Notorious for his sins of the flesh, Trump the politician had tried to demonstrate some Christian bona fides before. Early in the campaign, when asked if he sought God’s forgiveness, he had clumsily referenced Communion, saying, “When I drink my little wine—which is about the only wine I drink—and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed.” With Pence at his side, Trump could leap to the head of the Sunday school class.
After the audience applauded, Pence said he was certain of victory. “I truly do believe that at particular moments in the life of this nation, the American people have risen up to demand government as good as our people, and this is such a time. The American people are rising up, and they will elect this good man, and we will make America great again together.”
* * *
On Election Day, November 8, 2016, Mike Pence awoke in Indianapolis at the governor’s mansion and went for a bike ride with Karen. They wore gym clothes and helmets. After the ride, they spent time in the mansion, emerging just before noon to cross the street to vote at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, where Karen joked, “You got my vote.” Mike said he felt “humbled” by the experience of voting. Later in the day, he, Karen, and some family members flew to New York to await the election returns at the Hilton Midtown Hotel. The tide turned in favor of the Republicans early in the evening, but Trump waited to speak until Hillary Clinton’s concession and phone call well after midnight. He stood before supporters at around 3:00 A.M. and delivered a speech designed to sound duly presidential. “Now it’s time to bind the wounds of division,” Trump read. “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”
Pence and his family entourage cheered, and Mike went around to embrace each of them. Pence and family left the celebration before dawn on November 9. In the hours to come, he would appear to be much calmer and more confident than the president-elect. Chris Christie, previously named chairman of the transition, had been gathering names and résumés for several months. Now that the dream was a reality, Trump would have to work quickly to assemble a government, but neither he nor Christie seemed ready to make many decisions.
10
RUSSIANS, WHAT RUSSIANS?
The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.
—Proverbs 12:22
Two days after the election, two elected officials of special note separately warned President-elect Donald J. Trump against bringing Lieutenant General Michael Flynn into the new administration. The lesser of them was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the head of Trump’s transition team, who assumed he was in line for a plum position. Christie had been suspicious of Flynn’s emotionally charged behavior during the campaign. When he met with Trump for ninety minutes on November 10 at Trump Tower, he had committed the cardinal sin of telling Trump what Trump didn’t want to hear. “If I were president-elect of the United States, I wouldn’t let General Flynn into the White House, let alone give him a job,” Christie said.1
Flynn and Christie had a history of conflict. In August, both men had attended one of the first intelligence briefings held for Trump after he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. NBC News reported, citing six sources, that after Flynn repeatedly interrupted the intelligence briefers, Christie told him to shut up and “calm down.” Publicly, Christie and Flynn denied that had ever happened, but Christie said he made it clear that “General Flynn and I didn’t see eye to eye. I didn’t think that he was someone who would bring benefit to the president or to the administration.”2
The other government official who warned the president-elect about Flynn was President Barack Obama, who had been shocked by Trump’s victory but who sought, in his last weeks in office, to respond to foreign intervention in the election. On November 10, Obama warned President-elect Trump against bringing Flynn into the administration, citing, among other things, his divisive performance as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Unlike Trump, Obama actually read his daily intelligence briefs and would have had additional information about Flynn, his work on behalf of the Turkish government, and his contact with Russia. Mike Pence also should have seen intelligence reports about Flynn’s activities. There is no record, however, that he expressed any concern about Flynn to Trump or anyone else.
Pence’s attitude had been consistent from the moment Trump had chosen him as his running mate. “He was all in.” This attitude shone during the transition and in the early days of the Trump administration as Trump veered from lie to lie and crisis to crisis and Pence remained loyal. Pence seemed willing to do anything to maintain his position and stay in the good graces of this new president, Donald J. Trump. But he also maneuvered himself out of the line of fire at key moments. Was it good fortune that he happened to be in Indiana or traveling abroad when controversy arose? Or was he trying to avoid getting dirtied by Trump so he could assume the role of president if necessary? Was this God’s plan? Had he been chosen to serve as president-in-waiting?
In the matter of Michael Flynn, Trump heard both Obama and Christie and disregarded their advice. Trump loved having top military men around him and had admired Flynn ever since they met in 2015. Flynn had been advising several other Republican candidates during the primary season but settled happily with Trump. “I think his view of the world and his view of where America was and where it needed to be,” Flynn said in recalling his first meeting with Trump. “I got the impression this was not a guy who was worried about Donald Trump but a guy worried about the country. I don’t think people can BS me that easily, and I was sort of looking for that. I found him to be in line with what I believed.”3
Within a day of the warnings, on Armistice Day, Christie was fired from the transition team. With no prospects for the future, all that was left was to return to New Jersey for the last few weeks of his term as governor. Most galling of all for Christie, who had such high hopes for himself after the election, was that he was replaced by Mike Pence. Trump announced Pence was taking over the role of transition chairman with Flynn remaining as one of the transition deputies. Trump’s choice was an early sign of Pence’s future status in the administration. He was now tasked with putting together a cabinet and recommending other top officials in the new government.
In Washington, as well as New Jersey, Christie’s departure was blamed, in part, on his other mighty antagonist in the incoming administration: Jared Kushner. Neither Christie nor Pence ever talked about how the transfer of responsibilities was handled. However, reporters would learn that the new transition team erased almost everything Christie had done. They disposed of his files on potential job candidates and, in a foreshadowing of White House chaos to come, summarily fired Christie’s top transition aides. Their departure meant that no one could pass along certain concerns about Flynn. If Christie had warned Pence about Flynn during the campaign or on his way out the door at the transition office, Pence gave no sign that he was concerned. At this stage in their relationship, he was not going to challenge Trump.
On November 17, one week after he heard Obama’s warning about Flynn, Trump appointed him national security advisor. Flynn, said Trump, “is one of the country’s foremost experts on military and intelligence matters.” With Flynn “by my side,” Trump pledged they would “work to defeat radical Islamic terrorism, navigate geopolitical challenges, and keep Americans safe at home and abroad.”
Despite Trump’s praise of Flynn, the general’s record during the campaign had been mixed at best. Flynn had been charged with anti-Semitism, criticized as an Islamophobe, outed as having hidden ties to Russia and Turkey, to name a few, and he had a penchant for espousing and retweeting wing-nut conspiracy theories. Unless he had been sequestered by his staff throughout the campaign and transition, Pence must have noticed the controversies. However he did not appear to care much about the danger Flynn posed to the ne
w administration. This attitude aligned with Pence’s behavior throughout the campaign, when he serenely looked past one controversy after another. If Trump issued an offensive tweet or off-the-cuff slur, Pence responded with a shrug, said his boss was joking, or insisted that Trump had not made the statement in the first place. For example, he flatly denied that Trump had called for shutting down the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (he had) and argued that Trump had not said more nations should obtain nuclear weapons (he did). Pence was either playing to an audience of one (Trump himself) or had drunk the same Kool-Aid that gave him the temerity to deny the very Trump statements that had been broadcast around the world and were easily available on the internet. Both declarations had shocked many Republicans, let alone Democrats and foreign allies, who were not yet accustomed to Trump’s unhinged tweet storms.4
* * *
A day after Flynn’s designation as national security advisor, Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote to Pence as head of the Trump transition about an obvious conflict of interest for Flynn, whose attorney had acknowledged by now that Flynn was a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government. Cummings wrote:
Recent reports have revealed that Lt. Gen. Flynn was receiving classified briefings during the presidential campaign while his consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, Inc. was being paid to lobby the U.S. Government on behalf of a foreign government’s interests.
Flynn had not registered as a foreign agent as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and could be subject to criminal charges. Responding to the reported breach, Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelley, had a concise answer when asked whether Flynn’s work for Turkey was based on his close connection to Trump. “I hope so.”
In his letter, Cummings cited information related to Michael Isikoff’s interview with Flynn at the Republican National Convention about his 2015 speech in Moscow and Flynn’s attendance at the celebratory dinner seated next to Vladimir Putin. During the visit, Cummings wrote to Pence, “Lt. Gen. Flynn gave a speech that was highly critical of the United States.” Pence would say later that he didn’t remember the letter from Cummings and maintained he had no knowledge of Flynn’s connections to Russia or Turkey. Yet the warning had been received at his office. Cummings made public a reply from the transition office that said, “We will review your letter carefully.”
Days later, Pence could not avoid dealing with another Flynn-related problem. The controversy began when Michael G. Flynn, Flynn’s son, reiterated his interest in a conspiracy theory that apparently originated within a white supremacy organization. The conspiracy nuts believed that Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager, John Podesta, and other Democrats were running a Satanic child abduction, pedophilia, and sex ring, based on the nonexistent basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in northwest Washington. Although fringe media figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars spread the conspiracy theory around the world, reporters at The New York Times and other media outlets debunked the story as a baseless hoax. The debunking did not stop Flynn Jr. when working with his father on the Trump transition effort from promoting the fakery, which was now dubbed “Pizzagate.” Remarkably, the senior Flynn helped spread the bizarre conspiracy theory by tweeting inferences about Hillary Clinton and the other unfounded claims linking her to the sexual abuse of children. Flynn wrote:
U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails:
Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc … MUST READ!
The Flynns’ actions came as sober men and women of all political stripes were calling for restraint when it came to online commentary and inflammatory rhetoric. But here were key members of the Trump team—the future national security advisor and his son—transmitting unhinged, divisive, and libelous stories. Viewed by some as merely provocative speech, this rumormongering led to threats against the pizza restaurant and its owner, James Alefantis, who had been besieged by threatening messages and web postings. Finally, on December 4, Edgar Maddison Welch, a deluded twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina, drove to the Comet Ping Pong restaurant on what he considered a divine mission to “rescue” the reported sex slaves. He entered the restaurant and fired three shots with an automatic rifle. No one was injured; Welch surrendered to police and was arrested. Eventually, he pleaded guilty, apologized for being reckless—and gullible—and was sentenced to four years in prison. Alefantis was relieved that no one was hurt, but the nightmare was not over. “This guy’s going to jail,” he said, but “InfoWars [Alex Jones’s online radio outlet] continues to push this conspiracy, as do many others.”5
Two days after the shooting incident at Comet Ping Pong, the vice president elect appeared on the MSNBC television program Morning Joe and was questioned about the younger Flynn’s relationship to the transition. All he would say was that the young man was no longer employed by the Trump transition team. “Well, General Flynn’s son has no involvement in the transition whatsoever,” he said. For emphasis, he repeated himself: “He has no involvement in the transition whatsoever.”
Later in the day on CNN, Pence struggled to respond to new information about previous efforts to obtain a security clearance for the younger Flynn, which would have authorized his access to classified information. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked whether Pence knew that the Trump team had sought the clearance. Pence did not answer directly and tried again to minimize the younger Flynn’s role in the transition, saying he had only pitched in with some scheduling and administrative work for his father. Pence’s exchange with Tapper was one more case of a Pence promise to be clear, followed by a fog of words.
PENCE: Look, all—all of our families want to be helpful. And four weeks to the day from Election Day, there’s been an awful lot of work to do. But—but—but Mike Flynn Jr. is no longer associated with General Flynn’s efforts or with the transition team.
TAPPER: You’re downplaying his role, but you must be aware that the transition team put in for a security clearance. For Michael G. Flynn, the son …
PENCE: I think that’s the appropriate decision for us to move forward, avoid any further distraction and I’m very confident as we continue to build this team …
Instead of rejecting the conspiracy-mongering of Flynn and his son, Pence brushed off the entire matter and took up the age-old practice of media-bashing. However, he made one telling admission. He said he worked “very closely” with General Flynn as one would have imagined, since they were directing the transition together. If this were true, however, why had Pence not condemned the conspiracy hoax or replied fully to the questions sent by Cummings on November 18 about Flynn’s lobbying contract with Turkey and Russia contacts? Weeks later, once Flynn had been outed for further contacts with Russians, Pence changed his characterization of his relationship with Flynn. His staff said Flynn and Pence had only occasional contact during the campaign and transition and did not work closely.
The Comet Ping Pong story was only one of the controversies that contributed to the growing sense that social media and the internet had played an outsized role in the presidential campaign. By early December, it was clear that Russia had meddled in the election, though not yet clear how much and with whom. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, raised an early alarm. “Stories also have circulated about Russian and other foreign actors involved in the production of fake news, as well as collaboration between Russian (and other foreign) and American leaders and movements regarding common political agendas,” he wrote. “What was the full scope of these activities? Did any of these actions influence the election outcome? I don’t know, but we need to know.”6 News outlets reported, meanwhile, that RT had more viewers on YouTube than did CNN’s YouTube channel. A Washington Post report, among others, reminded that Flynn was paid by Russia’s RT network a year earlier and had compared the Russian government broadcaster to CNN.
* * *
Pence showed no concern or anxiety about such matters. As
Christmas 2016 approached, he prepared for a two-week vacation back home in Indiana. From the outside, the break appeared to be ill-timed. By all accounts, the transition—which essentially started over after Christie left—was far behind schedule in naming the hundreds of men and women who would be needed to staff the top echelon of the incoming Trump administration. The inauguration was less than a month away. Concern about Russian interference was growing. Yet Mike Pence opted to leave town; he and Karen went home with their family to Indiana. Flynn, meanwhile, also left town for a Caribbean vacation.
Happy to be back, Pence returned to his duties as governor of Indiana. On December 21, he went to the Wheeler Mission Ministries, a shelter for the homeless in Indianapolis. With cameras recording the action, he donned an apron and a blue Wheeler baseball cap and stepped behind the steel table where workers filled trays with holiday foods. Pence put trays into the hands of the men and patted shoulders. When one addressed him as “Mr. Vice President,” Pence replied, “It’s Mike to you.”
After the meal was served, Pence walked along on the periphery of the lunch tables as Secret Service agents, aides, and even a chef looked on. Pence shook hands and spoke with a few of the men who men stood up. He then approached the camera. “I thought it was important to continue the tradition I’ve had throughout my life of stopping by and giving encouragement to ministries like this,” Pence said. “I know that Hoosiers in big cities and small towns are taking time to reach out this week to the less fortunate.”
As for the larger task ahead of him, Pence said there was much work to do. “I’m very humbled by the opportunity we’ve been presented to serve our nation.”
The Shadow President Page 23