Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Copyright © 2020 by Michael S. Schmidt

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781984854667

  Ebook ISBN 9781984854674

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover photograph: iStock/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Act One

  Chapter I: Rule of Law, Rule of Trump

  Act Two

  Chapter II: The Institutionalist

  Chapter III: The Point of No Return

  Chapter IV: “Oh, God”

  Act Three

  Chapter V: The Road to Mueller

  Act Four

  Chapter VI: “He’s Saying Some Crazy Shit”

  Chapter VII: Norms of Presidential Conduct 101

  Epilogue: President Trump Finds His Roy Cohn

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak when power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound when majesty falls to folly.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN DONALD J. TRUMP entered the Oval Office as president of the United States on January 20, 2017, he ushered in a new age of American politics. His improbable victory stemmed from an explosive collision of novelties. Trump, a political unicorn, without the experience or comportment of any previous public figure seeking high office, was propelled by a new set of forces that were taking hold inside and outside the country.

  These forces had begun swirling during the Obama era, when siloed echo chambers increasingly prevented objective facts from penetrating, hardening partisan lines. Political discourse started to reflect a growing sense of grievance and conspiracy, contributing to an erosion of public trust in established institutions. At the same time, a beleaguered foreign adversary tapped into the very same fissures forming in American society to sow chaos and discord, and to undermine the integrity of the country’s democratic institutions. Vladimir Putin’s Russia showed that in some ways it knew America better than Americans, using the very hallmarks of democracy—particularly the free flow of information—to launch a wide-ranging attack on the 2016 presidential election, designed to bolster Trump’s chances of winning the White House.

  Nearly all public figures would reject this domestic divisiveness and foreign disruption. But Trump embraced these dual forces, emerging as both the outgrowth and embodiment of this new political era. His refusal to follow norms or honor tradition became a core feature of his political appeal. Trump weathered a series of campaign crises that would have ended the candidacies of anyone else. Stoking a growing tribalism and resentment among a segment of the electorate that felt ignored during the Obama years, he rode their support to the White House. By all accounts, Trump’s ascension to the presidency represented one of the most extraordinary stories in our nation’s political history.

  But the story of his rise would soon be overshadowed by what happened next. As president, Trump sought to wield power in a way so concerning to those around him—his top aides and officials in the executive branch tasked with implementing the administration’s agenda and enforcing the law—that they pursued a path rarely, if ever, seen since the country’s founding. Instead of enabling the commander in chief’s exercise of power, several sought to thwart it. These individuals undertook a mission to stop a president because they feared he could damage himself, the country, and the presidency.

  In this era, with Trump now installed as commander in chief, the traditional checks on presidential power would be largely neutered. No part of the Washington establishment seemed protected from the pull of Trump’s demand for loyalty to his party of one. Figures of the Washington establishment were faced with a singular question: Are you with Trump or against him? A professional bureaucracy that had historically operated outside the churn of partisan politics, keeping the gears of government turning across Democratic and Republican administrations, found itself thrust into the post-fact, hyperpartisan energy now emanating from the Oval Office. This phenomenon enveloped Congress. Trump routinely outflanked the Democratic lawmakers investigating him, and Republican leadership became Trump’s public defenders. Those charged with “calling balls and strikes,” career civil servants and journalists, were now maligned as part of the “Deep State” and deemed “fake news.”

  The place where this new force had its greatest impact was at the Justice Department and its investigative arm, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the forty years since the Watergate scandal, DOJ and the FBI had evolved to a point where trying to keep the perception of politics out of their work was almost as important as enforcing the law itself. Trump’s unrelenting push to use the country’s law enforcement department as an appendage of his political and personal empire placed DOJ and the FBI under excruciating pressure. Some officials would seek to mollify Trump with half steps, others would outright refuse to bend, and face the consequences. All would feel the strain of the president’s demands.

  For much of human history, journalists, authors, and academics have focused on how leaders, like presidents, with the help of their advisers, exert power to shape public policy, and on what that says about them, those whom they led, and the times in which they lived. Trump’s exercise of presidential power is, of course, worthy of examination, even more so because he has used his power in unprecedented ways. This book covers that ground.

  But, at its heart, this book is not the standard account of presidential power or a chronicle of the cabinet meetings and deliberations that animate an administration’s agenda. Rather, this book tells the story of a few individuals who were compelled to confront the most powerful leader in the world, uncertain whether he was acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle to restrain an unbound president.

  The Trump presidency is the biggest story of our time—a tall tale of brute political power and the titanic struggle atop the United States government. But it is also the most basic human story about how people, thrust into highly unusual circumstances, reacted when, under great pressure, they saw right before their eyes the president act in ways that deeply unnerved them.

  * * *

  —

  You and I will almost certainly never find ourselves in the position of standing between the most powerful person in the world and the abyss, fighting to stop a president from using his power. But whether dealing with a financial hardship, a setback at work, or even just a problem at home with a child, we have all faced a trying situation in which we thought, maybe, we could overcome a challenge that might ultimately be out of our control. In the clashes between Trump and those seeking to stop him, we see, and perhaps identify with, ordinary people operating un
der extraordinary pressure, trying to stop something that may ultimately be beyond them.

  There were several officials who stood up to Trump that I could have chosen to concentrate on. I ultimately focused on two main ones: former FBI director James B. Comey and former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II. I chose Comey because, besides Presidents Obama and Trump, I believe Comey made the decisions that had the greatest impact on the country. His significance makes anything that illuminates his decision making essential to history. If you scored the Trump administration, there are probably people—like John Kelly—who did more to stop Trump than McGahn did. But along with serving as a major container of Trump, McGahn did two other things that made him remarkable: He was in charge of Trump’s greatest political accomplishment, and he found himself caught up as the chief witness against Trump in an investigation that posed an existential threat to the president. The arc of this book covers how Comey’s decisions led directly to McGahn’s problems.

  For this monumental struggle, I had a front-row seat. This is what I saw.

  —MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, JUNE 2020

  I

  RULE OF LAW, RULE OF TRUMP

  AUGUST 1, 2018

  ONE YEAR, SIX MONTHS, AND TWELVE DAYS INTO THE PRESIDENCY

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—Just before 9:30 on a brutally humid summer night in Washington, I was in a dead sprint down Connecticut Avenue toward the White House, chasing after a man who had no idea I was trying to catch him.

  The math, I figured, was simple: I had to cover three city blocks in about thirty seconds before the man reached the northwest gate of the White House grounds and passed through security screening into the eighteen-acre headquarters of the United States’ executive branch, safely out of reach. I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting to him.

  It definitely occurred to me that it was ridiculous that I was running down the street like a cop chasing after a robber while wearing black dress shoes, jeans, and a sport jacket. But we’d long moved beyond normal in the year and a half since Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as president of the United States and we began confronting the daily bewilderment and furor that came with him running the country. What was unfolding before us was more a rolling series of crises than a traditional presidency, and with every twist and turn it became clearer that the Trump era in America would be the story of our lives.

  And so I ran in the dark after this man. Since I’d started at The New York Times two months out of college as a clerk in the sports department, I had probably done stranger things in pursuit of a story. For one of my first big assignments, I tracked George Steinbrenner, the combustible owner of the New York Yankees, as he left the stadium and headed to the parking lot after games, aiming to capture a complaint about his club that would make a headline the next day. From there, I eventually took on a beat no one else wanted—performance-enhancing drugs—and had been hired as a full-time reporter. After four years, I left sports to spend a year in the Times’ Baghdad bureau, before being moved to the Washington bureau in 2012. I covered the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Defense Department. But now, having joined a team investigating the Trump White House following the 2016 election, none of my experiences prepared me for the sheer velocity and disorientation of covering this president.

  A few months earlier, it had become clear there was an emerging existential threat to Trump’s presidency. A team of investigators from a special counsel’s office was bearing down on the White House, the president wasn’t taking it well, and his volatility itself had become a matter of grave national importance. A president in trouble, whose conduct was so unpredictable, required good sourcing to understand. It pushed us to get better at cultivating and protecting our sources, so I had recently found myself chauffeuring a key witness to the chaos around the Washington metro area. At all hours of the day, I would pick the source up at airports and train stations in my mother’s fourteen-year-old Volvo station wagon for secret meetings in the only place where I could have the source’s undivided attention and guarantee him that, as we snaked aimlessly through Washington’s leafy neighborhoods and talked, no one would see us together or hear what we were saying.

  Now, as for the man I was chasing down the street, he had never been a source, but I wanted badly to know everything he knew about President Trump and the inside dynamics of his administration. The man had been in the room for many of the events being investigated by the special counsel, though his significance in the unfolding saga went far beyond just passively witnessing extraordinary, possibly historic, or even criminal events in real time. Based on my reporting, the man two blocks in front of me striding back to the Executive Mansion, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, was more important to the success and survival of Trump’s presidency than anyone else in the West Wing.

  McGahn was only really known to those who closely watched the administration and monitored the rising and falling cachet of the people around the mercurial president. From McGahn’s perspective, he was there to serve as the most senior lawyer responsible for counseling the president behind closed doors and helping him work the levers of power to achieve his policy goals. But because that president was Trump, this was complicated, and what McGahn actually spent his days doing amounted to trying to fit the square peg of what Trump wanted to do as he worked the levers of power through the round hole of what was legal and ethical. Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions would be perceived and was often indifferent to the law and precedent. He routinely staked out positions on issues that violated the law and that ran counter to what career law enforcement, intelligence, military, and economic officials believed was right. Even more mysteriously, at times Trump appeared to favor policies that benefited America’s geopolitical adversaries, like Russia, more than the United States.

  McGahn was one of the few Trump advisers—or members of the Republican establishment, for that matter—who regularly stood up to the president, telling him when his ideas were harebrained and screaming back at him when he unloaded nasty digs at the senior staff. Their clashes were primal, I had been told, and when they got really bad, Trump would go for what was the ultimate insult in his book, telling McGahn that he “used to be a great lawyer.” All of this left McGahn sufficiently scarred, and he had started calling Trump “Kong,” “King Kong,” or “fucking Kong” behind his back, in honor of the oversized gorilla from film lore who would destroy anything in his way. Despite their penchant for clashes and fireworks, McGahn had actually approved a number of Trump’s decisions that ultimately boomeranged devastatingly on the president—including some that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate ties between Trump and Russia and Russian interference in the 2016 election. More important, McGahn had been a rare guardrail on the president—standing in the way when he sought to fire Mueller. And as much as his attempts to rein Trump in infuriated the president, McGahn was almost singularly responsible for the two greatest political accomplishments of the Trump presidency: stacking the courts with conservative judges and slashing government regulations.

  McGahn wasn’t just the rare senior Trump staffer with the spine to stand up to him—there was more. I had been told there was a secret about McGahn that had the potential to drive Trump from office. A trusted source had told me that as the special counsel had accelerated the investigation of the president the previous year, McGahn had become convinced that with Trump’s fleeting sense of loyalty the president was going to make him a scapegoat. Fearing his own legal exposure, McGahn had begun cooperating with Mueller’s investigators far more extensively than the White House and Trump knew. He’d even arranged for nearly a thousand pages of handwritten White House notes to be given to investigators without the president’s lawyers or anyone else in the White House knowing—notes that provided a road map for how the president had potentially obstructed justice. By giving Mueller’s team such an unfiltered and sweeping view of the inside of Tru
mp’s West Wing, McGahn was putting his boss’s entire presidency in peril.

  Sources told me that in a windowless conference room inside the special counsel’s offices on the other side of Washington from the White House, McGahn had spent hours laying out what the president did and said behind closed doors as he sought to maintain control over the Russia investigation. McGahn told the prosecutors about how the president insisted on having a loyalist oversee the investigation. He had told them the true reasons the president had for firing the FBI director, James Comey. He had told them that Trump wanted Mueller out. I had discovered that the cooperation had become so chummy that Mueller’s team had begun trying to run McGahn—“run” being a term used to describe how investigators use informants to infiltrate the mob or drug gangs—and tap him for real-time information about what was going on inside the White House.

  Despite essentially turning state’s evidence against the president, McGahn stayed in his job as White House counsel, advising on everything from trade policy to national security. A source told me that McGahn believed he needed to try to stop the president from inflicting damage to the office of the president and the country. The source said that McGahn also worried that if he quit, Trump would install one of his crony lawyers from New York who would rubber-stamp whatever the president wanted—lawyers in the mold of Michael Cohen, who functioned more like fixers.

  McGahn’s own personal and political ambitions complicated his calculations about whether to stay. He was an ardent libertarian who had become convinced that under both Democratic and Republican presidents the government had overreached in nearly every regard—from health care to education to the wars in the Middle East. With a broken Congress, the most effective way to reverse this trend was to stack the federal courts with hard-line judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. In fact, McGahn had accepted the White House job on the condition that he essentially serve as a committee of one to determine whom Trump would nominate to the federal bench, including district, appeals, and Supreme Court vacancies. Unlike previous administrations that relied on teams of White House and Justice Department officials who spent months if not years carefully deliberating on candidates for judicial nominations, McGahn streamlined the process and ran it out of his office. When he settled on candidates, he would present them to Trump, who would approve the nominations without raising many questions—simple as that. This hastened the pace at which the administration could get nominations to one of McGahn’s closest allies in Washington, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who would then ram them through the Senate. By the end of the second year in Trump’s presidency, this judicial conveyor belt had nominated more judges than any other modern administration had at the same point. McGahn knew that he would never have this power again. The longer he stayed in his position—even if doing so imperiled him legally and politically if he ended up on the wrong side of Kong—the more he would change the courts, cement his legacy, and, perhaps, have the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.