Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

  The next day, Kellyanne Conway said on CBS This Morning, “Why would Russia want Donald Trump to win the presidency here? Donald Trump has promised to modernize our nuclear capability.”

  In a telephone interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “This is a political witch hunt.”

  * * *

  Hope Hicks, 28, the public relations specialist who had been Trump’s press secretary during the campaign, was situated in a small 14th floor conference room in Trump Tower during the transition in early January 2017. She had two qualities important to Trump—loyalty and good looks. She had modeled as a teenager and now, with perfectly made-up eyes and long brown hair swept back on one side, she had the polished and glamorous look Trump liked. She also had genuine public relations skills.

  Trump had asked her what job she wanted in the White House. Anxious to avoid the daily hand-to-hand combat with the press, she had picked strategic communications director so she could manage his media opportunities, which were, of course, now endless. She’d been the gatekeeper to his interviews. Everyone wanted Trump and she felt that he had lost some of his leverage with the media by being overexposed during the campaign. Exploiting those opportunities would now require careful calibration. As well as anyone, she knew that might be impossible with the president-elect.

  Hicks was convinced the media had “oppositional defiance syndrome,” which is a term from clinical psychology most often applied to rebellious children. “Oppositional defiance syndrome” is characterized by excessive anger against authority, vindictiveness and temper tantrums. As far as she was concerned, that described the press.

  Hicks was already working on a response to the reports of Russian meddling in the election. The excessive news reporting on what she called the “alleged hacking by Russia” only made the United States look weak and Russia more influential than she thought possible.

  * * *

  On January 6, the intelligence chiefs came to Trump Tower. Comey met Trump for the first time. In his book, Comey offers a description, perhaps to demonstrate his keen eye: “His suit jacket was open and his tie too long, as usual. His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. I remember wondering how long it must have taken him in the morning to get that done. As he extended his hand, I made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”

  In the Trump Tower briefing, Clapper summarized the Key Judgments, the heart of any intelligence assessment:

  • Russia has had a long-standing desire “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order” but in the 2016 presidential election there was “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity and scope of effort.”

  • Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election . . . to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

  • “When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.”

  It was a mild formulation. Trump was a “clear preference” and the effort was aimed very much at “discrediting” and “undermining” Clinton. There was no suggestion that Trump or his associates had colluded or coordinated with the Russian effort.

  All the sources fit together and told a consistent story from different vantages in the Kremlin, Clapper said. These human sources had been so-called “legacy sources”—they had been right in their intelligence and assessments over the years, and at least one source had provided reliable information going back a generation.

  What has not been previously reported: One source was in such jeopardy that the CIA wanted to exfiltrate that person from Russia to safety abroad or in the United States. The source refused to leave, apparently out of fear of repercussions against the person’s family if the source suddenly left Russia or disappeared.

  Clapper did not give the sources’ names to Trump, though he could have asked for them.

  “I don’t believe in human sources,” Trump replied. “These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country.” He wasn’t buying. “I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies.”

  This remark caused Brennan, whose CIA relied almost entirely on human sources, later to remark, “I guess I won’t tell the employees about that.”

  This has also not been previously reported: The CIA believed they had at least six human sources supporting this finding. One person with access to the full top secret report later told me he believed that only two were solid.

  Trump asked if there was anything more.

  “Well, yes, there is some additional sensitive material,” Clapper said.

  Do you want us to stay or do this alone? Priebus asked Trump.

  Comey suggested, “I was thinking the two of us.”

  “Just the two of us,” Trump agreed.

  Though he could play the tough G-man, Comey somewhat soft-pedaled the summary he had. He explained that there was a dossier with allegations. He was passing it on. It was out there; he didn’t want the president-elect to be blindsided because it was in wide circulation, and certainly it, or parts of it, would surface in the media.

  The dossier alleged that Trump had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and the Russians had filmed it. Comey did not mention the allegation in the dossier that Trump had prostitutes urinate on each other on the bed President Obama and Michelle Obama had once used.

  Comey later wrote, “I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material. This whole thing was weird enough. As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia.”

  Trump denied the allegations. Did he seem like a guy who needed prostitutes?

  In A Higher Loyalty, Comey wrote, “The FBI was not currently investigating him. This was literally true. We did not have a counterintelligence case file open on him. We really didn’t care if he had cavorted with hookers in Moscow, so long as the Russians weren’t trying to coerce him in some way.”

  This is what Comey wrote about how he conveyed this message to Trump at the end of their private meeting: “As he began to grow more defensive and the conversation teetered toward disaster, on instinct, I pulled the tool from my bag: ‘We are not investigating you, sir.’ That seemed to quiet him.”

  The private meeting lasted five minutes.

  Trump later told his attorney that he felt shaken down by Comey with the presentation about the alleged prostitutes in Moscow. “I’ve got enough problems with Melania and girlfriends and all that. I don’t need any more. I can’t have Melania hearing about that.”

  After the briefing Trump released a statement calling the briefing “constructive,” but he was clearly unswayed by the impact. Attempts by “Russia, China, other countries” to interfere had had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”

  Four days later, January 10, BuzzFeed published the 35-page dossier online.

  This was when I read the document. On page 27, it said, “Two knowledgeable St. Petersburg sources claim Republican candidate TRUMP has paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities there but key witnesses silenced and evidence hard to obtain.”

  It added, “all direct witnesses to this recently had been ‘silenced’ i.e. bribed or coerced to disappear.”

  It made clear there was apparently no path to seek verification.

  I was surprised, not at the allegations, which might be true, but that the intelligence chiefs, particularly the FBI director, would present any of thi
s to Trump.

  The core of their presentation on January 6 had been the intelligence community’s assessment on Russian election interference. It was a report they felt was one of the most important, well-documented, convincing assessments by the intelligence community in recent times. In Facts and Fears, Clapper called it “a landmark product—among the most important ever produced by U.S. intelligence.” The CIA, NSA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies had invested heavily in the intelligence gathering. They had also taken a risk by putting so much sensitive information in one report that could leak or be described.

  And then, almost as an afterthought, Comey had introduced the dossier as if to say, by the way, here is this scurrilous, unverified, unsupported footnote with some of the ugliest allegations against you.

  They wanted the formal assessment to be believed by the president-elect. Why pollute it with the dossier summary? They knew enough about Trump to know it would rile him up. It likely would have riled anyone up. Why would they accompany some of their most serious work with this unverified dossier?

  The material in the dossier is the sort of stuff that a reporter or the FBI might more than reasonably follow up on, try to track down its origins, even locate some of the sources and see if any confirmation can be found. Clearly, the FBI had an obligation to make this effort—as they later would.

  But including it, even in scaled-down form, in one of the most important briefings the intelligence chiefs might ever present to a president-elect made little sense to me. It would be as if I had reported and written one of the most serious, complex stories for The Washington Post that I had ever done—and then provided an appendix of unverified allegations. Oh, by the way, here is a to-do list for further reporting and we’re publishing it.

  In A Higher Loyalty, published a year later, Comey writes at length about his misgivings about how he was going to handle the dossier before he met with Trump.

  “I was staying on as FBI director,” he wrote. “We knew the information, and the man had to be told. It made complete sense for me to do it. The plan was sensible, if the word applies in the context of talking with a new president about prostitutes in Moscow.”

  Perhaps it may turn out to all be true, but imagine being told that by the FBI director.

  As Comey continued, “Still, the plan left me deeply uncomfortable. . . . There was a real chance that Donald Trump, politician and hardball deal-maker, would assume I was dangling the prostitute thing over him to jam him, to gain leverage. He might well assume I was pulling a J. Edgar Hoover, because that’s what Hoover would do in my shoes. An eyebrow raise didn’t quite do this situation justice; it was really going to suck.”

  * * *

  On January 15, five days before the inauguration, I appeared on Fox News Sunday. I said, “I’ve lived in this world for 45 years where you get things and people make allegations. That is a garbage document. It never should have been presented as part of an intelligence briefing. Trump’s right to be upset about that.” The intelligence officials, “who are terrific and have done great work, made a mistake here, and when people make mistakes they should apologize.” I said the normal route for such information, as in past administrations, was passing it to the incoming White House counsel. Let the new president’s lawyer handle the hot potato.

  Later that afternoon Trump tweeted: “Thank you to Bob Woodward who said, ‘That is a garbage document . . . it never should have been presented . . . Trump’s right to be upset (angry) . . .”

  I was not delighted to appear to have taken sides, but I felt strongly that such a document, even in an abbreviated form, really was “garbage” and should have been handled differently.

  The episode played a big role in launching Trump’s war with the intelligence world, especially the FBI and Comey.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Five days after taking the oath of office, January 25, President Trump invited his top advisers and his national security team to the White House for dinner. Mattis, the new secretary of defense, presented Trump with plans for a SEAL Team Six operation against a senior al Qaeda collaborator in Yemen.

  He described how several dozen commandos would attack, hoping to capture intelligence, cell phones and laptop computers, and kill the collaborator, one of the few al Qaeda leaders still alive.

  It would be the first operation in Yemen in two years. It had been considered and delayed by President Obama. The military wanted a moonless night for the attacks, and one was coming up.

  Bannon had questions about the larger problems in Yemen. The former Navy lieutenant commander wondered why the arms to the rebel Houthis could not be cut off and stopped by sea. Iran was their only ally.

  “You control the air,” Bannon said. “You’ve got the U.S. Navy, and you control the sea. How tough is it?”

  “It’s a big coastline,” Mattis replied.

  “Steve,” Trump said impatiently, “these guys, this is what they do. Let them do it.” In other words, shut up.

  * * *

  Trump signed the order the next day and the raid was carried out before dawn on Sunday, January 29. A lot went wrong. During a 50-minute firefight one SEAL was killed, three wounded. Civilians, including children, were killed. A $75 million Marine MV-22 Osprey made a hard landing, disabling the plane. It had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy.

  Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, 36, from Peoria, Illinois, was the first combat casualty in Trump’s presidency. Trump decided to go to Dover, Delaware, to observe the ceremony for the arrival of his body. Ivanka accompanied him.

  When they arrived at Dover, the commander pulled the president aside. According to what Trump told his senior staff later, the commander said: I want to prepare you for this, Mr. President. When you walk in, the family is going to come up to you. It will be an experience like no other. You’re the commander in chief. The respect they show to you, and their grieving, will be incredible. You’ll be there to comfort them. When the plane rolls up, when the flag-draped casket comes down, some of the family are going to lose it and they will lose it very badly. On the other hand, be prepared to have some people say something inappropriate, even harsh.

  No one said anything harsh, but there was a definite coldness that the president remembered.

  “That’s a hard one,” he said afterward. He was clearly rattled. He let it be known he would make no more trips to Dover.

  Owens’s father, Bill Owens, was at Dover but he and his wife did not want to meet with Trump.

  “I’m sorry,” Owens told the chaplain. I don’t want to meet the president. I don’t want to make a scene about it, but my conscience won’t let me talk to him.

  He later also said, “For two years prior, there were no boots on the ground in Yemen—everything was missiles and drones—because there was not a target worth one American life. Now, all of a sudden we had to make this grand display.”

  Instead of striking out as Trump had done against the Khans, the Gold Star parents who had appeared at the Democratic convention in 2016, Trump expressed sympathy for Owens’s father.

  “I can understand people saying that,” Trump said later. “I’d feel—you know, what’s worse? There’s nothing worse.”

  Several former Obama administration officials said the operation had been planned months earlier but they distanced Obama from it, saying he had never approved it.

  In an interview on Fox the morning of his first joint address to Congress, Trump said the Yemen raid was something his “very respected” generals “were looking at for a long time doing.”

  “And they lost Ryan,” he said.

  * * *

  Trump invited Carryn Owens, Ryan’s widow and mother of three young children, to sit in the balcony at the joint address to Congress on February 28. She sat next to Ivanka.

  To the congressional audience and 47 million television viewers, the president said, “We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens. Ryan d
ied as he lived, a warrior and a hero—battling against terrorism and securing our nation.”

  Because the operation was being criticized, Trump added, “I just spoke to General Mattis, who reconfirmed that, and I quote, ‘Ryan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.’ Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity.”

  The president turned to Owens’s widow in the balcony and said “Thank you.”

  Thunderous applause broke out.

  At first Carryn Owens fought back tears, exhaled and mouthed, “I love you, baby.” The applause continued and tears began to stream down her face. She stood, joined her hands in apparent prayer, looked up and mouthed, “I love you.”

  Trump said, “For as the Bible teaches us, there is no greater act of love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Ryan laid down his life for his friends, for his country, and for our freedom—we will never forget him.”

  The applause and standing ovation from the Congress and the audience lasted nearly two minutes.

  “Ryan is looking down right now,” Trump said. “You know that. And he is very happy because I think he just broke a record.”

  Carryn Owens smiled and clapped. The president greeted and embraced her in the hallway following the speech.

  * * *

  Afterward, when Trump had phone calls with the families of others from the military who had been killed, the White House staff noticed how hard and tough it seemed for him.

  “He’s not that guy,” Bannon said. “He’s never really been around the military. He’s never been around military family. Never been around death.” The deaths of “parents of small kids” struck him particularly hard. “That had a big impact on him, and it’s seen throughout everything.”