Evidently channel surfing beyond the echo chamber of Fox News, Trump called Chris Christie that evening, upset that he was getting “killed” in the media, as he put it. What could he do?
“Did you fire him because of what Rod wrote in the memo?” Christie asked.
“Yes,” Trump replied.
Then he should “get Rod out there” to defend the decision, Christie recommended.
Trump said he’d call Rosenstein right away, but it was the White House press office that first reached out to say the White House wanted to release a statement saying it was Rosenstein’s idea to fire Comey.
Rosenstein balked, telling other Justice Department officials he wasn’t going to be part of a “false story.”
Trump himself called Rosenstein soon after. He said he’d been watching Fox News, and the coverage had been “great.”
But Trump wanted Rosenstein to do a press conference to say firing Comey was all his idea.
Rosenstein again refused and told the president that if he gave a press conference, he’d tell the truth: it wasn’t his idea.
This apparently prompted a call from Priebus to the Justice Department public affairs office, in which he was “screaming” that Rosenstein had to do a press conference.
Sessions, too, called the White House to warn that Rosenstein was getting upset.
Spicer, who had earlier said he wouldn’t be saying anything more about Comey’s firing that day, was hurriedly summoned for an interview with Fox Business News. Afterward, he was spotted in bushes near the White House trying to avoid other reporters. Finally he emerged, agreeing to take ten minutes of questions, though only in darkness. “Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off,” he ordered as cameras rolled. “We’ll take care of this. Can you just turn that light off?”
Spicer told reporters Trump knew nothing about firing Comey until he received the memo from Rosenstein, along with the letter from Sessions recommending that he be fired.
“It was all him,” Spicer said, meaning Rosenstein.
“It was all him?” a reporter asked.
“That’s correct,” Spicer said. “I mean, I can’t, I guess I shouldn’t say that, thank you for the help on that one. No one from the White House. That was a DOJ decision.”
* * *
—
WHEN MCCABE REACHED the White House that evening for his 6:30 appointment, Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, showed him to the Oval Office. McCabe had been to the West Wing many times for meetings, but he’d never before been in the Oval Office. McGahn, Pence, and Priebus were there, sitting in a row of wooden chairs across from Trump, who was behind his large desk. Trump rose and shook hands with McCabe, who took the remaining seat in the row of chairs.
There was as yet no sign from Trump himself that he was getting “killed” in the media; the president seemed in unusually high spirits and gleeful as he reenacted firing Comey for McCabe’s benefit. He had to do it, he said, because of the bad decisions Comey had made in the email investigation and, he added, for many other unspecified reasons.
Was McCabe aware that Comey had told him on three separate occasions that he was not under investigation? Trump asked.
McCabe said yes, he knew Comey had told Trump that.
People at the FBI were “thrilled” he’d fired Comey, Trump asserted. People there “really disliked Jim Comey,” they were “really happy” he was gone, and it was a “great thing.”
McCabe said that in his experience, most people in the FBI felt positively about Comey.
“I heard you were part of the resistance,” Trump continued.
McCabe asked what he meant by that.
“I heard that you were one of the people that did not support Jim Comey. You didn’t agree with him and the decisions that he’d made in the Clinton case. And is that true?”
“No, sir,” McCabe replied. “That’s not true. I worked very closely with Jim Comey. I was a part of that team and a part of those decisions.”
McCabe knew he’d just given all the wrong answers.
TEN
SEVEN DAYS IN MAY
If Trump thought he was getting “killed” on Tuesday night, it was worse by Wednesday morning. Firing Comey had set off a firestorm in the media and in Congress, with renewed calls for the appointment of a special counsel. There was widespread skepticism that the idea to fire Comey had come from Rosenstein and had nothing to do with Russia.
“Why now?” asked the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. “If the administration had objections to the way Director Comey handled the Clinton investigation, they had those objections the minute the President got into office. But they didn’t fire him then. Why did it happen today?”
“If Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein does not appoint an independent special prosecutor, every American will rightly suspect that the decision to fire Director Comey was part of a cover-up,” Schumer said.
Members of both committees investigating ties between Russia and the Trump campaign expressed concerns. “The decision by a President whose campaign associates are under investigation by the FBI for collusion with Russia to fire the man overseeing that investigation, upon the recommendation of an Attorney General who has recused himself from that investigation, raises profound questions about whether the White House is brazenly interfering in a criminal matter,” said Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Even a Republican, Richard Burr, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was “troubled by the timing and reasoning of Director Comey’s termination.”
* * *
—
AFTER BEING INTERRUPTED the night before by his summons to the White House, McCabe and his top leadership reconvened that morning in McCabe’s conference room. While they were discussing the previous day’s turn of events, McCabe’s secretary interrupted to tell him the president himself was on the line. Surprised, McCabe took the call. Everyone stayed in the room and listened to McCabe’s end of the conversation.
Trump proposed a presidential visit to FBI headquarters and invited McCabe to the White House to discuss it. He expected an enthusiastic reception; he told McCabe he’d received “hundreds” of messages of support from FBI personnel since firing Comey.
But simply arranging a visit didn’t require a call from the president. Trump quickly shifted the topic to what seemed the real reason: He’d seen Comey on television boarding a government plane for his return to Washington, after he’d been fired. How had that happened?
McCabe said he’d authorized it. He’d discussed the matter with Baker and other FBI lawyers, and no one saw any reason to stop Comey from flying back, given that the plane and its crew had to return anyway.
“That’s not right!” Trump exploded. “I never approved that!”
McCabe said he was sorry Trump disagreed with the decision.
“I want you to look into that,” Trump persisted. McCabe wondered, what was he supposed to look into? He’d authorized it; there wasn’t anything left to investigate.
McCabe’s answers only seemed to further enrage the president. He said he wanted Comey banned from FBI headquarters and all FBI property. He didn’t want Comey coming in to collect any personal effects.
People listening in the room were stunned that the president would be so petty and vindictive.
Trump’s anger at Comey seemingly spent, he asked McCabe about his wife, Jill, the object of so much of Trump’s scorn on the campaign trail.
“She’s fine,” McCabe replied. His wife had taken her loss in stride and had resumed her career as a medical doctor and the task of raising their three children.
“That must have been really rough,” Trump said. “To lose. To be a loser.”
Everyone in the room saw McCabe’s face stiffen.
Trump hung up. Strzok texted Page again: “We need to lock in”
the investigation. “In a formal chargeable way. Soon.”
McCabe was already of the same mind. After the comments about his wife and the tone of the call, which everyone had heard, it seemed possible—even likely—that McCabe would be fired any moment. He asked Priestap, Strzok, and the Russia team to figure out what needed to be done to “put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
* * *
—
THAT MORNING THE president hosted Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and the ubiquitous Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, in the Oval Office. Trump and Putin had agreed to the meeting during a phone call the week before, and details had been completed that weekend in Bedminster while Trump and Miller were planning Comey’s ouster.
That a meeting with Russians the day after he fired the FBI director might be considered ill-timed never seems to have occurred to Trump. He boasted to his Russian guests, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” according to a written summary of the meeting that was read to a New York Times reporter. He also explicitly linked the decision to the Russia investigation. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump assured them, “I’m not under investigation.”
* * *
—
THUS FAR, the FBI had uncovered no overt acts by Trump linking him to the Russians, the “articulable factual basis,” which is grounds for opening a case file. But in firing Comey, Trump had just handed the FBI one.
Until now, Strzok had agreed that opening a case on the president himself was premature. But firing the director, as he told his colleagues, “was a very real tangible event adversely impacting our ability to conduct an investigation.”
As Baker later put it, “Not only would it be an issue about obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to the national security. Our inability or our—the inability or the delays, the difficulties that we might have with respect to trying to figure out what the Russians were doing, because our main objective was to thwart them.”
Taken in context—Trump’s admiration for Putin, his attempts to protect Flynn, his efforts to co-opt Comey, his disparagement of the investigation as a “witch hunt”—his firing of Comey forced the FBI to contemplate what Baker referred to as an “extreme” and unnerving possibility: that the president of the United States might be “acting at the behest of [Russia] and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will. That was one extreme. The other extreme is that the President is completely innocent, and we discussed that too.”
* * *
—
AFTER HIS LATE night before the cameras, Sean Spicer reported for U.S. Navy Reserve duty, so the deputy White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, conducted the packed press briefing that began that day just before 2:00 p.m.
“The President, over the last several months, lost confidence in Director Comey,” Sanders said in her opening remarks. “The DOJ lost confidence in Director Comey. Bipartisan members of Congress made it clear that they had lost confidence in Director Comey. And most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director. Accordingly, the President accepted the recommendation of his Deputy Attorney General to remove James Comey from his position.”
The NBC White House correspondent Hallie Jackson had the first question: “Yes or no, did the President direct Rod Rosenstein to write this memo on James Comey?”
“No,” Sanders answered. The president had “lost confidence in Director Comey, and, frankly, he’d been considering letting Director Comey go since the day he was elected. But he did have a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General on Monday, where they had come to him to express their concerns. The President asked they put those concerns and their recommendation in writing, which is the letter that you guys have received.”
“So it’s the White House’s assertion that Rod Rosenstein decided on his own, after being confirmed, to review Comey’s performance?” Jackson continued.
“Absolutely.”
ABC’s Jonathan Karl pressed Sanders on the point: “Sarah, isn’t it true that the President had already decided to fire James Comey, and he asked the Justice Department to put together the rationale for that firing?”
“No.”
“When did he make the decision?”
“He made the decision for—the final decision to move forward with it was yesterday. But I know that he’s been contemplating it for a while.” She added, “I did speak directly to the President and heard directly from him that he, again, had been considering letting Director Comey go pretty much since the day he took office, but that there was no request by him to have a review at the Department of Justice.”
“But was the reason for the firing what was written by the Deputy Attorney General? Is that why he did it?” Karl asked again.
“That was, I think, the final piece that moved the President to make that quick and decisive action yesterday,” Sanders said.
“What did he mean in the letter that he wrote informing Comey that he was being fired—he said, on three separate occasions Comey had told him that ‘I am not under investigation.’ What were those three occasions that the FBI Director told the President that he wasn’t under investigation?”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics of their conversations, but I can tell you that Director Comey relayed that information to the President.”
Charlie Spiering of Breitbart News asked if Trump wanted to “shut down what he’s called a ‘taxpayer-funded charade’ investigation.”
“He wants them to continue with whatever they see appropriate and sees fit, just the same as he’s encouraged the House and Senate committees to continue any ongoing investigations,” Sanders replied, trying to head off any intimation of obstruction. “Look, the bottom line is any investigation that was happening on Monday is still happening today,” she said. “That hasn’t changed. And, in fact, we encourage them to complete this investigation so we can put it behind us and we can continue to see exactly what we’ve been saying for nearly a year, there’s no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. And we’d love for that to be completed so that we can all move on and focus on the things that, frankly, I think most of Americans are concerned with.”
“What gives you such confidence that the rank and file within the Bureau lost faith in the FBI Director?” another reporter asked, and then quoted from a letter by an FBI agent: “The vast majority of the Bureau is in favor of Director Comey. This is a total shock. This is not supposed to happen. The real losers here are 20,000 front-line people in the organization because they lost the only guy working here in the past 15 years who actually cared about them.”
“We’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things,” Sanders replied, echoing what the president had been repeating. “In fact, the President will be meeting with Acting Director McCabe later today to discuss that very thing—the morale at the FBI—as well as make an offer to go directly to the FBI if he feels that that’s necessary and appropriate.”
Sanders spoke to Trump after the press conference, and he told her what a good job she’d done—notwithstanding that what she’d said bore almost no resemblance to reality.
* * *
—
MCCABE WAS, at that very moment, at the White House for his meeting to discuss Trump’s visit. Schiller again showed him to the Oval Office. Trump was behind his desk, and the wooden chairs were in the same place as the night before. McCabe took a seat next to Priebus and McGahn.
Trump couldn’t stop talking about what a great decision it was to fire Comey and how happy it had made peop
le at the FBI. So many people “hated” the man, Trump asserted. Trump said he was pleased to see so many people applauding his decision on TV, evidently referring to Comey’s critics on Fox News. Had McCabe seen that?
No, he hadn’t, McCabe said. What he didn’t say was that what he’d seen was the opposite: people at the FBI were dejected.
“We’ve had so many FBI people calling us, sending us messages to say they’re so glad the director is gone,” Trump said.
McCabe wondered who at the FBI would be calling the White House. Everyone there knew such direct contact was inappropriate, especially given recent events.
“Well, sir, I don’t know. I guess it’s possible,” McCabe equivocated. “But most people seem shocked and surprised by what happened. They will rebound. We will move on. Right now people are just trying to figure things out.”
That wasn’t what the president wanted to hear. He asked again, were people glad he was gone?
“Some people were frustrated with last summer’s outcome on the Clinton case,” McCabe acknowledged. “It’s possible that some of these people are glad. Other than that, I’ve seen no evidence that people are happy about the director being fired.”
“You know, your only problem is your wife,” Trump said, again bringing up Jill’s unsuccessful campaign.
“She’s a bright and independent woman and I’ve always supported her,” McCabe replied.
Evidently frustrated by McCabe’s responses, Trump turned to the stated purpose of the meeting, which was his proposed triumphal visit to FBI headquarters. McCabe thought it a terrible idea, even a potential disaster. It was astonishing that Trump would suggest such a thing when so many questions were being raised about the independence of the bureau and Trump’s attempts to exert undue influence over it. And then there was the reality of how people felt about Comey’s firing, as opposed to the delusion that Trump seems to have embraced. Trump might even be booed.
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