The Divider, page 15
As it happened, on the same day McCabe was forcing Rosenstein’s hand on a special counsel, Mueller was at the White House at the president’s invitation to discuss Comey’s replacement at the FBI. While Trump would later claim Mueller was applying for his old job, Mueller insisted he was only there to offer advice. By day’s end, Mueller reached out to Rosenstein to say that he had changed his mind and would leave his firm to accept the special counsel appointment.
The next day, May 17, unaware of Rosenstein’s plans, Trump was interviewing another candidate to replace Comey, Frank Keating, a former Oklahoma governor who once served as an FBI agent. Don McGahn was told he had a phone call and slipped out. When he returned, he whispered to Jeff Sessions, “Rod is on the phone and needs to speak with you now.” Sessions then left the room, returning only as Keating was leaving. They shut the door.
“Mr. President, I need to tell you I just got a call from Rod Rosenstein and he has appointed a special counsel on the Russia matter and it will be public in half an hour,” Sessions said.
Trump slumped in his chair, leaning way back. “Oh my God,” he said. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
Others in the room thought much the same. Annie Donaldson, McGahn’s deputy, scribbled in her notes: “Is this the beginning of the end?”[60]
* * *
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It would be hard to overstate Trump’s agitation as he absorbed the consequences of the new investigation that he had just brought upon himself. The immediate target of his ire was right in front of him and he turned on Sessions ferociously. “How could you let this happen, Jeff?” he demanded. “How could you let it happen? I appointed you attorney general. You recused yourself. Left me on an island by myself.”
He went on to attack Rosenstein and Sessions’s decision to hire him. “You let me down, Jeff,” Trump continued. “Kennedy names his brother AG. Obama names Holder. It’s the most important appointment and I appoint you and you have let me down.”
Sessions stiffened. “Well, if you feel like I need to step aside and you don’t have confidence in me, you can put someone else in as attorney general,” he said.
“Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels, it ruins your presidency,” Trump moaned. “It takes years and years and I won’t be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Mike Pence tried to console him. “This may not be so bad,” he offered. “Nobody here thinks it’s the end of your presidency. It could be a good thing in the end.”
Trump was not buying it. “It’s not,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
He turned back to Sessions. “Jeff, you really let me down. I think you should resign. I think you should submit your resignation.”
“Okay,” Sessions said. He picked up his papers and shoved them in a folder. “You’ll have it.” He turned to go and then paused to say that he still supported Trump and his agenda. He stuck out his hand. “It has been an honor to serve as attorney general.”
Pence tried to intervene. “Could the three of us just have a moment?”
The others stepped out, but the president would not be talked out of his rage. Don McGahn rushed to find Reince Priebus.
“We’ve got a problem,” McGahn said, red-faced and out of breath.
“What?” the chief of staff asked.
“Well, we just got a special counsel and Sessions just resigned.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Priebus exclaimed. “That can’t happen.”
But it could and it had. Priebus bolted down the back stairway of the West Wing, out the door, and into the parking lot to find Sessions in a black sedan with the engine running about to leave. Priebus banged on the car door, then jumped inside.
Sessions told him he was resigning.
“You cannot resign. It’s not possible,” Priebus insisted. “We are going to talk about this right now.”[61]
Priebus dragged Sessions out of the car and back into the White House to his office. Pence and Steve Bannon joined them, pressing Sessions not to step down.
Trump’s eruption would open a remarkable standoff between the president and the attorney general that would drag on for a year and a half, leaving a broken relationship at the heart of the administration that would drive decisions by a weakened, insecure Justice Department chief and prove a source of never-ending rage for Trump as he tried to figure out how to stop this new special counsel that he saw as an existential threat.
Back in the Oval Office, Trump was interviewing the next candidate for the FBI, former senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been recommended by Trump’s longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz. Lieberman, who worked part-time at Kasowitz’s law firm, had been a Washington iconoclast, the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000 who was effectively run out of his party because of his support for the Iraq War and later endorsed his Republican friend John McCain for president in 2008. Now Lieberman found himself in the Oval Office with a steaming mad Trump.
“Did you hear the shocking news?” Trump asked him. The president then told Lieberman that a special counsel had just been named. “The guy they just appointed was sitting in the same chair you are!” Trump exclaimed. He was furious at his attorney general. “I can’t believe Jeff Sessions allowed it to happen.”
For the next hour and fifteen minutes, Lieberman got a taste of how Trump’s White House operated. The Oval Office was like a train station as advisers filed in and out—McGahn, Kushner, Bannon, Priebus. Trump alternated between pitching Lieberman on the FBI post and railing about Mueller’s appointment. Trump dictated a blistering statement to Hope Hicks attacking Sessions. Lieberman was taken aback at how harsh it was. Hicks left to type it up and came back about twenty minutes later for Trump to approve it. She had taken out a lot of the vitriol. “Okay, okay, fine, put it out,” Trump said grudgingly.
Lieberman could hardly sleep that night. Did he have a responsibility to take the job? In the end, he was saved from having to decide because Trump in the meantime had asked Kasowitz to represent him in the investigation, making it a conflict of interest for Lieberman to take over the FBI. Lieberman was relieved. “I felt like I had been saved by some sort of divine intervention,” he said later.
To take over the FBI, Trump eventually went with a recommendation from Chris Christie, who suggested his personal attorney, Christopher Wray, a by-the-book former assistant attorney general who had defended the New Jersey governor in the Bridgegate scandal after Christie’s aides were caught closing the George Washington Bridge in an effort to punish a political adversary. Wray, who had prosecuted the lobbyist Jack Abramoff as well as corrupt congressmen of both parties when he served in the Bush Justice Department, would go on to assure the Senate that he would not be a Trump stooge—“I am not faint of heart,” he promised—and be confirmed 92 to 5.[62]
Sessions, in the meantime, had returned to the Justice Department thoroughly deflated. He sat in his office stewing, uncertain what to do. It was almost 10 p.m. “You have to give him a letter because you told him you would,” Jody Hunt, his chief of staff, told him. “But what you should do is write down in the letter that he asked you for your resignation and make it say, ‘if you accept it,’ so it’s his choice. Otherwise, it will be that you abandoned him.”
Sessions agreed and started to write the letter, then gave up. “Let’s do it in the morning,” he said.
By 8:15 the next morning, though, he had already been summoned to a 9 a.m. meeting at the White House. “You have to have that letter,” Hunt told him.
“Go write it,” Sessions said.
After a scramble, they got a few sentences on paper, making clear it was written “at your request,” and rushed out the door, arriving at the White House five minutes late. Sessions was escorted into the residence, where he put the letter on a coffee table. Trump asked Sessions if he still wanted to serve as attorney general and Sessions said yes. Trump agreed to let him stay, but stood, picked up the letter, and put it in his pocket.
When Priebus, Bannon, and McGahn learned later that Trump kept the letter, they were stunned. They worried that Trump could use it to improperly influence Sessions, holding it over his head to get him to do whatever the president wanted. Priebus told the group that it amounted to a “shock collar” keeping the attorney general on a leash, an extraordinary comment for a White House chief of staff to make about his boss.[63]
A few days later, during his first overseas trip, Trump took the letter from his pocket while on Air Force One flying from Saudi Arabia to Israel and showed it off to Hope Hicks and other aides. But later on the trip, when Priebus tried to retrieve the letter from him, Trump claimed he did not have it, saying it was back at the White House. Priebus insisted he could not keep it.
Three days after returning to Washington, Trump gave in. Jody Hunt was summoned to the White House to take the letter back. Trump was on the phone with Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, when Hunt was escorted into the Oval Office, but motioned him to open the envelope. On it, Trump had written, “Jeff, not accepted. Make America great again. Donald Trump.”
* * *
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Trump was not the only one naive about the ways of the nation’s capital. Jared Kushner reacted to the Mueller appointment as if it had solved their political problems, at least in the short term, by forcing Congress to back off the various investigations it too had launched into Russian interference in the election.
“This is great, this is great,” he told Mike Dubke. “Now we won’t have to answer all these questions from these senators.”
“What do you mean?” Dubke asked.
“Now there’s a prosecutor so it’ll go into the courts and we won’t have to answer these senators.”
Dubke was flabbergasted. “You really don’t understand how Washington works, do you?” he said. A special counsel inquiry would be the most intense investigation Trump or Kushner had ever endured. “I hope you have a good proctologist, because you’re going to bend over, my friend,” Dubke told Kushner.
That was something Dubke had no interest in himself. He had promised his wife when he took the White House job that he would quit if it ever became necessary to hire a lawyer. He was not going to bankrupt his family to defend Trump. And so, nine days after Mueller was appointed, Dubke turned in his resignation.
Trump turned to another Washington veteran for advice on how to handle the special counsel probe. George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne Conway, had agreed to head the Justice Department’s civil division, when his wife asked him to write a memo for the president on the Mueller inquiry. This was a sideline expertise of Conway’s. A graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School who went on to become a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, he had been one of the so-called Elves, a loose group of conservative lawyers who secretly provided information and legal advice to Bill Clinton’s antagonists during the investigation that led to the impeachment of 1998. In his memo for Trump, Conway contrasted Trump’s “fake news” scandal with Clinton’s “real scandal”—but then advised him to handle it just as Clinton had. Play “rope-a-dope.” Just be president. Let your lawyers take care of the investigation. “Everything you say or tweet becomes the story of the day because you’re the president and you have the bully pulpit,” Conway wrote. “The people of the country want to see a president being president, not being his own defense lawyer.”
Trump called a couple days later. He was not, of course, going to follow Conway’s advice, at least not the part urging him to shut up about the investigation, but he wanted to know who should represent him. He coveted famous attorneys like Brendan Sullivan of Iran-contra fame or Theodore Olson, the Republican lawyer who had won Bush v. Gore, but the city’s most celebrated lawyers wanted nothing to do with him. And as more information came out, Conway increasingly came to understand why. Over the course of the next few weeks, he grew uncomfortable with Trump too, and pulled his name from consideration for the Justice Department job.
The next time he saw Trump was at Steven Mnuchin’s black-tie wedding three weeks later at Washington’s Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium. Mike Pence officiated as the fifty-four-year-old treasury secretary married Louise Linton, a thirty-six-year-old actress who had recently appeared in a remake of the horror movie Cabin Fever. It was his third marriage and her second. They had already moved into a $12.6 million house off Massachusetts Avenue, although she split her time between Washington and Los Angeles, posting red-carpet appearances on her Instagram account in between animal rights advocacy.
Some of Mnuchin’s relatives despised the president, seeing him as a vulgar narcissist, and were unhappy to be in his presence. Mnuchin’s mother went so far as to feign a broken arm, wrapping it in a sling, to avoid having to shake hands with Trump. Mnuchin’s father later complained to friends that the affair was tacky and expressed astonishment that the president did not even offer a toast. Gary Cohn, a Mnuchin rival since their days at Goldman Sachs, skipped altogether. Asked why, he told an associate, “Well, I’ve been to a couple of his weddings. Neither of them worked out.”
At the cocktail reception, the president ran into the Conways. As they talked, it became clear that Trump mistakenly believed that George had turned down the Justice job because Jeff Sessions was “weak,” then began ranting about the attorney general. George and Kellyanne later escaped to the bar and laughed at how bizarre it was to have a president act that way.
By the next morning, though, George had a change of heart. “Yeah, but it’s the president of the United States,” he remembered telling his wife. “It’s not funny.”
She did not see it that way. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “He’s hilarious.”
The Mnuchins were not the only family being torn apart by Trump.
* * *
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Whatever the president hoped to gain by firing James Comey, it soon became clear that the investigation Comey started and parallel inquiries by the House and Senate intelligence committees were only becoming more threatening.
The next big blow came within weeks of Comey’s firing and Mueller’s appointment, when a search of Trump campaign emails in response to investigators’ requests turned up the message traffic that had led to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort held with the visiting Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Soon enough, The New York Times let the White House know that it had learned about the meeting and was about to publish a story. Aboard Air Force One flying home from a trip to Germany, Trump dictated a deceptive statement to be released in his son’s name. “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children,” the statement said.[64] Only after Don Jr. realized that the Times had copies of the emails did he post the entire exchange to get ahead of the reporters, but the message chain exposed how misleading the presidentially dictated statement was.
Trump was livid. “He’s such a fuckup,” he railed about his son. “He screwed up again, but this time, he’s screwing us all, big time!”[65] In fact, while the original meeting was a huge mistake, it was the president who had screwed up now by drafting a statement that would quickly be exposed as disingenuous.
In the Trump family, father and son had long had a fraught relationship. From the start, Trump doubted that Don Jr. was worthy of the family mantle. When Ivana gave birth, he objected to sharing his name with his newborn son. “What if he’s a loser?” he asked.[66] Ivana prevailed, but Don Jr.’s upbringing was tumultuous. At age twelve, he grew estranged from his father during the divorce from his mother. “You don’t love us!” he reportedly yelled at Trump. “You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money!”[67] Don Jr. did not speak with Trump for a year, hanging up on him whenever he called.
Reconciliation did not fully close the rift. Don Jr. eventually went to work for the family business, but Trump regularly berated him, grousing about the latest “shit deal” his son brought him. It often seemed like Don Jr. could do no right. When he once asked his father if he was nervous as he was about to participate in a staged televised wrestling match, Trump snapped at him for putting such a thought in his head right before going onstage. “What kind of stupid fucking question is that?” he roared. “Get out of here.” Then, as if his son were not still in the room, Trump exclaimed, “The kid has the worst fucking judgment of anyone I have ever met.” When Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, later asked if he was okay, Don Jr. brushed it off. “We have a torturous relationship,” he said. “It’s not the first time he said that and it won’t be the last.”[68]
Nonetheless, Trump had invited his son to join the campaign and Don Jr. eventually became a leading surrogate for his father. More than anyone else in the family, he channeled the culture war grievances that animated his father’s campaign crowds. In his warm-up speeches, Don Jr. acerbically defied political correctness and suggested the media would be “warming up the gas chamber” if Republicans acted like Democrats.[69] He even compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles with one poisoned candy among the sweets, only to generate a furor. “Look what he did now,” Trump growled. “He screwed up again. What a fuckup.”[70]
When Trump moved into the White House, Don Jr. remained in New York but continued his new sideline in politics, firing away at Democrats, journalists, and other perceived enemies as he sought his father’s approval. During James Comey’s testimony before Congress a month after his dismissal, Don Jr. posted more than eighty tweets attacking the former FBI director. “Basically, Trump Jr. is the voice of undiluted Trumpism,” observed Roger Stone, the president’s longtime friend.[71]
Publication in July of the emails regarding Don Jr.’s Russia meeting sparked the predictable firestorm and made Trump furious all over again at Jeff Sessions. Just days after the revelations, Trump unexpectedly unloaded on his attorney general during an interview with the Times. “Sessions should have never recused himself,” Trump declared. “And if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” He complained that the recusal was “very unfair to the president.” As a result, the responsibility fell to Rod Rosenstein, who Trump pointed out was from Baltimore. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he complained.[72]
