by Doug Wead
On Thursday, January 5, 2017, after an Oval Office intelligence briefing to President Obama, Director Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Vice President Biden, and President Obama had a “brief follow-on conversation.” Susan Rice wrote an email to herself to document the conversation:
“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
“From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”18
A long section of the email follows with redactions, presumably for security reasons. Then Rice finishes the email:
“The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”19
Rice wrote this email to herself on January 20, 2017. Fifteen minutes after the inauguration ceremony for Donald Trump had begun.
The day after the Oval Office “follow-up conversation,” Director Comey arrived in New York to visit with the president-elect at his office in Trump Tower. This was where transition business was being conducted. Comey was there for the scheduled regular intelligence briefing for the incoming president.
It was Friday, January 6, 2017. A two-page summary of the Steele dossier was presented to president-elect Trump. It was also provided that day to the so-called Gang of Eight, the congressional leaders of both parties, who are briefed on sensitive intelligence and national security matters.
Until that time no news organizations had published the Steele dossier’s allegations. No one deemed them credible enough to run. There is an old maxim in media relations that if you have bad news you put it out on Friday—that way the story has time to die over the weekend. If you have good news, you put it out on Tuesday, so the story has time to be picked up and repeated many times during the rest of the week.
Four days later, on Tuesday, CNN was reporting that the presidentelect had been briefed on a summary of the dossier’s information. Their story came from “multiple US officials with knowledge of the briefings.” The CNN byline was by four of their top reporters, including Carl Bernstein, who had helped break the Watergate scandal and had coauthored All the President’s Men. Information in the dossier was not deemed newsworthy before, but intelligence officials briefing an incoming president on the same information would pass the test.20 Soon after, Buzzfeed published all thirty-five pages of the Steele dossier. News outlets picked up the intelligence briefing story and included links to the Buzzfeed story.21
Where did Buzzfeed get its copy?
Apparently it got its copy from David Kramer, Senator McCain’s transatlantic traveling associate. This was revealed in a libel suit filed in a British court by Russian companies that had been mentioned in the dossier. In that case, under oath, Christopher Steele admitted that the allegations in the dossier were “unverified.”22
DONALD TRUMP CALLS IT TREASON
So it was that the national media, stung by the embarrassment of the 2016 election, now began promoting the idea that the Russians had “colluded” with Donald Trump to win an unlikely election. They had done it, the media alleged, so they could blackmail the new president into doing what they wanted. Soon Democrats and their media allies began promoting the idea that Donald Trump was a Russian spy.
Once in office, Trump had immediately ordered the modernization of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. He had increased military expenditures. He had increased sanctions against Russia. He had taken a strong stand against Syria and Iran, Russian-supported states. He had forced NATO nations to increase their military commitments. He had campaigned against Nord Stream 2 and Germany’s reliance on a gas pipeline from Russia. It was pretty hard to understand how or why the Russians would want their spy to take such actions.23
It didn’t matter. In May 2017, a special counsel investigation into Russian collusion began. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller was tasked to lead the probe.
In my conversations with the president, he readily conceded that the attacks from hostile media had preoccupied him and harmed his presidency. “Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn’t get anything done. No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something up.
“The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you know? What is that all about?”
He turned to Sarah Sanders, his press secretary. “Sarah, they were spying.”
Then he turned back to me. “I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying!”
And then, in case I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, he added just who it was who he thought was doing the spying.
“Obama,” the president said.
He let that sink in for a moment before continuing. “Think about that for a minute,” the president said. “They were spying. Remember? Two years ago. I mentioned this thing about Trump Tower? I put out this thing?”
In March 2017, he had claimed in a tweet that he had been wiretapped at Trump Tower. The national media had mocked him. This was absurd, they said, although in 1993, the new first lady, Hillary Clinton, had claimed something similar. She and Bill Clinton had moved into the White House. At the time, Hillary suspected that their predecessor, President George H. W. Bush, who had once been director of the CIA, was having them bugged. Hillary didn’t trust the Secret Service, which she feared was loyal to the former president, so she called for the FBI to do a sweep. When they failed to find anything, she tasked the Secret Service and even later the CIA to search for eavesdropping devices. When nothing was found, she set up her own internal White House personnel security office, staffed by two workers from the political campaign.
“It turned out I was right. By the way,” Trump said. “In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said, ‘Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.’ Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?
“What they did was treasonous, Okay? It was treasonous.”24
NOTES
1. Interview with President Trump, January 24, 2019.
2. https://www.politicususa.com/2018/07/19/report-may-provide-proof-that-trump-is-a-russian-spy.html
3. Interview with Jared Kushner, 2019.
4. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/14/hillary-clinton-uranium-one-deal-russia-explainer-244895
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-the-clintons-should-be-investigated/2017/11/19/d88bb652-cb15-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html
7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-the-clintons-should-be-investigated/2017/11/19/d88bb652-cb15-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html
8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-the-clintons-should-be-investigated/2017/11/19/d88bb652-cb15-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html
9. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/279359-clinton-is-largest-benefactor-of-facebook-donations
10. Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos, “Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation,” New York Times, May 16, 2018.
11. Frank Miele, “Mueller ‘Strzok Out’ with his Whitewash Report,” Real Clear Politics, Ap
ril 19, 2019.
12. Philip Bump, “What the Strzok-Page ‘Insurance Policy’ E-Mail Was Actually About,” Washington Post, March 14, 2019.
13. https://www.newsweek.com/peter-strzok-trump-smell-hillbillies-1020892
14. John McCain and Mark Salter, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018)
15. McCain and Salter, The Restless Wave.
16. McCain and Salter, The Restless Wave.
17. Tim Haines, “James Baker: Comey and I Worried about Creating Any J. Edgar Hoover Impression with Steele Dossier,” Real Clear Politics, May 16, 2019.
18. Susan Rice, “Susan Rice January 20, 2017 Email to Self,” WikiSource 2018, accessed June 12, 2019, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Susan_Rice_January_20,_2017_E-mail_to_Self.
19. Rice, “Email to Self.”
20. Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein, “Intel Chiefs Present Trump with Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him,” CNN, January 12, 2017.
21. Ken Dilanian, “FBI’s Comey Told Trump about Russia Dossier after Intel Briefing,” NBC News, January 12, 2017.
22. Caitlin Yilek, “Court to Unseal Christopher Steele Deposition,” Washington Examiner, February 28, 2019.
23. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/11/germany-and-russia-gas-links-trump-questions-europe-nord-stream2
24. This conversation took place between the president and the author in 2019.
12
SUNDAY EVENING AT JARED AND IVANKA’S HOUSE
“In politics, we find that people who talk, don’t do, and people who do, don’t talk.”
—JARED KUSHNER1
It was a cold, dark Sunday night in January 2019. The residential streets of this Georgetown neighborhood were so crowded that my wife, Myriam, and I had to park a couple of blocks away and walk to the house. The sidewalks that lined the narrow streets curved and wound up and down hills, making it feel more like San Francisco than suburban Washington.
We were told that former president Barack Obama lived nearby. This meant that the Secret Service had double duty in this neighborhood, with two families to protect. It also explained why there were so many police SUVs lined up, their flashing red lights a jarring interruption to the blackness of the cold night. Police and Secret Service officers were out on the streets, mingling and talking among themselves. We felt like strangers, outsiders, passing through a neighborhood block party.
The Kushners’ three-story house was large, well-lit, and white. There was no front yard, and the house itself was on a slight incline, which made it appear to jut straight up out of the sidewalk. The lower floor and garage were at street level; a two-story staircase led up to the main entrance.
Secret Service agents quizzed us as we approached out of the darkness, their faces appearing and disappearing as the red lights flashed. They asked for our names and then sent us up the stairway to the front door.
Inside, Jared, Ivanka, and their children greeted us warmly. The children appeared happy, confident, outgoing, and polite, needing little encouragement from their parents. “Make sure you shake Mr. Wead’s hand.”
We were ushered into a living room, where two comfortable-looking couches faced each other. Like Ivanka’s office, the room was minimally furnished. There were no exotic artifacts from foreign countries, no zebra skins, no massive family portraits on the walls, and, if there was any artwork, I can’t remember it.
Inside a fireplace at the end of the room, a fire crackled, popped, and hissed throughout the evening. This was the real thing: no cluster of ceramic, fake logs, heated by piped gas.
Jared and Ivanka sat side by side on one of the couches, facing us. Myriam and I sat on the other. There, for the next two hours, we interviewed one of America’s most enigmatic and mysterious couples. Throughout the evening, a young man brought us drinks—we drank only water—and hors d’oeuvres of avocado toast.
POLITICS IS A STRANGE BUSINESS
From the beginning, Ivanka had told me that I needed to sit down with Jared Kushner, her husband. After speaking with him for a few minutes, I could see why. He is scary bright. He often sees things that others miss. The storyline held that, when the president encountered an impossible problem, he passed it to Jared Kushner to see what he could come up with.
Most of the books written about the Trump White House have been driven by colorful stories about political infighting, with Kushner often the target. Having written about numerous presidents and their White House operations, and having served as a senior staff member at the White House, I knew well why Jared Kushner had become the target of bitter vitriol—and why he had survived.
He had survived, of course, because he was the president’s son-in-law and his loyalty was unquestioned. If the president were to fail, so would Jared Kushner.
And he had become a target because it was much easier to blame him for any in-house political defeat than it would have been to blame the president, which would have amounted to political suicide. Thus, an attack on Jared Kushner would be the last stop on the train, the last station before the train would leave the White House altogether. Any attack on Kushner was an attack on Trump.
During this first interview in January 2019 and in the one that followed at the White House that summer, Kushner never said a negative word about anybody else. He appeared to be without guile. Clinical. Taking none of it personally. When we confronted him with salacious stories from books and articles that depended on anonymous sources for their material, he only smiled. At one point, he looked at Ivanka and said, “In politics, we find that people who talk, don’t do, and people who do, don’t talk.”
When we raised some of the criticisms that Chief of Staff John Kelly had leveled against him, he refused to take the bait.
Later in the conversation, he said, “In general, people in politics seem to develop their strategies around their personal ambition and then decide on their objectives. For me, the first step is to define the objective and then develop the strategy.”
Later that night, on our drive home, my wife and I talked about this. Maybe Jared didn’t get the point. For most people in politics and in government, achieving their personal ambitions was the objective. Jared Kushner’s goal may very well be justice reform, or finding common ground in the Middle East, or reworking the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the people he was dealing with wanted power. At one time, they, too, may have cared about policy. It may have even been what initially attracted them to politics. But most had long since concluded that they couldn’t do anything good unless they were to advance.
They cared about policy only to the extent that it helped them destroy the person who worked in the next cubicle or who was higher up the ladder. Some of these rivals, these enemies, were people they had met for the first time only a few months before. A year before, they hadn’t even known they existed. Now they were willing to risk their whole career and cause the nation to suffer just to bring them down. Such were the creatures that evolved from the swamp that Trump had vowed to drain.
This partially explained why Jared and Ivanka were able to get so many things done. They already had power. They also had fame and money. They could pursue policy for its own sake. Meanwhile, loyalty came naturally to them. Betraying the president would not bring them any more wealth or fame or power; it would bring only pain.
Their challenge was to find others who would help them—like-minded people who would focus on similar objectives. Sometimes they would be outsiders to government and politics, and sometimes they would be exceptional persons from inside the government who, for their own complicated reasons, had crawled out of the swamp onto higher ground. Jared and Ivanka needed allies who would fix on the same objectives and help them attain the right results.
Some journalists and activists misunderstood the role that Jared and Ivanka played in the Trump administration. They saw them as ideological advocates, arguing for liberal positions in
side the White House bubble.
In my interviews, I would find that they played a much different role. Yes, they sometimes advocated for a more liberal view on a given issue, but not as a means to dictate policy. Instead, it was to make sure that every side of a question was fully understood. From their New York experience, even their Jewish experience, they often had perspectives that had been missing from other Republican White Houses. But once any issue had been fully vetted, once the president had been given all the facts and made his decision, they were fully on board.
HOW JARED AND IVANKA GOT THEIR WEST WING OFFICES
We started by asking about the 2016 campaign. As discussed in earlier chapters, Jared and Ivanka had played prominent roles.
Then we asked about the Trump administration’s first days in the White House. When had Jared and Ivanka taken their first walk through the West Wing? I imagined that they would have returned to Trump Tower with a map of the White House in hand, discussing who would have which office, where and why.
I asked Jared how he had decided on his office. Is it next to the president’s? Between the Oval Office and the chief of staff’s office? Was there a fight for the territory? Were there big discussions? Did the president insist on that?
“We just took the offices we were given,” Jared said.
That was a surprise. I later learned from an administration official that Reince Preibus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee who became Trump’s first chief of staff, had mapped it all out. It had nothing to do with Jared or Ivanka.
There had been a tweet by the New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman saying that Ivanka’s office had been set aside for her months in advance.2 That seemed unlikely, and if it was true, Ivanka apparently knew nothing about it.
There had also been an incredible account from Vicky Ward’s book Kushner, Inc. I wanted to know if President Trump had, indeed, hired John Kelly as chief of staff and ordered him to “get rid of my kids; get them back to New York.”3