The Divider, page 13
In 2008, the future president sold a massive Palm Beach beachfront mansion complete with art gallery, ballroom, and forty-eight-car garage that he had bought for $41 million to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, an astonishing profit that drew plenty of suspicion.[6] Even then, he tried to keep the buyer’s nationality secret. “Don’t say Russian,” he asked a reporter at the time.[7] Buyers tied to Russia and other former Soviet republics separately made eighty-six purchases of Trump-branded condominiums in New York and Florida for a total of nearly $109 million—all in cash.[8] In 2013, the future president brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow and tried unsuccessfully to meet with Putin while in town. “Will he become my new best friend?” Trump asked on Twitter.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump talked admiringly about Putin (“a strong leader”) and compared him favorably to Barack Obama (“he is getting an A and our president is not doing so well”).[9] “You can get along with those people and get along with them well,” he told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News the day he announced his campaign. “You can make deals with those people.”[10] He then hosted the Russian ambassador in the front row for his only foreign policy speech of the primaries, at which he promised “improved relations” with Moscow.[11] He even suggested he was perfectly fine if Russia wanted to keep Crimea, the peninsula it seized by force in 2014 from neighboring Ukraine. “The people of Crimea from what I’ve heard would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.[12] He told a German reporter at a news conference that he would consider lifting sanctions on Russia imposed after the Crimea takeover. At the Republican National Convention that summer, Trump campaign advisers stripped language from the party platform calling for “lethal defensive weapons” to be sent to Ukraine in its ongoing efforts to counter Russian-sponsored separatists on its eastern edges, substituting softer wording merely suggesting “appropriate assistance.”
After firing his first campaign manager, Trump replaced him with Paul Manafort, a Republican who had built a lucrative lobbying career working for Russians and Ukrainians aligned with Putin. And Trump openly asked Moscow for help winning his campaign, calling on the Kremlin to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email (“Russia, if you’re listening”).[13] When WikiLeaks obtained stolen Clinton campaign emails from Russian agents, Trump’s campaign, with the help of his old friend and adviser Roger Stone, appeared to know in advance when they would be released. Indeed, a wave of Clinton campaign emails was posted online hours after the American intelligence community publicly accused Russia of election interference and the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed. The timing was so extraordinary that it seemed like a deliberate effort to change the story line away from revelations that could hurt Trump.
What voters did not know at the time was that Trump surrogates had a remarkable amount of contact with Russian figures and intermediaries throughout the campaign. Manafort, who had volunteered to work for Trump for free, secretly slipped internal campaign polling to Konstantin Kilimnik, an old business associate who also happened to be a Russian spy and passed along the data to Russian intelligence. At the same time, Kilimnik was urging Manafort to share with Trump a supposed “peace plan” for Ukraine that would reinstall the country’s ousted pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, a Manafort client and Kremlin ally who had been pushed out in a 2014 revolution and fled to Russia after allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars in stolen Ukrainian funds.
Through all of this, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen was secretly negotiating to build the elusive Trump Tower Moscow even as his boss campaigned for the presidency. By November 2015, Trump had signed a letter of intent with a Russia-based developer. Cohen directly sought help from Putin’s office and pursued the deal as late as June 2016, even though Trump repeatedly denied any business interests in Russia. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump insisted that July without disclosing the effort to build the tower.[14]
Trump’s campaign welcomed help from Moscow while Cohen was still pursuing the real estate deal. In June, a business acquaintance reached out to Don Jr. to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with a “Russian government attorney” who promised to bring dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr. replied, “I love it,” and invited Manafort and Jared Kushner to join them.[15] In the end, the attorney offered no useful damaging information but pressed them on adoption policy, a thinly veiled reference to American sanctions that had prompted Putin to retaliate by curbing foreign adoptions of Russian children.
Trump stoked suspicions with conflicting accounts of whether he had ever met Putin. “I do have a relationship with him,” he told an interviewer in 2013 and told another that he had “met him once.”[16] Referring to his Miss Universe contest in Moscow, he said at an appearance at the National Press Club in 2014 that “I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.”[17] During a primary debate, he implied that they had talked in a television green room.[18] “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes; we were stablemates and we did very well that night,” he said.[19] In fact, they never met at 60 Minutes because they were interviewed separately thousands of miles apart, Trump in New York and Putin in Moscow.
Later, as the issue became more problematic, Trump started denying that he had ever encountered the Russian president. “I never met Putin,” he said at a news conference in July 2016. “I don’t know who Putin is.”[20] But by the time he was elected, Trump was back to defending Putin. In a pre–Super Bowl interview on Fox News, Trump stuck up for the Russian president when Bill O’Reilly called him a killer. “We got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”[21]
All of it fed theories that Trump and his campaign had been acting in collusion with the Russians. American intelligence agencies had firmly established that Putin not only authorized a covert operation to disrupt American elections but specifically wanted to tilt the outcome in favor of Trump. When a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos confided to an Australian diplomat over drinks in London in May 2016 that Russia had thousands of Democratic emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton, Australian officials tipped American intelligence, leading the FBI to open an investigation. Unlike the email probe in which Clinton was eventually cleared, the inquiry into Trump’s campaign remained little publicized until after the election. The pre-inaugural phone calls with the Russian ambassador that got Mike Flynn fired only fueled suspicions. And when Trump took office, he prepared to lift some sanctions on Russia until Republican senators led by Mitch McConnell threatened to overrule him with legislation.
Some of those around Trump said the explanation of his fawning approach to Putin was simpler than the fishy facts and unexplained affinity for a Russian dictator made it seem. Instead, they argued, it was more about a lifetime of motivation: money. “By ingratiating himself with Putin and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump presidency, the boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along,” Michael Cohen later wrote in a memoir blasting his former boss. “The campaign was far too chaotic and incompetent to actually conspire with the Russian government. The reality was that Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money and he had no hesitation in bending American foreign policy to his personal financial benefit.”[22]
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By the time he was inaugurated, the Moscow project was off the table. But Trump saw no reason he should not monetize the presidency in other ways. Unlike presidents for nearly half a century, he refused to extricate himself from his private business or release his tax returns. Starting during the campaign, Trump claimed he would put out his tax returns once an IRS audit was finished. But he never did, and every year of his presidency he would just repeat the same unconvincing excuse.
His Trump International Hotel in Washington, which opened in the city’s historic Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House weeks before the 2016 election, became a magnet for money from people and institutions currying favor with the president. The Saudi government spent more than $270,000 at the hotel in just three months after the inauguration. In the years to come, the governments of Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines, among others, would host events at the Trump hotel or one of his other properties.[23] Republican operatives and Washington lobbyists made the Trump hotel a regular venue for receptions. Trump himself often held court in the restaurant on the mezzanine, at Table 72, a round booth with an unmissable view. Servers were instructed to bring him a bottle of hand sanitizer and a Diet Coke immediately upon arrival; his menu of shrimp cocktail, steak, and fries never varied either. Incredible access, in other words, for those who might be looking for it.[24]
It all looked like a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbids public officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Critics quickly filed lawsuits, although courts eventually rejected the claims.[25] Trump was more accustomed to lawsuits and investigations than most presidents because he had been sued and investigated so many times for everything from racially discriminatory rental practices to questionable stock dealings to violations of casino regulations. Most of the time, he got off without consequence or perhaps with a fine. When he entered politics, another slew of investigations followed. Just before being sworn in as president, Trump paid $25 million to former students of his defunct Trump University to settle fraud claims. The New York State attorney general later found a “shocking pattern of illegality” at the Trump Foundation, which functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”[26]
So Trump was delighted to now have the Justice Department under his purview and wasted little time moving to protect himself. Within days of his election, he began courting Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose jurisdiction included Trump’s business and home. Within days, Bharara was invited to Trump Tower to meet with the president-elect. Trump made a point of asking for Bharara’s mobile phone number. Less than two weeks later, he used it, calling Bharara for no apparent reason other than to shoot the breeze. He called again right before the inauguration, with no evident purpose.
U.S. attorneys rarely hear from a president and Bharara was mystified. He decided it was all right to return the calls while Trump was still president-elect and not yet technically his boss. But then Trump called again after being sworn in, this time on March 9. Bharara considered secretly taping their conversation or having an aide listen in, but instead told the White House he did not want to take the call. The next day, Trump fired Bharara.
No reason was given and because he was a political appointee from the previous administration none was needed. Bharara concluded that Trump had been trying to woo him in case any prosecutorial issues came up involving him or his business—or in case he had any enemies he wanted investigated. Bharara later decided, “He would have called me up eventually and asked for something—I have zero doubt.”
The Bharara episode foreshadowed Trump’s ultimately futile efforts to win over James Comey and their resulting conflict. At six-foot-eight, Comey was a giant of a man who stood out in any room. Known for a stubborn streak of either principle or self-righteousness, depending on who was talking, Comey had prosecuted money launderers, mobsters, terrorists, and even Martha Stewart before being appointed deputy attorney general by George W. Bush and FBI director by Barack Obama.
His relationship with the new president got off to an awkward start days before the inauguration with that pull-aside to let Trump know about the Steele dossier, followed by the publication of the document by BuzzFeed News. Assuming that the FBI director was trying to undercut him rather than warn him, Trump decided to test Comey’s loyalties by inviting him to dinner at the White House on January 27, a week after taking office. “Don’t talk about Russia, whatever you do,” Reince Priebus urged the president, worrying that it would be seen as improperly influencing an investigation.[27] Trump barely listened. Over shrimp scampi and chicken parmesan, the president demanded a virtual oath from the FBI director. “I need loyalty,” Trump said. Trying to duck without a direct confrontation, Comey settled on: “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump reinterpreted his answer to be what he wanted to hear. “That’s what I want,” he replied, “honest loyalty.”[28] Comey was troubled. Neither Bush nor Obama had ever demanded such a thing. The whole exchange recalled the mobsters Comey had prosecuted as a younger man, so he made a point of recording every conversation with Trump in a memo immediately afterward to protect himself. “To my mind,” he wrote later, “the demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony—with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’ ”[29]
All of this was so out of the norm, but Trump had no real understanding of the rules and certainly no respect for them. His ignorance of both political reality and what it was like to be in the crosshairs of the FBI was clear when he and Jared Kushner had lunch with Chris Christie on February 14, the day after he dismissed Mike Flynn.
“Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over,” Trump told Christie.
Christie laughed. As a former prosecutor, he knew that was ridiculous. “No way,” he said. “This Russia thing is far from over.” Indeed, he predicted, “we’ll be here on Valentine’s Day 2018 talking about this.”
Trump seemed shocked. “What do you mean?” he said. “Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”
Quite the opposite, Christie said. There was no way to curtail the investigation. And Flynn, he said, would remain a problem for Trump for a long time, “like gum on the bottom of your shoe.”
Almost as if to prove the point, Kushner’s phone rang during the lunch. It was Flynn, calling to complain about how the White House had characterized his departure. Kushner sought to reassure him. “You know the president respects you,” he told the fired adviser. “The president cares about you. I’ll get the president to send out a positive tweet about you later.” Trump nodded in agreement.
But the president was worried about Comey. Trump asked Christie to call the FBI director to “tell him he’s part of the team.” Christie thought that was “nonsensical” and had no intention of doing so.[30]
As it happened, Comey was at the White House a few hours later for a homeland security briefing. Trump asked him to stay afterward to talk privately. After shooing away Priebus, who tried to join them, Trump leaned on Comey to drop his investigation of Flynn, in effect trying to determine whether the FBI director really was a made man.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told him. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
As he did at their dinner, Comey again tried to dodge without directly contradicting the president. “I agree he is a good guy,” he said noncommittally.[31]
Trump called Comey a few more times in the following weeks, complaining that “the cloud” from the Russia inquiry was complicating his ability to manage foreign policy and asking for a public statement affirming that he was not under investigation. “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know,” Trump said on April 11, alluding to his Mafia-like loyalty request.[32] That was the last time Comey would speak with Trump.
Trump was frustrated. He had already lost one measure of control over the investigation when Jeff Sessions recused himself in March from overseeing the probe on the grounds that he had been a campaign adviser. “I’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are not aggressive, who are weak, who don’t have my best interests in mind, who aren’t loyal,” Trump complained one day in the Oval Office.[33] The attorney general, the FBI director—they were supposed to answer him and do his bidding. As he saw it, they were his sword against his enemies and his shield against danger. At one point, while pressuring his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to stop Sessions from recusing himself, Trump had bellowed in frustration, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
That’s what he wanted. Another Roy Cohn.
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To understand Trump’s view of law and justice, it was necessary to understand his relationship with Roy Cohn, the infamous red-baiter turned brass-knuckled New York fixer. More than three decades after his death, Cohn still wielded enormous influence over Trump, a mentor from the grave whose take-no-prisoners approach to business and politics would define the forty-fifth president. To Trump, every lawyer was measured against his memory of Cohn, judged by their willingness to wage unrelenting war on his behalf. All of them, in one way or another, would be found wanting. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” became a regular mantra.
No other modern president would embrace a figure like Cohn. Lean and eternally tanned, with heavy-lidded, often bloodshot eyes, and a scarred nose, Cohn looked the part of the Mafia lawyer he was—the word “reptilian” was used a lot—and he reveled in his brazen defiance of tax collectors, prosecutors, judges, regulators, and civil libertarians.[34] As a young prosecutor, he helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for espionage, then earned national notoriety as the interrogator at Joseph McCarthy’s hearings. After McCarthy was eventually censured, Cohn reinvented himself as a New York lawyer who could get anything done for corrupt politicians, mob bosses, Catholic cardinals, the accused wife killer Claus von Bülow, the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and a young developer on the make named Donald Trump.
