A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  A few days before Thanksgiving, Trump’s lawyers arrived at Rosenstein’s conference room at the Justice Department. In walked James Quarles, Aaron Zebley, and Andrew Goldstein of the special counsel’s office. Rosenstein was out of town and was represented by Ed O’Callaghan. But Mueller was a no-show. His deputies said he couldn’t attend, but provided no reason. The Trump lawyers were flabbergasted that their concern didn’t rate as important enough to command Mueller’s presence. They later wondered if Mueller was ill, presuming it was the only reason he would skip an important meeting with opposing counsel.

  “We weren’t repping some minor player; we were representing the president of the United States,” recalled one of Trump’s lawyers. “We are meeting with the deputy in his conference room. . . . [Mueller] wouldn’t even talk with us.”

  The meeting got off to a hostile start. “You’re not conducting an investigation,” Giuliani told the special counsel trio. “You’re conducting a complete frame-up focused on one person, Donald Trump. This is an outrage and the Justice Department will be disgraced by this.”

  At one point, Sekulow said something along the lines of “You’re trying to squeeze this old guy to flip another guy against my client.”

  Quarles led the defense. “You’re mischaracterizing it,” he responded to Giuliani.

  O’Callaghan tried to calm Trump’s lawyers. “Rudy, I’ve been briefed on this,” he said. “I know where this is going. It’s not about flipping Corsi to open up another avenue of the investigation. It’s just not.”

  Despite Mueller’s absence, the meeting ultimately helped to smooth over anxieties. The special counsel lawyers insisted they had nothing to do with the Assange leak and that it had been an electronic filing mistake by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia. They said they couldn’t get into a lot of details about the Corsi agreement but that there was nothing untoward about making clear this related to the Trump campaign and Trump’s candidacy.

  As the meeting wrapped up, Giuliani told the special counsel team that they would take “a little interruption right now in deciding on submitting the answers.” But on November 20, Trump’s lawyers submitted the president’s answers to Mueller’s questions. They had successfully persuaded Trump to repeatedly use a phrase he had ardently resisted uttering over the years: “I do not recall.” In his written submission, drafted by his lawyers but approved by Trump, the president provided twenty-two answers to Mueller questions on four main subjects: the Trump Organization’s proposed tower in Moscow; Russia’s interference in the 2016 election; the Trump campaign; and contacts by Trump allies with Russians during the campaign. In nineteen of his twenty-two answers, Trump said he couldn’t remember enough to answer some or all of the questions.

  Regarding the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump junior, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer, Trump said in his answers to Mueller that he didn’t recall whether he learned about it before or after it happened; whether he knew about Trump junior’s work to set it up; or whether he spoke with Trump junior, Kushner, or Manafort on the day of the meeting. Asked if he was told by anyone during the campaign that Putin supported his candidacy, Trump replied, “I have no recollection of being told.”

  But in July 2018, Trump had reacted to news reports about the meeting by denying any knowledge of it. He tweeted, “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.” One thing Trump told Mueller he could remember from that time was that he was “aware of reports indicating that Putin had made complimentary statements” about him.

  Had Mueller secured a face-to-face interview with Trump, he or others on his team might have been able to press the president with follow-up questions or bring evidence to his attention to rejigger his memory and better get the truth out of him. But that was not to be. As Mueller would later write in his report on the investigation, “We viewed the written answers to be inadequate.”

  Twenty-one

  GUT OVER BRAINS

  On December 6, 2018, Rex Tillerson made his first extensive public remarks since being ousted as secretary of state that spring. He was remarkably candid. Fielding questions from Bob Schieffer of CBS News at a Houston event, Tillerson described the difference between transitioning from the highly disciplined, process-oriented Exxon Mobil Corporation to the Trump White House. He described Trump as “a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of said, ‘Look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you’re not going to do that.’”

  When Schieffer asked how his relationship with Trump went off the rails, Tillerson said, “We are starkly different in our styles. We did not have a common value system. I’ll just be blunt about that and so often the president would say, ‘Well, here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it.’ And I had to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates the treaty.’”

  Never one to let a slight go unaddressed, Trump slammed Tillerson. He cast the man who rose from civil engineer to chief executive at one of the world’s largest companies and who considered himself a student of history as, of all things, unintelligent. Trump tweeted that Tillerson “didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.”

  The insult was a reminder to all who served in the administration that loyalty was a one-way street. An honest reflection like the one Tillerson gave Schieffer after more than a year of service in government could easily be interpreted by the president as a personal betrayal, from which there could be no complete recovery. Tillerson was entirely unbothered, confiding to friends there was nothing to learn or gain by taking Trump’s bait. “Don’t ask me,” he would say to associates with a chuckle months later. “I’m dumb as a rock!”

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  The first week of December, Trump was focused on selecting a new attorney general. Finally, he could have a loyal foot soldier helming the Justice Department. He considered a range of candidates but kept gravitating toward Bill Barr, sixty-eight, a well-respected Republican lawyer who held the job a quarter century earlier, during the George H. W. Bush administration. Barr was a favorite of Trump’s legal team and close to Pat Cipollone, the new White House counsel. Emmet Flood, the White House lawyer dealing with Robert Mueller’s investigation, helped sell Barr to the president as “the gold standard.” Trump did not really know Barr, but Flood argued that he could be trusted to be a grown-up and, importantly, had the pedigree to make him “totally unimpeachable” on Capitol Hill. Barr at first resisted entreaties to become attorney general again but eventually warmed to the idea.

  Trump also considered Chris Christie for the job and had a much greater level of comfort with the former New Jersey governor, who was a ruthless political brawler and had proven his loyalty as Trump’s campaign-trail sidekick. As he angled to be attorney general, Christie played up their long relationship and sowed doubts about Barr. “I cannot believe you’re going into a reelect with an attorney general you don’t know,” he told Trump.

  Christie assumed that Barr, a fixture in Washington’s legal community, would be more loyal to the American Bar Association than to the president. “If he has to choose between the ABA crowd and you in terms of who he’s going to make happy, he’s picking the ABA crowd every day of the week,” Christie told Trump. “It’s just who he is. It’s where he’s from, and it’s who he’s going back to.”

  But Barr had already signaled his loyalty to Trump in a nineteen-page unsolicited private memo to the Justice Department on June 8, 2018. He had originally intended to share his thoughts on the Mueller investigation in an opinion column, but Barr was so verbose he figured the better vehicle would be a memo, which he addressed to Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Russia probe, and Ass
istant Attorney General Steven Engel, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel. Barr sent Flood a courtesy copy. Barr authored the memo as a “former official deeply concerned with the institutions of the Presidency and the Department of Justice” and said he hoped that his views “may be useful.”

  In the memo, Barr denounced Mueller’s obstruction of justice inquiry by arguing that in most of the publicly known episodes the president had acted within his broad executive authority and that probing his actions in those cases as possible obstruction was “grossly irresponsible.” A student of constitutional law who had once overseen the OLC, the government’s premier legal office, Barr believed prosecutors could not question any president’s unfettered power to remove his subordinates. Any inquiry into the president’s firing of Comey and wish to remove Sessions struck Barr as ridiculous.

  “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the President submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction,” Barr wrote. “Apart from whether Mueller [has] a strong enough factual basis for doing so, Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived. As I understand it, his theory is premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.”

  Barr went on to warn about the special counsel’s indulging in “the fancies by overly-zealous prosecutors” and wrote that investigating the president’s “discretionary actions” would have “potentially disastrous implications” for the executive branch as a whole. “I know you will agree that, if a DOJ investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected President, it is imperative to the health of our system and to our national cohesion that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on evidence of a real crime—not a debatable one,” Barr wrote.

  On December 7, Trump called Barr to say he was ready to nominate him as attorney general. Barr’s youngest daughter was getting married the next day, so he was preoccupied, but Trump wanted to share the news right away. “I’m going to go out to the helicopter and announce it,” Trump told Barr. Shortly thereafter, Trump strode onto the South Lawn and announced his intention to nominate Barr. “He was my first choice since day one,” Trump told reporters. Later that day, at a Justice Department event in Kansas City, Trump praised Barr for having “demonstrated an unwavering adherence to the rule of law, which the people in this room like to hear. There is no one more capable or more qualified for this role. He deserves overwhelming bipartisan support.”

  At the wedding reception the night of December 8, at the Willard hotel, a couple of blocks from the White House, Barr’s daughter Meg said in her remarks, “Pop, you’re the only guy I know who would upstage his daughter’s wedding.” When it came time for him to deliver the father-of-the-bride toast, Barr said, “Meg, look at it this way. Just before the name Barr is being dragged through the mud, you are changing yours to McGaughey.”

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  At the same time that Trump was heralding Barr, he was cutting ties with John Kelly. Trump complained more and more to friends about Kelly, arguing the retired Marine Corps general sometimes acted as if he had been elected president. “He didn’t have the guts to work for the job like I did,” Trump vented to at least one confidant. This kind of mockery by the headstrong president signaled an aide’s end was near. Trump also started telling other aides not to bother keeping Kelly abreast of important developments, effectively cutting the chief of staff out of decisions in the White House that he had once commanded with military precision.

  This frustrated Kelly, who after his decades of service in the U.S. Marines had little tolerance for being disrespected or marginalized. More dangerous, however, was the fact that Trump was no longer heeding Kelly’s advice on matters of national security. In the week after returning from Paris in mid-November, Trump agitated to withdraw U.S. forces from the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, as well as bases in South Korea. He talked openly about pulling out of NATO.

  Meanwhile, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, as well as a pair of ambitious aides who were eyeing Kelly’s job—Nick Ayers, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget—were telling Trump that he needed to change chiefs. Ayers had been open with Kelly, telling him he wanted to succeed him when Kelly decided it was time to go; Mulvaney was less so. They reinforced their own selling points: Kelly had his strengths, but Trump needed a more politically savvy chief of staff as he prepared to run for reelection and deal with a divided Congress.

  On December 7, after returning from Kansas City, Trump and Kelly met privately and decided to part ways. The next day, as Trump left the White House to attend the Army v. Navy football game in Philadelphia, he stopped on the South Lawn to tell reporters, “John Kelly will be leaving. I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring.’ But he’s a great guy.” The announcement was anticlimactic, considering tensions between the two men had long ago spilled into the press. Still, Trump afforded Kelly a graceful exit compared with how he had dismissed Tillerson, Reince Priebus, H. R. McMaster, and other senior advisers.

  Trump settled on Ayers as Kelly’s replacement. The thirty-six-year-old was a smooth and slick political operative, a wunderkind when he ran the Republican Governors Association in his twenties. Through his position as Pence’s chief, Ayers had regular access to Trump and cultivated an easy rapport with the president. He also aligned himself with Ivanka and Kushner, who were enthusiastic boosters of his. But when Trump offered him the job, Ayers shocked the president by turning him down. He was unwilling to commit to Trump’s request that he serve for two years, through the 2020 election. A father of triplets, Ayers would agree to do the job only on an interim basis for a few months because he had plans to relocate his family to his home state of Georgia. While family concerns were his stated reason for bowing out, Ayers confided to some in the White House he had been concerned watching how frequently the president bypassed or ignored a person as serious and respected as Kelly. By leaving, Ayers also dodged inquiries into his work as a political consultant, for which he reported amassing a net worth of $12.8 million to $54.8 million, before he had become Pence’s chief of staff.

  Trump, who for days had been telling friends that Ayers would be his next chief, was suddenly a red-faced groom left at the altar. It was a humiliating blow for a president who loathes humiliations. Trump had no Plan B and would scramble in the days ahead to recruit other candidates.

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  On December 11, Trump got his first taste of divided government. Two years of operating without a check on his power came to a crashing halt as the combustible president met for the first time since the midterm elections with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The leaders faced a December 22 deadline to pass a government spending bill or face a shutdown, and they were at a stalemate over Trump’s demand for it to include $5.7 billion to construct his long-promised border wall. But the meeting was about more than federal appropriations. It would establish the postelection power dynamic in Washington.

  White House advisers knew the stakes were high, so they tried to prepare Trump. Kelly, who had stayed on as chief of staff through the end of the month, and legislative affairs director Shahira Knight, among others, implored Trump to strive for a deal but to be guarded with the Democrats, who they warned might try to manipulate him. They cautioned Trump about the politics of a government shutdown and told him, no matter what happens, don’t say anything that would make him “own” a government shutdown. “Don’t take the bait,” the president’s aides told him. But Trump seemed to be only half listening to their advice. He wanted a dramatic clash on immigration with the Democrats. In his mind, immigration was his issue—a winning issue. After all, he figured, who wouldn’t want a more secure border?

  As the Democrats arrived in the Oval, Pelosi tried to set the tone. She led a prayer about King Solomon. She and Schumer took seats on the soft cream couches, while Trump and Pence sat in the yellow wingback chairs. The meeting was scheduled to be closed to the press, but Trump, as he often did, invited the pres
s pool in to record the exchange. What followed were seventeen minutes of raised voices, pointed fingers, and boorish interruptions, with each principal playing for the television audience. At one point, Trump suggested Pelosi couldn’t share her true beliefs without hurting her bid to be elected House Speaker. “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now,” Trump said. “Mr. President,” Pelosi said, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”

  Schumer baited Trump by reminding him that he had repeatedly threatened to shut down the government if he did not get his wall funding. Flustered, the president said, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.” There it was. White House aides immediately felt a pit in their stomachs. Their boss had just handed the Democrats an unexpected gift. All that preparation was for naught. Trump got played.

  When Pelosi returned to the Capitol later that day, she recounted the highlights to some of her colleagues. She described the Oval Office meeting as being in “a tinkle contest with a skunk.” The Speaker in waiting said debating the wall with Trump was “like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.”

  Yet as acrimonious as the meeting was, Trump was simultaneously on the cusp of a rare bipartisan accomplishment. The First Step Act, which would be signed into law on December 21, represented the biggest overhaul to the nation’s criminal justice system in a generation by reducing mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses and expanding programs such as job training designed to control the exploding federal prison population.