I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
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Trump had long believed that previous Democratic presidents had used the Justice Department to advance their political goals and that he was well within his rights to do the same. Trump had complained bitterly whenever Bill Barr had told him there was no rationale for investigating Obama or indicting James Comey, saying, “These guys, you know if the shoe was on the other foot . . .” So when Giuliani tantalizingly claimed he had smoking-gun emails that linked Biden to his son’s foreign profiteering, Trump called Barr sometime in mid-October wanting to discuss Giuliani’s “evidence.”
Barr had already been down this road with the president and Giuliani and found the idea of returning to it exhausting. In January 2020, at the president’s urging, Barr had agreed to have the Justice Department receive—and vet—information Giuliani said he had gathered about Hunter’s lucrative role in Burisma and a possible connection to Joe Biden. At the outset, Barr was somewhat guarded about anything Giuliani delivered. The attorney general blamed Trump’s lawyer-turned-opposition-researcher for getting the president impeached. After all, it had been Giuliani’s promises of getting “dirt” on Biden that had embroiled Trump in his pressure campaign on Ukraine’s new president.
Still, Barr had been willing to consider that some small portion of what Trump and Giuliani claimed in January 2020 could be real. One of Giuliani’s sources was someone the FBI itself had relied on in the past. So Barr tapped the Republican U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, Scott Brady, to take in Giuliani’s leads and documents, and to figure out whether they stood up. It wasn’t an investigation, but a vetting.
Back in February, Lindsey Graham had revealed publicly that the Justice Department had set up a process by which Giuliani could submit information. Barr then confirmed that to reporters, arguing that the Justice Department had an “obligation to have an open door to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant.” But Barr also said he cautioned Graham that the department had to be circumspect. “We have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine,” Barr said he counseled the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine. There are a lot of crosscurrents, and we can’t take anything we receive from the Ukraine at face value.”
Barr’s instincts had been right. While some agents in the FBI believed Brady’s assignment was strictly a political mission, it didn’t produce any headlines or charges. After reviewing the material, Giuliani’s great “case” fell apart. By summer, the Justice Department had concluded none of it could be corroborated or had any basis in real events. “It was nearly all bullshit,” said one former senior law enforcement official.
Giuliani was damaged goods in Barr’s eyes for other reasons, too. The attorney general and his deputies had already been given the same defensive briefing that White House officials had received earlier in the year, with the intelligence community warning that Giuliani was being worked and fed some disinformation by a Russian intelligence asset, Andriy Derkach. In October, Giuliani was expecting information from Derkach to figure prominently in the Trump-Biden debate, which he hoped would highlight the ongoing probe into alleged Biden family corruption.
Barr told aides he felt fairly certain that Giuliani had not hit upon something new regarding Hunter that was worth probing. Even if Giuliani had, Trump did not understand that federal criminal investigations were not exactly the all-powerful political weapons he wished them to be. Investigations had a high hurdle to establish a crime, took a long time to complete, and were conducted largely in secret.
But Barr had yet another reason to be tense. He told trusted aides he had assiduously avoided telling Trump anything about an ongoing federal investigation looking into Hunter’s finances. The U.S. attorney in Delaware had been probing Biden’s son’s deals with Chinese officials. After months of probing, prosecutors found evidence suggesting that Hunter had received income that he did not report to the IRS. During the active campaign, however, the federal prosecutors in Delaware put their tax probe of the Democratic nominee’s son on ice, avoiding steps that could become public and potentially taint the election. Barr had not told the president any of that.
During his October call with Barr, Trump yet again referenced his hope of finally punishing the enemies that ate at him the most: Comey and others at the FBI whom Trump believed had set him up in 2016 and tried to undermine his presidency. When Trump asked if the Justice Department would ever prosecute his enemies, Barr snapped, saying something to the effect of: “I told you. There’s nothing there.” Trump did not appreciate Barr’s harsh tone. He got off the phone quickly. The president and his longtime Cabinet member would not speak again before the election.
On October 21, the day before the final debate, Giuliani’s reputation and credibility took yet another blow. The formerly revered mayor of New York, federal prosecutor, and presidential candidate was punked in Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodic movie Borat 2. In the film, Giuliani is approached and flattered by a pretty young woman pretending to be a television journalist for a conservative news site, Patriots Report. During the fake interview, which took place in a hotel suite, she fawns over Giuliani. The scene culminates with Giuliani lying on the bed, placing his hands inside his pants, and the actress pretending to flee in shock at Giuliani’s romantic overtures.
Baron Cohen, who made a career punking public figures, including Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and Ted Koppel, had sought from the beginning of his Borat sequel to nab Giuliani. Not only had he succeeded, but the film’s release had coincided with Giuliani’s push for an October surprise, generating huge buzz for the film and heightening the embarrassment for the president’s key advocate. Giuliani dismissed the scene as a setup, but did not directly deny the events that were filmed, including him patting the bottom of the actress while he lay back on the hotel bed. Predictably, he blamed Trump’s foes for the whole incident. “This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family,” Giuliani tweeted on October 21.
Giuliani added, “We are preparing much bigger dumps off of the hard drive from hell, of which Joe Biden will be unable to defend or hide from. I have the receipts.”
There were no further dumps. If Giuliani had receipts, he never showed them.
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Trump headed into his final debate angry. He was mad at the news media for continuing to intensively cover the ravages of the pandemic. The country’s coronavirus death toll continued to climb, above two hundred thousand, and infection numbers soared, especially in the Midwest and Great Plains, where cooler fall temperatures had been forcing people indoors. Trump believed the media were conspiring to sabotage his reelection chances by shining their spotlights on the contagion’s spread, despite the fact that the pandemic was the globally dominant news story.
At a rally October 21 in Gastonia, North Carolina, Trump let loose. “That pandemic is rounding the corner. They hate it when I say it,” the president proclaimed.
Then, using his derisive nickname for MSNBC to falsely suggest that the cable news network was in bed with the Democratic National Committee, Trump said, “You know you turn onto this MSDNC and fake news CNN, all you hear is, ‘COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.’ That’s all they put on, because they want to scare the hell out of everyone.”
The next day, as Trump flew to Nashville for the debate, which was held on the campus of Belmont University, his aides discussed another New York Post story about Hunter Biden. The story, which was published on October 16, included a text message exchange between Hunter and his father from February 24, 2019, when Hunter was at a rehabilitation facility for his drug abuse and Joe was preparing to announce his campaign for president. Joe wrote to Hunter, “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad.”
Farah warned campaign advisers against the president using the intimate text messag
es to suggest there was some corrupt financial relationship between Biden and his troubled son. She thought bringing the messages up on a presidential debate stage was a low blow and could backfire on Trump.
“Are you kidding me?” Farah told other aides. “We have an addiction crisis in the country. All that shows is Joe Biden is a good father and loves his son.”
On the ground in Nashville that evening, shortly before the debate began, Trump orchestrated a stunt designed to rattle Biden and ensure news coverage of it centered on his son. In a move reminiscent of inviting several women who had accused former president Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to the second debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump trotted out Bobulinski, the former business associate of Hunter, to hold a news conference.
The Bobulinski stunt was a flop. Biden did not appear rattled when the debate began. And when it concluded, there were two main takeaways. This clash had been far calmer than the first debate, in part because of the smooth moderation of NBC’s Kristen Welker and new rules that muted the candidates’ microphones when they were not answering a question. The two candidates had had starkly divergent stances on the pandemic. Trump was all happy talk, claiming the virus was disappearing and the country was opening, while Biden warned of a “dark winter” to come and called for more aggressive action to control the contagion.
Trump did attack Biden over his son Hunter—though he did not quote the “I love you” text messages—and it didn’t seem to move the needle. The election was just eleven days away. The race was static. It was Biden’s to lose.
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The night of October 24, White House officials confirmed that a new coronavirus outbreak had infected five of Pence’s advisers and aides. The outbreak was suspected to have originated with Marty Obst, one of Pence’s top outside political advisers, who tested positive after traveling to campaign events earlier that week with the vice president and his staff and security entourage. On October 24, Short tested positive, as did Zach Bauer, the vice president’s personal aide, or body man. Both Short and Bauer had been in close contact with Obst on Air Force Two. Two other aides in Pence’s office also tested positive. Obst, Short, and Bauer were in close contact with the vice president, but officials said Pence and his wife, Karen, continually tested negative for the virus and would keep up their busy schedule of campaign travel.
Meadows had sought to keep the news secret. Some in the vice president’s office suggested that the White House Medical Unit release a statement about Short’s diagnosis. Short and others on Pence’s staff thought the news would be better received from White House doctors because they could explain why the vice president was authorized to continue campaigning. But Meadows scuttled that idea and ordered the White House Medical Unit to stand down, threatening to punish the doctors if they released a statement about Short. Trump’s chief of staff stressed the White House had no obligation to report to the public the health conditions of members of the staff. More important, though, Meadows and some other White House aides did not want attention on the pandemic in the home stretch of the campaign. Kellyanne Conway strongly disagreed. She counseled Short to do what she had done less than a month earlier, to announce publicly that he had tested positive for COVID. As senior White House officials who appeared regularly on television, they were public people and should be transparent.
“Marc, you’ve got a big life behind you and a big life ahead of you,” Conway said. “You’ve got to be honest. You’re chief of staff to the vice president. You have to tell people.”
Conway didn’t have to do much convincing. Short already had decided to disclose his diagnosis. Later that night, Pence’s spokesman, Devin O’Malley, released a statement to reporters announcing Short’s positive test result and that he was self-isolating and had begun contact tracing.
The next morning, October 25, Meadows made an extraordinary admission that the administration had effectively given up on trying to slow the spread of the virus. “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said on CNN. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigations.”
Biden seized on the comment to bolster his argument that the Trump administration had failed in its pandemic response. “This wasn’t a slip by Meadows; it was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away,” Biden said. “It hasn’t, and it won’t.”
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Back in Washington, a bizarre lack of process unfolded in the final days of October. As Mark Esper was getting ready to fly back from the Mideast late on the night of October 28, he was alerted by Mark Milley that an American citizen and son of a missionary working in Niger had been kidnapped by militia forces from neighboring Nigeria who were demanding a $1 million ransom. Esper and Milley agreed that U.S. hostage negotiators should try to secure the release of the man, Philip Walton, but that they would put Special Forces units on standby in case it turned into a rescue mission and they had to be inserted rapidly into the region. By the time Esper landed back in Washington in the early hours of October 30, U.S. officials had received worrisome intelligence: the militia leaders might be planning to sell Walton to a terrorist group.
“People were nervous,” recalled one senior military adviser. “It looked like the soft-core group might trade him to the hard-core group.”
At 7:30 a.m. at his Pentagon office that day, Esper got briefed on the situation and was alarmed to learn the president had already green-lit the Special Forces rescue for Walton. Presidents typically received extensive briefings on missions and crises of this magnitude. Esper knew Mike Pompeo was overseas and Robert O’Brien also was out of town, so he questioned who was presenting this very serious set of circumstances and decision options to Trump. To Esper’s chagrin, he discovered one key person informing the president had been Kash Patel, a counterterrorism official who sometimes held himself as if he were the national security adviser. In a normal process for something this serious, Meadows should have been calling Esper, Pompeo, and CIA director Gina Haspel to get their feedback. The normal process had been rushed and short-circuited.
Esper wasn’t worried about SEAL Team 6 conducting an impeccable extraction. But he was worried about launching a life-or-death mission without knowing whether this Special Forces rescue—just days before the election—was justified and made sense. He couldn’t call the White House and trust anything Patel said. He didn’t know that O’Brien had participated in briefing the president on the kidnapping and had urged moving fast. So Esper began furiously dialing all the “adults” he did trust—Pompeo, Barr, Haspel, and Chris Wray—so he could find out what they knew about the status on the ground in Nigeria. He reached Wray.
“I hear you are negotiating, and I want to hear how negotiations are going before I send my boys in,” Esper told the FBI director. Wray confirmed the talks had gone nowhere and there were worries about what the kidnappers might do next.
For Esper, Wray’s assessment was the key. Now he felt on solid ground in agreeing to launch the special operators. But then came a major glitch, thanks to another breakdown somewhere in the White House process. Patel had insisted the countries into which the U.S. forces would have to fly to stage the operation and then conduct the rescue—Niger and Nigeria—had been notified and had approved of the plan. It was not Patel’s job responsibility to secure their approval, although senior officials said they were assured by him that this step had been taken. Patel declined to discuss the episode.
As the operators were en route, they had to pause midmission when U.S. military and State Department officials learned Patel had been mistaken. Nigeria had not been notified. The mission had to be paused until the Nigerian government signed off. American forces had come very close to a technical invasion of a foreign country.
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In the final week of campaigning, Biden stuck to his familiar if unimaginative script about the pandemic’s dangers, Trump’s failures, and the promise to heal a broken nation. The likable yet uninspiring Biden was riding high from the fiery boost he had received from Obama, who had upped the ante by eviscerating Trump at an October 27 rally in Orlando.
“What’s his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID,” Obama had said. “He said this at one of his rallies: ‘COVID, COVID, COVID.’ He’s complaining. He’s jealous of COVID’s media coverage.”
Referring to the two coronavirus outbreaks in the White House over the past month, Obama had said, “I lived in the White House for a while. You know, it’s a controlled environment. You can take some preventative measures in the White House to avoid getting sick. Except this guy can’t seem to do it. He’s turned the White House into a hot zone.”
Obama had reminded voters of Trump’s recent retweet spreading a false conspiracy theory about Osama bin Laden’s assassination, which occurred in 2011 on Obama’s order.