to Kelly. Isgur Flores tracked down Rosenstein, who was in his office taking goodbye photos with his staff. “Sir, we’re out of time,” she told him.
“Wait, let’s take a picture first,” Rosenstein told his trusted spokeswoman.
“Sir, I need to talk to you immediately,” Isgur Flores said. “It’s happening.”
Rosenstein then went to the White
House in late morning, where he expected to be fired. Isgur Flores put the finishing touches on a Justice Department statement announcing Rosenstein’s departure, Whitaker’s appointment as deputy attorney general, and Francisco’s role overseeing the Mueller investigation.
Inside the West Wing, Rosenstein met with Kelly and made clear he was no longer resisting. He said he would resign; he just didn’t want an ignominious, abrupt ending. “If you want me to resign, I’ll be happy to talk to the president and we can negotiate a reasonable amount of time,” Rosenstein said. “I don’t intend to resign immediately.” Kelly didn’t demand anything, but listened instead.
Rosenstein then went to meet with McGahn, who was about to head over to the Hill for the Kavanaugh hearings. In the early afternoon, just after Rosenstein left a National Security Council meeting, he talked by phone with Trump, who was in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly. The call was cordial, even friendly, with Rosenstein saying that the Times story was wrong.
“I don’t want to fire you,” Trump told Rosenstein. “Where did you get that idea?”
Trump suggested Rosenstein visit him later that week at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he told the president. “I’ll talk to you when you come back to town.”
They decided to meet that Thursday. Despite the pleasantries of the call, Rosenstein still thought, “I’ll be fired soon, just not today.” Rosenstein became the latest senior government official left hanging in one of Trump’s parlor games. “I think it pleases him to sort of paw at a wounded mouse in front of him because it asserts his sense of control and authority, and he enjoys that to no end,” Trump’s biographer Tim O’Brien told The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.
A Very Stable Genius Page 32
