I came to a pretty clear understanding through this process that Trump and Comey had had a one-on-one dinner at the White House sometime early in the administration and that Trump had asked Comey for something. I did not yet know what it was.
That Wednesday, with the fury from Comey’s firing still building, I went back to Richman one last time and told him I was going to write about the dinner and that he had to level with me.
He did.
The story I wrote following that conversation began like this:
Only seven days after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president, James B. Comey has told associates, the F.B.I. director was summoned to the White House for a one-on-one dinner with the new commander in chief.
The conversation that night in January, Mr. Comey now believes, was a harbinger of his downfall this week as head of the F.B.I., according to two people who have heard his account of the dinner.
As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.
Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.
The following morning, Trump responded to the story with a tweet implying it was false and that he had recordings of their conversation: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
The story was solid and provided the first real insight into the relationship between the two men leading up to Comey’s firing. Trump went nuts about the reporting, but the article was far from conclusive, as it led to more questions than answers. It also left plenty of room for Trump’s defenders to argue that the president was just trying to feel out one of the most important members of the executive branch—one who had plenty of critics in the Democratic Party.
It didn’t make sense that Trump would have fired Comey in May over one awkward dinner in January. The two had interacted many times after that, and those meetings remained a mystery. But Trump had already amply demonstrated that he was unwilling or unable to change as president to adapt to Washington’s norms. If he had leaned on Comey for loyalty in his first week as president, then the relationship had been fraught from the start. The White House must have known that axing Comey was going to be an earthquake, but they did it anyway. Trump must not have gotten the personal loyalty he demanded. There had to be more to the story. Richman and the other sources I was speaking to signaled that was the case. So I returned to the methodical work of going back and forth between Richman and others, tracking the holes in the conversations, and then working to fill them with other sources and subsequent conversations with Richman himself. I pushed them all more aggressively than I’d ever pushed for anything before. Six days after Comey was fired, finding out what had happened had taken on the air of an emergency.
As I was flailing around with a lot of leads but nothing solid enough to put in the paper, I sent Richman an email, not quite letting on how desperate I was.
DANNY:
so here’s the deal ..
i tried to leave you alone yesterday, as i know what a long and tiring and trying week it’s been.
but we’re moving forward with something.
it seems like there’s a lot of funky shit that went on between trump and comey, especially in the first two months of trump’s time in office
what i also know—and this is not just from you—is about a weird meeting in the oval office between comey, trump, sessions and pence. trump kicks the other two out the room and then quizzes comey about leaks. comey didn’t like this and said to sessions afterwards you can’t leave me in the oval office alone with trump. not sure what sessions said to comey.
In caps, for emphasis, I asked a series of questions. Among them was this:
DID FLYNN COME UP?
I hit send and had a sinking feeling that if my email didn’t crack him open, I’d be at a dead end. That’s the worst feeling for a reporter. Richman never replied to the email, leaving me to believe maybe there was nothing there or, worse, that there was and we may never learn what it is.
What I did not know was that weekend, at his home in Virginia, Comey woke up in the middle of the night with an idea. He always slept through the night. But now he lay awake in bed with a realization that if Trump—as he had hinted at in his tweets after the loyalty dinner story—had indeed installed a recording system in the White House as Nixon had fifty years earlier, then their conversations were recorded. If those recordings could get into the hands of federal investigators, there may be evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had obstructed justice in several ways.
★ ★ ★
MAY 15, 2017
TWO DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU—The story about the loyalty dinner had made it easier for us to forget the harsh reality that had set in around us at the Times. As we covered the biggest political and national security story of our lives, we were lagging behind our rivals at The Washington Post.
There’s no exact scoring system in journalism. But one way to measure our work is to focus not just on how interesting the information we uncover is but also on how much it affects perception and policy.
And by that measure, despite our successes, the Post was clearly ahead.
Early in the transition, the Post had seized the moment and over the next few months had broken the stories that led to Flynn’s resignation and Sessions’s recusal. Every scoop the Post got gnawed at us just as losses will for a sports team. In our heads, there was even more pressure on us because the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, was longtime “frenemies” with the Post’s editor, Marty Baron. The two had come to know and respect each other in the late 1990s as colleagues at The New York Times. Dean wanted nothing more than to beat Marty and vice versa, especially on the biggest story of their respective tenures leading their newspapers.
Though my story put us back on the board, that Monday, the reality that the Post was ahead was once again brought home dramatically when they broke a story that Trump had disclosed highly sensitive intelligence to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in an Oval Office meeting on the day after he had fired Comey. In fact, the president had bragged to Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak that the firing would now lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. The story confirmed many of the biggest fears about Trump: At worst, he was a Manchurian candidate, rewarding an adversary that had just attacked our democracy to help make him president by giving them closely guarded national security secrets. At best, he was a novice president learning on the job.
Either way, the presidency was in disarray, and bizarrely, the president’s loyalties seemed unclear.
We scrambled to confirm the story while our editors assured New York we had the situation under control (even though we probably did not). That night I went to talk to the Times’ Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller. A palpable fear was setting in that the Trump story was really getting away from us, and we had quietly begun to point fingers at each other about whose fault it was. Bumiller was a former reporter who made her name as a White House and Pentagon correspondent in the years after the 9/11 attacks, at one point spending weeks with women soldiers on the front lines of the war in Afghanistan. As bureau chief, she had grown into a commanding leader of our ever-expanding bureau in the Trump era. She had an uncanny knack for charming sources and reporters alike, even as she struck fear into anyone who might disappoint her. Her reporting career had begun at The Washington Post, and as much as Dean wanted to beat the Post, I think Elisabeth wante
d it even more.
I walked up to where she was standing at her computer in front of the long series of desks the bureau’s editors operate from. I knew she was looking for a story that we could use to strike back at the Post. The bureau editors did not know the extent to which I had been chasing leads about what had gone on between Comey and Trump. I told her that if I made some progress overnight, I might be able to write the next day about a series of memos that Comey was said to have written contemporaneously as he had interactions with Trump. As described to me, it was as if the encounters had so disturbed Comey that he felt he had to create a record, memorializing what had happened. While “contemporaneous memos” sounded secret and sexy, the truth was that I didn’t really know what they were about. She looked over her reading glasses at me with a sort of puzzled So what? Why are you bothering me? look.
She said, “Okay,” and went back to editing.
As I walked home that night to my small basement apartment, twenty minutes north of our bureau, I thought about how everything was going wrong. It was the biggest story I had ever covered, and we were in danger of being overshadowed again by the Post, just as four decades earlier the Times had started way behind on the Watergate story. The legacy of Watergate still hangs over much of what goes on in Washington. Many veteran editors lived through it, and unfolding scandals are measured against it. Bob Woodward is held up as a lion of journalism. Most of all, nobody wants to get beaten on covering a scandal, let alone one that could rival Watergate.
Overnight, I pushed my sources for more information on the Comey memos but came up with little. Still, I left my apartment early the next morning determined to push the story along enough to write something. It was a sunny morning, and Washington’s humid summer had not yet set in. And as I walked to work, I got word that I needed to call Dan Richman.
After receiving that message, I hopped in a cab to the office and called Richman as soon as I got to my desk. He said he was at the gym and would have to call me when he got home and had a chance to look at his email. The information he had, I thought, couldn’t be that urgent if he was not rushing home from the gym. (In all my years talking to Richman, he had never talked about going to the gym. But there was nothing I could do; I had no choice but to wait.)
Journalists get a lot of practice in waiting, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Sitting around while you are expecting to get information that you know could be promising is one of the more excruciating experiences a reporter can go through. It’s all but impossible to do any other work. So that morning, I just sat there staring at my two computer screens. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues what was going on, because, well, I didn’t know what I was—or wasn’t—about to learn.
After an hour, Richman, home from the gym, finally called me back. He said he’d received an email from Comey with a memo in it that Richman had never seen before. Richman said he had been instructed by Comey to read it to me. I opened up a window in my computer and prepared to type. There was a moment of silence, and then Richman, who I could tell was quickly scanning the memo, let out a nervous laugh. He started to read the memo, line by line, and I began to type.
The memo began with details including where Comey sat during a threat briefing that he and other senior intelligence officials gave to Trump in the Oval Office on February 14. It ended with a description of Comey’s running into Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly on his way out of the West Wing to his awaiting security detail. In between, there were revelations that I thought might change the trajectory of the Trump presidency because they described what might have been the crime of obstruction of justice.
The memo described how at the end of the threat briefing Trump cleared the Oval Office of everyone—including Comey’s boss, Attorney General Sessions—to speak one-on-one with Comey. The president had the door to the Oval Office closed. He then brought up Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser who had resigned the previous day after questions arose about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
“Flynn is a good guy, and has been through a lot,” Trump said to Comey, according to the memo. “He misled the vice president but he didn’t do anything wrong in the call.”
Then Trump asked Comey to end the investigation.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Richman read the entire document to me in mostly the same tone, and neither of us discussed the potential damage that the Flynn conversation could do to the president or the risk to Comey of having his contemporaneous account of the Oval Office meeting made public. We both understood.
When I hung up, I should have felt exhilarated. Instead I was nervous. This story would open a new frontier in the reporting on the Trump presidency and would plunge a White House that hadn’t been stable on its best day into crisis.
I walked three desks over to my editor, Mazzetti, and told him that we needed to talk. We went into the closest private area there was, the bureau’s lactation room, and I told him what I had just learned. A huge smile came over Mazzetti’s face. He asked me why I looked so nervous and told me to start writing.
A few minutes later, I was back at my desk, working on a Google Doc with Mazzetti reading behind me from his desk. We soon pulled Bumiller into her office and told her what we had. There was so much going on in the Trump era that Bumiller had taken to writing down everything—even the most mundane stories or bureau issues—on a white legal pad. As we described to her what we knew, she wrote down what I was saying. She realized the gravity of the story and told us to finish it immediately. She then called Matt Purdy, Dean’s trusted deputy, and read him the notes from her legal pad. As Mazzetti edited the story, I sat down with the other members of our Russia team to tell them what I had learned. As word spread through the office, I called my parents, who were traveling in France, to tell them what was about to happen, because I did not want them to be blindsided by the news. My father, a New York liberal who was deeply skeptical of the government, did not sound surprised.
At 3:05 p.m., I sent an email to the president’s top aide, Hope Hicks, under the subject line “urgent.” I laid out what we knew and asked whether the president had any comment.
I didn’t hear anything for half an hour and sent her another email.
“Just want to make sure you got this,” I wrote.
I still didn’t hear anything. At 3:56 p.m., I sent another email, this time copying several other members of the White House press office.
“Folks, we sent this email to Hope about an hour ago. We need a response by 430 pm, at which time we plan to publish. Thank you.”
Inside the bureau, pressure was building on me to just post the story, because we couldn’t risk being beaten. The editors were getting anxious. Would the White House try to upend us by giving the story to someone else? Sometimes this happens, when the subject of an article wants to both punish you and try to deflect the negative impact of an impending story by handing the details over to a more forgiving news outlet. What if Fox or Breitbart got this and tried to spin an article on Comey writing secret memos? Why should we give the White House—which had failed to tell the truth about so many important matters—more time to respond? What were they going to say that would change our view of the story?
I pushed back on the editors, telling them it was far too big a story to either rush it or publish it without giving the White House a chance to respond.
I couldn’t help remembering a mistake I had made while covering the Clinton email affair, also writing in a hurry. Due to my haste, I had made a small error—the difference between a “national security referral” and a “criminal referral”—and the Clintons drove a Mack truck through the opening I gave them. I was wrong, and I was savaged for it. The problem was that we had been moving too quickly, and I hadn’t taken the time to clarify which kind of referral
it was with the intelligence community inspector general before the Times published the story. I was determined not to make such a mistake again.
At 4:07 p.m., Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then the deputy White House spokeswoman, responded to me.
“What’s your number? Will call you.”
When she called, I told her that we really needed to get a response quickly. She said, in her thick Arkansas accent, that she knew nothing about the February 14 meeting but would try to get something soon. From the tone of her voice she seemed to appreciate the gravity of the story. Even though we were dealing with such a contentious topic, she could not have been more pleasant.
When I relayed this to the editors, they told me to call the White House back and say they had five minutes or we would publish. Between the top editors at the Times and the top staff at the White House, I was in a vise. When I called Sanders back, she pleaded for twenty minutes. I said okay. I knew my editors would be upset, but I also knew that we had to get a response from the White House.
At 5:17 p.m., she finally sent me a statement with a flat denial.
While the President has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the President has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn. The President has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the President and Mr. Comey.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 23