The Divider, page 42
Either way, there never was a deal, let alone the deal of the century. By the end of the Trump administration, North Korea had continued to grow its nuclear arsenal by an estimated fifteen more warheads since the two leaders first met, while improving its long-range missile capability, expanding its nuclear complex, and hardening it against attack.[17]
The sense of relief had been palpable and largely bipartisan when Washington absorbed the news from Hanoi. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” said Senator Marco Rubio, which was nearly identical, for once, to what Nancy Pelosi said.[18] This was also the view in Tokyo, where, a senior American official was told, a bottle of champagne was opened that night for a toast among the prime minister’s top advisers. They drank to the failure of the summit.
Trump, for his part, remained furious that Democrats had sought to embarrass him with the Michael Cohen testimony even as he was meeting with Kim. When he returned to Washington after the long flight across the Pacific, Trump sent out a single tweet about the Hanoi summit (“Relationship very good,” he reported, “let’s see what happens!”) and a dozen over the next few days about Cohen. “For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk,’ ” he tweeted a few days after returning to the White House. “Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!”
CHAPTER 16
King Kong Always Wins
Not long after he got back from Vietnam, Trump traveled to Maryland just outside of the capital to appear before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a collection of some of the loudest and fringiest voices from the hard right. Once a powerful forum for rebels against the Republican establishment, the group had become a Trump adoration society, so much so that Kellyanne Conway joked that CPAC should really be called TPAC. The convention center was filled with Trump shirts, Trump hats, Trump socks, Trump paintings. When Trump took the stage on March 2, the audience roared its approval, especially when he approached an American flag and wrapped his arms around it. Flag hugging was not just a metaphor for Trump.
For the next two hours, he held forth—“totally off script!”—to boast, attack, spin, joke, complain, ramble, dissemble, improvise, extemporize, and otherwise give voice to whatever happened to be on his mind. Mostly, what was on his mind, because it was always on his mind, was the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference. He celebrated his decision to take out the “bad cop” James Comey, the action that triggered Robert Mueller’s appointment in the first place, and asserted that the prosecutors were “angry Democrats” out to get him, “all killers” putting him in the crosshairs. “They’re trying to take you out with bullshit. Okay? With bullshit,” he said. “So now we’re waiting for a report,” Trump added, “and we’ll find out whether or not, and who we’re dealing with.”
Nearly two years after Mueller’s appointment, Trump was nearing the end of the investigation that had hung over his presidency and nervously anticipating the results. He had fired Jeff Sessions and replaced him as attorney general with Bill Barr with the explicit mission of protecting him from Mueller. The probe weighed on him constantly. He would tweet about it at six in the morning and still be complaining about it at midnight. There were entire days when Trump would just hide out in his dining room next to the Oval Office, staring at cable news about the Russia probe. If aides needed documents signed, they tried to slip in and out as quickly as possible lest they be subjected to one of his self-pitying monologues that could last thirty minutes, an hour, even an hour and a half. “What the fuck are they talking about?” Trump would rail. “No one did anything wrong! I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m not involved with anything! This is crazy!” He repeated his denials to anyone who would listen. “I’ve gotten away with more stuff than you’ll ever know. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life,” Trump claimed over dinner one night with Lindsey Graham. “But I didn’t do this.”
In policy meetings, maybe thirty seconds or two minutes in, the discussion would be derailed because Trump would ask about the latest news of the investigation. “There were moments where you just almost had to give up,” one senior official recalled. Trump was so far gone that at times it seemed they ought to find someone to actually perform the duties of the president while the real one was busy nursing his grievances in the other room. “It was almost like we needed to give somebody a proxy,” the official added, “so that if we needed a presidential decision on something, we can still move forward.”
The investigation had transformed Trump’s presidency in profound ways. For a president who thrived on conflict, it was the ultimate showdown, pitting him against all those out to get him, an ever-evolving cast of characters who fit into his conspiratorial views of the Deep State enemy—the Democrats, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, the news media, the State Department, the Pentagon, the career civil service, the establishment writ large, fellow Republicans who had never fully accepted him. In other words, Washington. In keeping with his approach to the presidency overall, Trump treated the investigation as a daily battle to be won or lost on television and Twitter. He made the probe the subject of a thousand rants at his campaign-style rallies, elevating his resentment to the level of political theology for his followers. It was, increasingly as the months went on, a consuming private obsession of Trump’s as well.
After Gary Cohn left the White House in the spring of 2018, an old associate from Wall Street asked if Trump obsessed about the investigation. “Twenty-two-point-nine hours a day,” Cohn deadpanned. Some advisers slyly used this to their own benefit. Barr and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state widely viewed as a master Trump-whisperer, had a “running joke,” as Barr called it, with each other. When Trump would appear on the verge of screaming at them over something, Pompeo would quickly raise the matter of the FBI agents investigating the president and say he hoped that one day they would be held accountable. This would invariably send Trump off into long tangents of grievance. “By the time the president was done,” Barr would recall, “he had forgotten any gripe he had with Pompeo.”[1]
The investigation fed not only Trump’s sense of victimhood but his manifest insecurity. In the view of some advisers, he had arrived in office with a bad case of impostor syndrome. So sensitive was Trump to the notion that he might not have won properly that in his private dining room he kept a stack of color-coded maps that he gave out to visitors showing how the United States voted in 2016, broken down by county so that the red swaths of Trump voters in sparse rural America misleadingly dominated the smaller blue splotches of Clinton voters in denser, more populous urban areas. The Russia inquiry exacerbated his self-doubt by seeming to question his very legitimacy as president. The result was that, while national security officials wanted him to confront the reality of Russia’s attack as a national security threat to the United States, Trump viewed it only as a threat to himself. He was determined to fight back. He was not going to let that righteous Bob Mueller bring him down.
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Donald Trump and Robert Swan Mueller III were both born to wealthy families in New York City just twenty-two months and ten miles apart, but they could hardly have turned out more differently. While Trump’s supposed bone spur troubles saved him from the draft in the 1960s and he once said that “my personal Vietnam” was avoiding venereal disease on the dating circuit, Mueller was taking fire with his fellow Marines at places like Mutter’s Ridge in Vietnam and later earning the Bronze Star.[2] While Trump amassed a real estate fortune by day and went clubbing with platinum blond supermodels at night, Mueller married his high school sweetheart and settled for government wages as a prosecutor, taking down crime bosses such as John Gotti. While Trump chased celebrity with a television show featuring manufactured conflict, Mueller chased bomb-wielding international terrorists as the FBI director who took over just a week before the September 11 attacks.
Mueller was one of the few figures in Trump’s Washington who commanded respect across the aisle, the only FBI director to have had his tour extended beyond the statutory ten-year limit adopted after J. Edgar Hoover died. Tall, with chiseled features, tightly combed gray hair, and an unfailingly pressed white shirt and dark suit, Mueller had the bearing and demeanor of a man comfortable being in charge and the reputation of someone who never colored outside the lines. An old-school Episcopalian of the sort that once dominated the capital, he was nicknamed Bobby Three Sticks, after the III at the end of his name. When his family talked him into hosting a holiday party for top FBI staff at his house, he tolerated the soirée for exactly two hours before flicking the lights on and off to indicate that it was time to go home. Most Friday nights, he dined with the same friends at the same Washington restaurant, tucking into a plate of scallops accompanied by a glass of white wine, then headed each Sunday to one of the Episcopal parishes he frequented, including St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. But he had a dry sense of humor and a keen understanding of how Washington worked. “If you are going to insist on being logical,” he once told Andrew Weissmann, one of his prosecutors, “you have no future in this town.”[3]
To investigate the president, Mueller had recruited a platoon of experienced investigators and prosecutors such as Weissmann, many of whom he had worked with before. They set up shop in an office building aptly called Patriots Plaza on the waterfront not far from Nationals Park. The staff was divided into three groups: Team R was to pick up the FBI’s investigation of ties between Russia’s 2016 election interference and the Trump campaign. Team M was to look at Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, and his various financial entanglements. And Team 600, named after a relevant section of the Justice Department regulations covering special counsels, was to look at Trump’s possible obstruction of justice.
The center of the action was the Russia investigation. Led by Jeannie Rhee, a veteran prosecutor and partner of Mueller’s at the white-shoe Washington law firm of WilmerHale, Team R set up two large whiteboards to map out Russia’s election operation. One in Rhee’s office was filled over time with a cascade of Russian names, essentially a schematic of who was who in Putin’s effort to tilt the election to Trump. The other, even larger, was set up in the open-floor-plan common area anchoring the end of a long conference table where investigators gathered every day. On this one, multiple empty boxes with no lines were drawn at first; eventually, over time, each of the boxes was filled in and linked to others.
Mueller was especially interested in following the trails to Moscow. He would emerge from his office and plunk down in a chair at the large table for Team R’s late-morning meetings, sitting expectantly, almost as if to say, what did you learn today? For some of the younger agents and analysts, his regular presence was unintentionally intimidating, rendering some of them tongue-tied. Mueller was not particularly fond of throat clearing. He wanted his investigators to get to the point. “Stop playing with your food,” he would say.
Team M was led by Weissmann, a relentless investigator who had prosecuted everyone from mobsters to the corporate executives in the Enron scandal before becoming Mueller’s special counsel at the FBI. His part of the investigation was broken off from the rest of the Russia probe because Manafort was seen as a complicated scandal in his own right. He had already been under investigation for a wide array of financial crimes for years before joining Trump’s operation and his extensive ties with Russian figures made his sudden appearance in a presidential campaign particularly suspect. Team 600, led by James Quarles, another WilmerHale partner and a former Watergate prosecutor, was aimed directly at the president and therefore even more politically fraught. More than the other two, this team found over the course of the inquiry that it was investigating possible crimes as they were being committed in real time.
To defend himself, Trump wanted big names from the past, names he recognized from his heyday in the 1980s. But after the likes of Brendan Sullivan, Ted Olson, and Abbe Lowell all said no, he was left with his longtime New York attorney Marc Kasowitz, a combative lawyer who had seen Trump through divorces and bankruptcies but was unschooled in the ways of Washington. Trump had to quickly shift course when Kasowitz responded to a critic calling on him to resign with a profanity-laden string of late-night emails: “You are fucking with me now. Let’s see who you are. Watch your back, bitch,” adding, “I already know where you live.”[4] Trump then settled on a couple of longtime Washington attorneys well past their professional prime. Ty Cobb, a former prosecutor whose handlebar mustache, beard, and bow tie gave him the appearance of an amiable grandfather, joined the White House staff as special counsel; John Dowd, a gravelly-voiced retired Marine with a short temper, represented Trump from the outside along with Jay Sekulow, one of the legal leaders of the Christian conservative movement.
Like others, they quickly discovered the ongoing tribal warfare within Trump’s White House. Cobb later told people that his first three meetings at the White House were all about enlisting him in what he called the “We Hate Jared and Ivanka Club.” Trying to duck that, Cobb spent two weeks studying the case before concluding that Trump really was not guilty of anything and so advised him to cooperate fully with investigators, including providing documents and allowing testimony by advisers without asserting privileges. In exchange, Trump’s new lawyers told him, the inquiry would be over by Thanksgiving. When that did not happen, they told him it would surely be wrapped up by Christmas, and when that did not happen, the spring, and so on. Cobb’s theory was that if investigators could get all the evidence they needed from other sources, they would have a harder time demonstrating to a court that they needed to force the president to testify. But that strategy flabbergasted Don McGahn, the White House counsel who thought it was crazy to so readily abandon Trump’s claims to executive and attorney-client privileges. Cobb, for his part, thought McGahn was jealous of turf and trying to get rid of him from the day he arrived in the White House.
The friction spilled into public view when Cobb and Dowd made the curious choice one day to have lunch outdoors at BLT Steak, which happened to be next door to the New York Times’s Washington bureau. Predictably enough, Ken Vogel, a Times reporter, was sitting at the next table as the two attorneys groused about the internal dispute. Cobb could be heard talking about an unnamed White House lawyer he deemed “a McGahn spy” and complaining that McGahn had “a couple documents locked in a safe” outside his access. He blamed a colleague for “some of these earlier leaks” and for trying “to push Jared out.”[5] When the newspaper printed a story on the overheard conversation, McGahn blew up at Cobb while John Kelly, still White House chief of staff at the time, reprimanded him for indiscretion.
Trump, impatient and fuming, would put up with only so much of this. He was still looking for his Roy Cohn.
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For investigators trying to unlock the secrets of Trump’s aberrant relationship with Russia, Paul Manafort seemed like an obvious target. With broad shoulders, a helmet of hair dyed jet black, and a taste for extravagantly expensive clothes, Manafort had once been a respected operative for Republicans like Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dole. But over time he drifted away from American campaigns, drawn by the lure of huge payoffs and rules-free politics in the frontier of the former Soviet Union.
By the time he showed up on Trump’s doorstep offering to work for free as a convention strategist and later campaign manager, Manafort was generally shunned in Washington as an overseas political profiteer with shadowy ties to Russia and Ukraine. He had worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire aluminum magnate who was close to Vladimir Putin and had been banned from the United States, and he helped the Moscow-aligned Party of Regions take back power in Ukraine after the 2004 Orange Revolution, when peaceful protesters successfully blocked the party from stealing an election won by the opposition. Over the following years, Manafort transformed Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s favorite, from a thuggish party leader into a more polished figure with a better wardrobe, hairstyle, and elocution who captured the Ukrainian presidency in a 2010 election. Later, as Yanukovych jailed his leading opponent and presided over a corrupt state, Manafort helped whitewash his reputation. “Manafort was said to be running a shadow government in Ukraine, operating out of a luxury suite at a top hotel, as well as offices in downtown Kiev,” Andrew Weissmann wrote later.[6]
Yanukovych was ultimately ousted in Ukraine’s 2014 pro-Western revolution and fled to Russia after his forces opened fire and killed more than a hundred protesters. But not before Manafort had pocketed millions of dollars using offshore accounts. Manafort’s daughter suggested in text messages that were hacked that her father had culpability in the deaths of the demonstrators. “That money we have is blood money,” she wrote to her sister.[7] Yanukovych’s fall led Putin to invade and annex Crimea and sponsor a pro-Russia separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine.
Trump either did not know that or did not care. What he knew was that Manafort was a name brand from the 1980s, Trump’s perennial frame of reference, and that he was willing to work without pay.
Manafort was no philanthropist; deep in debt, he figured out how to cash in on his work for Trump through what investigators eventually determined was a kickback scheme from a Trump-supporting PAC. More important, Manafort seemed intent on parlaying his high-visibility role in Trump’s campaign to revive his business with Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian figures. “I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort wrote Konstantin Kilimnik, who helped run his operations in Ukraine for a decade, in an email a couple weeks after joining the campaign. “Absolutely,” Kilimnik replied from Kyiv. “Every article.”[8]
