by Bob Woodward
* * *
Porter noticed Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, in the West Wing lobby on April 5. He had been Pruitt’s Sherpa when Pruitt was barely confirmed by the Senate 52 to 46. Pruitt had been Oklahoma attorney general for six years, where he ran a war against EPA regulations.
They made small talk. When Pruitt walked down to the Oval Office, Porter followed. Pruitt was not on the regular schedule. This was clearly an off-the-books meeting. That was evident when Bannon showed up in the Oval Office.
“We need to get out of Paris,” Pruitt said, handing the president a plain sheet of paper he wanted him to read withdrawing from the Paris Accord. We need to get out, he said. “This was a campaign commitment.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Bannon said several times. “We’ve got to do this now.”
Make this statement, Pruitt said. This could be your press statement. Maybe read it to reporters in the Oval Office, and have the press secretary put it out as a written statement.
Porter was taken aback. As staff secretary he knew there had been no process. No one had been consulted. There had been no legal review. Pruitt and Bannon had snuck into the Oval Office and wanted an instant decision on the major international and national environmental issue of the day.
Porter knew the paper on the president’s desk was incendiary. Trump could pick it up, decide to read it out loud to the press or take it to Press Secretary Sean Spicer and say, put this out. When he had a chance, Porter took Pruitt’s draft statement from Trump’s desk.
Later he told Bannon and Pruitt they could not just walk into the Oval Office this way. It was a huge process foul. It was unacceptable.
* * *
Gary Cohn gathered the principals for a meeting on the Paris Agreement in the Situation Room on April 27. Cohn’s National Economic Council had sent around a For Official Use Only six-page memo proposing two options. The first was to withdraw from Paris. The second was: “Remain in the Paris Agreement, but Adopt a Pledge that Does Not Harm the Economy and Puts a Hold on Further Financial Commitments and Contributions.”
“I want to turn first to the White House counsel,” Cohn said, opening the meeting, “to walk us through some of the legal issues.”
But Don McGahn was not yet there. His deputy, Greg Katsas, discussed technical issues until McGahn arrived.
“Great, McGahn’s here,” Cohn said. “Tee up the legal issues for us.”
McGahn supported getting out, though he had not yet revealed his hand. “Well,” he said, “we’re going to have these court cases. And if we don’t get out of Paris, then it’s really going to jeopardize some of the regulatory rollback that we’re likely to do at EPA.
“Paris was one of the justifications the Obama administration used as part of the regulatory record to justify the cost and benefits of the Clean Power Plan.” That was an Obama-era 460-page rule to lower carbon dioxide emitted by power plants that the EPA estimated would save 4,500 lives a year. Pruitt was already moving to end the policy.
“So unless we exit Paris, all of these sorts of cases are going to be in jeopardy,” McGahn said. He was for getting out immediately.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Tillerson said. “My State Department legal adviser, which was the office that negotiated this in the first place and has the relevant expertise, says we can’t just announce that we are getting out.”
The option paper clearly said the “United States cannot officially announce a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement until November 2019”—two and a half years away.
But the second option—remaining in the accord but doing nothing that harmed the economy and putting a hold on further financial contributions—would put the U.S. in good stead in terms of litigation, Tillerson said.
The secretary of state stood alone. Pruitt spoke strongly for getting out. Priebus, who saw the political benefits, was for getting out. Bannon saw Paris as one more globalist deal that screwed the United States.
At the end, Cohn said they obviously needed to get the legal issues squared away. “But I think we’re starting to get a consensus.” He was right. Paris was dead.
* * *
McMaster and Porter huddled before a 10 a.m., June 1 meeting with the president in the Oval Office on the Paris Accord. Trump was due to make an announcement that day. We’ve got to make a last-ditch effort, they agreed.
Withdrawing will damage our relationships with so many other countries, McMaster said. He was inundated with calls from his counterparts. “You guys aren’t really thinking about doing this, are you?” Or more explicitly, “Please don’t do this.”
Porter had drafted some language for the president to use. “The United States will withdraw from the terms of the Paris Climate Accord, effective immediately.” Porter read his proposal, “As of today the United States will not adhere to any financial or economic burden the Paris Accord purports to impose, including its nationally determined contribution.”
Withdrawing from the “terms” would technically leave the United States in the accord. “This will read like it’s tough enough,” Porter argued to McMaster. “He’ll feel like he’s getting the political bang for the buck. He’ll be fulfilling the campaign promise. It’ll excite the base.”
It was basically option two from the principals meeting—“Remain in the Paris Accord.” Porter thought he had found a way to minimize the damage.
Porter and McMaster presented the proposed language to the president. They talked until they were blue in the face, but it was clear they’d lost the fight.
No, no, no, Trump said. He was withdrawing full-scale. “That’s the only way that I can be true to my base.”
As Trump worked over the speech draft, he toughened the language further.
* * *
In a late-afternoon Rose Garden appearance that day that included a brass band, the president praised the stock market and U.S. efforts to fight terrorism.
“On these issues and so many more, we’re following through on our commitments. And I don’t want anything to get in our way.” Then unburying the lead, he said, “Therefore in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
“As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States—which is what it does—the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
* * *
On June 15, 2017, The Washington Post ran a story by three of its top Justice Department and FBI reporters headlined “Special Counsel Is Investigating Jared Kushner’s Business Dealings.” Mueller wanted more and more records. Kushner hired Abbe Lowell, a top Washington criminal defense lawyer. Priebus could see the fires building around a string of troubled investments Jared was involved in. He decided to escalate, make a big play. He told Trump that Jared should not be in the White House in an official capacity. Nepotism laws existed for a reason. The Mueller investigation was going deeply into Jared’s finances. And it will jump to your finances if it hasn’t already.
Normally Trump would ignore or dismiss. This time he paused, slowed down, and became reflective. He looked at his chief of staff. The response was jarring, so different.
“You’re right,” the president said.
Priebus continued to tell Trump that as his son-in-law, Jared should not have an official position and office in the White House. But this suggestion would ricochet right back and get him in trouble with Jared, who wanted to stay. Jared remained a mission Priebus failed to accomplish.
* * *
Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president’s tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president’s obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television. But telev
ision was Trump’s default activity. Sunday nights were often the worst. Trump would come back to the White House from the weekend at one of his golf resorts just in time to catch political talk on his enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN.
The president and the first lady had separate bedrooms in the residence. Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom “the devil’s workshop” and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights “the witching hour.”
There was not much he could do about the mornings, but he had some control over the weekend schedule. He started scheduling Trump’s Sunday returns to the White House later in the afternoon. Trump would get to the White House just before 9 p.m. when MSNBC and CNN generally turned to softer programming that did not focus on the immediate political controversies and Trump’s inevitable role in them.
* * *
Bannon realized that the cascade of NSC presentations about Afghanistan, Iran, China, Russia and North Korea was not really connecting with Trump. Without some organizing principle, it was too much for his attention span.
So he called Sally Donnelly, a key close adviser to Secretary Mattis. “Sally, you’ve got to talk to your boss. Here’s the problem.” One day the focus was Libya, the next it might be Syria. “I know this guy. He’s frustrated. It’s too disjointed. Besides what we are doing with the Saudis, everything else is kind of hodgepodge.
“I’ve got something I want to talk to Mattis about, and I’ll bring it over and diagram it for him.” Bannon had come up with what he called “the strategy of the United States.”
At 8 a.m. on a June Saturday, Bannon arrived at the Pentagon. He had coffee with Donnelly and Mattis’s chief of staff, retired Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney. They then gathered with Mattis around the small conference table in the secretary’s office.
“Here’s my problem,” Bannon said. “You guys haven’t thought about the Pacific at all. You haven’t thought about China. There’s no in-depth. You are so tied to CentCom”—the Central Command that covered the Middle East and South Asia.
Since Mattis had been the CentCom commander from 2010 to 2013, Bannon thought that Mattis had brought that mind-set to the job of secretary of defense. He reminded Mattis that Chinese policy leaders and intellectuals were split on their views of the United States. One group saw the U.S. as an equal partner, a co-hegemon. The other, the hawks, looked at the United States as a lesser power and treated it like one.
Mattis countered. Annihilating ISIS was the assignment President Trump had specifically given him.
“I’ll basically cut a deal with you,” Bannon proposed. If Mattis would support the containment of China, he would back off on the pressure to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was a linchpin in the Chinese One Belt, One Road plan to expand its trading network to Europe.
“Steve,” Mattis said, “I’m kind of one of those global trading guys. I think all that trade stuff’s pretty good.”
Bannon was appalled. Trump was right. The generals didn’t know anything about business and economics. They never really cared about the cost of anything.
CHAPTER
24
Over the weekend of July 8 and 9, The New York Times published two stories about a previously undisclosed meeting in Trump Tower in the middle of the campaign. Don Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner had met with a Russian lawyer who, among other things, was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. There were the usual denials, restatements and confusion among the participants. It was a huge story, suggesting—but not proving—some kind of subterfuge and clandestine cooperation with Russians.
The president was in orbit and called Dowd to complain about leaks and the press.
“Mr. President, it’s horseshit,” Dowd told him. And so what? Getting dirt on people was commonplace in campaigns and the nation’s capital. It even had a name—“opposition research” or “investigative reporting.” That’s what half of Washington seemed to be paid for. Is there something wrong with that? No. Dowd knew that opposition research teams and investigative reporters would take dirt from anyone, even foreign governments. All the media posturing was disgusting. They were treating it like the crime of the century. The New York Times and The Washington Post thought they were the special counsel and the law of the land. The stories were a big nothing burger, Dowd concluded.
On July 17 Trump tweeted: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”
Dowd was determined not to be distracted by the daily drip from the media. He wanted hard evidence. McGahn religiously dictated all significant meetings or discussions with the president to his executive assistant, Annie Donaldson. She had 17 hours of notes relating to matters being investigated by Mueller and his team.
Dowd gave Mueller these notes and those of seven other lawyers. Nothing was held back. He told Mueller, “Bob, read Annie Donaldson’s notes if you want to know what was in the head of the president.”
All this was done with the president’s blessing. Dowd would talk to him and say, look, here’s the categories of documents. We’re going to give him this. We’re going to give him that. “Constitutionally he has no right” to the documents and testimony, “but just out of respect for law enforcement, since you’re the chief, let’s just let him do it. Not get in the fight.” Dowd concluded that the president seemed fearless. He never said no.
Dowd told Mueller, “This is what I told the president, so don’t make me look like an idiot, okay? And we’re going to make you look good. You make us look good. But you’ve got to get it done.”
Mueller received 1.4 million pages of documents from the Trump campaign and 20,000 pages from the White House. Dowd believed no documents had been destroyed. In all, 37 witnesses gave interviews to Mueller’s team voluntarily.
McGahn, Priebus and the vice president’s staff had put together a six-page White House summary of the entire Flynn matter from contemporaneous recollections. Dowd considered it the Bible on Flynn and delivered it to Mueller. He believed that no one, other than Flynn, had lied to investigators, and Mueller had not needed to pressure or jam anyone.
When Dowd was sending the campaign records to the congressional investigating committee, he told Mueller’s deputy Quarles, “We’re sending copies to the Hill. How about if I just deliver a copy to you?”
Quarles accepted. Dowd thought he and Quarles worked well together. They could meet and talk, whereas Mueller was so rigid, he sometimes seemed like marble.
* * *
On July 20 Bloomberg dropped an apparent bombshell: Mueller was investigating Trump’s finances including “Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings . . . the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.”
Dowd called Quarles to ask about the story.
“Well,” Quarles said, “Bob never comments.”
“Give me a break, pal,” Dowd replied angrily. “I’m taking care of you, now you take care of me.” As they both knew, “a denial from the White House doesn’t get anywhere.” Dowd continued, “The deal was, with you guys, if you guys added to the investigation, we’d get a heads-up first.”
“That’s right.”
“Because you gave us the subjects to cover,” Dowd said. “And every once in a while you guys add things and we put it on a list. I didn’t hear about condos in Florida or selling this estate.” Dowd said he was aware of some matters under investigation in New York about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, who tried to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. “You know, Jimmy,” Dowd added, “when you ask me a question, I give it all to you. So I need a better explanation.”
“John, let me put it this way,” Quarles said. “I’m 99 percent sure that it’s not us.”
“I got it,” Dowd said. He immediately called the president, knowing when that kind of story bro
ke Trump could not focus on anything else. Trump was apoplectic.
“They’re not investigating that stuff,” Dowd said, trying to reassure him. But Trump was not trusting at all and sounded like he could find no comfort.
Four days later Dowd met Quarles on a stone bench outside the Patriot Plaza where Mueller had his offices.
“Bob and I owe you one,” Quarles said. “Bob says don’t believe what you read in the papers.”
“I got it,” Dowd replied.
“We are really embarrassed,” Quarles said.
“Why?”
“You’ve delivered more than you promised, and we’re so pleased. We’re moving along. We’re getting it done. And there’s a lot of stuff here to organize, but it came very well organized. We didn’t have to go hunt and peck. You didn’t drown us.”
Dowd knew about a target of a tax investigation who had once told the FBI that the answer to their request was somewhere in two warehouses. The agents spent years searching.
“But let’s agree going forward,” Dowd said. “I don’t want to play cat-and-mouse. You’re not on my end of the stick. I got a guy that wants to know yesterday,” and Trump’s “instincts are it’s bullshit.” Dowd added that he had checked with the Trump Organization, and they had denied they were being separately investigated. They’d received no requests for documents or interviews—standard preliminary steps. “And they said, as far as we know, it’s bullshit.” All the organization’s projects were eight or nine years old. There were no issues. Whatever Mueller wanted to see was out there in the public record someplace.