I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  The South Korean embassy hosted the governors, with President Moon Jae-in beaming in on a video conference to welcome them—a warm reminder of the close diplomatic and economic ties between South Korea and the United States. Moon offered a special greeting to Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who chaired the NGA and whose wife, Yumi, was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States in her twenties. Moon called him “a son-in-law to the Korean people.”

  The next night, at a private dinner for the Republican Governors Association, Trump gave a rambling address during which he sprayed insults far and wide—his remarks so disjointed and long that the catering staff, who were loath to walk around the room while the president was talking, held off delivering entrees to increasingly hungry governors and their spouses. Trump brought up South Korea.

  “Why should we even defend them?” Trump asked, referring to the extensive U.S. military presence in the Korean peninsula. “They’re not paying us enough.”

  Trump went on to make fun of Moon, as if they were schoolyard rivals.

  Yumi Hogan was nearly in tears and thought about walking out, but she kept her composure and the Hogans stayed.

  The next night, February 9, at the Governors Ball, a black-tie affair hosted every year on NGA weekend at the White House, Yumi Hogan still couldn’t shake Trump’s attacks on her homeland. It turned out the Hogans were seated for dinner at the ball next to Pence and his wife, Karen. The two couples were relatively close, and the Hogans knew that Pence’s father was a veteran of the Korean War.

  “Your father fought for freedom in South Korea,” Yumi Hogan told the vice president. “I wouldn’t be here without your dad.”

  Then Maryland’s first lady cut to the chase.

  “Mr. Vice President, you have to talk to the president,” Yumi Hogan said. “Did you hear what he said about South Korea?”

  Pence turned slightly red in the face and shook his head. Ever loyal to Trump, the vice president appeared to be searching for words and quickly changed the subject.

  * * *

  —

  Roger Stone was a lifelong dirty trickster, a political operative with a carnival huckster style and, most important at this juncture in the sixty-seven-year-old’s life, a loyal defender of Trump. He had used smears and sleights of hand to help his political clients—including, for many years, Trump—make their opponents look foolish or guilty, stretching all the way back to his work for Richard Nixon at the start of his career.

  Stone had been found guilty in November 2019 of obstructing a congressional probe and witness tampering while dodging Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. A jury concluded Stone had lied repeatedly to a congressional committee about his advance knowledge of the Russian hack of emails that could embarrass Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, and that he later threatened to hurt a person who could expose his lies.

  In early February 2020, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington faced a judge’s deadline to recommend the prison sentence befitting his crimes. It was a hot-button case as well as one that Attorney General Bill Barr would soon take a strong interest in.

  Barr had just arranged to change leadership in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, pressuring the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu over the Christmas holidays and through January to give up her job so he could install one of his closer advisers in that role. Liu was awaiting confirmation hearings for the number three job at Treasury, and though nominees usually got to remain in their job until confirmed for the new one, Barr kept pressing her to go. In an awkward January 9 meeting, Liu asked the attorney general why he wanted to rush her out the door. “We don’t want the uncertainty,” Barr told her. His explanation didn’t make sense. He gave her February 1 as a deadline to leave. As that date approached, Barr announced his former counselor Tim Shea would become the new U.S. attorney and start work February 3. This was less than a week before line prosecutors in the office would present a recommendation for Stone’s punishment.

  On February 5, the four prosecutors in the D.C. office handling the Stone case recommended a prison sentence of seven to nine years. But over the next several days, they received warnings from their supervisors that this proposal wasn’t going to fly with their new boss. They said Shea felt pressure to “cut Stone a break” and was “afraid of the president.” One of the prosecutors, Aaron Zelinsky, a former Mueller prosecutor who had worked on the Stone team the longest, said he would withdraw from the case rather than sign a politically manipulated recommendation.

  On February 10, Shea told Barr the prosecutors in his office were pushing to recommend a seven- to nine-year sentence for Stone. Barr told Shea that was ridiculous. He wanted prosecutors to let the judge decide Stone’s punishment without pushing for the tough sentence they were technically entitled to seek. Shea said he thought he had a good compromise on a recommendation that would satisfy both the prosecutors and Barr. Shea promised to take care of it.

  That night, the prosecutorial team got word they could file their recommendation of seven to nine years, if they deleted a section describing Stone’s threatening behavior. Barr, who didn’t closely monitor the news, heard reports of the tough new sentencing recommendation. “What the hell happened?” Barr asked an aide. He couldn’t reach Shea. But the attorney general felt the prosecutors were way out of line. White-collar criminals charged with obstructing a criminal probe or lying to federal agents rarely did more than two years in jail. He wasn’t wrong about that. On the other hand, Stone’s conduct had been unusually egregious. In addition to threatening to kill a witness and ruin his life, he had also released an image of crosshairs over the face of the judge presiding over his trial. Barr debated that night with his chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt, about the holy hell they believed he would spark if he reduced the proposed punishment, but decided lessening Stone’s recommended sentence was the right thing. “We’re going to have to fix this in the morning,” Barr said.

  Over at the White House, Trump didn’t like what he was seeing on the news either. In a sign of how little he slept when he was worked up, Trump issued a fiery tweet at 2:48 a.m. on February 11. “This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” he wrote. “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

  Later that morning at the Justice Department, Barr was discussing the new sentencing recommendation with staff when Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen walked in. It was about 8:30 a.m.

  “So, did you see the president’s tweet?” Rosen asked. Aides looked at their phones and read it aloud.

  “Holy shit,” Barr said. “Now what do I do?”

  Should he proceed with reducing the recommendation or stand down? Barr decided to go forward. It looked to prosecutors across the country—and many in the general public—like Barr was dutifully obeying Trump’s Twitter instructions. Trump and Barr insisted they never spoke about what to do about Stone, but that hardly mattered. Trump’s wishes about going easy on Stone were easy for anyone to see. Barr’s decision only cemented the view that the attorney general was manhandling the independent Justice Department to do Trump’s bidding.

  At Barr’s instruction, Shea told the court his office wasn’t pushing for a specific penalty. It was too much for the four prosecutors on the case—Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed, and Michael Marando—who each left the case or resigned from the department altogether. This was a deafening version of what lawyers call “a noisy withdrawal”—a notice that signals to the court that lawyers are disgusted with the client or the handling of the case. In this case, both.

  Liu, meanwhile, was preparing for her upcoming Senate confirmation hearing for the Treasury job, relieved she had had no role in the Stone decision, when she got a strange call from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s office asking her to meet with Mnuchin to discuss “the stuff in the news today.”

  When they
met, an apologetic Mnuchin told Liu that she wouldn’t get the job because the White House decided to withdraw her nomination.

  “Can you tell me why?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the secretary said. “I cannot.”

  Trump had been convinced by conspiracy-minded supporters that Liu was part of the “deep state” and had gone too easy on former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, a villain in Trump’s mind, and gone too hard against Stone. Their list of objections to Liu was longer still, but this was enough. In Trump’s view, she was disloyal, and she was out.

  Furious that his reputation was taking a beating, Barr knew he could not change the minds of the Stone prosecutors, but he was determined to establish for the record that the president wasn’t pulling his strings. He also knew he had to get through to the so-called audience of one, Trump. Barr’s staff arranged for him to sit for an interview with Pierre Thomas of ABC News on February 13, explaining the Stone case. They did not give the White House a heads-up; Barr wanted Trump to watch it and understand he meant business.

  “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told Thomas. “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody . . . whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. . . . I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

  Not more than two minutes after the interview aired, Barr’s cell phone rang. It was the audience of one. Barr’s message had been received. Instantly.

  “Hey, I thought that was cool,” Trump told him. “There’s no problem.”

  “I meant what I said, Mr. President,” Barr replied. “You can’t be doing that kind of thing.”

  The president wasn’t in the mood to fully comply, however. In a volley that had become familiar, Trump tried to get the last word. Early in the morning of February 14, the president was back on Twitter, quoting the part of Barr’s interview where he said the president had never asked him to interfere in the Stone case.

  “This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so, I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” Trump wrote.

  Later that day, however, Trump got a taste of the Justice Department’s independence, though the timing was strictly coincidental. The department notified McCabe’s lawyers they were dropping their investigation of him and would not charge him for lying about disclosing information to the media. Trump raged about this development to his aides, furious the “deep state” former FBI honcho wasn’t going to be roughed up by prosecutors. That afternoon, Trump bellyached to Barr that this wasn’t fair. He wanted to know why the government couldn’t bring a case against McCabe.

  Barr put his foot down. “I’m not talking to you about that,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  By mid-February, the coronavirus had killed some two thousand people around the world and sickened seventy-five thousand. The vast majority of cases were in China, but the contagion was spreading quickly, with infections now reported in at least twenty-eight other countries, including the United States. World leaders were on edge, but the kind of global stewardship the United States had often provided at moments of international crisis was nonexistent.

  Jeremy Farrar, one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts, who was based in London, was so exasperated by the lack of engagement by the White House that he called Tom Bossert, who had served as Trump’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser earlier in the administration. In the mid-2000s, as a staffer on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, Bossert had helped write a pandemic response strategy, and Farrar saw him as an ally in trying to contain the coronavirus.

  “There’s nobody we can talk to,” Farrar told Bossert. “Nobody’s answering our calls.”

  Bossert took Farrar’s plea to heart. He put in calls to Trump and Pence, and even tried to track down a private number for Melania Trump, hoping to scare them into action on the virus, but had no luck. He was convinced that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who was the most powerful aide in the West Wing, and Marc Short were blocking his calls as an act of retaliation after Bossert had criticized in an ABC News interview Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president.

  When Bossert got through to Trump’s assistant, Molly Michael, he told her, “Either Marc Short or Jared are standing in front of your desk. Tell them, ‘Fuck you. Mr. Bossert wants to talk to the president.’ Put me through to the president and let him decide.”

  Michael suggested Bossert talk to Pence, but when Bossert was connected to the vice president’s office, Short picked up. “Sorry,” he said, “the VP isn’t interested in talking to you right now. He’s busy.”

  “Come on, Marc, this is serious,” Bossert replied, and went into a spiel about just how devastating the infection rate and death toll could soon be.

  “We’ve got plenty of smart people working on this, but none of them have numbers that agree with yours,” Short said. “It’s not that bad. Thanks for your call. We’ll figure it out.”

  Short told Pence about Bossert’s outreach and tried to arrange a follow-up conversation, but it was unclear if the two ever spoke. Bossert, who was warning that the virus would leave ninety-eight million people sick, twelve to fifteen million hospitalized, and five hundred thousand dead, never got to speak with Trump.

  Bossert confided his frustrations in Fauci, whom he had known for years.

  “Listen,” Fauci told him, “I just present the facts. I wish you were still in the White House. I’m not the one that runs the CDC. I’m the infectious disease person that does the research.”

  Fauci told Bossert that he felt little urgency about the virus from the White House. Trump wasn’t attending task-force meetings, for instance, and the federal response efforts were not being properly coordinated. It was a mess.

  * * *

  —

  Trump had long considered the stock markets his political weathervane, so the week of February 24, when markets tanked amid reports the coronavirus was spreading across South Korea and Italy, brought gale-force winds. The president was on a two-day visit to India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi played to his ego by staging a massive, hundred-thousand-person stadium rally called “Namaste Trump.”

  Back in the United States, Nancy Messonnier, the head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, held her daily media teleconference on February 25 to update the public on the rapidly evolving coronavirus situation. She spoke the truth.

  “I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe,” Messonnier told reporters. “But these are things that people need to start thinking about now. I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning and I told my children that while I didn’t think that they were at risk right now, we as a family need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives. You should ask your children’s school about their plans for school dismissals or school closures. Ask if there are plans for teleschool. I contacted my local school superintendent this morning with exactly those questions. You should think about what you would do for childcare if schools or day cares close, if teleworking is an option for you. All of these questions can help you be better prepared for what might happen.”

  Messonnier’s warnings of impending disruptions to everyday life quickly became banner headlines on television news. The markets’ reaction was deafening, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling another 879 points that afternoon. Aides watching from the West Wing were gobsmacked, and some believed Messonnier had been overly alarmist. “This is ridiculous,” Short said, shaking his head.

  At about the same time, Trump boarded Air Force One in India for his return to Washington. The president stayed awake for the entire fourteen-hour turbulent flight home, watch
ing market reports and news coverage. He was fuming about Messonnier, becoming obsessed with a CDC scientist he had never met. Trump called Azar from the plane.

  “What the hell is this woman doing?” he said. “What are these statements? The market has collapsed.”

  The president added, “She’s scaring people! This is killing me!”

  Azar said Messonnier’s only failing was getting out in front of the president in explaining it to the public.

  “What she said is true and we’re actually planning to meet with you at five p.m. the day you get back to go through all of this,” Azar said.

  “You gotta keep her away from the microphone,” Trump ordered. “You gotta get out there and clear this up. Get the market calm again.”

  Azar tried to sound agreeable and understanding, having learned that when Trump was in a true frenzy, it was better to absorb his rage rather than argue. He said he had a press briefing of his own scheduled within the next hour or so.

  “We’ll get this clarified,” Azar said.

  Also on the flight home, Melania Trump tried to talk some sense into her husband. “You have to take this more seriously,” the first lady told the president. “This is going to be a big problem and you need to get out in front of it. . . . You can’t be telling people it’s just going to go away, that you have it handled, because we don’t and you need to stop.”

  Concerned that he might not listen to her, Melania Trump then enlisted former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, an old friend of the president’s, to help reinforce her message with him. When Christie called him, Trump casually dismissed him. “You sound just like Melania,” Trump told Christie. “You two worry too much.”

  The morning of February 26, Trump took to Twitter to accuse the media and Democrats of exaggerating the coronavirus threat, though he misspelled the name of the virus. “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape! @CDCgov . . .”