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

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Dear Director Comey, While I greatly appreciate your informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation concerning the fabricated and politically-motivated allegations of a Trump-Russia relationship with respect to the 2016 Presidential Election, please be informed that I, along with members of both political parties and, most importantly, the American Public, have lost faith in you as the Director of the FBI and you are hereby terminated.

  The letter explicitly criticized Comey for politicizing the FBI and allowing McCabe to be involved in the Clinton investigation:

  The FBI must not be a political organization, but you have totally politicized it—something that should never have been allowed to happen. Few events have represented a more profound breach of public trust than your decision to allow the Clinton email investigation to be overseen by deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose wife Jill McCabe received approximately $700,000 in campaign donations steered to her by a top Clinton surrogate….Your job is to look for corruption—at a minimum, McCabe should not have been allowed to work on this matter.

  The instant Miller handed out copies of the letter in the Oval Office, McGahn realized it was the kind of document that should have originated in the counsel’s office. But he was still formulating a strategy on how to protect Trump from the fallout from the firing and had yet to seize control of the process. So, back in his office, McGahn marked it up, highlighting several sections that he believed needed to be removed, and gave the changes to Miller.

  The editing process bought McGahn some valuable time that he used to come up with a way of trying to slow down the president. McGahn spoke with Trump, telling him that it was essential that he first consult with Sessions and Rosenstein, because Comey reported directly to them.

  Sessions had a prescheduled lunch with McGahn that Monday. McGahn had an aide call Rosenstein and summon him to the White House. The aide told Rosenstein only that McGahn wanted to see him immediately. The deputy attorney general rushed over. In McGahn’s office, Sessions, Rosenstein, and McGahn ordered sandwiches from the White House mess and sat to discuss the firing.

  Accounts differ as to what transpired over lunch. One account has McGahn hoping that Sessions and Rosenstein would say that they opposed the firing, and would then try to block it. The other has McGahn representing to Sessions and Rosenstein that the firing was a fait accompli. Whatever the case, McGahn was surprised by how Sessions and, especially, Rosenstein seemed eager to fire Comey.

  For McGahn, Rosenstein’s endorsement of the move was key to assuring him there would never be any legitimate claim that in axing Comey, Trump was trying to obstruct an investigation. Because of Sessions’s recusal, Rosenstein was now the top Justice Department official overseeing the Russia investigation and any other investigation that might involve Trump, his family, or anyone else in the president’s orbit. Surely, McGahn assumed, Rosenstein had by that point been briefed on everything the FBI was investigating. If any of the investigations even remotely touched Trump, McGahn believed, Rosenstein would signal that a dismissal was not prudent. Not only was Rosenstein not signaling there was a problem, but he seemed enthusiastic about ousting Comey.

  McGahn told Sessions and Rosenstein there was an issue: The letter Trump wanted to send was incendiary and vengeful. By itself, it could have tremendous unintended consequences for the White House. As they ate, Priebus came into McGahn’s office several times. The White House chief of staff appeared frantic and sweaty. His eyes were bloodshot. Trump wanted the firing done that day, and Priebus, always trying to please Trump, wanted to know how they could make that happen. Desperate to slow the train down, McGahn tried to brush off Priebus.

  Later that afternoon, Sessions, Rosenstein, McGahn, Pence, Priebus, and Dhillon met with Trump. The meeting marked Rosenstein’s first time in the Oval Office as deputy attorney general. The president spent much of the meeting talking about his grievances with Comey and at one point called out for his assistant to bring him a copy of the Miller letter and handed it to Rosenstein, who immediately read it and thought that it was just as problematic as McGahn had described, particularly because it started with a reference to the Russia investigation. Such a mention could obviously raise questions about Trump’s true motives for firing the FBI director. On its face, after all, characterizing the agency’s investigation into his campaign as “the fabricated and politically-motivated allegations of a Trump-Russia relationship with respect to the 2016 Presidential Election” and then proceeding to fire the man overseeing the said investigation in the same paragraph could obviously be interpreted as an open admission by the president that he was purposely obstructing justice.

  Rosenstein told the president that the letter was better without that passage.

  There are differing accounts of what happened next. Some say Trump suggested that Rosenstein write a new memo laying out why he believed Comey should be fired. Others say Rosenstein, wanting to please Trump, offered on his own to write a memo rationalizing the dismissal. Whatever the case, Trump said Sessions would then write a letter to the president recommending the firing.

  McGahn greeted this arrangement with some relief. At least the Justice Department would be providing a more cogent public rationale for what would surely be a controversial move. It was bad enough that that draft even existed. Rosenstein’s memo would focus in particular on Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, which was clearly safer terrain. After all, both Democrats and Republicans had a beef with Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

  In the meeting, McGahn and Dhillon also tried to appeal to Trump to take a lighter touch overall, saying that Trump should offer Comey the chance to resign. Trump, reflexively, refused to go along with that. In fact, simply firing Comey was not enough. Several of the aides arrayed before him were struck that they were not so much seeing a president changing the management at the top law enforcement agency in the country. Rather, this was a vivid demonstration of Trump’s primal need to dominate and publicly humiliate a vanquished foe. Trump wanted to put it in Comey’s face. Shows of public virtue bothered the president, and Comey was a Boy Scout. Trump wanted to show Comey that he was the more powerful man and wanted to do it in the most humiliating way possible. Comey was out of town visiting FBI field offices, making the firing logistically more difficult.

  What could be more humiliating than finding out that you’ve been fired by watching it on the news, far from home?

  ★ ★ ★

  MAY 9, 2017

  EIGHT DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III

  CONFERENCE ROOM, FBI FIELD OFFICE, LOS ANGELES—As Rosenstein’s memo and Sessions’s letter arrived at the White House the following morning, Comey began his day in Jacksonville, Florida, where he spoke at a law enforcement leadership conference. He then boarded the FBI’s jet and flew across the country to Los Angeles, where he had scheduled a visit to the field office there.

  Around 2:00 p.m. West Coast time, Comey began addressing a group of support staff in a large room.

  On the other side of the country, in northern Virginia, Patrice was having happy hour at a friend’s house.

  She received a text from a friend.

  “Is it true?”

  Patrice had no idea what the friend was talking about.

  She then received a flurry of other texts from other friends, asking if it was true what they were saying about Comey.

  Patrice called her husband.

  “What is happening?” Patrice asked.

  By that point, Comey had seen his firing already being discussed on cable television, but he had not heard from anyone in Washington. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he told Patrice. “I’ll call you back.”

  As Patrice waited, Comey walked into a small room with his aides and called FBI headquarters, where his assistant, dumbstruck, said that a term
ination letter had just been delivered to her. Trump’s body man had handed it to her at the front door of the bureau on Pennsylvania Avenue. She would scan it and email it to Comey.

  Comey called Patrice back.

  “I’m fired,” he said. “And I don’t know how I am getting back home.”

  She had known her husband was under a lot of pressure from the White House and that some of his recent actions, like his testimony the week prior, had angered Trump. But she was not at all prepared for him to get fired. Their family had packed up and reset their entire lives and careers in Washington specifically for this job. Now, less than halfway through his ten-year term as director, this was how they were being repaid.

  This was seismic news. Patrice tried to make sense of the firing as she watched the breathless cable coverage. The anchors and reporters kept referring to a letter from Rosenstein that had established the legal basis for Trump’s dismissal of her husband. How could that be? Patrice thought. Rosenstein was supposed to be a life preserver. Now he had become part of the plot to oust her husband?

  “I thought Rod was our savior,” Patrice said. “But Rod must have been a very dishonest person.”

  From Los Angeles, Comey sent a volley of texts to friends, family, and anyone who would listen.

  “What a world,” Comey wrote. “No call from anyone. I found out while addressing my employees here in LA. There were TVs on in the back and I could see the crawl saying I had been fired. They put it out and then had someone hand deliver a letter an hour later to fbi HQ. Classy.”

  “I was talking to my troops in LA office and I saw the headline flash on TVs at back of room,” Comey wrote in another text. “I laughed because I assumed it was a prank and said it was very funny. My staff then start scrambling around and said I should step into a side office. Before I did I shook the hands of the support employees I was addressing. Went into side office and confirmed it was true (although still no calls of any kind). By this point much of LA office had gathered where I had just been speaking to support employees. I came out and told them I was very sad to leave them but I am sad because of the values this place represents and they must uphold those values….Then I left.”

  “I’m with my peeps (former peeps),” Comey wrote in another. “They are broken up and I’m sitting with them like a wake. Trying to figure out how to get back to home. May hitchhike.”

  “Started in Jacksonville talking to cops. Was gonna end day here talking to 500 minority potential applicants. Was gonna do it anyway but just reconsidered. I’m gonna fly back on fbi plane and then drift into retirement ”

  “I almost kept the diversity event appointment because I really do care but I don’t want to make it a media circus.”

  “Dunno,” Comey replied in a text when asked why he was fired. “Not for the reasons stated.”

  Comey’s motorcade, with a police escort, left the field office in Los Angeles and headed to LAX. But it being L.A., a news helicopter followed him, and the footage was televised live, like the slow O. J. Simpson freeway chase two decades earlier. When Comey arrived at the airport, he shook the hands of the police officers who escorted him. He quickly climbed eleven steps into the FBI’s G5 jet, ducking his head one last time as he entered the plane to avoid hitting it. Comey sat in the seat reserved for the director. Once he was in the air, he opened a bottle of red wine and received a phone call from the secretary of homeland security, the former general John Kelly. Comey and Kelly had gotten to know each other during meetings at the White House in the first few months of the administration, and Kelly had grown fond of Comey, believing he was a fair and independent voice. Kelly was emotional and said he was sickened by Trump’s move and that he didn’t want to work for dishonorable people and was himself prepared to resign. Comey told Kelly not to do that. The administration needed any good people who were willing to serve.

  Comey landed at Reagan National Airport at 1:24 a.m. and still had things he needed to collect from FBI headquarters, but because he was no longer an employee, he would not be allowed into the building, so he went home instead.

  Comey walked into his house through the back porch. Patrice was there to meet him. He had tears in his eyes. The two embraced.

  In the days that followed, his things were boxed up and sent to him. Nearly all of his personal items showed up. But one that never arrived was a memento that had been a steady reminder of the work ahead necessary to fix the FBI: the broken piece of the building, with “Director” written in blue felt marker.

  That was literally government property. It would remain at the FBI.

  But the most important keepsakes Comey had from his time as director were the memos he had written about his interactions with Trump. The former FBI director knew how damaging they could be to the president, because he believed they were evidence of Trump’s efforts to interfere with the Russia investigation. Comey had wanted to share them with Rosenstein before he was fired. Now, to Comey, Rosenstein—rather than being a rampart to insulate an independent FBI from the White House—had become a tool of the president’s obstruction campaign. In the wake of Rosenstein’s betrayal, Comey had a growing fear that no one in the Justice Department would be able to stand up to the president’s forceful demands that the FBI back off the Russia investigation. Although Comey was out of government, the most fateful decision of his career still lay ahead of him.

  * * *

  —

  When the news broke shortly before 6:00 p.m. eastern that Comey had been fired, I was standing in the greenroom at MSNBC’s studios in Washington preparing to go on Chris Matthews’s show. I was hit by a wave of regret for not more aggressively pursuing the information from the Cinco de Mayo party. Sessions had been out to get Comey, after all. But there was not much I could do about it now. I called Richman and was the first to break the news to him. Sounding depressed, he said he wasn’t surprised and quickly hung up the phone. The producers asked me to stay around to talk about the firing on the air, but I knew I had to rush back to the newsroom. On such a big story, there is nowhere reporters would rather be than with their colleagues. By the time I got back to the Times bureau, chaos had set in. Usually when there’s a big breaking news story, you can feel the adrenaline pulsating in your fingers. That energy was certainly there, joined by a sense that this was a truly game-changing event and that we were headed into a darker and more troubling phase of Trump’s three-and-a-half-month-old presidency. At his desk, Apuzzo had his shirtsleeves rolled up and was writing the main story of the firing. Sweating and screaming like an emergency room doctor, he pounded away at his keyboard.

  When big stories happen, two things almost always occur: The bureau orders massive amounts of food for us to eat on deadline, and reporters who often know little about the event that has occurred come out of the woodwork to gorge on the spread and try to get bylines. In the scrum of assignments, I was stuck working with two veteran reporters, and I ended up with the third byline on a story about how Comey’s firing had led lawmakers—including Republicans like John McCain—to call for an independent investigator to look into Russia’s meddling in the election. After we had all finished filing our stories, I went downstairs to the street to have a cigarette with my colleagues. It was clear that the firing would have enormous implications—some that we couldn’t yet imagine. What did the story really mean? In the middle of our conversation, my phone rang, a call from New York. It was Matt Purdy, one of the top deputies to the executive editor, Dean Baquet. I had worked closely with Purdy on the stories my colleague Emily Steel and I had done on Bill O’Reilly. Emily and I had been chasing some other threads from that story, but the message from Purdy was clear: The Russia investigation was now a five-alarm story, and we had to get to the bottom of why Trump had fired Comey.

  Late that evening or sometime the following day, as Washington was still absorbing the jolt of Comey’s firing, a trusted source told me that what had g
one on between Trump and Comey was “wild.” But the source refused to say more. I was unsure what any of this meant. But I trusted the source and realized I had to do everything to go after the story, including taking a new approach to my relationship with one of the most valuable and trusted people I’d relied upon during my career: Richman. He had served as a tutor, but now I needed him as a source.

  I could tell from our conversations that he was angry about the firing and that he knew more than he was sharing. He had been through a grueling six months. The previous October, he had been one of the few people to publicly stand up for Comey after he’d reopened the Clinton email investigation, even going on PBS to awkwardly defend his old friend. Richman loyally stood by Comey to me in private, too, even when I had a sneaking suspicion that he really believed that Comey might have gone too far. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like that.

  The notion that Comey had helped get someone like Trump elected bothered Richman endlessly. In the wake of the firing, Richman seemed more depressed, losing faith in a government he had spent his life studying, working for, and believing in.

  In our initial conversations after Comey’s firing, he remained unwilling to disclose anything of his private conversations with Comey. But I couldn’t afford to respect the unofficial lines I’d drawn around our relationship. The stakes were too high. I didn’t know what had gone on between Trump and Comey before Comey’s firing, but I had a feeling that Richman did and I desperately needed him to share it with me. It was too important for him not to.

  I started calling him every few hours, telling him what I was hearing from other sources and interspersing questions that I thought could elicit clues about what he knew. It was a process of elimination. If something was flat wrong, he would usually say so. I noted the awkward pauses in our conversations after I floated new information or theories, a sign that seemed to indicate that I was getting warmer. I was taking notes during our lengthy conversations, scribbling as many notes interpreting his nonanswers as his answers. In subsequent conversations, it was those things I would start with. In that way and little by little, I began to assemble the puzzle of what had happened between Comey and Trump. I took what I could glean from him, talked to other sources, and then would come back to him within hours with new details and added clarity that showed him he wasn’t the only one talking to me about this stunning turn of events.