Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  “So if Robert Mueller wanted to speak with you about that you would be willing to talk to him?”

  “I would be glad to tell him exactly what I just told you, Jon,” Trump replied.

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  TRUMP SPENT THE weekend fuming over the press coverage and venting about Mueller’s conflicts. Priebus and Bannon were so worried that Trump might precipitously order Rosenstein to fire Mueller that they summoned Christopher Ruddy to the White House. Ruddy, the chief executive of the conservative Newsmax Media, a longtime conspiracy theorist, and a Trump confidant dubbed the “Trump whisperer” by The Washington Post, was a reliable media conduit. Priebus told Ruddy he hoped they wouldn’t have another blowup like the one that followed Comey’s firing. So Ruddy agreed to send up a trial balloon.

  Ruddy appeared that evening on PBS’s NewsHour with Judy Woodruff. “Is President Trump prepared to let the special counsel pursue his investigation?” Woodruff asked.

  “Well, I think he’s considering perhaps terminating the special counsel. I think he’s weighing that option.” Ruddy went on, “I mean, Robert Mueller, there are some real conflicts. He comes from a law firm that represents members of the Trump family. He interviewed the day before, a few days before he was appointed special counsel with the president, who was looking at him potentially to become the next FBI director.”

  Afterward, Sean Spicer issued a statement that “Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue,” which prompted Ruddy to send a text message to ABC News: “Spicer issued a bizarre late night press release that a) doesn’t deny my claim the president is considering firing Mueller and b) says I didn’t speak to the president about the matter—when I never claimed to have done so.” He reiterated that “Trump is definitely considering it . . . it’s not something that’s being dismissed.”

  Ruddy might not have spoken to Trump directly, but his comments hadn’t come out of thin air. In that sense, the gambit worked: there was an immediate media outcry, and Sanders had to deny that the president intended to fire Mueller. “While the president has the right to, he has no intention to do so,” she told reporters on Air Force One the next day, adding that that’s what the president told her to say.

  And Ruddy’s comments prompted Senator Susan Collins to ask Rosenstein, when he testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee, what would happen if Trump ordered him to fire Mueller.

  “Senator, I’m not going to follow any order unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders,” Rosenstein replied. “Special counsel Mueller may be fired only for good cause, and I am required to put that cause in writing. That’s what I would do. If there were good cause, I would consider it. If there were not good cause, it wouldn’t matter to me what anybody says.”

  The Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, warned Trump not to fire Mueller. “The best thing to do is to let Robert Mueller do his job,” Ryan said. “I think the best case for the president is to be vindicated by allowing this investigation to go on thoroughly and independently.”

  But Trump again ignored the advice. The president called Sessions at home and asked if he’d “unrecuse” himself and referred to “all of it,” which Sessions took to mean the Russia investigation and oversight of Mueller. Trump’s magnanimity toward Hillary Clinton having apparently run its course, he asked Sessions to direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton. Sessions did neither.

  On June 14, The Washington Post disclosed that Trump’s most cherished concession from Comey—that Trump himself was not under investigation—was no longer true. “Special Counsel Is Investigating Trump for Possible Obstruction of Justice, Officials Say,” the headline read, which was quickly trumpeted by cable networks. “Trump had received private assurances from then–FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation,” the story reported. “Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.”

  The revelation set off a rapid-fire series of tweets by Trump that were angry and frustrated even by Trump standards:

  “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice.”

  “You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history-led by some very bad and conflicted people!”

  “Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?”

  “After 7 months of investigations & committee hearings about my ‘collusion with the Russians,’ nobody has been able to show any proof. Sad!”

  And, in a pointed criticism of Rosenstein:

  “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”

  Wittingly or not, the tweets confirmed that the president was, indeed, under investigation.

  Trump also called Chris Christie to ask what he thought about getting rid of Mueller. Like just about everyone else outside the right-wing fringe, Christie was against it. He said there weren’t any legitimate grounds for removing him and Trump would lose even Republican support in Congress if he did.

  Despite the overwhelming advice not to do it, Trump set out to get rid of Mueller.

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  TRUMP CALLED MCGAHN at 10:31 on the night of the Post story and told him he wanted Mueller removed. He told McGahn to call Rosenstein and tell him to fire Mueller because of the special counsel’s multiple conflicts.

  “You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod,” Trump said.

  McGahn had no intention of doing so, but all he said was that he’d see what he could do. If he did nothing, maybe Trump would forget, or think better of it.

  McGahn was at home on Saturday, June 17, when the president called him from Camp David just before 2:30 p.m. This time Trump was more insistent: “Call Rod. Tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.” Trump added that “Mueller has to go” and “Call me back when you do it.”*

  Worn down by the president’s demands and eager to get him off the phone, McGahn agreed, even though he wasn’t going to do it.

  McGahn felt trapped. He thought of Robert Bork, who fired the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The resulting public outcry had helped doom Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and Bork complained he was “tired of it being portrayed as the only thing I ever did.”

  McGahn had no intention of becoming another Bork. But what would he say the next time the president called? McGahn saw only one way out, which was to resign.

  TWELVE

  “THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE”

  McGahn told his personal lawyer, chief of staff, Bannon, and Priebus that he was resigning. He was deliberately vague about the reasons; he told Priebus only that Trump had asked him to “do crazy shit.” Bannon and Priebus pleaded with him to stay, and Bannon stressed that his legacy would be the makeup of the Supreme Court. But McGahn drove to the White House to pack his belongings and draft a resignation letter.

  On Monday, June 19, McGahn nonetheless showed up for work. When he saw the president, Trump said nothing about Mueller or his weekend calls.

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  TRUMP CONTINUED TO remind people that he could have Mueller fired anytime he wanted. But after the aborted attempt with McGahn and repeated warnings from just about everybody around him—including Priebus and Bannon—not to interfere with the special counsel, Trump shifted his focus, aiming his fire at the beleaguered Sessions, whom he saw as the root of the problem.

  Unlike Mueller, Sessions reported directly to him. Trump could bend the attorney general to his will, and, if not, he could try to get him to resign. If that failed, he could fire him, eve
n though his advisers had repeatedly warned that doing so risked arousing the ire of Sessions’s former colleagues in the Senate. But now that Sessions, too, was being investigated by the FBI—something that Trump surely knew—he had added leverage. Once rid of Sessions, Trump could name a new attorney general in the mold of Holder or Bobby Kennedy, someone who could protect him.

  And replacing Sessions with an unconflicted attorney general had the added advantage of sidelining Rosenstein, who had defied him when Trump asked him to do a press conference after Comey was fired and, after all, was the one who decided to name a special counsel and chose Mueller. The president’s disdain for both men was evident from their nicknames: “Mr. Magoo” for Sessions, and “Mr. Peepers” for Rosenstein.*

  In the Oval Office on June 19, Trump met alone with his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and began a campaign to get rid of Sessions. “Write this down,” Trump directed, and then dictated a public statement Sessions should make.

  Lewandowski hastily took notes: “I know that I recused myself from certain things having to do with specific areas. But our POTUS . . . is being treated very unfairly. He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong. I was on the campaign w/ him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.”

  Seemingly oblivious to the fact that Sessions had recused himself from anything related to Russia, Trump wanted Sessions to restrict Mueller to investigating future Russian interference: “I am going to meet with the Special Prosecutor to explain this is very unfair and let the Special Prosecutor move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections so that nothing can happen in future elections.”

  If Sessions delivered that statement, he’d be the “most popular guy in the country,” Trump said.

  Lewandowski kept the notes but didn’t deliver the message to Sessions. A month later, Trump asked him if he’d talked to Sessions. Lewandowski hadn’t, but said he would soon. If Sessions didn’t meet with him, Trump said, Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired.

  Needless to say, Lewandowski was in no position to fire the attorney general. As he later told Priebus, “What can I do? I’m not an employee of the administration. I’m a nobody.” Lewandowski didn’t deliver the message.*

  Later that day, Trump and Hope Hicks met in the Oval Office with three New York Times reporters, Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Michael Schmidt, who’d broken the Comey memos story. Instead of following Hicks’s advice to steer clear of anything having to do with the special counsel investigation, Trump managed to tar Sessions, Rosenstein, Mueller, and Comey while again accusing Comey of perjury.

  After a brief discussion of Russian interference in the election, Trump segued into the dossier: “Now, that was totally made-up stuff, and in fact, that guy’s being sued by somebody. . . . And he’s dying with the lawsuit. I know a lot about those guys, they’re phony guys. They make up whatever they want. Just not my thing—plus, I have witnesses, because I went there with a group of people.” Trump continued, “I had a group of bodyguards, including Keith [Schiller]. . . . He said, ‘What kind of crap is this?’ I went there for one day for the Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back. It was so disgraceful. It was so disgraceful.”

  Referring to Comey, “When he brought it to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about anything. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”

  From there he moved to Mueller. Hicks later said she tried to throw herself between Trump and the reporters and stop him, to no avail. “A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.”

  “Was that Sessions’s mistake or Rosenstein’s mistake?” Schmidt asked.

  “Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.”

  “Was that a mistake?” Baker asked.

  “Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.”

  “He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?” Haberman asked.

  “Zero,” Trump replied. “So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have—which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.”

  “Rosenstein,” Haberman clarified.

  “Who is he? And Jeff hardly knew. He’s from Baltimore.”

  Trump continued, “Yeah, what Jeff Sessions did was he recused himself right after, right after he became attorney general. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ I would have—then I said, ‘Who’s your deputy?’ So his deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. So, he’s from Baltimore. Now, he, we went through a lot of things. We were interviewing replacements at the FBI. Did you know Mueller was one of the people that was being interviewed?

  “He was sitting in that chair. We had a wonderful meeting. The day before! Of course, he was up here, and he wanted the job.”

  The next day, Mueller “is appointed special counsel,” Trump went on. “I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts? But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point. So Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.”

  Baker asked, “What would cause you—what would be the line beyond which if Mueller went, you would say, ‘That’s too far, we would need to dismiss him’?”

  “Look, there are so many conflicts that everybody has,” Trump answered, none more glaring than Rosenstein’s: “Then Rosenstein becomes extremely angry because of Comey’s Wednesday press conference, where he said that he would do the same thing he did a year ago with Hillary Clinton, and Rosenstein became extremely angry at that because, as a prosecutor, he knows that Comey did the wrong thing. Totally wrong thing. And he gives me a letter, O.K., he gives me a letter about Comey. And by the way, that was a tough letter, O.K. Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K. But he gives me a very strong letter, and now he’s involved in the case. Well, that’s a conflict of interest.”

  Trump had just made the same point as had McCabe at his Sunday meeting with Rosenstein and Mueller.

  “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are? But then, then Comey also says that he did something in order to get the special counsel. He leaked. The reason he leaked. So, he illegally leaked.

  “So think of this, Mike,” Trump went on. “He illegally leaks, and everyone thinks it is illegal, and by the way, it looks like it’s classified and all that stuff. So he got—not a smart guy—he got tricked into that, because they didn’t even ask him that question.”

  Trump reminded the reporters that he could have “ended the whole thing.” Then he questioned the very premise that the FBI should operate independently of the White House, blaming Richard Nixon and Watergate for the idea. “Nothing was changed other than Richard Nixon came along,” he said, which was “pretty brutal, and out of courtesy, the FBI started reporting to the Department of Justice. But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing—anything. But the FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting. And I think we’re going to have a great new FBI director.”

  As for Comey, “His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”

 
At that point Ivanka showed up with Trump’s granddaughter Arabella Kushner, who’d turned six years old two days earlier.

  “My granddaughter Arabella,” Trump said. “Say hello to them in Chinese.”

  “Ni hao.”

  “She’s great. She speaks fluent Chinese. She’s amazing. She spoke with President Xi. Honey? Can you say a few words in Chinese? Say, like, ‘I love you, Grandpa.’”

  “Wo ai ni, Grandpa.”

  “She’s unbelievable, huh? Good, smart genes.”

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  TO HICKS’S DISMAY, the Times led with Trump’s criticisms of Sessions and that Trump had accused Comey “of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job.” But Trump told Hicks he “loved” the interview and how the media covered it.

  Despite all the hints, Jody Hunt, Sessions’s chief of staff, told Priebus the attorney general had no intention of resigning and questioned what getting rid of Sessions would accomplish anyway: there was an investigation before, and there would be an investigation after.

  Three days after the Times interview, Trump stepped up the pressure. He tweeted, “So many people are asking why isn’t the A.G. or Special Council looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes. 33,000 emails deleted?” Three minutes later, he added, “What about all of the Clinton ties to Russia, including Podesta Company, Uranium deal, Russian Reset, big dollar speeches etc.”

  The same morning, en route to Norfolk, Virginia, with Priebus, Trump said the country had lost confidence in Sessions. Priebus took notes: “Need a letter of resignation on desk immediately.” Sessions had “no choice” but “must immediately resign.”