Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  Based on that experience, firing Flynn would not end the investigation. Christie told the president that there was no way to shorten an investigation, but many ways to prolong it, including talking about it.

  Despite that advice, Trump brought up Comey twice, making clear that the FBI director remained a preoccupation. Christie had a friendly relationship with Comey, and Trump asked him to call Comey and say the president “really likes him. Tell him he’s part of the team.” Trump again asked him to make the call toward the end of the lunch.

  The suggestion made Christie uncomfortable. Trump was obviously ignoring his advice to avoid doing anything that might prolong an investigation. Christie decided to ignore the request.

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  JUST A FEW hours after Trump’s lunch with Christie, at 4:00 p.m., Comey was back in the Oval Office with Trump, this time for a homeland security briefing. It was Comey’s first White House meeting with Sessions present. Sizing up the new attorney general, Comey found him both “overwhelmed and overmatched” for his new job. Sessions reminded him of the hapless Gonzales, without Gonzales’s kindness.

  Trump seemed distracted, showed little interest in the discussion, and after about fifteen minutes brought it to an abrupt end with a dismissive “thanks, everybody.” He pointed toward Comey. “I just want to talk to Jim.”

  Sessions and Kushner lingered as the other participants filed out, and Kushner chatted with Comey, mentioning how hard the email investigation must have been.

  “Thanks, Jeff,” Trump said to Sessions, indicating he should leave. Trump turned to his son-in-law. “Okay, Jared, thank you.” Kushner followed Priebus out, leaving Comey, once again, alone with Trump.

  The president wasted no time with pleasantries: “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.”

  Trump repeatedly stressed that Flynn “hadn’t done anything wrong” in talking to Kislyak, apparently latching onto McGahn’s conclusion that the conversation didn’t violate the Logan Act. But Trump said he couldn’t have Flynn going around misleading the vice president (a “good guy”); he had other issues with Flynn (which he didn’t specify); and, in any event, he had a “great guy” to replace him. Spicer, he said, had done a “great job” that morning explaining things.

  “Did you see my tweet this morning?” Trump asked, adding, “It’s really about the leaks.” He patted the gray phone set on his desk. He thought calls on “this beautiful phone” were strictly confidential, but recent conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia had leaked. It “makes us look terrible,” he said. Moreover, he didn’t remember saying the things that got leaked, and “they say I have one of the world’s greatest memories.”

  What Flynn did wasn’t wrong “in any way,” but the leaks were terrible.

  As usual, Comey had trouble getting a word in. Finally Trump stopped talking, and Comey said he, too, was eager to find leakers and would like to “nail one to the door as a message.”

  “We need to go after the reporters,” Trump said. He mentioned the former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent eighty-five days in jail for refusing to identify a source in the Scooter Libby affair before she named Libby as her source. “Ten or fifteen years ago we put them in jail and it worked,” he said.

  Comey said he believed in pursuing leaks aggressively, but going after reporters was “tricky,” both for legal reasons and because the Department of Justice was cautious with members of the media.

  Trump told him to talk to Sessions and see what they could do about that. Priebus opened the door, and Comey glimpsed Pence waiting outside. But Trump waved Pence off, saying he knew people were waiting but he needed a few more minutes.

  Trump got back to the subject with which he’d opened the conversation. Flynn was a “good guy” who’d “been through a lot,” Trump said. Flynn might have misled the vice president, but he didn’t do anything wrong during the call.

  “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

  What could Comey say? The request was blatantly inappropriate. “I agree he is a good guy,” Comey said awkwardly, and stopped. Even that wasn’t really true. But caught off guard, alone with the president, Comey felt he had to say something.

  Trump got up from his desk. As he walked Comey out, he mentioned again that reporters should be jailed. “They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk,” he said.

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  FROM HIS CAR, Comey emailed McCabe, Baker, and his senior leadership team, “Now I have to write another memo.”

  Given the circumstances of their one-on-one meeting—alone, with Priebus and Kushner deliberately excluded so there would be no witnesses—Comey interpreted Trump’s comment to “let this go” as a “directive.” He had no intention of following it.

  Comey also called McCabe to discuss Trump’s request, which McCabe considered an “unqualified contradiction to what the Bureau stood for.” McCabe had found each of Comey’s conversations with Trump stranger and more inappropriate than the last. But he was willing to chalk them up to inexperience and not yet understanding the norms of government. But this was more sinister: an attempt to “manipulate the functions of government mainly for their own interests.”

  The next day, when Comey and McCabe and others at the bureau discussed the options, they decided to say nothing about it to Strzok or other investigators. Nor did there seem any point in briefing Sessions.

  Comey did arrange to stay behind with the attorney general after their weekly threat briefing at the Justice Department. Seated in Sessions’s secure conference room, he conveyed the message that the president wanted to go after leaks more aggressively, as promised. Then he said he never again wanted to be left alone with Trump. “That can’t happen,” Comey said. “You are my boss. You can’t be kicked out of the room so he can talk to me alone.”

  Sessions didn’t speak, but looked down at the table, his eyes darting from side to side.

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  THE FLYNN RESIGNATION—and why it took Trump so long to ask for it—continued to attract news coverage. “Michael Flynn, General Flynn is a wonderful man,” Trump said on February 15, 2017, during an appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media—as I call it, the fake media, in many cases. And I think it’s really a sad thing that he was treated so badly.”

  Trump continued to send messages of support to Flynn, in what Priebus thought an effort to maintain Flynn’s loyalty. He told Priebus to reach out to say the president still cared about him and felt bad about what happened to him. He told Flynn’s deputy, McFarland, to tell him he should stay strong; he told Hicks to say the president wanted to make sure he was okay.

  On February 14, another damaging Russia story ran in the Times: “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”

  Priebus thought the administration was getting “killed” in the press over Russia, so it was welcome news when McCabe stayed behind after an intelligence briefing at the White House that day and said the Times story was “overstated and inaccurate”; it was “total bullshit.”

  “What can we do about it?” Priebus asked. If he could refute the story, he knew he’d be seen as a hero in the West Wing. What if he got McCabe to deny it? The media couldn’t ignore a statement from the deputy director of the FBI, and it would take the Times down a peg or two. But McCabe said he wasn’t sure he could do that. A few hours later, he called to say he couldn’t, because he’d have to discuss classified information.

  “Yo
u just told me it’s inaccurate and now you say you can’t do anything? That’s ridiculous,” Priebus responded. McCabe said he’d ask again, but then he called to say the answer was still no.

  “You’re not being good partners,” Priebus said, which McCabe took to mean both him personally and the FBI as an institution. Comey, too, weighed in, calling Priebus to remind him that he shouldn’t be making such requests to the FBI.

  Trump complained to McGahn that Comey was “acting like his own branch of government.”

  The next day, at a White House press conference, Trump was pummeled with more questions about Flynn and Russia. The president extolled Flynn as a “fine man” and said, “What he did wasn’t wrong, what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That’s the real problem. And you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all fake news, a fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats, and the press plays right into it.”

  Trump acknowledged Flynn “didn’t tell the Vice President of the United States the facts, and then he didn’t remember. And that just wasn’t acceptable to me.” (Curiously, Trump didn’t say that Flynn had also dissembled with him.) As for the call to Kislyak to discuss sanctions, “It certainly would have been okay with me if he did,” Trump said. “I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn’t doing it. I didn’t direct him, but I would have directed him because that’s his job.”

  Asked more broadly about Russia, Trump again lambasted the media: “Well, the failing New York Times wrote a big, long front-page story yesterday. And it was very much discredited, as you know. It was—it’s a joke.” He continued, “Speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia. President Putin called me up very nicely to congratulate me on the win of the election. He then called me up extremely nicely to congratulate me on the inauguration, which was terrific. But so did many other leaders—almost all other leaders from almost all other countries. So that’s the extent. Russia is fake news. Russia—this is fake news put out by the media.”

  But over the next week, calls mounted for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. “The gravity of the issues raised by the events that led to national security adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation cannot be overstated or ignored,” the minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, wrote in The Washington Post. “The American people, and indeed American democracy, require a thorough and independent investigation into what transpired and whether any criminal laws or constitutional precepts were violated.” While that would normally fall within the purview of the attorney general, “in this case, given his deep and long-standing ties to President Trump and many of Trump’s top advisers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions cannot lead such an investigation.”

  A few days later, Priebus was astonished when CNN reported (accurately) that he’d tried to get the FBI to refute the Times story and suggested that making such a request was a “violation of procedures.” Priebus had only tried to refute the story because McCabe brought it up and said it was inaccurate. He and Trump both saw it as yet another leak, and who could it have been but someone at the FBI? Perhaps even Comey or McCabe himself. Trump lashed out at the FBI on Twitter: “The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time. They can’t even find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW.”

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  ON FEBRUARY 28, Trump gave his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress. A seemingly new, conciliatory Trump was on view. He called for putting aside “trivial fights” and joining across party lines to improve health care and achieve tax and immigration reform. The media praised this much more traditionally “presidential” approach, and Trump basked in the glow of the favorable publicity.

  For less than a day. The next morning, the vexing subject of Russia was again the lead story, and Trump saw the momentum from his speech vanish. The Washington Post reported that morning that Sessions himself had spoken with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, twice while serving as a top adviser to the Trump campaign, once in a private meeting in Sessions’s office.

  Sessions struggled to reconcile this with his sworn testimony, arguing he met with the Russian ambassador in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a campaign adviser, and thus hadn’t lied during his confirmation hearings. In a statement, he said he’d “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign” and promised to clarify his prior testimony.

  Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who had asked Sessions the question about contacts with Russians, called for Sessions’s recusal: “It is now clearer than ever that the attorney general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately.”

  As the public furor over Sessions mounted, Trump called Comey at about noon, saying he just wanted to “check in” and see how Comey was doing. Comey was about to board a helicopter for a flight to Richmond but delayed his departure to take the call.

  “I’m doing great,” Comey said, but “I have a lot going on.”

  Comey praised Sessions, saying the attorney general seemed “to have hit the ground running” with a recent speech on violent crime.

  “That’s his thing,” Trump responded.

  But Trump didn’t say anything more about Sessions, though it must have been the subject uppermost in his mind. He said only that Comey should “take good care” of himself and stop by to see him the next time he was at the White House.

  The next morning, Trump summoned McGahn and told him to stop Sessions from recusing himself. Doing so would make Sessions look guilty of lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and, even worse, leave Trump without an ally overseeing the investigation.

  McGahn dutifully delivered the message—repeatedly—but Sessions said he intended to follow the department’s rules. McGahn tried calling anyone who might be able to influence Sessions, even the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to no avail. Sessions fielded a barrage of similar calls from other administration officials, suggesting Trump had enlisted a battery of supporters to lobby him.

  But Sessions and the Justice Department lawyers advising him didn’t believe he had any choice, even before the devastating Post article. Justice Department regulations state, “No DOJ employee may participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would be directly affected by the outcome.” Sessions had a political relationship with Trump; Trump was involved in the conduct being investigated; and Trump had a huge stake in the outcome.

  Sessions issued a statement that afternoon announcing, “I have decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.” At a press conference he added, “My staff recommended recusal,” and “I have studied the rules and considered their comments and evaluation. I believe those recommendations are right and just.”

  Trump was livid. He convened a meeting with McGahn and Priebus. As the conversation became heated, Hicks called Bannon and told him to come to the Oval Office. When Bannon arrived, Trump was as angry as Bannon had ever seen him.

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” Trump said, glowering at McGahn. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

  Cohn had won hopeless cases for him and did “incredible things” for him, Trump said.

  That Tru
mp would cite Roy Cohn as a positive role model left his audience speechless. As Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, Cohn had aggressively assisted the senator’s purge of suspected communists during the mid-1950s; Cohn had tried to identify and purge homosexuals in the military and government (despite his own homosexuality); and he’d been disbarred for unethical conduct. Cohn was a memorable character in Tony Kushner’s acclaimed play Angels in America, portrayed as a lying, bitter, self-hating hypocrite dying of AIDS.

  But for Trump, Cohn was a “winner and a fixer,” someone who “got things done,” in contrast to McGahn and Sessions, who now merited Trump’s ultimate opprobrium—“weak.”

  By now, Trump was practically screaming. Referring to the previous attorneys general Bobby Kennedy and Eric Holder, Trump went on, “You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations? Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” They had protected the president. Holder had always stood up for President Obama and even took a contempt charge for him. Bobby Kennedy always had “his brother’s back.” Trump said he’d been told his entire life that he needed a great lawyer, a “bulldog.”

  Trump went so far as to say he wanted an attorney general he could tell “who to investigate.”

  Trump was so angry he told Priebus he didn’t want him on Air Force One for a planned weekend at Mar-a-Lago, and he agreed to stay behind. Bannon said he’d fly down the next day on the Justice Department plane with Sessions and McGahn. Trump did have dinner with them and a few others on Saturday night and pulled Sessions aside to ask him to “unrecuse” himself. He again mentioned Kennedy and Holder as the kind of attorney general he needed to protect him.

  Early the next morning, in what might have been an effort to change the subject, he tweeted the sensational claim that Obama had tapped his phone: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”