The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  The resort, on the Firth of Clyde, was huge, and many of us gathered outside to enjoy the view, until someone flying an ultralight vehicle, more like a bicycle with wings attached to it (a Greenpeace demonstrator, as we learned later), came peddling by flying a banner calling Trump “below par.” The Secret Service hustled Trump inside, along with everyone else except Kelly and me, who for some reason stayed outside to watch as this ungainly contraption flew ever closer. The Service finally decided Kelly and I should go inside as well. It was quite a breach of security, but fortunately only entertainment.

  We stayed at Turnberry until Sunday, Trump played golf, and we had several calls with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The key subject was Netanyahu’s recent meeting with Putin, and particularly what they had discussed about Syria. As he had implied in his earlier meeting with me, Putin told Netanyahu that Iran had to leave Syria, saying that he shared our goal, but that Assad had problems that precluded Putin from getting him to press the Iranians; Assad was, of course, relying on Iranian forces to make progress in Idlib against the Syrian Opposition and numerous terrorist groups. Dealing with Idlib was one thing, but there was no excuse for Assad to import weapons systems that could only be used to threaten Israel. Putin said he understood, but couldn’t make any promises. Israel rightly believed the United States was also concerned about Iran’s continuing presence in Syria, which Putin also said he understood even if disagreed with it. Netanyahu pressed Putin for a “permanent border” on the Golan Heights, a long-standing Israeli objective, with Syria on one side and Israel on the other, meaning, to me, the elimination of the UN disengagement force and areas of separation, and returning to a “normal” border situation. Israel had long since annexed the Golan Heights and wanted that reality regularized, so normalizing the border situation would be a significant step. I was doubtful that Trump would raise this particular issue with Putin, involving as it did an issue at a level of specificity Trump had not previously encountered.

  Air Force One left Prestwick Airport midafternoon on Sunday, July 15, for Helsinki. Trump was watching a World Cup soccer match in Moscow as I tried to brief him on the arms-control issues we might discuss with Putin. I explained why Obama’s New START agreement, which Trump had criticized during the 2016 campaign, was a disaster and definitely not something we should extend for another five years, which Moscow wanted to do. I explained that Senate Republicans had voted against the treaty in 2010 by a 26–13 margin, which I hoped would be convincing to Trump. We also talked about the INF Treaty (and why I wanted to leave it) and our national missile-defense program (which I said we should not negotiate with the Russians), but I didn’t get far. As we talked, while Trump watched the World Cup, he said of Mattis, “He’s a liberal Democrat, you know that, don’t you?” Trump asked if I knew Mark Milley, then Army Chief of Staff, which was interesting because Milley was a “candidate” to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Dunford’s term expired in September 2019. It was widely believed in the Pentagon that Mattis was determined to block Milley. I told Trump he should get at least three names from the Defense Department for all important military command and staff positions. The practice when I arrived was for Mattis to send over one name for each position, which I thought reflected a significant decline in civilian control over the military, an issue I pursued throughout my tenure as National Security Advisor with only mixed success.

  Trump and I also discussed how to handle the issue of election meddling with Putin, especially now that Mueller’s indictments of the GRU agents were public. Since we had no extradition treaty with Russia, and Russia’s “constitution” prohibited extraditions anyway, the odds these defendants would be handed over were infinitesimal. Accordingly, I advised against demanding that the Russians do so, as many Democrats and Republicans were suggesting. Asking for something we knew we couldn’t get made us look impotent. Instead, I suggested Trump say, “I’d love to have them come to the United States to prove their innocence,” which he seemed to like. “You should get credit for this,” said Trump. He wanted to say that if Russian hacking in 2016 was so serious, Obama should have done more about it, which was entirely true.

  I gave Trump a paper I had asked the White House Counsel’s office to draft, laying out our objections to Russian election meddling. Trump made several changes to it, reflecting his general unease with the subject. It was precisely to deal with that unease that I asked for the paper. Trump could make the point of our intense opposition to election interference by handing Putin the paper, obviating the need for a long conversation. Ultimately, Trump decided not to use the document. He wanted me to raise election interference, which I said I would do in the scheduled working lunch, but obviously I wouldn’t be in the one-on-one with Putin he wanted so much.

  Helsinki

  We landed in Helsinki and drove to the Kalastajatorppa Hotel (go ahead, try pronouncing it). On Monday morning, I walked through the tunnel to the hotel’s guesthouse to brief Trump for his breakfast with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. I had first walked through this tunnel in September 1990 with Jim Baker, to help prepare George H. W. Bush for his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, after Saddam Hussein’s August invasion of Kuwait. During the day, Finnish television ran endless footage of the Bush-Gorbachev summit, probably the last time US and Soviet/Russian leaders met in Helsinki. I was one of the few people in Trump’s entourage who even remembered that summit, let alone had attended it. In our brief preparatory meeting, Trump mostly complained about Jeff Sessions for his latest transgression, saying he had “lost his mind.” The substantive discussion we did have centered on Russian election meddling. Trump remained, as he had been from the beginning, unwilling or unable to admit any Russian meddling because he believed doing so would undercut the legitimacy of his election and the narrative of the witch hunt against him.

  Off we went at nine thirty a.m. to the nearby Mantyniemi compound, home of Finland’s President, for breakfast. Although we covered a number of topics, Niinisto wanted to make three points on Russia, the first being how to deal with Putin. Niinisto reminded Trump that Putin was a fighter, and Trump should therefore hit back if attacked. Second, Niinisto stressed the importance of respecting Putin, and that if trust were established, he might be more discrete. Finally, again as if preparing for a boxing match, Niinisto warned Trump never to provide an opening or give even one inch. He ended his pep talk with a Finnish saying, “The Cossacks take everything that’s loose.” Niinisto said Finland had an army of 280,000, if everyone was called up,12 to make it clear the price would be high if they were invaded. Trump asked if Finland wanted to join NATO, and Niinisto gave the complicated Finnish answer, not saying yes or no, but leaving the door open. Niinisto went back to his pep talk, saying Putin was not stupid and wouldn’t attack NATO countries. While Putin had made a mistake in engendering conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas, he didn’t believe Putin would give back Crimea. Trump blamed Obama, and promised not to accept such behavior, to my immense relief, underscoring that Putin would not have so acted had he been President at the time.

  Back at the Kalastajatorppa, we had word that Putin’s plane was late departing Moscow, following his pattern of making his guests wait. I hoped Trump would be irritated enough by this that he would be tougher on Putin than otherwise. We did consider canceling the meeting entirely if Putin were late enough, and we decided that in any event, we would make Putin wait for a while in Finland’s presidential palace (where the summit was to be held, as in 1990) once he did arrive.

  We sweated out a stunningly long, just-under-two-hour one-on-one meeting. Trump emerged at about four fifteen and briefed Kelly, Pompeo, Huntsman, and me. Most of the conversation was on Syria, with particular emphasis on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction (which Russia wanted us and the West generally to fund), and getting Iran out. Trump said Putin spent a lot of time talking, and he listened, which was a switch. In fact, the US interpreter told Fiona Hill and Joe Wang later that Putin had talked for 90 percent of the time
(excluding translation); she also said Trump had told her not to take any notes, so she could only debrief us from her unaided memory. It was clear, said Trump, that Putin “wants out” of Syria, and that he liked Netanyahu. Trump also said Putin didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about our leaving the Iran nuclear deal, although he did say Russia would stay in. On China trade issues, Putin commented on the tough US stance, and Trump had replied that he had no choice. Putin wanted the US to do more business in Russia, noting that the EU did twenty times more than America. The key point was there were no agreements on anything, no concessions, no real change in substantive foreign policy. I was delighted. And relieved. No successes, but that didn’t trouble me at all, since I had long seen this entire summit as one massive exercise in damage control.

  Then we came to election meddling, which Trump said he raised first. Unfortunately, Putin had a curveball ready, offering to try in Russia the just-indicted GRU agents (how thoughtful), under an unspecified treaty, saying further he would let Mueller’s investigators come in to do their work, so long as there was reciprocity with respect to Bill Browder, a businessman whose lawyer in Russia, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested and killed by the Putin regime. Browder’s grandfather Earl Browder had been General Secretary of the US Communist Party for many years in the 1930s and ’40s, marrying a Soviet citizen. The capitalist grandson, now a British citizen, had done well financially in Russia, but Magnitsky’s murder and the actions taken against his investments moved him to launch an international campaign against Moscow. He persuaded Congress to pass a law that enabled the US to sanction Russian human-rights violators; several other countries followed suit. The way Putin saw it, Browder had given Hillary Clinton’s campaign, foundation, and other parts of the Clinton galactic empire some $400 million that he had basically stolen from Russia, which got Trump’s attention. It was all hot air, but Trump was very excited about it. I tried to deflate his enthusiasm, at least until I could find out more about the treaty Putin had raised. This seemed like a trap if there ever was one. We then headed to the working lunch, now more like an early dinner.

  Trump asked Putin to describe the one-on-one, and Putin said Trump had first raised the election-interference issue, and then said he hoped we could provide a common explanation of the matter (whatever that meant). Putin said we should all promise no more cyberattacks. Sure, that’ll work. He followed with what they had said on Ukraine, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, with a few comments by Trump, and it all seemed uneventful, much like Trump had described it earlier. They also touched on arms control, but only superficially. I decided to let that last issue lie, worried it was simply risking problems to reopen it. Trump asked if anyone had any questions, so I asked Putin to expand on the 1974 Syria-Israel border question, to see if we could learn more on what he had said to Netanyahu. Putin made clear he was talking only about stiffening enforcement of the disengagement lines, not real “borders.” I also asked about Syrian humanitarian aid and reconstruction, because I was sure the more Putin said about how much aid was necessary, the less interested Trump would be. What both of them really wanted to discuss was increasing US trade and investment in Russia, a conversation that lasted a surprisingly long time given there was so little to say, with so few US businesses really eager to dive into the Russian political and economic morass.

  After the lunch broke, we walked to the Trump-Putin press conference, which started about six p.m.13 As Kelly observed to me at some point, there were now two military aides in the room, each carrying his country’s nuclear football. Putin read a prepared statement, written well before the meeting, but he did say publicly that Trump had raised the election-meddling issue first, answering “the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including the election process,” as he had in my earlier meeting with him. Fiona Hill, a Russian speaker, noted this choice of words, because obviously if the meddling had been done by a “nongovernmental organization” or a “corporation” (not that there were many truly independent versions of either in Russia), one could say with a modestly straight face that it was not “the Russian state” that had acted. We should have done more to highlight that point, but, once again, that would have required explicitly agreeing there was meddling in the first place. Trump read his anodyne statement, and the press questions started. Putin at one point mentioned that Trump had stood by the well-known US position that the annexation of Crimea was illegal, but that got lost in the shuffle.

  I thought we might actually be okay, for a while. A US reporter asked Putin why Americans should believe his denials of interference in our 2016 election, and Putin answered, “Where do you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him? He defends the interests of the United States of America, and I do defend the interests of the Russian Federation… Can you name a single fact that would definitively prove the collusion? This is utter nonsense.” Then, after showing more knowledge about Mueller’s recent indictments than might have been prudent, Putin raised the 1999 Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. Putin misnamed it (or it was mistranslated) during the press conference, although we had concluded by then this must have been what he had raised in his one-on-one with Trump. Putin said Mueller could take advantage of the treaty, and Russia should also be able to take advantage of it to pursue Bill Browder for his alleged crimes, as he had related to Trump during their encounter. Putin’s description of what might be possible under the treaty was a long way from what it actually provided, but by the time we explained it to the press, Putin had scored his propaganda point.

  Worryingly, however, Putin also said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election “because he talked about bringing the US-Russian relationship back to normal,” a significant deviation from the standard public line that countries don’t interfere in others’ internal politics and would work with whomever was elected. That in turn paled before the Trump response near the end of the press conference, when Trump said, “My people came to me—Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have—I have confidence in both parties… So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Kelly and I, sitting next to each other in the audience, were almost frozen to our seats by Trump’s answer. It was obvious that major corrective action would be needed because of this self-inflicted wound, but what exactly that would be was far from evident. The immediate media coverage was catastrophic.

  After Trump’s individual interviews finished, we raced to the airport to board Air Force One, which took off at eight p.m. local time. Dan Coats had been trying to reach me, and I called him immediately after we were airborne. He was, to say the least, upset. “Shock waves are rolling across Washington,” he said, and the intelligence community wanted a statement from him to prevent the community from being totally undermined. Coats had prepared something that in his view was necessary to defend the community, and I asked him to hold off issuing it for just a few minutes until I could talk to Kelly. I did not detect any hint that he was thinking of resigning, but his sense of urgency was palpable. I hung up and found Kelly, who thought a statement might be helpful if Coats talked about Trump Administration anti-meddling efforts, which were far greater than what Obama had done. Coats didn’t want to make any changes to the statement, which he read to me over the phone. I didn’t think, ceteris paribus, it was that bad, or unexpected. I still didn’t see any indication Coats might resign, so I told him to go ahead and release the statement.

  Coats’s comments, issued moments later, added fuel to the fire but were minor compared to what the press was already doing. We were hard at work researching the MLAT, confirming the initial view that Putin had totally distorted the treaty, both how it applied to Bill Browder and what Mueller’s te
am might be able to obtain. It was pure propaganda, Soviet-style. Nick Ayers called to say Pence wanted to point out that Trump had twice before said he had faith in the US intelligence community, which I said was a good idea. I told Trump what Pence was about to do, which he supported, and in fact he put out his own tweet to the same effect. Nonetheless, the press maelstrom continued unabated. After a little more thought, I wrote down the four points I thought Trump had to make: “(1) I have always supported the IC; (2) there was never any ‘Russia collusion’; (3) Russian (or any other foreign) meddling is unacceptable; and (4) it will not happen in 2018.” I typed this up and handed it to Kelly, Sanders, Sarah Tinsley (NSC Communications Senior Director), Miller, Bill Shine (former Fox News senior executive), Dan Scavino (Trump’s social media guru), and others, and then (around midnight Finnish time) took a nap. We landed at Andrews at nine fifteen p.m. Washington time, and I headed home.

  The next day, the entire senior White House communications team conferred with Trump in the Oval. Still surprised at the negative reaction, he had reviewed the press-conference transcript and decided he had misspoken. In the line where he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be,” meaning, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” he had meant to say “would not be [Russia],” thereby reversing the sentence’s meaning. Trump was renowned for never backing away from something he said, in fact usually digging in when challenged, so this was a surprising turnaround. Of course, that change alone did not eliminate the problem of his other statements accepting moral equivalence between Putin’s view and our own intelligence community’s view. But for the press office people, Trump’s making any kind of corrective statement was progress. Stephen Miller drafted prepared remarks, which Trump delivered in the early afternoon.