Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  “This all goes back to the same thing,” Don Trump Jr. told me. “They just keep wanting to redo the 2016 election. As it relates to Mueller? In the end, they were able to do the damage that they wanted to do. They were able to hold that over my father’s head in midterms.

  “Even so, basically, he had one of the most successful midterms in recent history. You know, we basically lost some in the House and picked up some in the Senate. Obama’s midterms were catastrophic by comparison.

  “We were able to have that kind of result, despite having this cloud overhead when you knew all along that there was no collusion. They were able to keep that going. With no evidence. Ridiculous assertions. It was very effective in doing, at least, part of what they wanted to do. They could keep the investigation going for many months more than they needed. It was bullshit from moment one.

  “Afterward, all of a sudden, Muller went from being the Democratic savior, the media savior, he was the messiah, he was going to be the guy, to a great disappointment. It went from collusion to obstruction, and now what do they call it again? A cover-up. It’s really bullshit. It’s all bullshit.

  “When do you think that Mueller knew there was no collusion?” Don Jr. asked. “In the first four days, maybe?’

  The Democrats and the national media put on a brave face. There had been earlier indictments; they could still point to that. Dozens of Russians had been indicted for election tampering, but these were largely symbolic charges. They had nothing to do with Trump. There had been a long list of the same kind of culprits when the Chinese had tried to pour money into the Clinton reelection campaign of 1996. Russia, China, and the United States do not have extradition treaties. The Russians were unlikely to face American justice. There was the galling fact that their illegal acts had taken place when Barack Obama was president.

  Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was also indicted and convicted on charges relating to his business dealing in Ukraine. But those were activities that happened twelve years before the campaign. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pled guilty on charges related to non-Trump businesses in New York City and Trump campaign violations having nothing to do with Russia. The political consultant Roger Stone was indicted on obstruction and witness tampering charges. None of the Stone charges were for crimes committed during the campaign.

  Part two of the Mueller report declined to reach a legal conclusion on obstruction of justice. Attorney General William Barr and Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had oversight of the Mueller Investigation, wrote that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”52

  WHEN TRUMP GOT THE NEWS

  Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was actually with the president and first lady when the Mueller Report came down. I wanted to get his inside take on what happened and how they reacted.

  “There were several different days,” the chief of staff said. “The first day was when the summary report came out. I think that was on a Friday. Of course, we could not see it. Then Attorney General Barr put out his own summary on a Sunday.”

  That was the big one. William Barr’s summary was made public. It was March 24, 2019. Reports said that the president and his staff were at Mar-a-Lago. That morning he had played golf with his chief of staff and others.

  “For that trip I remember specifically asking that Pat Cipollone and Emmet Flood be with us. These were our two lead lawyers. Cipollone was White House counsel and Flood had been taken on to help specifically with the Mueller report.

  The William Barr summary was relayed down to them at 3:50 p.m.

  “I remember standing there, along with Cipollone and Emmet, going over the four-page memo, line by line, with the president. We were able to digest that. Then we actually went back into the president’s suite, with the first lady. We were discussing the memo ourselves while we watched television and heard others commenting on the memo, all of this was happening in real time.”

  “What was the president’s reaction?” I asked.

  “Obviously, very positive, very positive.”

  “Did he smile or laugh?”

  “Well, I remember we went through it line by line and there were two parts that drew his attention, one of which was the language that said the decisions in the report were made without regard to the special consideration for the president.

  “There is a policy over at DOJ that says, constitutionally, you might not be able to indict a sitting president. So what that language told us was that this policy was not a factor. They were not withholding indictments because of this consideration. They were withholding indictments because they were not warranted. That was a huge win for the president.

  “Obviously, the findings in the first half about, you know, where it says there is no evidence, at all, of collusion, I can’t remember the exact language, or perhaps it said, ‘not a single piece of evidence for a single instance of collusion,’ those were the highlights that caught the president’s attention.”

  Stunned by the summary released by Attorney General William Barr, the media and the Democrats took a day off before regrouping and saying that the actual, full report would be damning. Just wait. The attorney general had mischaracterized the details.

  White House chief of staff Mulvaney’s team could take nothing for granted. “The final time was right here, in this office,” Mulvaney said. “We knew that the full report was coming out that day and so we had set up a war room. As soon as it came out, we broke it up into pieces. We had about ten people, and everybody was going to read forty pages. So we assigned everybody different forty-page sections. We were trying to learn as quickly as we could what was actually in the report both times.

  “I was extraordinarily proud of the work that the communications department, the press department did at that time. Of course it was Sarah Sanders, but not just her. It was the entire team.

  The day that the Barr summary came out and the day the Mueller report actually came out, itself, we had six or seven scenarios gamed out. If it says this, then this is where we’ll go with our response. If it says that, then we’ll go here instead.

  “In both cases, I remember, we had sorted out a range of scenarios with the very best possible outcome to the very worst possible outcome. So, there was the whole spectrum of scenarios. As it turned out, we were able to use our very best possible outcome on both days. So I was very pleased with the advance work that the communications and press shops had done. Because we were ready very, very quickly. I thought we were very right on message. Of course, we had great stuff to work with because the report was so favorable to the president.”

  THE “KEEP IT GREAT” RALLY IN ORLANDO

  Despite the warm summer weather in Orlando, Florida, people had started lining up for the Trump rally days in advance. Twenty thousand excited supporters waited, many dressed in iconic Trump campaign red. Across the crowd one could spot various versions of the “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The basketball arena where the Orlando Magic play was packed to maximum capacity.

  Thousands more, who were not able to gain entrance, watched on huge projection screens outside. They were eagerly anticipating the official launch of the president’s reelection campaign. It was Tuesday, June 18, 2019. Just a few short months after the release of the Mueller report.

  After a warm-up speech by Vice President Pence, the president and first lady entered the arena to the sounds of wild cheering and Lee Greenwood’s patriotic anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.” Melania, dressed in a bright yellow pantsuit with flowing sleeves, introduced her husband to the crowd. Just a few minutes into his speech, the president summarized, from his view, what happened with the Mueller investigation:

  “We went through the greatest witch hunt in political history. The only collusion was committed by the Democrats, the fake news media, and their operatives, and the people who funded the phony dossier: Crooked Hillary a
nd the DNC.

  “It was all an illegal attempt to overturn the results of the election, spy on our campaign, which is what they did, and subvert our democracy. Remember the insurance policy just in case Hillary lost? Remember the insurance policy.

  “They appointed eighteen very angry Democrats to try and take down our incredible movement. After two years, 1.4 million pages of documents, five hundred search warrants, five hundred witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas, and forty FBI agents working around the clock, what did they come up with?” he asked the crowd.

  He answered for them, “No collusion, and the facts that led our great attorney general to determine no obstruction. No collusion, no obstruction. And they spent forty million dollars on this witch hunt; forty million dollars.”53

  There would be no “bombshell” on Russia collusion. There would be no treason. There would be no walls closing in. There would be no resignation from office. No slaying of the dragon.

  Instead, there would be a reelection campaign.

  The motto this time: Keep America Great.

  NOTES

  1. https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/sol-wachtler-the-judge-who-coined-indict-a-ham-sandwich-was-himself-indicted.html

  2. https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2018/05/09/show-me-the-man-and-ill-show-you-the-crime/

  3. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/06/06/lawrence_odonnell_trump_made_decision_to_destroy_his_presidency_by_not_blocking_comey_testimony.html

  4. https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/07/30/rs-douglas-brinkley-trump-is-unfit-for-command.cnn

  5. Fox News, May 2017.

  6. https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/07/politics/norman-eisen-james-comey-richard-nixon-tapes-cnntv/index.html

  7. CNN, August 2017.

  8. MNSBC, August 2017.

  9. Harriet Agerholm, UK Independent, February 17, 2017.

  10. Stephanie Lindquist, Chicago Tribune, July 19, 2018.

  11. James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).

  12. Comey, Higher Loyalty, 203.

  13. Comey, Higher Loyalty, 210.

  14. Comey, Higher Loyalt, 234.

  15. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/head-of-pentagon-intelligence-agency-forced-out-officials-say/2014/04/30/ec15a366-d09d-11e3-9e25-188ebe1fa93b_story.html

  16. James Kitfield, “How Mike Flynn Became America’s Angriest General,” Politico, October 16, 2016.

  17. https://www.npr.org/2015/04/15/399853577/former-fbi-agent-speaks-out-i-was-not-protected. Carrie Johnson and Evie Stone, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 15, 2015.

  18. Greg Jarrett, The Russia Hoax (New York: Broadside Books 2018).

  19. Comey, Higher Loyalty.

  20. https://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/06/just-went-to-southern-virginia-walmart.html

  21. Jarrett, Russia Hoax.

  22. Comey, Higher Loyalty.

  23. Jarrett, Russia Hoax.

  24. Comey, Higher Loyalty.

  25. https://news.yahoo.com/trump-time-will-tell-happens-sessions-201937363.html

  26. Garrett Graff, “Robert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team,” Wired, June 14, 2017.

  27. Michelle Mark, “Meet the All-Star Team of Lawyers Robert Mueller Has Working on Trump-Russia Investigation,” Business Insider, May 17, 2018

  28. Mark, “All-Star Team.”

  29. Sidney Brown, Licensed to Lie (Dallas: Brown Books Publishing Group, 2014).

  30. https://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-andrew-weissman-mueller-trump-clinton-russia-investigation-fbi-2017-12

  31. Glenn Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures on the Trump=Russia Story,” The Intercept, January 20, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story.

  32. Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed.”

  33. Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed.”

  34. Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed.”

  35. Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed.”

  36. Greenwald, “Beyond Buzzfeed.”

  37. https://boingboing.net/2018/12/10/robert-mueller-devotional-cand.html

  38. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2018/12/02/snl-chicks-sing-twisted-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-mueller-or-a-coup-yet-were-going-to-ban-baby-its-cold-outside-698841

  39. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/mar/25/what-democrats-said-about-trump-collusion-mueller-/

  40. http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1901/10/nday.06.html

  41. http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/all-in/2018-10-17

  42. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxRPwhdb5z0&t=5102

  43. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-will-be-indicted-mueller-former-prosecutor-says-and-will-help-1315865

  44. https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/436750-davis-says-evidence-shows-trump-jr-could-be-indicted

  45. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/9/donald-trump-jr-expects-to-be-indicted-claims-repo/

  46. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/9/donald-trump-jr-expects-to-be-indicted-claims-repo/

  47. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/9/donald-trump-jr-expects-to-be-indicted-claims-repo/

  48. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/31/muellers-investigation-cost-16-7-million-in-just-under-a-year-new-documents-show/

  49. Executive summary, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, US Department of Justice, Washington, DC, March 2019.

  50. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/trump-robert-mueller.html

  51. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2019/03/22/kaboom-cnn-admits-no-further-mueller-indictments-huge-victory

  52. “Read Attorney General William Barr’s Summary of the Mueller Report,” New York Times Interactive, March 24, 2019

  53. C-Span 2, “Road to the White House,” June 18, 2019

  19

  GOD AND THE SUPREME COURT

  “Paula, you’re praying!”

  —DONALD TRUMP TELLING HIS FRIEND WHAT HE WANTED HER TO DO ON INAUGURATION DAY

  It has been said that Donald Trump’s legacy will be “conservative judges who will dominate US law for decades.”1 His reshaping of the Supreme Court was not as easy as it looked. Thirty-seven times in American history a Supreme Court nominee had been unsuccessful. Eleven times the nominees had been withdrawn by the president himself, sometimes after great public pressure. Even George Washington had withdrawn a name. Another of Washington’s nominees had been rejected by the Senate. Indeed, Donald Trump would be severely pressured to withdraw both of his nominees, not only by his political opposition and the national media but by some within his own political party. He never wavered.

  Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump’s appointment of federal judges operated like a factory assembly line. He was reshaping the American judiciary. By January 2019, “Trump had appointed 30 circuit court judges, a rate unparalleled by his recent predecessors.”2

  One report claimed that “Trump had already appointed more judges in his first two years than the five previous presidents at the same point in their presidencies.”3

  Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court during Trump’s first month in office. His confirmation hearing was an unsettling, bruising business, but nothing compared with the fight that was to come. Gorsuch was finally sworn in as a justice on April 10, 2017.

  The Democrats, consistently unable to win statewide referendums for their cultural agenda, even in the most liberal of states, had turned more and more to a combination of the courts and the national media to promote their issues. In a tradition that hailed back to Dwight Eisenhower and continued during the Reagan-Bush years, they had relied on an occasional gift of a more moderate-to-liberal judge nominated to the Supreme Court from a Republican president. Thus, Democrats nominated liberal justices. Republicans nominated conservative justices but also a few liberals of their own.
In recent years, Reagan had given them Justice Anthony Kennedy, a so-called swing vote. George H. W. Bush had given them Justice David Souter, who was soon considered by the modern, neoconservative movement to be a liberal.4

  On July 9, 2018, after the resignation of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump announced Brett Kavanaugh as his second nominee. Kavanaugh was a Catholic and a Yale Law School graduate who had already been confirmed by the Senate to serve on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But Brett Kavanaugh was another conservative. There would be fireworks.

  The national media and the Democratic Party reacted with horror. A Republican president had appointed two Supreme Court nominees and they had both been conservatives.

  “What’s the big deal?” Trump asked me in one of our interviews. Democrats nominate liberal justices; Republicans were elected to nominate conservative justices. “That’s why people voted for me.”

  On the very day that Kavanaugh’s nomination was to be decided by the Senate Judiciary Committee and sent to the floor of the Senate, Democratic ranking member Dianne Feinstein of California interrupted the process by introducing allegations against the nominee. Feinstein had been sitting on the story for months. According to a summary of the allegations, “36 years ago, as a 17-year-old high school student, he groped and tried to force himself on a 15-year-old girl at an underage beer party.”5 Kavanaugh vehemently denied the story.

  The unfolding drama escalated into a circus. Michael Avenatti, the attorney for a porn star who went by the name Stormy Daniels, now represented new clients who came forward to make their accusations against Kavanaugh. Avenatti was being encouraged by journalists to run for president himself, so they gave his allegations some credence at the time. The story was that Brett Kavanaugh, during his high school years, did “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang-raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of boys.”6