★ ★ ★
JUNE 15, 2017
ONE YEAR, TEN MONTHS, AND THREE DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
THE MCGAHN HOME, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA—The twin pressures on McGahn—navigating a poorly run White House and stopping a president from hurting himself—were becoming unbearable. Although McGahn had told Trump that he would not ask for Mueller to be removed, the president continued to badger him on the subject. Late on June 14, The Washington Post reported a nightmare scenario for Trump: In spite of the hopeful signs from Rosenstein, Mueller’s team was indeed investigating whether Trump had obstructed justice. And of course, as McGahn was by now painfully aware, with this president every day was another opportunity to obstruct justice.
McGahn looked at the story and wondered, Why had Rosenstein given him the impression that Mueller was not seriously looking at obstruction of justice? But McGahn had a more pressing issue. An angry Trump was steaming toward him. That night, Trump called McGahn at home to complain and rage about Mueller, Sessions’s recusal, and McGahn’s inability to solve it all.
“Where are my fucking lawyers? All I have is Mr. Magoo, Mr. Peepers, and you,” Trump said to McGahn, referring to Sessions as Mr. Magoo, the hapless cartoon character from the 1950s, and Rosenstein as Mr. Peepers, the main character in a 1950s sitcom about a dorky teacher.
The call so bothered McGahn that he called Burck, bringing his lawyer in for the first time on Trump’s maniacal desire to rid himself of the Mueller investigation.
“I have a real fucking problem,” McGahn told him. “I don’t want to speak out of school, but he’s saying some crazy shit.”
“You can’t fire Mueller,” Burck told McGahn.
The following evening should have been one of celebration for both McGahn and the administration: Neil Gorsuch was receiving his commission, a ceremony of sorts for his induction onto the Supreme Court. For McGahn, it was a short but bright moment of glory. Every day in the White House had been far worse than he could have imagined, but helping to shepherd Gorsuch through the nomination and confirmation process to a lifetime appointment was the most significant accomplishment of McGahn’s life, so for him the event was a moment of true celebration. It also reminded McGahn of the scores of additional federal court posts he could fill over the following months; maybe he really could survive the Trump administration by focusing on judges. But how the evening unfolded demonstrated all of the problems with the Trump administration. The attorney general failed to show, Trump openly sneered at Rosenstein, and within thirty minutes of returning home, Trump was again defying McGahn’s counsel and tweeting his complaints about the Mueller investigation.
“Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?” Trump tweeted.
The next morning, he tweeted again, about Rosenstein: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”
McGahn’s frustrations went beyond Trump, because he pinned a lot of the blame for the dysfunction on Priebus and Bannon. The chief of staff and the chief strategist were often unwilling to help McGahn when he tried to curb Trump’s destructive impulses. Besides their inability to help McGahn stand up to Trump, they had acted, at times, in ways that McGahn thought were unbecoming of senior White House officials. One stark example of this had occurred in the first few months of the administration. Bannon had brought Tom Fitton, the head of the far-right-wing advocacy group Judicial Watch, to meet with Trump in the Oval Office to lobby the president to have the State Department speed up its production of documents and emails related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account. Sure, Judicial Watch had been one of Trump’s greatest supporters, as it continuously pushed conspiracies about Clinton and other Trump enemies. But throwing open the door of the Oval Office for such an extreme partisan to discuss how the levers of government could be used against a rival showed bad judgment.
Working for Donald Trump and in this atmosphere was like parenting unruly toddlers, and for the second time in only five months on the job McGahn was ready to quit.
Instead of just impulsively walking away, he told Priebus and other White House officials that he was taking that Friday off. He needed a break, and it was his birthday. Then that Saturday was one of his young son’s birthdays, and the family planned to take a trip an hour and a half south to the amusement park Kings Dominion in Virginia. McGahn loved riding roller coasters and thought it would all be a nice distraction. Sunday was Father’s Day.
But the weekend got off to an odd start. That Friday evening, as McGahn flipped through the channels at home, he saw on Fox News a report that Trump had hired John Dowd—a retired Washington lawyer who had made his name in the late 1980s investigating the baseball star Pete Rose in a gambling probe—to be his personal lawyer. It was an unusual way for a White House counsel to learn whom the president had hired to be his personal lawyer in an investigation that directly involved the president’s conduct in office. It was yet another example of Trump’s lack of discipline. If the administration was going to survive the special counsel’s investigation, the conventional wisdom said, everybody would need to be on the same page.
On Saturday morning, McGahn slept in. By the time he got up and looked at his phone, he saw that he had several messages from the White House switchboard.
Trump was looking for him.
Oh, great, McGahn thought.
At 2:23 p.m., Trump, who had just arrived at Camp David, finally reached McGahn. He’d had enough. It was time for Mueller to go. McGahn, Trump said, should call Rosenstein and have him remove Mueller because of his conflicts.
“You gotta do this,” Trump told McGahn. “You gotta call Rod.”
McGahn was furious that Trump had bothered him at home on his birthday weekend, and about an issue he had already made himself clear on. Trump was so impulsive that he obviously didn’t care that firing the special counsel would imperil his presidency. Instead of erupting back at Trump, McGahn tried to stall the president. But this time, it wasn’t working.
Several minutes later, Trump called back. He was manic.
“Call Rod, and tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” Trump said. “Mueller has to go,” Trump said again, instructing McGahn to call him back immediately after he had made the call to Rosenstein.
McGahn had no intention of calling Rosenstein. He believed that if he even broached the subject with Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general might turn around and resign to ensure a safe landing for his reputation after the blowup over the Comey firing. It would also give Democrats and the media their Nixon moment, their Saturday Night Massacre, their Watergate echo of the moment when Nixon’s attorney general and deputy attorney general had resigned after being ordered by the president to fire the special prosecutor investigating Nixon’s campaign and administration. The moment that had transformed that scandal into a full-blown constitutional crisis. On the phone, McGahn didn’t want to fight with Trump; the easiest way to get off the call, he knew, was to give Trump the impression that he would call Rosenstein.
McGahn hung up the phone and decided he was going to resign. If Trump had had enough, well, so had he.
Since the first days of the administration, McGahn had instructed the lawyers in the counsel’s office to have their resignation letters ready in case they needed to quickly leave. McGahn had carried his around with him, and now it was time.
President Donald J. Trump
The White House
Washington, DC 20501
Dear Mr. President:
By this letter, I hereby tender my resignation as Counsel to the President, effective immediately.
Sincerely,
Donald F. McGahn II
McGahn called Burck, telling him what Trump had told him to do a
nd that he planned to resign.
Burck agreed with his client’s decision.
“You cannot fire Mueller,” Burck said. “You’re walking yourself into a huge problem.”
As McGahn’s lawyer, Burck was most concerned about his client’s criminal exposure, and playing a role in firing the special counsel would certainly have made McGahn a co-conspirator in Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation. On top of quitting, Burck told McGahn, he needed to take additional measures to protect himself. He instructed McGahn that he should avoid telling anyone—including his chief of staff, Annie Donaldson—why he was resigning. There were several reasons for this. One was that Burck was worried about McGahn’s name being at all associated with Mueller’s firing. If Trump did end up dismissing the special counsel, Burck did not want White House officials to have first heard of the idea from McGahn. This decision would later have an impact on investigators’ ability to substantiate McGahn’s account of the incident.
After he got off the phone with Burck, McGahn called Donaldson. Without telling her why, he told her to meet him at the White House to help pack up his office. Because McGahn had done little by way of decorating his office, the packing went quickly. He had been unsure from the start how long he’d last in the job. He and Donaldson carried his belongings to his car, and McGahn then walked through the West Wing with his letter in hand looking for someone to give it to. It turned out that because it was the weekend, there were logistical obstacles to resigning. Trump was at Camp David, and there were few top White House officials—no Priebus or Bannon—in the West Wing.
Unable to resign, McGahn left the White House with the letter and drove home, believing he was departing the White House for the final time. Resigning would be a formality at this point.
It’s unclear what happened next. But McGahn did not call the president and resign or email his resignation letter. Perhaps he got cold feet. That evening he did speak with Bannon and Priebus by phone. When McGahn said he was quitting, Bannon replied that he shouldn’t do it and that he would get Trump to back off. Concentrate on the judges, Bannon said.
Trump and McGahn did not speak again that day, but from Camp David, Trump continued to foment his rebellion against Mueller to whoever would listen.
On Monday, McGahn dutifully returned to the office.
★ ★ ★
SUMMER 2017
AIRPORT PARKING LOT—I held my phone in my right hand just as the text came in.
“Landed.”
“Great, I’ll meet you at arrivals,” I wrote back.
It was a little before 5:00 on a weekend morning in the summer of 2017. It was still dark. I pulled my mother’s 2004 Volvo station wagon, which I had been given months earlier, up to arrivals and easily found him. He got in and we were off.
“How was your trip?”
Fine.
We made small talk. I said something about the weather. Then I gingerly moved the conversation toward Special Counsel Mueller.
I recounted some of the stories in the press that week and asked him what he thought was going on. He responded with a blunt assessment.
“Mueller’s going for it on obstruction,” he said.
I repeated those words back to myself in my head: Mueller’s going for it on obstruction.
In a sense, I knew what that meant. Mueller’s team wanted to build some sort of obstruction case against the president. But what did that exactly mean? Mueller’s team could not indict the president under Justice Department policy.
I just wanted to keep him talking, so I repeated back to him what he said.
“So you think he’s going for the president directly?”
The person said he did. He threw out some possibilities. Maybe, despite the department’s policy that a sitting president could not be indicted, Mueller might try to move to charge the president. Trump had behaved so belligerently, he said, there was no way Mueller could look the other way.
Mueller had assembled a team of what we thought were some of the toughest, most skilled prosecutors in the country. Trump had, at the least, behaved unconventionally as president, and at worst his conduct had been criminal. It was hard to imagine, with all of Trump’s attacks on the institutions of government, that there would not be some sort of immune response triggered, in this case from Mueller’s prosecutors. Here, someone I trusted, who had visibility into what Mueller’s office was thinking, was telling me that for Trump it was very serious indeed. He said Trump’s lawyers had their heads in the sand and had little sense of how urgent the situation was. To make it all more consequential, Trump had shown no interest in curbing his behavior.
Most Washington reporters were more focused on the possibility that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians in their attacks on the election of 2016. I drove the source all the way to his house and dropped him off. I was going to have to focus on obstruction.
★ ★ ★
JULY 19, 2017
ONE YEAR, EIGHT MONTHS, AND THIRTY DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
OVAL OFFICE—“The killers are here,” Trump said cheerfully as I shook his hand.
I was joined by two White House correspondents from the Times, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker, and we had just arrived in the Oval Office to speak with the president in an open-ended interview. It was my first time meeting him. From behind the Resolute desk, Trump began talking. Trying to decode the president’s patterns of thought can at times be like trying to unzip fog, and that morning we were in for a master class in non sequitur. He sprinted from one unrelated topic to the next. Within the first few minutes, he discussed his own struggles with getting a health-care bill passed, and did we know that Hillary Clinton had failed to get one passed during her husband’s presidency, and that Obama had taken more than a year with a healthy Senate majority, then straight to his recent one-night trip to France for the Bastille Day celebrations, and how much he enjoyed the military parade he watched there with the French president, Macron, and his desire to re-create it with the American military in Washington. Three nonconsecutive times he mentioned how much he loved holding hands with Macron. He then talked about Napoleon and the difficulty of fighting a war in Russia in the middle of winter.
Russia, of course, was on our minds, too. We wanted to get the president on the record about the Mueller investigation, the Comey firing, and the question of whether his campaign had colluded with the Russians. Baker took the first stab, asking Trump about a one-on-one conversation the president had had with Putin at the G20 summit a week and a half earlier.
The president happily set the scene for us. The G20 leaders, their spouses, and a few others were spread across a giant table in Hamburg, Germany. Trump had been seated between the wife of the Argentinian president, Mauricio Macri, and the wife of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. The prime minister’s wife spoke no English. Late into the meal—which Trump said he enjoyed very much—he had gotten up to go around the large table to say hello to his own wife, Melania, who happened to be seated next to Putin.
“While I was there, I said hello to Putin,” Trump said. “Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be fifteen minutes. Just talked about—things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”
Our ears perked up.
“You did?” Maggie said.
“We talked about Russian adoption,” he continued. “Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him.”
Trump said it was notable that Putin had brought up adoption because Trump’s son Don Jr. had just been in the news for his discussions with Russians about adoption.
More than two weeks earlier, my colleagues had reported that Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had met
at Trump Tower during the campaign with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Don Jr. said that the meeting had largely focused on the issue of reinstating American adoptions of Russian orphans.
Unprompted, Trump defended his son’s choice to take the meeting. “As I’ve said—most other people, you know, when they call up and say, ‘By the way, we have information on your opponent,’ I think most politicians—I was just with a lot of people, they said, ‘Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?’ ”
It was a rhetorical question, begging for a proper answer, but was quickly followed by another swirl of free association—North Korea, Crimea, Syria, sarin gas.
Baker continually refocused Trump back to the email that the Russians had sent his son.
“All I know is this: When somebody calls up and they say, ‘We have infor—’ ” Trump said.
Not finishing the thought, he swerved to the dossier and the allegation about the hookers and Obama’s bed during Trump’s trip to Moscow in 2013. The president said he had been in Moscow for only one day and that when Comey told him about the dossier in January at Trump Tower, he had known it was “really made-up junk” and “such a phony deal.”
“In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there.”
“As leverage?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” he affirmed. “In retrospect. In retrospect.”
Believing that a dossier of made-up junk might be used as leverage showed a highly sinister view of the world. But never mind, because in firing Comey, “I think I did a great thing for the American people.”
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 27