Patrice watched the hearing from home, surprised to hear her husband had actually admitted to being “mildly nauseous” that his actions might have had an impact on the election. While it might offend Trump, she knew it to be true.
That night, Patrice mentioned the comment. “You know he might interpret that as you being nauseous that he became president, right?”
“Ooh, he’s not going to like that,” Comey agreed.
That afternoon, McGahn told Trump—while he was meeting with Attorney General Sessions in the Oval Office—how Comey had refused to answer a question about whether the president was under investigation. Trump erupted in anger, pinning the blame directly on Sessions, who was conveniently sitting just feet away.
“This is terrible, Jeff,” Trump said. “It’s all because you recused. Kennedy appointed his brother. Obama appointed Holder. I appointed you and you recused yourself. You left me on an island. I can’t do anything.”
Sessions tried again to explain why he had been required to recuse himself from the investigation, and to deflect some of Trump’s unbridled rage, he changed the topic to the FBI and suggested the time might have come to make a change in the bureau’s leadership.
It did nothing to blunt Trump’s attack on Sessions, but the beleaguered attorney general had just unwittingly endorsed a notion that the president had already been mulling for days.
★ ★ ★
MAY 4, 2017
THIRTEEN DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
OVAL OFFICE—In the days that followed, Trump continued to obsess about Comey as cable news played the “mildly nauseous” clip relentlessly, transforming it into a signal event of the Trump presidency. The president brought up the FBI director more than a dozen times over the course of meetings in the Oval Office.
“He told me three times that I wasn’t under investigation,” Trump told Steve Bannon. “He’s a showboater. He’s a grandstander. I don’t know any Russians. There was no collusion.”
Bannon strongly cautioned Trump against firing Comey, saying it wouldn’t end the Russia inquiry. “You can fire the FBI director, but you can’t fire the FBI,” Bannon said.
That afternoon, House Republicans changed the news when they voted to pass legislation that repealed significant parts of Obamacare. Although the bill had still not been passed in the Senate, the president—lacking any major legislative achievements despite Republicans controlling Congress—wanted to celebrate it. So he held a victory ceremony in the Rose Garden, the type of event presidents usually hold when a bill has actually passed and is being signed into law.
Later that day, Trump boarded Air Force One for New York to meet with the Australian prime minister at an event on the Intrepid aircraft carrier on Manhattan’s West Side. At 11:00 that night, Trump arrived by helicopter at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with a small number of his advisers—Ivanka, Kushner, Stephen Miller. McGahn, not currently a member of the true inner circle, was back home in Washington. Trump was scheduled to golf that Friday at his club with Greg Norman, the legendary Australian golfer. But it rained and instead of blowing off steam on the course, Trump stewed inside the club about Comey and the Russia investigation. That afternoon, he sat and watched all of Comey’s testimony from earlier in the week. The combination of the rain and the testimony would turn combustible.
* * *
—
Comey’s disclosures to Congress about the Russia investigation loosened the logjam around Rosenstein’s nomination. Still, Senate Republicans would take another month to confirm him. Finally, in early May, Comey was alone in the deputy attorney general’s austere office with the newly sworn in man whom he was counting on to be the bulwark between the FBI and the White House—an able partner in investigating the president of the United States for obstructing justice.
Rosenstein had invited Comey back to the office—an office he had occupied a dozen years earlier—after the pair and their aides had the first of what were scheduled to be biweekly meetings between the deputy attorney general and the FBI director.
“What do you think of the old place?” Rosenstein said.
Rosenstein, in a dark club chair with a high back, sat across from Comey, who was on a large tan couch. Comey had originally planned to bring up the meeting with the president on February 14, when he had asked him to end the Flynn investigation. But he hesitated. Rosenstein was still getting up to speed, and he had a lot to sort out about the Russia investigation. Comey only mentioned that he had a “weird” one-on-one meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. There was no need to rush into a discussion about whether to open an investigation into the president. Comey couldn’t have known at the time what a fateful mistake he was making.
Instead of discussing the president, the two men talked about work-life balance, sleeping habits, and an oddly elaborate alternating sandwich schedule that Comey used to plan his lunches when he was deputy attorney general.
Because Comey did not seem to have any pressing issues to talk to Rosenstein about, after just a few minutes the deputy attorney general—with a slew of posts to fill and the Trump administration already in court fighting to defend its travel ban—said that he had to go.
The two men parted ways, not having discussed how the FBI director had evidence to open a criminal investigation on the president of the United States. Heading into the coming week, Rosenstein would have no understanding of what had gone on between Trump and Comey.
As Rosenstein rushed to his next meeting, he mentioned to one of his top aides how it seemed that Comey did not like Trump and how Comey thought Trump was weird. For Rosenstein, it was yet another sign of a troubling relationship brewing between the Justice Department, the White House, and the FBI. The FBI director did not think highly of the president. The attorney general did not think highly of the FBI director. And Rosenstein had just been briefed that the inspector general for the Justice Department was going to find that Comey had acted improperly in his handling of the Clinton email investigation.
But that evening, Comey returned home with newfound confidence in Rosenstein, telling Patrice that Rosenstein could be an important force for good. Patrice felt relieved that Rosenstein had finally arrived. Maybe now, she thought, Jim’s life would be a bit easier.
★ ★ ★
MAY 5, 2017
TWELVE DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
AN APARTMENT IN NORTHWEST WASHINGTON, D.C.—Cinco de Mayo fell on a Friday in 2017, allowing for extra-hard partying because most people didn’t have work the next day. That Friday night I was invited to a Make Margaritas Great Again party being held by a brash lawyer in the White House counsel’s office at a duplex in Washington.
It was the end of a tough stretch. During the transition, I had been named to a team of reporters who were supposed to do investigative work on the Trump administration. I had to balance that assignment with a project I had begun before the election: examining whether the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had sexually harassed women with whom he worked. Our story had run in April, and later that month O’Reilly had been fired. While that was behind us, it had taken a lot out of me, and that Friday night I did not particularly feel like going to a party.
But a friend who had also been invited had persuaded me to come along, telling me that influential people whom I would find interesting would be there. At the party were a bunch of young Republicans who had joined the administration as White House lawyers working for McGahn or senior officials at the Justice Department. Everyone seemed to know each other, but I barely recognized any of them. This was—as my friend said it would be—a target-rich environment to meet people who could be great sources. But I can be shy at times in large groups of people I don’t know, and amid the shouts from drinking games, I spent much of the night on the apartment’s back porch talking with the few
people I knew while drinking Coke Zeros. I left early, headed straight home, and went to bed, completely missing a moment that foreshadowed perhaps the most important decision Trump would make in his presidency.
That weekend, the friend who had persuaded me to tag along called to report what he described as a curious interaction at the party after I left. The friend said a senior Justice Department official who worked directly for Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been openly asking those at the party whether they had any dirt on Comey. My friend heard the official say that Sessions wanted one bad story a day on Comey in the media, in an apparent effort to undercut his credibility. Now, my friend is a measured guy who is not one to twist the facts to make himself seem more important, which is a common practice in Washington. Nevertheless, I thought the story was ridiculous. Why would Sessions want to get rid of Comey? Sessions and Trump had been the ones to praise Comey when he reopened the email investigation just before the election. In what I can only describe as one of the more naive thoughts I have ever had, I was convinced Sessions and Trump would be concerned that it would be, for lack of a better term, intellectually dishonest to get rid of Comey, after having lavished so much praise on him for reopening the email investigation on the brink of the election. Making the story even less credible in my mind, Comey was the one conducting the investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia. If the president fired him, it would obviously look as if the White House were trying to obstruct the investigation. And the political blowback, so early in an administration, would be devastating.
So I found the tip absurd. Still, I was learning—barely more than three months into the administration, and along with the rest of the country—just how unpredictable Trump could be. The only predictable pattern so far was that his lack of discipline led him to repeatedly undercut himself, his agenda, and his own officials at almost every turn. As it became clear in those early days that this was how Trump was going to operate, I reexamined my presumptions about what the president might or might not do under the pressure of the Russia investigation and the other burdens of his office.
Given the high stakes, I had adopted what I called the “FBI post-9/11 mindset” to tips. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Robert S. Mueller III, then the FBI director, had made it a rule that every terrorism tip would be logged and run down. Even the most outlandish ones—like people who reported seeing Osama bin Laden walking around midtown Manhattan. By sussing out every tip, counterterrorism agents hoped to ensure that absolutely nothing got by them. And so I thought that if I did the same with Trump, I would lessen my chances of getting beaten on major stories. So I entered every lead I heard in my notebook, however crazy it might have seemed.
Based on the report from my friend at the party, what I wrote in my notebook on May 9 was this: “Sessions out to get Comey.” I wasn’t even sure where to turn to try to get it confirmed. Although Trump often tripped over himself, if he and the attorney general were plotting against Comey, they or their aides were not going to tell me. And they certainly wouldn’t tell anyone at the FBI, who would be likely to let Comey know and would perhaps even be motivated to tell me or another reporter in the hopes of bringing attention to it and stopping Trump.
But there was one person who might be able to help me. I had known Dan Richman, a Columbia Law School professor, from my days working as a sportswriter at the Times a decade earlier. We had first met when I was trying to learn how to cover the federal investigation of sports, mainly the BALCO inquiry into performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. My editor at the time, whose only knowledge of federal investigations came from writing headlines at the Daily News about mobsters, told me to call one of the local law schools to find “one of those professors to explain this shit to us—you know, one of those guys who wants to get quoted.”
I soon found Richman, a professor who taught federal criminal law. He had impressive credentials. He had clerked for the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall before becoming a federal prosecutor in New York, where he locked up violent criminals and organized crime figures under U.S. attorneys like Rudy Giuliani. Beyond his impressive talents and accomplishments, he did one of the most important things anyone can do for a reporter: He always answered the phone. It turned out he was more interested in explaining than actually being quoted in the paper, and, generously, he became my tutor in federal investigations, patiently walking me through how prosecutors thought about their cases and how things like grand juries and plea agreements functioned. He was not a partisan. He always just gave me the facts on how the criminal justice system worked. I needed so much help that I spent hours on the phone with him, and we developed such a close relationship that I occasionally joined him and his wife, Alex, for dinner in their Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. One time, I even brought my then girlfriend with me.
When Richman served as a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, he’d worked alongside dozens of ambitious young lawyers who would go on to climb the rungs of the Justice Department in Washington. One of those prosecutors was a lanky young lawyer named Jim Comey. Although Comey comes across as at ease in public settings, he’s a fairly introverted guy who likes to spend hours alone reading. He has few close friends, but in the years after he left the office in Manhattan, Richman and Comey had grown close. They were intellectual equals. But where Comey can come across like a savvy, seasoned politician, Richman—with thick glasses and endless enthusiasm to talk about issues like sentencing guidelines and plea agreements—decamped to academia to teach. After becoming FBI director, Comey had hired Richman to work as a special consultant to deal with new and abstruse legal issues, like encryption, that require extraordinary brainpower.
I reached out to Richman.
“You got a sec?” I wrote in an email the next Monday.
“On Amtrak on way to D.C. Call my cell—not in quiet car,” he responded.
I called Richman and told him what I had heard. He, too, said it made no sense. He followed with a comment about how he had recently been with Rosenstein’s staff and it had gone swimmingly.
Another useless tip, I thought.
But I recorded my exchange with Richman in my notebook, just in case. And I told Matt Apuzzo, the seasoned law enforcement reporter who sat next to me, what I had heard. Apuzzo also thought it made no sense, but he said it might be worth making some calls. I considered calling two senior officials I knew at the FBI but decided it would be wrong for me to get people spun up about something I did not really believe to be true. There was enough chaos in the air.
★ ★ ★
MAY 8, 2017
NINE DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
OVAL OFFICE—McGahn drove to work that Monday morning figuring it would be a normal day—at least normal for the Trump White House. But shortly after arriving in the West Wing, he was told that Trump wanted to have a meeting in the Oval Office with him and his other top aides immediately.
That weekend—with just Miller, Hicks, Ivanka, and Kushner—Trump had decided, without consulting his White House counsel or any other lawyer, to fire the FBI director. Bizarrely, he had Miller, who has no legal training, draft a termination letter to send to Comey. In the Oval Office, Miller handed out copies of the letter. Among those in the room who were learning about the firing for the first time was the late arriving vice president.
McGahn had been through this drill before, when Trump had declared that he was pulling the Gorsuch nomination, only to later forget about it. But this seemed serious. McGahn knew that Trump had become increasingly agitated at the FBI director, especially after his March testimony. As Trump read aloud from the letter to the assembled aides, McGahn became increasingly alarmed. Trump had done a lot of complaining, but he had never gone so far as to actually draft a letter. And the letter was filled with all sorts of claims that McGahn knew would be problematic.
McGahn had actually come to agree with Trump that Comey had to go. To McGahn, Comey acted as if he answered to no one. McGahn thought the FBI was unnecessarily delaying background checks for security clearances, and in his new perch in the White House he had learned about a wide range of areas—like domestic intelligence—that the bureau was involved in that he believed made it clear that the FBI had overstepped its prerogatives and assumed too much power. He also genuinely believed that Comey had made a mess of the Clinton email investigation.
But McGahn also knew that the way Trump was impulsively moving to fire Comey was reckless and could end in disaster. In the middle of an investigation, it would look terrible. Why, he thought, were they taking such an unnecessary step, when the whole town was so jacked up about this Russia investigation? There would be no way to avoid the appearance that the president was using his power to eliminate a threat to himself. And since when did the president of the United States get his legal advice on such a critical decision from an aide—who was not a lawyer—who had done his research on the internet? It struck him again the extent to which he was surrounded by hotheads and amateurs.
McGahn took a copy of Miller’s letter back to his office. As he reviewed it closely, he became even more troubled. It read like a rant from a stump speech, railing openly about the Russia investigation and the Clinton email investigation and deriding Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe. Paranoid and angry, the letter read as if it had been dictated directly from Trump’s id.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 21