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

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Walsh, who had inflicted more political damage on Reagan and his allies, like Bush, than anyone else in Washington during his six-year investigation, had decamped to his personal office in Oklahoma City, where he lived, to write the final report that examined whether the Reagan administration sought to sell arms to Iran and illegally funneled the proceeds to fund a rebel army in its fight against the government in Nicaragua—after Congress had expressly forbidden funding the contras. Two days before the deadline, Walsh’s staff faxed him a copy of the draft indictment. It included several direct quotations from Weinberger’s notes that had never been made public before. One of the quotations implicated Bush in the scandal, saying that he had “favored” the sale of weapons in exchange for American hostages. This revelation was significant because Bush had claimed for years that he was not fully aware of the discussions surrounding the deal. He had famously claimed he was out of the loop.

  Back in Washington, two of the more junior members of the prosecutorial team were alarmed when they saw that the quotation about Bush was set to be included in the indictment. With the election just days away, they believed it could be a move that could potentially influence public opinion in the critical days before a presidential election. And they thought such an aggressive move on the eve of the election would likely anger Bush and might even lead him to retaliate by pardoning Weinberger.

  The junior prosecutors voiced their concerns to Walsh’s deputies. One of the deputies said that they could give no consideration to the timing of the upcoming election because of a Justice Department policy that barred prosecutors from making prosecutorial decisions based on the political calendar. And in any case, Walsh didn’t want to water down the indictment, because the substance of Weinberger’s damning quotation had already been made public during congressional testimony years earlier. “Nobody believes Bush when he says that,” Walsh said on the phone, referring to Bush’s claims of ignorance about the deal.

  So, four days before the election, on the afternoon of Friday, October 30, 1992, the independent counsel’s office filed the indictment in federal court. It was an incredible boon for Bill Clinton, who immediately moved to capitalize on Walsh’s action, holding a news conference to accuse Bush of diminishing “the credibility of the presidency.”

  The indictment changed the messaging of the race profoundly in the closing days of the campaign. Four days later, Clinton won 370 electoral votes.

  “Probably cost me the election,” Bush said in the aftermath. He said he viewed the whole thing as a “big witch hunt.”

  Bush talked to Attorney General William P. Barr—the young lawyer Bush had appointed a year earlier—about dismissing Walsh. But he held off, and at the urging of members of Congress he asked the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Robert Mueller, to look into whether Walsh had been politically motivated to file the indictment. No evidence of that ever surfaced.

  Years later, Walsh acknowledged that the timing of the indictment might well have turned the election.

  At home, Jim laid out to Patrice how to him there was only one choice: disclosure. He would at least be transparent and honest and show that politics had not factored into the decision.

  “What is the alternative?” he asked Patrice.

  He answered the question for himself.

  “The alternative is a fucking disaster,” he said, explaining how the bureau would be accused of having covered up for a newly elected president Clinton.

  Patrice believed that her husband wanted Attorney General Lynch to tell him not to send a letter to Congress, thereby relieving him of the burden of the decision. But she knew that was unlikely.

  “But why do you have to keep stepping out front?” she asked.

  The melding of her concerns as an American and a wife made for an extraordinary moment. The presidency was supposed to be in the bag for Clinton, she thought. The election, to Patrice, was supposed to be a formality, one where voters would denounce Trump and forever shun his brand of politics—“Trumpism”—from the civic life of America. Could her husband—someone she believed was a pillar of honesty and transparency in Washington—really be put in a position to alter the course of history like that?

  “This is going to be awful for you,” she said. “You just can’t do it.”

  “Tricey, that’s not helping me,” he said. “That’s not helping me.”

  If nothing else, talking to Patrice disabused Jim of any notion that this was going to be anything but awful. And as a small grace, that gave him a sense of liberation.

  “I am screwed no matter what happens,” he told Patrice. “If I disclose this, I’m screwed. If I don’t disclose this, I’m screwed. And so it’s freeing in a way.”

  In the hours after telling Patrice, Jim gave himself pep talks.

  Look, you don’t want to be anything else, he told himself. You’re not going to go anywhere else, you have more money than you ever imagined, and you have a ten-year term—so what?

  The next morning, Comey sent a letter to select members of Congress notifying them of the situation; it immediately leaked, and the firestorm was just as Patrice expected—with Republicans reigniting their insistence that Clinton was a criminal all along and Democrats attacking Comey for abusing his power and inserting himself into a presidential election.

  After seeing Comey reopen the Clinton email investigation, a former British intelligence Russia specialist named Christopher Steele was worried that the FBI director might be working to help boost Trump’s odds of getting elected. The firm Steele worked for had been investigating the Republican nominee for a succession of clients—and since Trump had won the nomination, for the law firm that represented Clinton’s campaign. He was alarmed at what he had found concerning the myriad ways that Trump was potentially compromised by his indebtedness to the Russians and had managed to share his findings with the FBI. With the election just over a week away and the bureau unlikely to make any public statements about their investigation of the Trump campaign before it was time to vote, he decided to go public himself.

  Steele reached out to David Corn—a reporter for Mother Jones—and told him he had provided the FBI with a dossier of memos that tried to prove that Russia had been supporting Trump and cultivating him as an asset for years. On October 31, Corn’s story, citing Steele as “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence,” was the first piece on the public record discussing Steele’s dossier.

  The next day, when approached by the bureau about the story, Steele admitted that he was Corn’s source. Because it is frowned upon for an FBI source to talk to the media about their interactions, Steele’s relationship with the bureau had to be cut off.

  Just a day or two before the election, Comey received an unusual message from a friend of his. It turned out his friend had heard from one of Hillary Clinton’s close allies who was looking to pass along an assurance to the FBI director. Comey’s friend said the message came from the Democratic candidate herself. She apparently wanted to make it clear that Jim would not have opponents in the White House when she was president. Comey felt that the message reflected a confidence from the Clinton camp that she was going to win.

  The message left Comey relieved, and hopeful that when Clinton became president there may not be an all-out war between the FBI and her White House.

  IV

  “OH, GOD”

  NOVEMBER 8, 2016

  SEVENTY-THREE DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  MCLEAN, VIRGINIA—On Election Day, Jim would not vote. Long before the issues with Clinton arose, he had decided he would not vote as FBI director. It was important, he thought, not to take sides but rather to simply live with equanimity in the world that the voters chose.

  Patrice, on the other hand, was excited to vote. She had waited decades to vote for a woman preside
ntial candidate, and her eyes brimmed with tears as she selected Clinton.

  She remembered a lifetime of conversations with other women about how they never thought they would see a woman president. A book club she had been part of had read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, published in 1991, about ways in which popular media narratives stunted the feminist movement. When her club met, Patrice remembered saying to the group that “every kind of man” would be president before a woman got elected.

  She had voted for Clinton eight years earlier, during the 2008 primary, but Clinton failed to reach the general election. By 2016, another eight years after her prediction, it seemed as if she might finally be proved wrong. She couldn’t wait for that to happen.

  Patrice returned home nervous but excited for the results to come in. She kept a close eye on The New York Times online app containing a presidential forecasting needle that started the day predicting Clinton had an 82 percent chance of winning. That evening, she watched the coverage with their youngest daughter. She texted their other children to see what they were thinking. Jim puttered about the house, watching little. He assumed that Clinton would win, and he found punditry and cable news off-putting. He had also been making a concerted effort for the months leading up to the election to stay as uninformed as possible about the presidential horse race.

  After the Associated Press called Florida for Trump at 10:50 p.m., Jim went to bed, still thinking Clinton would win. At 2:30 a.m., when the AP called the race for Donald Trump, Patrice cried on the phone with her daughters, not giving voice to what she feared: that their father might be blamed for Trump’s election.

  Patrice finally went upstairs to their dark bedroom and woke up her husband to tell him the news. Jim sat right up.

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  Oh, God, Oh God, Jim thought to himself. Did we contribute to this? Is this something I did?

  He immediately started convincing himself that this was not his or the FBI’s fault. To reduce the pain that came with that notion, he tried to convince himself of things he knew were likely untrue.

  Maybe the office will change him, Jim told himself.

  He also couldn’t help but think about what his next four-plus years were going to be like. He had no idea what was in store for him or the FBI. It did not cross his mind that his job might be in jeopardy.

  To cope, the brain is wired to rationalize the irrational. Comey knew that was exactly what he was doing. Telling himself that the majesty of the office of the presidency would sand down Trump’s crass edges was more of a silent prayer than a prediction. But it was one he clung to that early morning as he lay in his bed contemplating the reality of a Trump presidency, next to a distraught Patrice. He was also convinced of his own power to be one of the people who could, at least in law enforcement matters, lead the president away from the darkness of his sometimes xenophobic and uninformed campaign persona and toward the light of something resembling more traditional presidential conduct. Comey didn’t yet know that Trump would wield some of his darkest visions of vengeance and retribution and character assassination against him. But even if he had known, he might have been sanguine about it. He had stared down political ruin during the Bush years. But after the Bush administration he had faced the very real prospect of leaving Patrice a widow. And that experience had led him to become FBI director. If he could survive looking death directly in the eye, why couldn’t he survive Trump?

  ★ ★ ★

  AUGUST 2006

  TEN YEARS, FIVE MONTHS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  RECOVERY ROOM AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL, BALTIMORE—Jim’s decision to leave the Justice Department early in Bush’s second term and become the top lawyer at Lockheed Martin had an enormously positive impact on his family. Not only was Dad no longer working in such a stressful job, but he was now making more money than the family could ever have imagined, relieving the tremendous financial stress the Comeys had been under for years.

  When his signing bonus landed from Lockheed Martin, Jim worried the bank would file a suspicious activity report on him. Overnight, he went from being unable to pay one month of his daughter’s college tuition to being able to write a check for the entire thing. His time in government was over; life was good.

  Then one day, a little less than a year after leaving the Justice Department, Jim noticed that he had passed some blood in his stool and made an appointment with his doctor to have it checked out. Within days, he was told that he had an advanced form of colon cancer.

  To those with the misfortune of such a diagnosis, the prognosis is bleak: Among cancer patients the rule of thumb is stage 3, you’re in trouble; stage 4, you’re dead. When cancer cells are found in the lymph nodes, that means they have left the point of origin and the cancer is on its way to another organ. That’s stage 3. Sometimes the difference between the two diagnoses can be a matter of days. Jim’s cancer was detected at stage 3, and if he was going to stop it from becoming a terminal metastatic disease, the treatment would have to be quick and harsh. Jim would undergo radiation, several rounds of chemotherapy, a surgery that rewired his digestive system and left him with an ostomy bag. A port was installed in his chest for all the chemotherapy drugs to flow into his system. It was a desperate race to kill the cancer before it killed him. Complications from that treatment led him to be hospitalized twice—one time for an abscess that formed in his stomach and the other for a blood clot found in a lung.

  Patrice lied to Jim, telling him that his hair was not thinning. They tried to maintain some sense of normalcy, and he and Patrice continued coaching one of their daughter’s basketball teams. He tried to work through it, but serious illness is its own full-time job. And after months of being terribly sick, he was weak and frail, and he began to assume that he was going to die.

  Jim and Patrice put their wills in order and talked about writing letters or taping videos to show to their kids after he passed. Every family birthday or holiday was treated as if it would be his last. But he didn’t die from his cancer. And in the oddest of serendipities, it was his surrender to that fate that would lead to his appointment to be director of the FBI.

  In November 2006, the Democrats won control of Congress and by the following January began investigating the Bush administration, including a scandal involving the firing of several U.S. attorneys. Few people had a closer view of the Justice Department under Bush than Comey, the former second-in-command. That spring, the top staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was now controlled by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, reached out to see whether he would answer their questions about the scandal. Comey knew the staffer, Preet Bharara, who had worked for him at the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, and he agreed to testify. In the course of their conversations in the week before the testimony, Comey told Bharara about something unrelated to the U.S. attorneys’ firing scandal. Comey described in detail Dick Cheney’s attempt in March 2004 to go around him to get a hospitalized and incapacitated attorney general, John Ashcroft, to reauthorize a surveillance program that Comey had concluded was illegal.

  The story and its dramatic details stunned Bharara. If Comey was willing to share the story publicly, it would provide conclusive firsthand evidence from inside the administration of the extent of what Bush, Cheney, and their deputies had been willing to do in the name of executive power. Bharara asked Comey whether he would testify publicly about what he had told him privately.

  Comey had a choice to make about how he would testify. He could answer questions minimally, offering the senators no more than what was necessary to be truthful. Or he could testify expansively and tell Congress of his experience fully and completely.

  Depleted from cancer and wary that it would return, Comey thought it likely that he would die in the coming months or, if he was lucky, in a year or two. This hearing could be the last time he would ever speak publicly. So he entertained the expansive ap
proach. He could be unrestrained and lay out the scene that unfolded in Ashcroft’s hospital room three years prior in all of its dramatic detail.

  I feel like my life is ending, Comey thought. So, if I’m going to tell the story, I should tell the whole story.

  “The shorter-term perspective allows you to think of things in a bigger way,” Comey would say later. “I would have testified anyway and answered the questions. But there was an end-of-life feeling that made it easier to tell the story. I wasn’t thinking about how will this affect my future.”

  In the days before the hearing, Bharara told only Schumer about the new revelation. They both wanted to surprise viewers with the shocking new testimony and make it impossible for the White House to block it.

  On May 15, 2007, Comey walked into the hearing room. Two years had passed since he had left government. In that time, he had seldom been seen in public. To nearly everyone in the room and watching on television, he was a former deputy attorney general reemerging to testify as Democrats amped up their scrutiny of the Bush administration. But physically and emotionally, Comey was in a different place. He was still hooked up to the ostomy bag. His chest was starting to develop scar tissue around the area where the pump had been removed just a few months earlier. The blood clots had permanently damaged the vascular system in his leg, and he would from then on wear a compression sleeve to prevent further clotting. The chemo had left him with no feeling in the tips of his fingers or the bottoms of his feet. His hair was still thin, and he looked pale.