On Fox News, Trump allies like Sean Hannity avidly cast the revelation of the texts in apocalyptic terms. “This is very profound because on a level far deeper than Watergate ever was here, there is corruption at the highest levels,” Hannity said on December 14. “This is no longer paranoia, it’s provable fact that the fix was in here. You have James Comey. Then you have the pro-Hillary, anti-Trump Peter Strzok and then his girlfriend Lisa Page, yeah, they are the ones going to save America with what they are doing.” He continued, “I don’t even know what to say. I mean I don’t even know what to say. Wouldn’t you define this as obstruction?”
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker and strong Trump ally, responded, “At every level, this is undermining our system of justice. It is violating the law. It’s very likely all of these people will end up going to jail.”
Congressman Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, also interviewed on Fox News, stated, “In any other country, we would call it a coup when you abuse the power of the police state to basically disenfranchise or just eliminate, if you will, the acting president. That’s what was being done here.”
That day, as he left for a visit to the FBI Academy, Trump commented, “It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI. But we’re going to rebuild the FBI. It will be bigger and better than ever. But it is very sad when you look at those documents. And how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it. It’s a very sad thing to watch, I will tell you that.”
* * *
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A WEEK AFTER their release, the “Lovebirds” texts still dominated cable news, which lent itself to rampant speculation about their meaning and ever darker conspiracy theories. In this highly charged atmosphere, McCabe testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 21. The designated topic was the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email case, but questions inevitably turned to the raging topic of the day. And questions from more sympathetic Democrats gave McCabe an opportunity to defend himself against some of the more extreme accusations, even if it was a closed-door session from which the press was excluded.
David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asked, “Mr. McCabe, was there any effort at the FBI to stop Donald Trump from being elected President of the United States?”
“No, sir.”
“Is there any effort at the FBI currently to launch a coup against the President of the United States?”
“No, sir.”
The congressman continued, “You’ve come under attack in a way that you’ve described as having devastating consequences for you and your family. Are you allowed publicly to respond?”
McCabe shook his head no.
“Could you speak, Mr. McCabe, a little bit more about that? We are seeing—we’ve seen it in this committee, we’ve seen it on television—what appears to be an intentional campaign to undermine the work of the FBI, the professionalism of the men and women who risk their lives to keep our country safe, and even the Department of Justice. Would you talk a little bit about what the impact of that is on the agency and the danger you think it poses—if you think it poses any danger—to the rule of law in this country?”
“You’ve asked quite a lot there,” McCabe answered. “First, as I have said before, the men and women of the FBI remain committed to the most righteous mission on earth, and that is protecting Americans wherever they are, in whatever they do, and upholding the Constitution. I have no doubt that the men and women of the FBI will remain committed to and continue to execute that mission in an effective and professional and independent way. So that’s what we do. That’s our job. No matter what anyone says or how—what directions the winds blow around us, we will stay focused on that mission and continue doing that job.”
McCabe elaborated on his role in removing Strzok from the Mueller investigation, even though Strzok’s political views were his own business and there wasn’t any evidence they’d affected his work.
McCabe said that after he learned about the texts, “I made the decision to remove him from the investigation that evening. I came back from my meeting with the inspector general. I met with a very small group of my fellow leaders. We discussed Peter’s reassignment, and we discussed where we would place him.”
Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, asked, “Now, just to take the devil’s advocate’s position, someone might have said, well, he expressed very vigorous criticism and opinions of Governor O’Malley, of Bernie Sanders, of Donald Trump, other people. Why was he not entitled to those private opinions expressed in the texts? Could he have made the argument that it didn’t affect his public performance?”
“He certainly could and he certainly may,” McCabe said. “What I knew at that point was that the inspector general was investigating Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for potential political bias. And simply the existence of that investigation I felt was—could place in jeopardy the work of the special counsel’s team, and I did not—I could not possibly take that risk.”
Raskin asked of Strzok, “Did he in any way contaminate the entire investigation with bias because of those private texts that he sent?”
“Not in any way that I am aware of, sir,” McCabe replied.
Elijah Cummings, also a Maryland Democrat, asked McCabe much the same question: “In your long and distinguished career at the FBI, have you ever let your personal political views, whatever they might be, influence you in any way with regard to your actions as an FBI agent?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you ever let the fact that your wife ran for State Senate, or anything that occurred related to her campaign, influence or impact, in any way, your official actions as an FBI agent?”
“No, sir.”
“What is your reaction to those personal attacks against you, and, more broadly, against the FBI as an institution?”
“Well, you have given me a lot to unpack there,” McCabe responded.
“Let me tell you something,” Cummings said. “I’m concerned about the tearing down of the reputation of the FBI, and it is painful.”
“Yep.”
“Because I think it’s an attack on our very democracy. That’s my feeling. But I’m just wondering what—I mean, how the men and women, these men and women who go out every day and give their blood, their sweat, their tears, wondering if they’re going to come home, I mean, I’m just wondering how you and how they are affected.”
“Yeah. So if I could speak just for a minute about my personal experience over the last year. And I’ll tell you it has been enormously challenging. My wife is a wonderful, brilliant, caring physician who was drawn to take a run at public life because she was committed to trying to expand health insurance coverage for the people of the State of Virginia. That was the one and only thing that raised her interest in running for office when she was approached with the possibility of doing so. And having started with that noble intention, to have gone through what she and my children have experienced over the last year has been—it has been devastating.”
Cummings asked for a “general idea” of what that was like.
“The constant reiteration of the lies and accusations about things that she allegedly did, or I allegedly did, in support of her campaign, despite the fact that we’ve consistently tried to tell folks the truth about what happened, has been very, very frustrating.”
Two days later, Trump did exactly that, with an error-filled tweet: “How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?”
And Trump followed up the same day with his first reference to McCabe’s eligibility to retire: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”
THIRTEEN
DEEP STATE
Trump began the New Year of 2018 by tweeting another attack on the Justice Department, referring to it this time as the “Deep State Justice Department.” There was nothing new in his calls for jail time for Clinton and Comey. But it did mark his first public use of a phrase that had become ubiquitous among his adoring media chorus.*
Newt Gingrich elaborated on the theme, calling Mueller “the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency” on Twitter. He added, “The brazen redefinition of Mueller’s task tells you how arrogant the deep state is and how confident it is it can get away with anything.”
“Deep State” soon joined “witch hunt” and “lock her up” in the pantheon of repetitive Trumpisms.
The term appears to have first been used in the 1990s to describe bureaucratic resistance to the Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But its use in the United States picked up after a 2014 Bill Moyers television interview with the author Mike Lofgren, a Republican former congressional staff member. It quickly made the leap from PBS to right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who accused the Deep State of plotting to assassinate Trump.
In an essay to accompany the Moyers interview, Lofgren posited,
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
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IN MID-JANUARY, TRUMP was diverted from Mueller and the Russia investigation by yet another scandal, this one involving payoffs to a porn star. On January 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen “arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen.
In a statement to the Journal, Cohen said, “This is now the second time that you are raising outlandish allegations against my client. You have attempted to perpetuate this false narrative for over a year; a narrative that has been consistently denied by all parties since at least 2011,” but he stopped short of explicitly denying payments had been made.
When Cohen sought guidance from Trump (again defying his lawyer’s order not to talk to the president), Trump told him to say the president “was not knowledgeable” about the transaction. Cohen subsequently released a statement to that effect: “In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000” to Clifford. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction,” and “neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”
Trump’s lawyer sent Cohen a text: “Client says thanks for what you do.”
* * *
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WITH PRIEBUS GONE, McGahn was increasingly isolated at the White House. He and Trump were now communicating mostly through lawyers. On the other hand, his status as a key witness to the Comey firing gave him a certain amount of job security. Still, as should have been obvious, McGahn was fast falling from favor with the president.
Matters came to a head after The New York Times, on January 25, disclosed that Trump had ordered McGahn to get rid of Mueller but had backed down after McGahn refused and threatened to quit—all of which was true.
“Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story,” Trump said en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Through various lawyers and other intermediaries, Trump asked McGahn to refute the story. McGahn wasn’t about to lie. He refused, saying the article was largely accurate.
A week later Trump was still fulminating. The story was “bullshit,” he told Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who was emerging as the president’s preferred confidant. McGahn had leaked it to make himself look good. Trump said he wanted McGahn to write a letter refuting the story “for our records” because McGahn was a “lying bastard.” He added that if McGahn didn’t write such a letter, “then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him.”
When Porter dutifully conveyed the message, McGahn refused, saying the story was true. He waved off the president’s threat to fire him, saying the “optics would be terrible.”
The next day, in an Oval Office meeting with McGahn and the president’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, Trump told McGahn he needed to correct the Times story. “I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ‘fire,’” Trump insisted. “This story doesn’t look good. You need to correct this. You’re the White House counsel. Did I say the word ‘fire’?”
“What you said is, ‘Call Rod [Rosenstein], tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel,’” McGahn responded.
“I never said that,” Trump said. He only wanted McGahn to tell Rosenstein about Mueller’s conflicts and then let Rosenstein decide how to proceed.
Trump had said no such thing. McGahn asserted again that Trump had said, “Call Rod. There are conflicts. Mueller has to go.”
At this juncture the conversation was getting “a little tense,” in Kelly’s view.
So would McGahn do a correction? Trump asked.
“No,” McGahn said.
Plainly annoyed, Trump noticed McGahn was writing on a legal pad. “What about these notes?” he asked. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”
McGahn said a “real lawyer” takes notes because they create a record and aren’t a bad thing.
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump said. “He did not take notes.”
* * *
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DESPITE TRUMP’S EARLIER public statements that he’d gladly submit to an interview by Mueller and his team, on January 29 Trump’s lawyers John Dowd and Jay Sekulow submitted a twenty-page letter refusing Mueller’s request to interview the president. It also constituted a detailed defense of the charges being investigated, focusing on the president’s unique status as chief executive officer. The memo took the sweeping—and in the view of many legal experts radical—view that a president could not be charged for doing something that was within his constitutional prerogative, such as firing Comey, no matter what his motive. They also took the opportunity to attack the FBI and the Department of Justice—a thinly veiled attack on Mueller himself.
“It is abundantly clear to the undersigned that all of the answers to your inquiries are contained in the exhibits and testimony that have already been voluntarily provided to you by the White House and witnesses, all of which clearly show that there was no collusion with Russia, and that no FBI investigation was or even could have been obstructed,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
“It remains our position that the President’s actions here, by virtue of his position as the chief law enforcement officer, could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself, and that he could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.”
They continued, “We express again, as we have expressed before, that the Special Counsel’s inquiry has been and remains a considerable burden for the President and his Office, has endangered the safety and security of our country,
and has interfered with the President’s ability to both govern domestically and conduct foreign affairs. This encumbrance has been only compounded by the astounding public revelations about the corruption within the FBI and Department of Justice which appears to have led to the alleged Russia collusion investigation and the establishment of the Office of Special Counsel in the first place. . . .
“We respectfully decline to allow our client to testify,” the letter continued, and the lawyers took aim again at the FBI: “As is now apparent with the benefit of subsequent developments, the firing of Mr. Comey has led to the discovery of corruption within the FBI at the highest levels. . . .
“It is also worth responding to the popular suggestion that the President’s public criticism of the FBI either constitutes obstruction or serves as evidence of obstruction. Such criticism ignores the sacred responsibility of the President to hold his subordinates accountable—a function not unlike public Congressional oversight hearings. After all, the FBI is not above the law and we are now learning of the disappointing results of a lack of accountability in both the DOJ and FBI.”
And they reinforced McCabe’s and Trump’s point that Rosenstein had an obvious conflict, given that he was a critical witness for the defense:
As you also know, far from merely signing off on a Presidential decision or taking a weak or indirect action indicating a tacit or pressured approval, Mr. Rosenstein actually helped to edit Mr. Comey’s termination letter and actively advised the President accordingly. It is unthinkable that a President acting (1) under his Constitutional authority; (2) on the written recommendation and with the overt participation of his Deputy Attorney General; and (3) consistent with the advice of his Attorney General, to fire a subordinate who has been universally condemned by bipartisan leadership could then be accused of obstruction for doing so.
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