A few minutes later, Ruddy showed up, accompanied by two of his friends, Andrew Stein, the former Manhattan borough president, and Lee Lipton, a local restaurant owner. We sat down at the table adjacent to a larger one, where Trump usually sat, and we ordered lunch. I had the chicken salad and another Diet Coke.
Like clockwork, right after the food came, Trump walked into the dining room with his son, a few of his golfing buddies, and a pro golfer I had never heard of. Trump stopped at different tables to chat with members—but not with us—before eventually sitting down and taking off his white hat. Waiters and waitresses immediately scurried over to take care of him.
It took a few minutes, but Trump saw that Ruddy was right near him and told him to come over. Ruddy looked at me and the others, as if to signal that we should join him. As Ruddy walked over to the president, I came up behind him and he told Trump, “I’ve got Michael Schmidt of The New York Times with me.”
Trump looked at me quizzically as if to say, “Why the hell is a reporter from The New York Times in the middle of my golf club?”
But Trump then turned affable.
“Michaaaaaaeeeeeel,” he said slowly as I walked over to shake his hand.
I reminded him that I had interviewed him in July in the Oval Office. He remembered, and he repeated what I’d heard, saying that we had treated him fairly.
Then, without pausing or waiting a beat, the president immediately launched into something of a rant about the tax bill that Congress had passed just a few days earlier. Although Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, Trump had struggled all year for a major legislative accomplishment. Now he had one and wanted to talk about it.
I didn’t know much about tax policy. But it was clear the president was energized, so I just shut my mouth and let him talk. I now thought I might have a chance of getting him to sit for an interview. But I was unsure how to broach the subject with him, so I walked up beside him, squatted next to him, like a catcher, which forced him to look down at me and kept him from being distracted by the throngs swirling nearby. One point about taxes turned into another and then another, and all these years after I’d retired as a Little League catcher, my legs quickly began to ache. Standing up at this point would signal that the conversation was over, so I interrupted him and told him that I thought what he was saying sounded new, and interesting, and that we should sit and do a quick interview so I could get it all down.
He said yes. He just wanted to finish his lunch (a salad that looked as if an entire head of lettuce had been cut up and doused in Thousand Island dressing), and then we could talk. I headed back to my table thinking it was a fifty-fifty shot that he’d actually call me back over.
But maybe five minutes later, I heard my name being called in an unmistakable voice.
“Michael, Michael…get over here,” Trump said.
Interviewing the president—any president—is rare. But interviewing a president alone, without aides, in the grillroom of the clubhouse of his golf club, was even more unusual. Nothing like this would have happened, of course, with Obama or Bush or Clinton or any president maybe going back fifty years. But Trump was a president who just couldn’t help himself when it came to the media, and because of his unusual routine, and the unusual sense of latitude that he gave to associates like Chris Ruddy, he was bizarrely accessible.
He started our interview by launching into his take on the situation, denying any collusion, calling the investigation a witch hunt, and insisting he won the election because he was “a better candidate by a lot” and had campaigned specifically to win the Electoral College. I didn’t point out that running to win the Electoral College was not really a novel political approach.
Wasting no time, I made my first question about Mueller, asking him what his expectations were and when he thought he’d be wrapping up his investigation.
“I have no expectation,” he said. “I can only tell you that there is absolutely no collusion.”
He said it did not bother him that it was unclear when Mueller would be done because he is “going to be fair.”
With rapid-fire repetitiveness, sixteen times in all, he insisted there’d be “no collusion” discovered by the inquiry, though he stopped short of demanding an end to it. He showed that he wanted a time limit on the investigation, saying that it “makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position. So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”
As he continued to say he’d done nothing wrong, he repeated accusations he’d been volleying at Democrats for months, on the dossier, on the Democratic National Committee, and on Hillary Clinton. I asked him if he thought the Justice Department should reopen the email investigation on his former opponent. Trump demonstrated his view of his powers as president and how the Justice Department was essentially a tool he could use as he wanted.
“I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said. “But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”
The interview zigged and zagged wildly from there as he went on about China, the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. With Trump in front of me I had the opportunity to check some of my reporting. I had been told in the final weeks of the year that Trump, in complaining about Sessions and McGahn, had used the refrain about Holder protecting Obama, as Robert F. Kennedy had for his brother. As Trump went on and on about how disloyal Sessions had been, I asked him about Eric Holder.
“I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama,” Trump said. “Totally protected him. When you look at the IRS scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems. When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”
The president seemed to be enjoying himself. At one point, the pro golfer he had played with that day, Jim Herman, came to say goodbye to the president. In front of Herman, Trump told me about how he had given him $50,000 years ago when he’d worked at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey and was trying to make the PGA Tour.
Trump asked him how much he’d made on the pro circuit so far in his career.
Herman estimated $3 million.
“Which to him is like making a billion because he doesn’t spend anything,” Trump said. “Ain’t that a great story?”
At another point, the president’s body man came over with a cell phone to say that his top aide, Hope Hicks, was on the line. The president took the phone, and while I could hear only his side of the conversation, I could tell that someone in the grillroom had tipped her off to the fact that Trump had sat down for an interview with The New York Times. From what Trump said, she appeared to be trying to stop the interview. Trump told her that he knew who I was and thought I had treated him fairly before.
“Yeah, maybe he’ll kill me in the piece,” he said, but then added, lightly, that he often gets killed in the press, so what’s the difference? He handed the phone back to his body man soon after that and continued, unbowed.
He finished off by saying that he was going to win a second term for a lot of reasons, including that “newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there, because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”
“Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times but the failed New York Times,” Trump said. “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose, Donald Trump.’ ”
When Ruddy even
tually came back over, the interview came to a close. But the president said that before I left, he wanted to show me something. We headed out of the grillroom, though we briefly stopped at a table where three people were sitting. The president introduced me to one of them, explaining that the guy in front of me was the richest man in Germany. Then he introduced me to another man at the table and told me that he was the second-richest man in Germany.
Then he looked at the supposed two richest guys in Germany, pointed to me, and said to them, “Mike hates Germans.”
I had no idea what Trump was talking about. I was going to explain that my last name was Schmidt and that I had some German or Austrian roots, but I wasn’t sure it was worth it. I had my interview, so I just smiled.
Then the president brought me over to what he wanted me to see—a plaque in the clubhouse that showed he had won the club championship several times and a framed copy of the scorecard from his low round at the course. I asked him how far he was hitting the ball these days, and in a rare moment of humility he acknowledged it was shorter and shorter the older he gets.
He said goodbye by asking me to be fair to him, repeating the phrase several times. I told him that I would treat him the same way we had in July. He invited me to play the course that afternoon. I told him it looked as if I had a story to file. We shook hands and he was off.
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 2, 2018
ONE YEAR, THREE MONTHS, AND SIXTEEN DAYS UNTIL THE RELEASE OF THE MUELLER REPORT
INSIDE THE WINDOWLESS CONFERENCE ROOM IN MUELLER’S OFFICE—When Don McGahn concluded his first series of interviews with Mueller’s team, they told him and Bill Burck that if they remembered anything related to their questions, or if they felt the need to clarify what McGahn had said, they should reach out. Nothing unusual with that request; witnesses who are under pressure in an interview with prosecutors and FBI agents often remember facts and anecdotes days after their memories are first jogged. But Mueller’s team added something else. James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, the members of Mueller’s team leading the obstruction investigation, said that going forward, if anything occurred along the lines of what they had questioned McGahn about, they should notify them. In other words, once McGahn returned to the West Wing, if the president did anything that walked up to the line of obstruction or could be relevant to their investigation, Burck should call to alert them.
For starters, it sounded a bit unusual for federal prosecutors to raise the prospect that the president of the United States—who was already under investigation—might break the law. Then again, an ongoing criminal investigation of the president was unusual. But the request also intimated something unmistakably audacious: that Mueller’s team, at the very least, felt comfortable with the idea of some real-time information flow from McGahn to them as their investigation progressed. The idea of prosecutors using the president’s lawyer as an active cooperator to learn about what occurred inside the walls of the White House felt so extraordinary that Burck struggled to take the possibility seriously. The CIA used that kind of tactic with moles around the world to penetrate adversarial governments to extract state secrets. At home, the Justice Department and FBI used informants in their most significant organized crime and terrorism investigations. Police departments in cities and towns used them to take down gangs who pushed guns and drugs on the streets.
But this investigation revolved around the sensitivities of the presidency. No way would Mueller’s team try to “run”—investigative jargon for how the feds use informants—McGahn. With everyone from Rosenstein to Congress claiming to be paying close attention, the tactic would receive far too much scrutiny.
But who knew what could happen? Dowd and Cobb had made their bet on cooperation, throwing the door of the White House open to allow the investigators to rummage around in the West Wing’s business and question the president’s lawyers. At the center of the chaos sat the mercurial Trump. Burck and McGahn knew better than anyone else in Washington that given Trump’s inability to control himself and the lack of guardrails around him, he would almost certainly do something that Mueller’s team would want to know.
For the moment, though, they had only one option: hope. Maybe, they thought, the president would learn to restrain himself or become distracted by something else and avoid doing something to grab the investigators’ attention. As legal strategies go, hope is particularly terrible. Especially when you are hoping for the impossible.
Back in their offices at Patriots Plaza, Quarles, Goldstein, and the rest of Mueller’s investigators were building a timeline of what had occurred inside the White House. The team had obtained a wide array of evidence—witness interviews, White House documents, and some of the notes from McGahn’s chief of staff that recounted conversations with Trump—and much of it involved Burck’s clients. So as the prosecutors sorted through the facts, Quarles, Goldstein, and an FBI agent working on the obstruction investigation repeatedly called Burck; it was one-stop shopping to clarify issues like what his clients remembered and what Donaldson meant in her notes and to schedule follow-up interviews. The normal back-and-forth between prosecutors and defense lawyers often involved these types of conversations. But at the end of these calls, after the prosecutors’ initial inquiries had been answered, they began asking Burck general questions about what might be going on at the White House.
Is there anything else we should know about? Is there anything going on?
For Mueller’s team to enter into this new and deeper relationship with the counsel for a client meant that they deeply trusted Burck. If they thought he would be a Trump lackey and relay these interactions back to the White House, they would never have asked such questions. The legal teams for defendants like Manafort had special pacts with Trump’s lawyers—known as joint defense agreements—that allowed them to essentially be on the same team, share information about the investigation, and still keep it protected from prosecutors under attorney-client privilege. Lawyers for Trump and Kushner had made overtures to Burck about having a similar setup, hoping to glean information from the interviews with his clients and learn more about what Mueller’s team was after. But Burck had avoided these pacts out of suspicion and out of a desire to show Mueller’s team that his witnesses had no complicating allegiances.
“How do I know if my guys’ interests line up with Trump’s or Kushner’s? I have no fucking idea,” Burck told others at the time.
In McGahn’s first round of interviews with investigators, Burck had shown his willingness to help the prosecutors. Instead of taking an adversarial approach, he kept a genial manner and reminded McGahn about facts that he believed would help the prosecutors. After all, it was Burck who had been the one to prompt McGahn at the end of his first round of interviews to disclose the attempted firing of Mueller.
Burck struggled to understand what had motivated Mueller’s team to take such an approach. Maybe the prosecutors, who were now being roundly attacked by Trump on Twitter, operated under the belief that he might actually be a Russian agent and they needed to use every tool at their disposal to oust him. Why else would Trump lash out so much about Russia? Burck wondered.
In response to the general inquiries from Quarles and Goldstein, Burck said little. But he told McGahn that Mueller’s team was asking questions about what was going on in the White House. McGahn told no one. He already knew his cooperation had been extensive, and he wanted to avoid bringing any additional attention to it. If Trump—who obsessed about loyalty and leaks—found out that Mueller’s team was fishing with McGahn, he could erupt in anger and fire both McGahn and Mueller.
But in the early weeks of 2018, something happened that turned McGahn into an active cooperator, and the questions from Mueller’s team about what Trump was saying behind closed doors in almost real time went from the general to the very specific.
★ ★ ★
WINTER 2018
ON AN AMTRAK TRAIN—I’d convinced myself that I’d worn out my welcome with one of my sources. For weeks, I’d struggled to get him to reengage with me on anything. My calls had gone unreturned, and when I texted him, he was nonresponsive. Sometimes a source gets cold feet weeks or months into a relationship when the story gets too hot. It was possible he thought he had shared too much or thought someone had figured out that we were talking. It was also possible that our exchanges had started to annoy him. Why should he be at my beck and call to help me write news stories?
But six months into the Mueller investigation, every juncture felt consequential, and every story more fateful. Mueller’s prosecutors were taking in an extraordinary amount of evidence through witness interviews and document production from the White House, the campaign, and who knows where else. This source who had ghosted me knew what Mueller knew, and I needed to do everything I could to find him.
Finally, after weeks of silence, he messaged to say that he knew I had been looking for him and that he planned to take a train trip that afternoon and I should come along. For reporting, the train is the second-best option behind the car. For several hours, you have nowhere else to be. You’re just two folks traveling. Wearing a baseball hat to disguise myself, I slid into a seat next to him. We began drinking cheap wine and chatting. There was no small talk or bullshit. We got right into talking about the investigation, and within the first hour I had hit on something.
“They’re looking at his attempts to get rid of Mueller,” he said to me.
I had to process that for a second. So Mueller is investigating Trump’s attempts to fire him? Okay, that’s big. Meta-obstruction of justice.
“He wanted to get rid of Mueller…,” I said, like a therapist repeating back what a patient says, just to establish that they’ve been heard.
He said he knew little more about the incident and what had gone on between Trump and McGahn. “Let me see what I can find out,” he said.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 31