The Divider, page 50
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Bolton’s time in Crazytown, at least, soon came to an end. On September 10, he finally resigned after a series of disagreements with Trump, including over the president’s insistence on hosting representatives of the Taliban at Camp David on the anniversary of September 11, when he hoped to announce his Afghan peace deal—an idea that “mortified” Joe Dunford, the outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman, and plenty of others.
The acrimonious parting played out, fittingly, on Twitter, where Trump and Bolton argued over whether he had quit or been fired. Trump was first to tweet the news of Bolton’s exit that morning, claiming that he had “informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed,” and adding, “I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions.” But Bolton had anticipated this and, as proof that he had quit, had printed out copies of his resignation letter even before giving it to the president and had them placed on the desks of senior White House staff so that Trump could not lie and say he had been fired. He also authorized an aide to call reporters immediately after his departure to make clear who had called the relationship off.
Soon after the story broke, Bolton’s rivals Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin showed up at a White House news conference that Bolton had been scheduled to attend. Both grinned broadly as they gloated over Bolton’s departure. The president “should have people that he trusts and values and whose efforts and judgments benefit him in delivering American foreign policy,” Pompeo said pointedly. Asked if he had been blindsided by Bolton’s exit, Pompeo replied, “I’m never surprised.” When the two cabinet secretaries, still beaming, left the room, one of the reporters summed up the day’s events, in a remark caught on the networks’ still-rolling tape: “God almighty. That’s a shit show.”[38]
A week later, Trump selected the State Department’s little-known hostage negotiator, a California lawyer named Robert O’Brien, to be his fourth national security adviser, the most any president had ever had in a single term. O’Brien had less relevant experience than perhaps anyone who had held the post. O’Brien’s only foreign policy work included a short assignment on Bolton’s staff at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, appointments to two obscure government commissions, and stints as an unpaid adviser to several Republican presidential campaigns, including Trump’s rivals Scott Walker and Ted Cruz in 2016. He had never worked in the White House or at the National Security Council, and had little firsthand knowledge of the complex interagency process that managed America’s massive national security bureaucracy and none at all leading it. He was a perfect fit, in other words, for a president who not only devalued expertise but had come to see it as a threat to his ability to do as he wished. “We got a compliant individual,” a senior national security official said at the time. “That’s what the president wanted.”
O’Brien had sealed his unlikely ascendance in August, during yet another improbable international incident generated by Trump, this one involving a jailed American rapper named A$AP Rocky. The president, apparently responding to a social media campaign on Rocky’s behalf by Kim Kardashian and other celebrities, not only called the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, urging the rapper’s release but also demanded that O’Brien fly there to attend his trial, although Rocky, who was accused of criminal assault after a street brawl, was hardly a political prisoner or hostage. At Trump’s behest, O’Brien even wrote a threatening letter to the Swedish authorities, warning of “potentially negative consequences” to the Swedish-American relationship, which earned him a rebuke from Sweden’s prosecutor general, who defended the independence of Sweden’s judiciary.[39] Rocky was released but ultimately convicted and fined $1,300, not exactly the normal concern of heads of state. Nonetheless, O’Brien told reporters, “The president sent me here, so it’s totally appropriate.”[40]
After two years of feuding with H. R. McMaster and John Bolton over their failed efforts to rein him in, this attitude was just what Trump was looking for in a national security adviser. Speaking to the media on Air Force One a day before he announced his choice, Trump revealed that O’Brien was one of five finalists, then quoted O’Brien as having told him, “Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States.”
“He happens to be right,” Trump immodestly added.[41]
The next morning, O’Brien got the job.
CHAPTER 19
Fucking Ukraine
Shortly after 9 p.m. one night that September, Lindsey Graham emerged from The Palm, a legendary see-and-be-seen steakhouse in downtown Washington whose walls were festooned with caricatures of its famous political clientele. He had just gotten off the telephone with Trump, who had interrupted his dinner to seek Graham’s advice on the biggest threat yet to his presidency.
Less than forty-eight hours earlier, Nancy Pelosi had launched the full-scale impeachment investigation that Trump had avoided for two and a half years. The move was triggered not by Robert Mueller’s report on Russia, but by revelations about Trump’s secret pressure campaign on Ukraine’s new president to investigate Joe Biden even as Trump was holding up the $391 million in congressional-approved security assistance for Ukraine. John Bolton had kept his qualms about Trump’s machinations with Ukraine to himself but the Rudy Giuliani grenade that he warned about had finally blown up in public. Just that morning, congressional investigators had released an explosive CIA whistleblower complaint with more startling information that the Trump administration had been withholding from Congress for weeks.
Yet Graham affected a sort of devil-may-care nonchalance when he stopped to talk outside the steakhouse. He boasted about his access to the president and dropped insider details like the phone call Trump told him he had received earlier in the day from six evangelical pastors promising to pray for him. (“Those fucking Christians love me,” the president had crowed.) The president’s friend seemed oddly sanguine, even giddy, about this new fight that now promised to consume Trump’s administration.
The senator had already come out publicly and said it would be “insane” to impeach the president because of the Ukraine matter. But on the sidewalk that evening he wanted two Washington reporters who had known him for more than two decades to understand that he was no mere toady. “He’s a lying motherfucker,” Graham said of Trump with a what-can-you-do shrug, but also “a lot of fun to hang out with.” Still, Graham made no apologies. Like other Senate Republicans who would ultimately have to decide Trump’s fate in any trial that resulted from this impeachment mess, Graham had followed Trump through innumerable outrages by this point. They could and would justify just about anything when it came to Trump. “He could kill fifty people on our side, and it wouldn’t matter,” Graham said. Their reasoning was simple: he was the president from their party.
Graham’s advice to Trump was simple too, born out of his experience as one of the House managers who unsuccessfully prosecuted Bill Clinton during the last impeachment trial. Trump, he counseled, should follow Clinton’s winning playbook: deny, delay, and attack. “You know what to do,” Graham told him. He seemed confident it would work.
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For months, Democrats had been fighting among themselves over what to do about Trump. They had taken back power in the House and vowed to investigate a full array of presidential abuses only to find themselves subject to the most successful information blockade ever waged by one branch of government against another. Whether it was subpoenas for documents or testimony or Trump’s still hidden tax returns, the Trump White House and its new counsel, Pat Cipollone, had decided on a strategy of total confrontation with the Democratic House. As far as Trump and his allies were concerned, Mueller’s report had put an end to the debilitating Russia scandal that had overshadowed so much of Trump’s presidency. Impeachment seemed dead. It was time to move on.
But in truth, neither Trump nor his Democratic opponents were prepared to do so. Trump, consumed by grievance, wanted not only vindication but vengeance, pinning his hopes on an inquiry ordered by Bill Barr to be conducted by the prosecutor John Durham into whether the FBI had acted improperly in undertaking its investigation of Trump’s Russia ties in the first place. Democrats, for their part, heatedly debated how to respond to the extensive evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice that Mueller had set out in the report. Over the summer, an increasing number of House Democrats argued for impeachment, including, privately, Representative Jerry Nadler, the New York Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. By early September, about one hundred House Democrats supported impeachment. Nadler’s team, led by Norman Eisen, a former Obama White House ethics lawyer brought in as counsel by the House Judiciary Committee, privately drafted ten articles of impeachment covering everything from the Mueller obstruction and the dangling of pardons to silence witnesses, to the Stormy Daniels hush money and the usurpation of congressional spending power; the tenth draft article was a placeholder titled “The Next High Crime” on the assumption that there would be one.[1]
But impeachment faced an immovable obstacle in the form of Pelosi, who had categorically ruled it out unless there was a bipartisan consensus. In March, even before the Mueller report was submitted, she had said: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”[2] The Nancy Pelosi of March did not find her criteria met in September. There was no bipartisan consensus about Trump’s latest outrage. But as the details came spilling out about Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine and apparent misuse of urgently needed military aid to fight off Russia as leverage for his own personal political purposes, they had their Next High Crime. Pelosi anticipated where her caucus was going, and, typically, got there first.
The exact moment that Trump’s impeachment began was arguably on Saturday morning, September 21, when Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, pulled into an empty parking lot on the way home from Los Angeles International Airport to take a call from Pelosi.
“Are you ready to do this?” she had asked.
“I am,” he replied.
Schiff was set to go on the Sunday shows the next day and would strongly preview which way the speaker was headed, suggesting the party might finally be ready to “cross the Rubicon” and begin formal proceedings against Trump.
“All right,” Pelosi replied. “Good.”[3]
The politics still did not look great, but by the next evening momentum for an investigation had the backing even of reluctant moderates who won election in 2018 in previously Republican districts, the “majority-makers,” as Democrats called them, or in the case of five women who had served in national security or intelligence posts before entering politics, the Bad-Ass Caucus. They sought out Schiff and Pelosi directly and, after the speaker gave permission for the public stampede to begin, published an op-ed in The Washington Post on September 23 declaring that Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand.”[4]
The new conventional wisdom that had rapidly replaced the old conventional wisdom was that Trump’s Ukraine “quid pro quo” of military aid in exchange for investigations was a slam dunk—a straightforward abuse of power that was so brazen that it would be irresponsible not to respond. The fact that Trump had hijacked security assistance to a country at war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia—military aid that was supported by the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the otherwise divided capital—made it seem all the more pressing. “He forced us into it,” Pelosi would say when her about-face was questioned. “He gave us no choice.”
Pelosi gave Trump a heads-up in a brief phone call the next day.
“How can you do that to me?” Trump insisted. “I have to speak at the General Assembly of the United Nations today.”
Pelosi’s reply could be more or less summed up as: So what? “Perhaps he mistook me for somebody who gave a damn about his schedule,” she would say later.
By 5 p.m., Pelosi publicly announced that the House would officially begin impeachment proceedings. Nodding to the complicated internal politics, she assigned Schiff’s Intelligence Committee to lead the investigation and Nadler’s Judiciary Committee to handle any resulting articles of impeachment. The idea was to get it done quickly, by the end of the year, to avoid acting in an election year. “The president must be held accountable,” Pelosi said in announcing her decision. “No one is above the law.”[5]
As the drumbeat for his impeachment built on Capitol Hill, Trump broke off official meetings in New York and ordered his motorcade to make an unscheduled stop at Trump Tower. Soon after, he sent out a quick blast of tweets attacking the “breaking news Witch Hunt garbage.” He added: “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” And also: “Can you believe this?”
The president, however, had one play left. The next morning, he released the full White House account of a July 25 phone call he had with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a call that was at the center of the CIA whistleblower’s complaint. Despite strong pushback from Mike Pompeo and press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Trump had become convinced it was a masterstroke that would undercut the impeachment inquiry before it even started. On Fox News, reporter Ed Henry quoted a Trump source who warned Democrats: “There’s no ‘there’ there.”[6] Trump himself got into the pre-spin game. “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President?” he tweeted at 9:17 a.m. that Wednesday. “They should, a perfect call—got them by surprise!”
Then, at 10 a.m., the White House released its call summary. It did not say what Trump had suggested it would say. Not at all. Usually in American politics, the goal in the expectations game is to tamp them down; in this case, Trump had succeeded at the opposite, promoting the notion that his phone call with Zelensky would prove innocuous. Instead, he added new information to the scandal. Trump on the call had not only requested an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma, but had specifically asked Zelensky to cooperate with Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr on it. He also wanted Zelensky to look into the preposterous Russian-originated myth that the previous government of Ukraine, not Moscow, was responsible for the 2016 hacking of Democrats’ emails.
The president’s language was hardly subtle. Trump mentioned the attorney general four times. “The United States has been very, very good to Ukraine,” Trump said before quickly adding, “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily.” After Zelensky responded by requesting approval to buy more American antitank Javelin missiles to aid Ukraine’s defense against Russia, Trump replied by explaining the reciprocity he really wanted: the investigations.
“I would like you to do us a favor, though,” the president said in a line that immediately seemed destined to land in the history books.[7]
Reading the transcript in the secure basement office of the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff was amazed. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he muttered out loud to his staff. “I can’t believe they would release this.”[8] It was not the exculpatory moment that Trump had claimed it would be. Impeachment may have been an uncertain outcome before the call’s release. Afterward, it was a near-certainty.
For months, bits and pieces of the scandal had been hiding in plain sight. Rudy Giuliani had long promoted the conspiracy theory generated by Russian intelligence agencies suggesting that Ukraine was the actual source of the hacking in the 2016 election. Trump began publicly floating this as far back as the spring of 2017 when he insisted that Democrats had put their email server in the hands of a “very rich Ukrainian” and it had then been attacked. He alluded to it again at the infamous Helsinki news conference with Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2018.
By the spring of 2019, the campaign led by Giuliani was targeting Biden and his son Hunter as well. As vice president, Biden had pushed Ukraine’s leadership to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in keeping with the policy taken by the United States, the European Union, and international organizations that all considered him an obstacle to reform. But Giuliani and his allies now claimed that Biden pushed for the prosecutor’s ouster in order to shut down an investigation of the energy firm on whose board Hunter sat, even though Shokin was actually described as hindering that inquiry.
Behind the scenes, Trump advisers, cabinet members, and professional Russia-watchers had known for months that there was a Ukraine problem. Some, like John Bolton, had struggled to stop it. Others, like Mick Mulvaney, had abetted it. Many, like the National Security Council aides Fiona Hill and her deputy, Alexander Vindman, knew at least some of the details.
By the time of the soon-to-be-famous telephone call between Trump and Zelensky on July 25, Hill had left her job in the White House but Vindman, listening in, reported the call to the lawyers. “If what I just heard becomes public,” he told his twin brother, Eugene, who happened to be the senior ethics lawyer for the National Security Council, “the president will be impeached.”[9] That same day, the Office of Management and Budget had put out a formal notice of the Ukraine aid suspension, meaning that even more officials in the vast national security bureaucracy were made aware of the hold, although it included a warning from the Trump political appointee overseeing the process, Michael Duffey, to limit knowledge of the aid freeze to a “need to know” basis.[10] But a CIA official who heard about it connected many of the dots and wrote them up in the whistleblower complaint filed on August 12.
