But text messages that included colorful language sent by the lead agent on the Trump-Russia investigation could easily be used by Trump and his allies as a cudgel against Mueller and a pretext to smear the whole investigation.
In December 2017, the Times would break the story about how Strzok had been removed from the Mueller investigation because of the texts. The disclosure came at a particularly ominous point in the investigation, because two days earlier Flynn had pleaded guilty and had agreed to cooperate with Mueller. Just as at many points where Trump appeared to be cornered, he had been thrown a lifeline. He would take full advantage of it.
★ ★ ★
NOVEMBER 30, 2017
ONE YEAR, FOUR MONTHS, AND NINETEEN DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
A WINDOWLESS CONFERENCE ROOM IN THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE—The best prosecutions have reliable narrators. These witnesses have proximity to the wrongdoing and solid memories, and they are truthful. With the door to the West Wing thrown open by Dowd and Cobb, Mueller’s team had a huge opportunity to run through the roster of senior White House officials in search of their own star witness. But while the first round of interviews turned up new leads and anecdotes that greatly enhanced Mueller’s understanding of the soft, dark underbelly of the Trump White House, none of the witnesses checked all the boxes necessary to be a guide to Trump’s obstruction.
One of the first to be interviewed was the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who had been in a meeting with the president when he asked his intel chiefs to say publicly that there were no nefarious connections between him and Russia. Pompeo remembered so little that some investigators were suspicious he was not being completely forthcoming.
The by-then-former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who had lasted just six months in the position before being fired by Trump, was the first senior White House official to be interviewed. He remembered far more than Pompeo and had been around the president during the Flynn and Comey firings and the efforts to oust Sessions. Priebus told them about how Trump had taken Sessions’s resignation letter with him when he went on his first trip abroad, suggesting that Trump was hoping he could strong-arm the attorney general into reassuming control of the Russia investigation. But he too had memory problems, and despite being presented with many emails between transition officials to help him remember, he said he had no memory of whether he had been told in advance of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador.
One of the first members of the White House counsel’s office to be interviewed was McGahn’s chief of staff, Annie Donaldson. She had a great sense of what had gone on between Trump and McGahn, but her knowledge was almost entirely secondhand, because McGahn would come back to his office after meeting with Trump and recount to her what he had said.
Mueller’s team then had a shot at Vice President Pence. It had been Flynn’s lie to Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador that set off the chain of events that ultimately led to Mueller’s appointment. If there was a link between collusion and obstruction, Pence could provide it. He had overseen the transition when there were odd contacts between transition officials and foreign leaders. He had been in the room with Trump for discussions leading up to the firing of Flynn and Comey, had been alone with Trump and Sessions when Trump had held Sessions’s job over his head. And he had been in the Oval Office to hear Trump rage about the Mueller investigation.
But Mueller treated Pence differently from all other witnesses. Shortly after the special counsel’s appointment, Pence’s lawyer, Richard Cullen, met with Mueller to say that Pence wanted to cooperate and that if Mueller’s team had any questions for him, his lawyer would be willing to answer them. With other witnesses, Mueller’s team was asking for direct access. But in the fall, the prosecutors asked Cullen—a former prosecutor whose slight southern twang and aw-shucks congeniality put a friendly face on one of the country’s most ruthless defense lawyers—to come in for a meeting.
No witness found himself in a more unusual position than Pence. Unlike all the other witnesses, he stood to benefit enormously if Mueller’s team uncovered evidence that Trump had broken the law, because it could potentially clear a path for him to become president. But from the beginning of the investigation, Pence had given his aides and lawyers strict instructions: We need to do everything possible to help support the president and his defense. Pence wanted to be loyal. And to those around the president it was clear that Trump was flailing, obsessed with the Russia investigation and media coverage of it.
Trump’s lawyers Dowd and Cobb had blithely taken Trump at his word that he did nothing wrong and told the president they could have the investigation wrapped up in a matter of weeks. But no top-tier lawyer involved in the investigation believed that any lawyer should take a client at his word and that such a high-profile investigation—involving the question of whether the president broke the law—could be so quickly wrapped up. So contrary to the approach of Trump’s lawyers, Cullen in the late spring of 2017 conducted an internal investigation into what occurred around the Comey and Flynn firings. Following Pence’s wishes, Cullen had met with Dowd to provide details on what he had found—many of which Dowd had no idea about because he had never done his own work. Cullen also provided Dowd with a legal opinion his lawyers had written about how an obstruction case would be highly difficult to build against Trump.
On October 11, six days after Donaldson went in for her first interview, Cullen went in to meet with Mueller and his investigators. He appeared to have two goals: get Pence out of having to sit for an interview and help Trump by showing the prosecutors why building an obstruction case around the firing of Comey was flawed. All the lawyers in the investigation wanted to keep their clients from sitting for questioning. Cullen feared Mueller might try to write a report and if Pence sat for an interview, his team could take a comment from Pence out of context or use the vice president against Trump.
Maybe if Cullen sat and told Mueller everything Pence knew, Mueller would decline to interview the vice president, for the sake of decorum and comity.
During the George H. W. Bush administration, Cullen had worked with Mueller when Mueller headed the criminal division at the Justice Department and Cullen served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the more prominent offices in the country. The two liked each other; they picked up where they had left off years earlier and had a good rapport in the meeting.
Cullen started by laying out a fact he had uncovered during his internal investigation that he believed kicked the legs out from underneath the obstruction argument. He said how in the Oval Office the day before the Comey firing, McGahn’s deputy, Uttam Dhillon, told Trump if he dismissed the FBI director, he would likely prolong the Russia investigation, trigger the appointment of a special counsel, and risk the release of damaging disclosures about himself. Trump told Dhillon and the others in the Oval Office—including Pence—he believed that Comey had to go and was prepared to bear whatever cost came with it.
Then Cullen took that piece of information and pivoted to laying out how no obstruction case could be built around the Comey firing. He asked, How could the firing be obstruction if Trump had been told that it would only make the investigation longer and lead to more damaging disclosures about him?
Mueller and the handful of investigators in the room said nothing in response to Cullen’s argument. But Mueller, who appeared attentive, seemed to understand the contours of the investigation and asked several questions. He asked Cullen what Pence had told Trump about in regard to whether he should fire Flynn. Cullen said that Pence wanted to stay away from discussing the advice he gave the president. In the course of the meeting, Cullen mentioned how one of Pence’s staffers had been involved in dealing with the Flynn firing. Mueller said that investigators would need to question that staffer.
The meeting ended with no discussion about Pence coming in to be interviewed. Cu
llen’s play worked. Mueller’s team never reached out to him to question Pence, nor did the investigators ever question the aide Mueller said they needed to talk to.
* * *
—
In late November, John Eisenberg—the brainy top national security lawyer for McGahn who was known as Mumbles for how he speaks—went in, but was not an impressive witness.
The day after Eisenberg’s interview, McGahn went in for his interview. Within an hour, prosecutors realized what they had: McGahn was an extraordinary witness. He had a clear recollection of facts, seemed truthful, knew how to answer questions, had a good handle on how Trump’s mind worked, and had created a paper trail to back up his work. He was likable and could even make a joke. He had an added layer of credibility with the investigators because he appeared reluctant to be speaking with them. In that session, he laid out the Flynn firing and Trump’s elaborate efforts to use him to stop Sessions’s recusal. The following day he was scheduled to return. But that morning, Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. In an early sign of how Trump loomed over the investigation, one of Mueller’s prosecutors told Burck that given the massive attention to the Flynn plea and the potential for more cameras than usual to be staked out in front of their offices, they did not want to risk having McGahn photographed coming in—for his sake and theirs. It could enrage the president and make them and McGahn a target.
Two weeks later, McGahn returned, and over two days he spent hours discussing the lead-up to and the execution of the firing of Comey, as well as the White House’s reaction and response to the appointment of Mueller. As the third day of interviews stretched on for several hours, Burck realized that the prosecutors had yet to ask about the attempt to fire Mueller. The prosecutors finished asking questions about all the incidents they knew about and then asked McGahn a standard question they always ask a witness at the end of an interview: Is there anything else related to what we discussed today that we should know about?
Burck jumped in. He knew that to stay in the good graces of the prosecutors, they needed to hear everything from McGahn first. Burck wanted to interrupt before McGahn had the chance to say no. If McGahn—knowing about the attempt to fire Mueller—said he had nothing to add, it could potentially raise questions about his credibility. So Burck led his client.
“There was an issue in June when Trump wanted Don to take action on Mueller,” Burck said.
McGahn tensed. He knew that disclosing the incident could damage Trump. But he had to tell the truth. Reluctantly, he offered a few details.
Intrigued by a scene of potential obstruction that they had never heard of before, the investigators told Burck and McGahn that they were interested in hearing more about that and began talking to Burck about scheduling another interview after the first of the year.
McGahn had given Mueller’s team a direct view of Trump’s conduct from one of the people closest to him—someone the president had confided in and taken advice from as he tried to pull the levers of power to protect himself. It was hard to find such a narrator in most criminal investigations, and nearly impossible in one involving the president. Mueller’s team had been investigating for only six months. But as the end of the year came to a close, they now had an incredibly important asset positioned right next to Trump. The team had an active investigation into whether the president was obstructing justice, and they were learning about new actions he had taken to thwart that investigation. For Mueller and McGahn, this information needed to be kept secret. If it got out, Trump might retaliate and fire what could be a potentially fruitful ongoing source for Mueller. But in the days after McGahn testified, word of what he said began to spread in Mueller’s office, the FBI, and elsewhere in Washington.
★ ★ ★
DECEMBER 28, 2017
ONE YEAR, THREE MONTHS, AND TWENTY-ONE DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB, WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA—Mueller’s team had the building blocks for an obstruction investigation against Trump. And they could back it up by relying on one of the people closest to the president to demonstrate how determined Trump had been to interfere in the investigations into him and his associates.
But Trump apparently had no appreciation of this. His lawyers told him that there was nothing to the investigation, and he told aides he assumed that whoever went in would be loyal to him. This left Trump, by the end of 2017, with the impression that a box-checking exercise by Mueller would not be a problem for him.
“I think he’s going to be fair,” Trump said to me. “And if he’s fair—because everybody knows the answer already, Michael.”
Then Trump wanted to assure himself that I would treat him the same way.
“I want you to treat me fairly. Okay?” Trump said.
“Believe me. This is—” I said before Trump interrupted me.
“Everybody knows the answer already,” Trump said about the investigation.
Trump and I were sitting in the middle of the grillroom of his golf club at a big round table with a white tablecloth on it. The president, wearing golf pants, a white polo shirt, and a white hat with the number 45 emblazoned on the side, had come off the course a few minutes earlier. I had managed to do an end around on the White House to land an interview with him. Now Trump and I were alone talking about the investigation.
A couple of weeks earlier, I had been sitting at my desk in the Times’ Washington bureau when the bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, approached me. Given the time of year, the look on her face, and who I was—single and Jewish—I had a good sense of what she was about to ask.
Can you spend Christmas vacation with Trump in Florida?
I had taken on this assignment two times over the previous three years, spending Christmases in Hawaii with President Obama. Although that might sound like an incredibly cushy assignment in the optimal locale, it was actually a lot of work, in part because Obama was highly active. On one day in 2015, I sat in the press van in Obama’s motorcade for hours as he, in the wake of imposing new sanctions on North Korea, went to the beach with his daughters at an Air Force base, visited his grandfather’s grave, spent time at his sister’s house, hung out with the rock star Eddie Vedder, and then had dinner with friends just before we all got on Air Force One back to Washington.
But Florida, with Trump, sounded easier and I convinced myself that I was actually getting the better end of the deal than the Times, which would be paying for me to go on vacation. Trump would do nothing; I would feel no pressure to write anything.
So four days before Christmas, I went to Andrews Air Force Base to fly down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One. Over the course of the first week I spent in Palm Beach, my plan worked out pretty well. On my duty days, I joined the press pool early in the morning outside the hotel we were all staying in, got in a van, rode in Trump’s motorcade to the golf club, didn’t really see the president, and filed reports essentially full of nothing back to Washington done in plenty of time to enjoy the evenings.
One night, I had dinner at the Breakers hotel with one of the president’s close friends and confidants, Chris Ruddy, the owner of the conservative media organization Newsmax. Ruddy—who brought two of Ralph Lauren’s brothers to the dinner—was one of a cabal of individuals in Trump’s orbit who often had his ear and who often took it upon themselves to freelance as the president’s unofficial advisers, promoters, and press agents. In June, he had gone on television out of the blue to say that Trump was considering firing Mueller. And so, in the back of my head, I thought maybe a dinner with Ruddy could lead to an encounter with Trump.
I planted the seed with Ruddy, telling him that when he saw Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he said he was going the next day, to tell him I was around. It was just a flier, of course, but Ruddy said he would pass the message along. A few days later, I saw Ruddy again, and h
e said he had seen Trump but didn’t mention to him that I was around. I told him it was fine. I didn’t want to push it and was a bit relieved because I knew interviewing Trump would be a potential headache. Nearly a year into Trump’s presidency, he had become so polarizing that every interview—and the transcripts from them—became fodder for the Right to call us “Fake News” and the Left to say we were not fact-checking the president in real time.
But the following night I saw Ruddy again out in Palm Beach at a restaurant called Buccan. And without telling anyone in the White House or Trump, Ruddy essentially appointed himself White House communications director for the evening and decided that Trump talking to me would be a good thing. He told me that the following day he was going to take me to lunch at Trump’s golf club. Ruddy’s idea was that we would go to the club at 12:30 p.m. and sit at the table directly next to Trump’s, timing it to when he’d get off the golf course. When the president finished his round and came in to eat lunch, we’d see if he wanted to chat.
The following day I put on my black golf pants and red polo shirt and rode over to the course in my rental car, told the security guard at the gate I was there to have lunch with Chris Ruddy, drove up to the bellhop, got out of my car, got wanded by a Secret Service agent, and walked into the grillroom of the clubhouse at Trump’s club. Nobody recognized me. I sat at the bar, ordered a Diet Coke, and tried to look as if I just walked off the course.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 30