A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  As he first absorbed the letter in private on March 28, Barr was pissed. He thought the letter was nasty. And he felt betrayed by his friend. “I’m calling Bob,” Barr told his staff. “We’ll work this out.” Mueller was out of the office getting a haircut that morning, but they connected later, shortly before lunchtime. Listening in from the Justice Department were Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt.

  “What the hell, Bob?” Barr asked. “What’s up with this letter? Why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me?”

  Mueller replied by saying something along the lines of “We have concerns that certain issues were not given their full context. The executive summaries are the precise information necessary to reach the conclusion. There’s not something that’s absolutely wrong with your letter. The problem is misrepresentations in the media. We need to get something out soon that is more accurate, to clarify things.”

  Despite his well-established lack of interest in public relations, Mueller zeroed in on the media coverage of his report. He said something along the lines of “We have concerns that our report is losing its impact because the full story’s not out there and the media’s not covering it the way we want them to.”

  “This is supposed to be confidential,” Barr told Mueller.

  Barr said the department was moving quickly to prepare the report for public release, but explained that there would be an unwanted gap of time as a consequence of the report’s being 448 pages and not containing the necessary redactions.

  “To be clear, we’re not trying to summarize the work; we’re just giving the principal conclusions,” Barr told Mueller. “We offered you the opportunity to look at the letter and you said no. We’re flabbergasted here.”

  “Your summary letter fails to put into context the decisions we made,” Mueller said.

  At this point, Zebley jumped in. He had no problems with Barr’s description of their Russian interference work and said nothing about it. “It’s all about obstruction. Your letter doesn’t give enough context as to our thinking about the OLC opinion and the media coverage is misleading about that.”

  Barr again defended his letter. “We weren’t trying to summarize. We weren’t trying to put in context. We were just trying to state your conclusions,” he told Mueller and Zebley.

  The temperature started to come down. Mueller asked how long it would be until the report was released in full, and Barr said they were aiming for mid-April. Mueller then made another pitch for issuing the executive summaries. “We’ve had a really good relationship with you so far, and we’re asking you to do this, and we’d like it to happen sooner rather than later,” Mueller said.

  Barr replied, “I’d prefer to push forward and get it all done. I don’t think putting it out piecemeal is good.” The attorney general said he thought issuing the summaries would cause even more confusion than was already in the body politic.

  “Thanks for entertaining the request,” Mueller said. “I appreciate it. We really just want full disclosure.”

  The call ended on an uplifting note.

  “At the end of the day, you’re part of the Department of Justice,” Barr said.

  “I agree,” Mueller replied.

  “We’re all in the department together,” Barr said. “We’ll get back to you.”

  That night, Mueller’s team considered putting out a press statement of their own explaining their objections to Barr’s four-page letter but decided against it.

  For the rest of the day and into the next morning, Barr, together with Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt, debated Mueller’s request. They nearly decided to release the executive summaries but opted against it for the reasons Barr articulated on the call with Mueller. The report was lengthy, nuanced, and confusing, and Barr worried that people would pick apart the summaries and draw misleading conclusions.

  Barr and his team regretted having used the word “summarize” in the March 24 letter. They also lamented that Trump was claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him. That was false, but Barr decided not to publicly correct his boss. The president’s lawyers understood the truth, too: a lot of iceberg remained under the water, but they could do little to wean their client off his talking points.

  On March 29, Barr decided to write another letter to congressional leaders to clear up his intentions. “My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report.” He added, “Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own. I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

  Barr intended this letter to be a warning shot—to Congress and the media, but also to Mueller’s angry prosecutors—to calm down, stop jumping to conclusions, and be patient. There was a lot more still to see.

  Twenty-five

  THE SHOW GOES ON

  On Sunday, March 31, 2019, Kirstjen Nielsen was fast asleep in a London hotel when a call came through from the White House. It was the middle of the night London time. A military aide traveling with the homeland security secretary answered, and the White House operator said President Trump wanted to speak to the secretary. “Is it an emergency?” the aide asked. “The secretary is asleep. Do you want to wake her up?” They decided no, the call was not urgent and could wait.

  When Nielsen woke up Monday morning, she learned of Trump’s call and called him back later when it was morning on the East Coast. The president was peeved.

  “Why the hell are you out of the country?” he asked Nielsen. “What are you doing over there?”

  Nielsen reminded Trump that she was meeting with her counterparts in the United Kingdom to discuss a series of threats they were partnering to thwart, including cyberattacks and child trafficking. It was a trip she had previously mentioned to him and White House officials. She had been planning to head from London to meetings in Sweden later that week with security ministers from the Group of Seven, the elite club of the world’s most powerful industrial nations.

  On the call, Trump asked her questions about border enforcement. Nielsen could tell he was angry she hadn’t taken his call the night before. The president didn’t seem to understand the obstacles the time difference presented. He kept homing in on Nielsen’s being out of the country at a critical time for security at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Department of Homeland Security was set to announce that apprehensions at the southern border had soared to nearly 100,000 arrests in March, many of them Central American families seeking asylum. Trump had again been threatening to close off the border, although he would stop short of doing so because of stark warnings of economic ruin from the business community.

  As the president and his White House aides scrambled to come up with actions to take to stem the flow of migrants, Nielsen was across the Atlantic. She was adamant that Trump’s obsession with the border not distract her and her team from other areas of her department’s mission, especially global cybersecurity, considering the attacks from Russia, China, and other countries. Still, the president did not seem to comprehend that her job entailed more than border security and enforcement.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she told him over the phone.

  By the time they hung up, Nielsen had the sense that something was up back home. She began to suspect her own job security hung in the balance. In the back of her mind, she was thinking about all the complaints Stephen Miller had lobbed behind her back. He hated when she focused on other missions of her department, whose central reason for being was to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. “Why is she doing this?” Miller would ask. “All the president cares about is the border.”

  Later on Monday, April 1, Nielsen called Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to check in.

  “I don’t know why you’re away,” Mulvaney told Nielsen as he mentioned the high volume of migrant crossings, a reaction that only exacerbated her concern. When she told him there we
re many things the Department of Homeland Security did besides border enforcement, Mulvaney replied, “Right now, all we’re doing here at the White House is the border.”

  Nielsen also spoke with Vice President Pence, who offered his support but whose comments revealed her overseas trip had been the subject of much internal discussion. “I’m glad you’re doing that,” Pence told her, then mentioned she could stay or return. “I’ll support you either way.”

  Nielsen knew something wasn’t right. When her aides visited in her hotel suite, she told them, “Guys, I think we’ve got to get back.” She left her deputy to be her proxy in the G7 meetings and hastily conferred with Sajid Javid, the United Kingdom’s home secretary, to let him know the U.S. position on a few key issues.

  In the days that followed, Nielsen returned stateside to become the public face of U.S. border enforcement amid a record-setting surge of migrants. She sped up the deployment of 750 Customs and Border Protection officers to support U.S. Border Patrol agents and arranged a series of emergency calls with other cabinet secretaries to engage their departments in support. Back in Washington the night of April 2, Nielsen appeared on set for an interview with Tucker Carlson, whose 9:00 p.m. Fox News show Trump watched religiously, to detail what her department was doing to address the crisis at the border—as well as to praise her boss.

  “The president predicted this as a candidate,” Nielsen told Carlson. “He predicted this before he was a candidate. He continues to show leadership and to raise the alarm bells.”

  Nielsen also said that Trump was prepared to close down the U.S.-Mexico border. “We have to stop the drugs, we have to stop the smuggling and trafficking,” she said. “I don’t think the president could be any clearer in his position. He will take every action within his authority to stop this flow.”

  On April 3, Nielsen traveled to the border to inspect the situation firsthand and continue her media tour. In an April 4 interview with Chris Cuomo on his 9:00 p.m. CNN show, Nielsen said she had instituted an “emergency response posture” across the federal government to address the surge of migrants. She said she was treating the situation as if the United States had been hit by a “Cat 5 hurricane.”

  The next day, April 5, Nielsen met up with Trump on the president’s tour of a section of new border wall in Calexico, California. Shortly before a pair of media appearances there, Trump told Nielsen, “Go tell them we’re full. We can’t take any more [migrants].”

  Nielsen declined. “That’s not a legal reason,” she told the president. Being “full” didn’t justify denying people legal asylum.

  Trump then pulled aside Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, for a chat out of Nielsen’s earshot. At a roundtable session with border security officials, Trump said himself what he had asked Nielsen to say: “The system is full. Can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, it’s illegal immigration. We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around. That’s the way it is.”

  When Trump toured the border wall in Calexico for his second media appearance, he did not praise Nielsen.

  Nielsen and McAleenan flew back to Washington that afternoon aboard a small Coast Guard jet. The two got along pretty well, and Nielsen had even talked Trump out of firing McAleenan when the president randomly threatened it a time or two. Nielsen didn’t fully realize it then, but something big was up. One of her senior staffers called her on the plane, and through the din of noise she heard him say that on April 4, while Nielsen had been at the border, Trump had vented frustration about her and the border situation in an Oval Office meeting. She would later learn that McAleenan had attended it.

  Later the night of April 5, Nielsen called Trump, who had stayed in California to attend a political fund-raiser. “I know you’re frustrated,” she said. “Can I come in this weekend?”

  Nielsen wanted to brief Trump on the new agreements she had just brokered with Northern Triangle countries designed to slow the flow of migrants into the United States by setting penalties for kidnappers, imposing blockades on travelers without visas, and establishing border checkpoints in southern Mexico. “I have seven or eight other ideas for what we can do,” she told him.

  “It’s not your fault,” Trump said, adding something like “I know you’re doing your best.” Then he agreed to meet. “Sure, come to the residence this Sunday,” he told her.

  When Nielsen showed up at the White House on April 7 to meet with Trump in the Yellow Oval Room, Mulvaney was there with the president. She started to explain a major agreement she had secured in private negotiations with Mexican authorities the previous week. Mexico had promised to stop 50 percent of the migrants flowing through its internal border checkpoints as they headed north. But Trump cut her off. Looking at Mulvaney, he said, “See, this is what’s wrong with her. It should be 100 percent.”

  Things were off to a very bad start.

  “Mr. President, we can’t stop 100 percent,” Nielsen said.

  They went back and forth. Trump didn’t listen to Nielsen’s explanations about the Northern Triangle agreement, how important it was to have partners in those regions to discourage the migration from within.

  “Sir, can we agree on what we are trying to accomplish?” she asked. But they couldn’t. He was tuning her out. The conversation escalated. Trump made it clear he wanted her gone.

  “Sir, why don’t I give you my resignation,” Nielsen asked the president.

  Trump accepted. He wanted a change. “But I want you to be in my administration elsewhere,” he added.

  Nielsen didn’t respond to that offer, but returned to the substance. “Okay, but can I explain how you can fix this, whoever does it?” she asked.

  Trump didn’t want to hear it.

  “Why don’t we do a week of transition?” Nielsen offered.

  Trump agreed and the meeting was over. Within minutes, as Nielsen was being driven home a few miles away in Alexandria, the president tweeted, “Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position, and I would like to thank her for her service. . . . I am pleased to announce that Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary for @DHSgov. I have confidence that Kevin will do a great job!”

  So much for that week of transition, Nielsen figured. Trump’s announcement made it sound immediate. She finalized her resignation letter and made it effective that date, April 7. Just like some other secretaries who had departed before her, Nielsen did not directly thank Trump or celebrate his leadership in her letter. Rather, she singled out the men and women of her department. “I could not be prouder of and more humbled by their service, dedication, and commitment to keep our country safe from all threats and hazards,” she wrote.

  Mulvaney called Nielsen later that evening, after getting her letter. “Why are you resigning today?” he asked.

  Nielsen was surprised by the question. “I’m not the one who changed the date,” she said.

  Mulvaney explained they weren’t trying to force her to leave immediately. But the president was in a rush, wanting to announce that he was the one making the decision for her to leave and trying to control the story. Mulvaney invoked Jim Mattis, reminding her of the umbrage the president had taken at the defense secretary’s resignation letter. It turned out Trump feared Nielsen might criticize him or reveal damaging information about him on her way out the door, but the president thought if he made the first announcement, he could dismiss anything she might say later as sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee.

  Mulvaney asked her to stay on until April 10 to ensure a smooth transition and explained that Trump intended to keep McAleenan as an acting secretary instead of nominating him for Senate confirmation. “You know the president,” Mulvaney said. “He likes actings.”

  Nielsen would soon learn that
the White House had one main goal for her three days of transition: to get her to sign off on changing the legal succession plan so the White House could install the people they wanted in the department’s top jobs without following the civil service regulations that would place Nielsen’s deputy in charge.

  In her sixteen months as homeland security secretary, Nielsen had become the face of Trump’s immigration policies, arguably the most controversial aspect of his presidency. As such, she had received threats against her life, including on the day she resigned. Nielsen had a heavy security detail as secretary. Packages that were delivered to her home were first scanned and searched at a secure facility. But she was told that once she left the administration, she would be losing her protection.

  Some other high-profile national security officials maintained protective details for a period of time after leaving the government, but only if requested by the White House chief of staff and authorized by the president. No such accommodation had been prearranged for Nielsen. As she left government service, Nielsen’s security team was preparing to remove the alarms and cameras from her home. If she wanted protection, she would have to hire it herself, and unlike her über-wealthy colleagues in Trump’s cabinet she did not necessarily have those kinds of resources.

  When some of her international counterparts visited Washington, they offered to hire personal security for Nielsen to protect her, but she declined. “That would look horrible,” Nielsen told them. “Can you imagine the story? Foreign governments provide security because the U.S. won’t.”

  Nielsen called Trump. She appealed to him to keep her security detail for another few weeks until she had time to install her own system. “Just say I say it’s fine,” Trump told her.

  * * *

  —

  The evening of April 3, amid the border crisis and Nielsen’s scramble to save her job, Trump gathered his most senior military brass for an annual White House tradition: a dinner hosted by the commander in chief. It was partly a gesture of gratitude, partly an informal session to share ideas.